Due to server setup and having no access to the php.ini file to change your server settings, we will resume to the .htaccess file for rewriting the URL, removing or adding the www. and removing the PHPSESSID from the URL itself to prevent duplicated content into the Search Engines, so here are few tips to get you started:

First lets create a new file and name it .htaccess (only if you don’t already have one), and ad the following lines at the very top:

Options +FollowSymlinks
RewriteEngine on
RewriteBase /

Now we are going to check the URL making sure the www. is always there otherwise we will redirect to the right format URL:

# redirect if not www
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !^(www)\.domain-name\.ie  

RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.domain-name.ie/$1 [R=301,L]

Now lets redirect the index.php or .html to the main URL as this creates duplicated content as well:

#redirect index.php or htm to /
RewriteCond %{THE_REQUEST} ^GET\ .*/index\.(htm|html|php)\ HTTP  

RewriteRule ^(.*)index\.(htm|html|php)$ /$1 [R=301,L]

Depending on your server settings, sometimes the PHPSESSID get attached to the end of your URL, which will also created duplicated content, so there is a solution written in php that will check for the PHPSESSID query-string and if found, we will remove it and do a 301 Permanent Redirect to the same page but without it:

//remove session id from url  

if (!empty($_GET['PHPSESSID'])) {  

  $clean_uri = preg_replace('/?PHPSESSID=[^&]+/','',$_SERVER['REQUEST_URI']);  

  $clean_uri = preg_replace('/&PHPSESSID=[^&]+/','',$clean_uri );  

    header('HTTP/1.1 301 Moved Permanently');  

  header('Location: http://'.$_SERVER['HTTP_HOST'] . $clean_uri );  

    exit();  

}  

//

Please Note: The above solution is not part of the .htaccess file, but has to be added to a common include file available across the site.

One of the first steps in search engines optimization is keywords research.
Say you have the website ready, it is probably already listed in search engines (type in Google search box “site:www.website_name.com“), but it doesn’t rank very well at the moment, so you start looking on the web for a solution then, you come across the SEO term which stands for search engines optimization or optimisation.

There are many tools available at the present for example: http://inventory.overture.com/  now owned by Yahoo or Google Keyword Tool, but myself, I  don’t find them very useful for a website that targets the Irish market.

A better approach for the moment, until new tools are made available is to sit down and write on a piece of paper a few sentences that would describe your business.
At the end of the day, nobody knows your business better than you do.

Now sit back and read them over and over again, until it sinks in, then try to get the meaning of one sentence at a time in just 3-4 words and write them down.

Why 3-4 words? Because if you are in a tight competitions, 1 (never recommended) or 2 words ranking are a lot harder to achieve, and more than 50% chances are that you will never get the results you are looking for.

E.g. – trying to optimise your website for just “insurance“, would be a mistake and you will have a very slim chance of making it into the first 10 results out of 414,000,000 found (default number of results Google returns per page), but if you are going for “car insurance” with only 79,500,000 results or even better, “car insurance ireland” with just 2,810,000 , you have a better chance.

Unless 2 words are more than 75% relevant to your query, search engines will try very hard to give you the right results.
Have a look at the example above, searching for “insurance ireland” could mean anything related to insuring something but what, a car, a house, valuables, etc….??? 

Now if you are looking to insure a car, and as usual you go to a search engine like Google.ie, what are you going to type in the search box?
More than likely, you will type car insurance and if results returned are not to your satisfaction you will add Ireland.
Don’t you?

Basically the point is that: the longer the phrase the greater the chances are for your website to rank well.

Getting back to our “ships”, make a list of as many short phrases you could come up with, then go back over them and try to make the list shorter like 10 to 15.

Now that you have the list, open your browser, go to a search engine and start your search for the phrases you have on the paper one by one. Look at the results returned and navigate to the first 3-5 websites that are on the first page, but not the ones listed as “Sponsored Links“.

Does the business profile of those websites relates to your business?
If yes, keep the phrase but if not ask yourself, are this the right keywords for me?
If I am looking for something related to my business, what will I be searching for?

Repeat the last step for every phrase you have, but don’t forget that search engines ignore words like: is, in, from, for, and, etc..

Eventually, you should be left with probably less than 7 phrases, and going over them again should tell you if they are the right phrases for your website or not.

Now navigate through your website and compare the list that you have with the text available on the home page.
Are any of your most important keywords in your Page Title?
What about the body text of your page?
Are there any headings that contain your keywords?

If your answer is No to any of the questions above, then you need to make changes.

Now remember, trying to conquer the search engines and get the “Google Love“ for a long list in one go will be a mistake, so keep it short and to the point.
You can always create new pages later and link them from your website home page.

When you hear the words Search Engine Optimisation, or SEO, you automatically think of improved traffic from the search engines, particularly Google. The process includes, site content, search words, relevancy, etc. 
Webmaster and companies are currently paying thousands to ensure their site has the highest ranking possible for their selected search words. 
There are also companies out there who offer their services to help these webmasters and companies in their efforts.

Sadly enough, there are also scammers out there who are only interested in separating the unsuspecting from their money. 
They prey on those who do not know enough about the search engines to know what to do or where to go for info. 
Currently, there are not as many of them out there as there are for other traffic scams, but it is still worth mentioning to help you stay alert for them.

One of the first flags to watch for is did they contact you first? Whether by e-mail or a telemarketer, it is best to be very cautious when dealing with anyone, or any firm, soliciting their services. Another red flag to watch for is “guaranteed rankings“. 
If they tell you they can guarantee the ranking of your site or guarantee “the top ten in search results“, beware. 
The guarantee alone should be sufficient to warn you as none can make that kind of guarantee. 
This is especially true if they tell that they can do it without making any changes to your site.

One thing you should do is check them out to verify their legitimacy and services. 
You can do this through forums and WHOIS. If they operate under multiple aliases, or have fake info in their WHOIS, it is best to walk away. 
You can look in other forums and articles related to the subject. If in the forums, ask questions and wait for the answers. 
A timely warning here can save you thousands down the road.

One tactic used by SEO scammers is the use of front pages and a demand that they control the URLs. 
Front pages are used to redirect traffic to your site using different search words and phrases. 
Controlling the doorway URLs simply means that they use their own domain in the doorway page URL. 
The promise is that these pages will get you a wider search result as they use more keywords relevant to your site.

This is a lie as individual pages are rarely relevant in keyword searches. 
Furthermore, these pages will often contain hidden links to other clients or the SEO firm itself. 
This tactic will diffuse the traffic that would otherwise come to your site and drain away your link popularity.

It is always important to understand exactly what the SEO firm is planning to do. 
Get specific information on how they plan to set up their service and where your money is going. 
If they won’t tell you, or use a sales pitch that sounds to good to be true, walk away. 
Beware the hard sell or high pressure sales tactics.

Ultimately, it is your responsibility what the firm does, or does not do. 
When choosing any advertising or SEO optimisation firm, always protect yourself and check them out. 
Be thorough in your research. A wise choice will help you along in your search engine traffic while an unwise one can cost you dearly.

A sitemap is often considered redundant in the process of building a website, and that is indeed the fact if you made a sitemap for the sake of having one. By highlighting the importance of having a well constructed sitemap, you will be able to tailor your own sitemap to suit your own needs.

1. Navigation purposes

A sitemap literally acts as a map of your site. If your visitors browses your site and gets lost between the thousands of pages on your site, they can always refer to your sitemap to see where they are, and navigate through your pages with the utmost ease.

2. Conveying your site’s theme

When your visitors load up your sitemap, they will get the gist of your site within a very short amount of time. There is no need to get the “big picture” of your site by reading through each page, and by doing that you will be saving your visitors’ time.

3. Site optimisation purposes

When you create a sitemap, you are actually creating a single page which contains links to every single page on your site. Imagine what happens when search engine robots hit this page — they will follow the links on the sitemap and naturally every single page of your site gets indexed by search engines! It is also for this purpose that a link to the sitemap has to be placed prominently on the front page of your website.

4. Organisation and relevance

A sitemap enables you to have a complete bird’s eye view of your site structure, and whenever you need to add new content or new sections, you will be able to take the existing hierarchy into consideration just by glancing at the sitemap. As a result, you will have a perfectly organised site with everything sorted according to their relevance.

From the above reasons, it is most important to implement a sitemap for website projects with a considerable size. Through this way, you will be able to keep your website easily accessible and neatly organised for everyone.

Search Engines avoids indexing multiple copies of the same content – this is what we call it “Duplicate Content“.
Not only does a search engine not index such pages, but it also penalises a site for having the duplicated content.

Having Duplicate Content will not improve your website rankings in any of the major search engines, therefore should be avoided.

There are two major cases of Duplicate Content:

1. Duplicate content as a result of Site Overall Structure

  ♦ Print-friendly pages
  ♦ Exactly same website content different domains (domain.com -> domain.ie or domain.net)
  ♦ Affiliate pages
  ♦ Navigation links and breadcrumb navigation 
  ♦ Pages with similar content that can be accessed via different URLs
  ♦ Pages with items that are very similar in description and name, but they are different in (e-commerce catalogue) colour, size, etc.
  ♦ Pages with the same Title or Meta Tags values.
  ♦ Using URL-based session IDs
  ♦ Canonicalization problems. (eg. domain.ie versus www.domain.ie or /index.htm versus / )

Example using .htaccess to redirect domain.com to www.domain.com

RewriteEngine onRewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !^www\.domain\.com  

RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.domain.com/$1 [R=301,L]

There are times when a  website has to contain duplicate content, as in the case of Printer friendly pages, which can be easily excluded from being indexed by SE using meta tag:

meta name="robots" content="noindex, nofollow"

You can also make use of the robots.txt file to exclude directories and files from being visited by search engines.
The robots.txt file should be placed in the root folder of your site and below you will find few basic things that will help you dealing with duplicated content:

#forbid all robots from your site
User-agent: *
Disallow: /

Disallow any URLs that start with a certain word:

#disallow ggogle from indexing URLs that starts with /blog ( note the leading / )
User-agent: googlebot
Disallow: /blog
#a particular page
Disallow: /page-name.html

You can also use wild-cards to disallow any URLs containing the sub-string of your choice ( in this case “print=”):

User-agent: googlebot
Disallow: /*print=

2. Duplicate content as a result of content theft

CopyScape is a service that helps you find content thieves by scanning for similar content contained by a given page on other pages.

If you are a victim to content theft, and want to take action, first let the individual using the content illicitly know by sending him a “Cease and Desist” letter, using the contact information you can gather from his website or in the WHOIS record of the domain name.

Failing that, the SE have procedures to alert them of stolen content:
  Google: http://www.google.com/dmca.html 
  Yahoo!: http://docs.yahoo.com/info/copyright/copyright.html 
  MSN: http://search.msn.com/docs/siteowner.aspx?t=SEARCH_WEBMASTER_CONC_AboutDMCA.htm