Excerpt: 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
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Excerpt: 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 se
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Excerpt: 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, nofoll
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Excerpt: Search engines may make the assumption that pages not linked to, or buried within a web site's internal link structure, are less important, just as they assume that pages that are not linked well from external sources are less important than those that are. Linking from the home page to content that you would like to rank can improve that page's rankings, as well as linking to it from a sitemap and from various related content within the site. In some cases, pages like "Terms & Condition, Help, FAQ, etc..." doesn't go well with the main navigation links, so a good practise is to include them into the footer of you web site. e.g. home | terms | help | faq... Another example is when the links structure are created using flash or form select menu.  Search engines are known for not being able to read images, flash content, etc. and they can not submit forms, so creating a sitemap and adding a link to it from the home page, or adding those links at the bottom of the page, helps search engines in finding to pages included within the web site. Talking about forms submission.     It's a good practise to offer your visitors a search form, especially when you have an e-commerce website with 1000's of products. As I said above search engines can not submit forms, and so the search page is not that relevant to them, but there is a way in making it important and gain from it. One solution I found to be very useful, is to log all searches done by users into a datab
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Excerpt: It is likely that keywords contained by URL, both in the domain name or in the file name, do have a minor but apparently positive effect on ranking and plays a very important part into search engines optimisation. It also likely has an effect on CTR (Click Through Ratio) because keywords in the URL may make a user more likely to click a link due to an increase in perceived relevance. The URL, like the Page Title, is also often selected as the anchor text for a link. This may have the same beneficial effect as mentioned in SEO Page Title If your website is hosted on Linux, you can make use of the .htaccess file to create Rewrite Rule and redirect long query strings pages to nice looking, friendly URL's. Example: Current URL could be www.domain-name.ie/pagename.php?a=1&b=2&c=3 From a search engine point of view, this type of URL format tells nothing about the page itself, but this example should: New URL: www.domain-name.com/details-Product-Name-Here-a1-b2-c3.html To achieve this type of url's, create a new file and name it .htaccess and ad the following line at the very top of the page: Options +FollowSymlinks RewriteEngine on RewriteBase /#new rule RewriteRule ^details-(.*)-a([0-9]+)-b([0-9]+)-c([0-9]+)\.html?$ /pagename.php?a=$1&b=$2&c=$3 [L,NC] #where L = last rule, NC = case insensitive, (.*) = anything, ([0-9]+) = numbers only Now change the link format on your page as shown in the example above and you are done.
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