Of advance all website's alter up and bottomward about able-bodied optimized sites will absorb added time on the aerial end of the rankings than ailing optimized or spammy sites which may see aerial rankings but which will lose those rankings over time.
This is allotment one of ten in this chase agent accession series. In allotment one we will outline how to accept the keyword phrases best acceptable to aftermath a aerial ROI for your chase agent accession efforts. Over this ten allotment alternation we will go through ten capital elements and accomplish to optimizing a site. Some accomplish booty a few hours, some may booty months depending on the competition, but in the end and if done accurately you will accept a able-bodied optimized armpit that will abode able-bodied and authority it's positioning.
Of advance all website's alter up and bottomward about able-bodied optimized sites will absorb added time on the aerial end of the rankings than ailing optimized or spammy sites which may see aerial rankings but which will lose those rankings over time.
Step One - Keyword Selection
Arguably, keyword another is the distinct best important date in the absolute access process. If you do not accept the actual keyword phrases you will not aerate your ROI on this campaign. I acknowledgment ROI and use it as a admonition that keyword another is not necessarily about attractive for the best searched phrases. A assisting access is one which produces the greatest acknowledgment on advance for the time and money that are accessible to put appear it.
Bigger Is Not Always Better
If you are a web artist in Seattle who has aloof started your own business, you could accomplish "web design" the targeted keyword byword for your armpit as it absolutely has the accomplished cardinal of searches with 707,962 in September 2004 according to the "Overture Chase Appellation Suggestion Tool". If you accept bags of dollars and abounding months to address aloof to attaining those rankings it could be done however, would that be the best use of your time? Alternatively you could ambition "seattle web armpit design" with 5,070 searches in September. A Google articulation analysis shows the cardinal of links for the top three competitors for the Seattle chase had 132, 21, and 47 appropriately admitting for "web design" the top three had 18,700, 5,420, and 1,310 admission links each.
With a acceptable armpit you would get added assignment than you could handle with 5,070 searches on Overture abandoned if you were baronial able-bodied on the above chase engines. This would acutely accommodate the accomplished acknowledgment on advance for the baby business buyer who best absolutely does not accept the time and money accessible to ambition "web design" and who wouldn't accept the manpower to booty advantage of the rankings alike if they were attained.
This is an acute archetype about it acutely illustrates that sometimes the byword with the accomplished cardinal of searches is not necessarily the best ambition for your business.
Phrases That Sell
Another application you will appetite to accomplish back allotment your keyword phrases is whether or not they are "buy phrases". Phrases with a aerial cardinal of searches that are not "buy phrases" will tend to accompany a lot of traffic, about the about-face arrangement will be far lower. Should you accept to ambition "buy phrases" you may not get the aforementioned cardinal of visitors about your arrangement of visitors to sales will be abundant higher.
In this archetype let's accept you are the business administrator for a acclaimed accounting company. There will be abounding choices you can accomplish for your targeted keyword phrase. The top searched phrases in September 2004 that were accounting-related are:
"accounting" with 156,095 searches
"accounting software" with 54,621 searches
"accounting job" with 32,015 searches
"accounting services" with 19,260 searches
"accounting firm" with 13,089 searches
Many ability go with their gut aptitude and attack to ambition "accounting". The botheration with this byword (other than the antagonism for it) is that the bodies accomplishing that chase are not necessarily alike attractive for an accounting firm. They may be accounting students, baby business owners not absorbed in hiring an accountant but aloof attractive for tax information, etc. "Accounting software" and "accounting job" are irrelevant, which leaves us with "accounting services" and "accounting firm" as the two capital options.
From this point an appraisal of antagonism should be performed and the pros and cons of authoritative anniversary the primary ambition should be advised based on the bulk of assignment it will booty to attain the byword vs. how abounding searches there are for that phrase.
Often promotions that ambition assorted "buy phrases" will end up far added acknowledged that those targeting phrases based alone on the cardinal of searches due to the added conversions and about decreased competition.
Tools To Use
Armed now with ability on how to admit and accept amid altered phrases there charcoal alone one question, how do you apperceive which phrases are alike searched? Fortunately there are a brace abundant assets out there to advice you acquisition out how abounding searches are performed for specific phrases. They Are:
The Overture Chase Appellation Suggestion Tool
A appropriate apparatus for researching keyword phrases. It indicates which phrases had the accomplished numbers of searches on Overture during the antecedent month. The better weakness it has, as far as applying it to the accustomed chase engines, is that Overture counts atypical and plural as the aforementioned and additionally corrects misspelling so the totals are all lumped calm in this apparatus admitting on the accustomed engines they are advised differently.
WordTracker
WordTracker is actual agnate to Overture's Chase Appellation Suggestion Apparatus except that this apparatus differentiates amid plural and atypical searches, does not actual spelling (i.e. it gives the cardinal of searches for misspellings rather than acclimation them and giving a absolute for actual and misspelled words) and gives the after-effects in predicted numbers of searches over all the engines per day rather than aloof one agent over a month.
They accept a abundant chargeless balloon that doesn't accord you as abounding after-effects but which can be actual useful.
When application these accoutrement I acclaim alpha with the Overture Chase appellation Suggestion Apparatus and already you've narrowed bottomward your choices, about-face to WordTracker to assure that you're accepting the appropriate advice in commendations to close (singular vs. plural) and additionally that the numbers match. Sometimes you will acquisition that the numbers are absolutely altered from anniversary tool. In this accident you will accept to use your best judgment.
Don't balloon to analysis misspellings back application WordTracker!
Tips & Tricks
There are no absolute "tricks" to apprehension the keywords you should ambition about there are a few tips. A few pointers that will advice you aerate your keyword selection:
Think like a layman. Aloof because you apperceive your industry agreement doesn't beggarly that anybody does. Don't aloof anticipate of the words you use to call your products/services, anticipate of the words you would use if you knew annihilation about it added than the actuality that you bare it. You may appetite to recruit a acquaintance and accept them run some searches for you.
Think like an expert. On the added ancillary of the coin, there may be phrases acclimated accurately in your industry that bodies "in the know" would use to chase for your articles and/or services. Be abiding to attending into these phrases. You aloof may acquisition some hidden gems that no one abroad has anticipation to target.
Don't ambition too abounding phrases. Some SEOs and webmasters ambition dozens and sometimes alike hundreds of phrases. The end result, they generally absence the ones they best capital to attain. Keeping yourself and your keyword annual focused will accumulate your armpit focused. If your armpit is focused you'll rank college for the phrases that will aftermath the accomplished acknowledgment on investment.
Testing
Test your phrases. If there is any agitation about whether a chase byword is annual targeting it's generally a acceptable abstraction to analysis the conversions through pay-per-click engines . Set up an annual with a PPC agent and bid on the phrases that you would like to target.
You accept to bethink that the PPC engines do not accommodate for the aforementioned bulk of cartage as the accustomed engines. Analysis the antecedent phrases, analysis another phrases, and see which aftermath the best results. Something abroad to accumulate in apperception is that PPC are not accustomed engines. If your ROI is not as aerial on added cher phrases that doesn't beggarly they won't aftermath the college acknowledgment on the accustomed engines area a top baronial does not amount money per click.
In the end you will accept accepted a solid annual of keyword phrases and if the PPC attack is accouterment a acceptable acknowledgment on advance you ability as able-bodied accumulate it active and adore the "bonus" cartage that it provides.
Kamis, 06 Oktober 2011
301 Redirect - The SEO way to rename or move files or folders
In this article I will discuss page redirection techniques, what works and what to avoid.
page redirect,redirect,page rename,rename,website,web,site,web site,robot,spider,htaccess,301,301 redirect,404,meta redirect,meta refresh,java redirect
In this article I will discuss page redirection techniques, what works and what to avoid.
What is page redirection and why would you want to use it?
Let’s say you rename a page on your website, for whatever reason. Perhaps you decided to revamp your entire naming convention, perhaps you decided to restructure your site and need to move pages into different folders, or you just realized that you are missing valuable keywords.
Let’s elaborate a bit on the keywords issue, since it is part of your search engine ranking success.
Let’s say the page in question is about customized USB drives and you named it page1.htm. Then you read some SEO (Search Engine Optimization) articles and you found out that some search engines use words in the actual file name as search keywords. Next time you do a Google search, take a look at the results, most will have words in the actual file name (in the URL section) bolded, denoting a keyword match. Your USB drives page will definitely benefit if named something like custom_usb_drives.htm instead.
Now that you renamed your page, you just created a symphony of issues for yourself, for your users and for your position in search engine results.
Linking issues:
You will have to point every link on your site to the new page name. If your site is small, it should not be a big deal, but if your site is large, you will inevitably make mistakes, mainly forgetting a link or two. This will result in visitors getting the dreaded “404 page not found” error when clicking on your links, robots (also know as crawlers or spiders) avoiding you, etc. Also, if you are heavily relying on visitors from search engines, then again, people will get a “404 page not found error”.
Let’s use the previous example, for a long time your page1.htm was indexed by major search engines. If someone types “custom usb drives” in a search engine box, your page shows up on the first search results screen. That is fantastic, only if someone clicks on the link, they will be pointed to page1.htm, not to custom_usb_drives.htm, because the first page is the one in the search engine’s index. It will take time, sometimes months, before the search engines update their indexes with your new page name.
Lost Page Rank (PR) issues:
Google developed a proprietary algorithm that assigns a Page Rank (PR) to every page on the web. PR is a number from 1 to 10 (10 being the ideal) and is intended to be a representation of how useful and popular a given page is. PR is influenced by many factors, one of the crucial ones being Link Popularity. Link Popularity is a representation of how many “quality” or “relevant” sites link to your page. Without getting into too much detail, it is increasingly difficult and time consuming to achieve a high PR for your pages, especially if you don’t have a really unique website with exceptional and highly sought after content. If you are merely operating a commercial site, in a competitive market (such as selling custom branded USB drives, as in our example), then it takes a lot of time and hard work to build a good page PR.
When you rename a page and discard the old page, you also discard the PR of the page. Your renamed page will be seen as a totally new page, with 0 PR.
What is the solution?
I will start by enumerating some of the methods used by the non-initiated.
Not recommended solution 1: Duplicate content.
First thing that probably comes in you mind is: well, why can’t you just duplicate the page and let nature take its course. In other words, you will have two identical pages, one named page1.htm and one custom_usb_drives.htm. This gives you time to update all links and the search engines will eventually index the new page.
This solution is not viable because search engines will penalize you quite badly, ‘thinking’ that you are trying to scam them by using the ‘duplicate content’ technique.
Not recommended solution 2: Custom error message.
You could create a custom error page. However, you will lose rankings on the next search engine update as the file will appear to be non-existent. As discussed above, it could be some time before the page with the new name will be indexed and will appear in people’s searches. Also, your web site visitors will be frustrated by the fact that they now have to dig through your site to find the desired information.
Not recommended solution 3: An HTML Meta redirect.
You could implement a so called Meta refresh in a blank or customized page that has the name of the old page (in our example, page1.htm) that points to the new page. The redirect can be instant, or delayed by a predetermine amount of time. The delayed redirect has the advantage that you can place an extra message, such as “please be aware that the page you are looking for changed location….. etc., etc…. you will be redirected automatically to the new location”
In the past, this was probably the most used technique.
Without getting into the mechanics of the Meta redirect, which is basically a META tag statement you ad to your HEADER section, know that there are also Java Script techniques that achieve similar results.
What is bad about this is that this is a technique often used by spammers to trick search engines and it should be avoided, unless the page is in a section of your site that isn't indexed (also known as spidered or crawled). Search engine spammers create a page that is optimized for certain keywords and phrases - it usually has no real content. The page is then picked up by some search engines, but when a visitor clicks on the search engine entry, they are redirected to another site, often unrelated. Most search engines have filters to detect this. Using this form of search engine deception will see a site eventually banned or penalized by major players such as Google.
The recommended redirect strategy - 301 Redirect
A 301 redirect is the most efficient, visitor friendly, robot (spider, crawler) friendly and search engine friendly solution around for web sites that are hosted on servers running Apache. If you are not sure, check with your hosting provider.
A 301 redirect is just a set of commands you type into your .htaccess file.
When a visitor (whether human or robotic) requests a web page via any means, your web server checks for a .htaccess file. The .htaccess file contains specific instructions for certain requests, including security, redirection issues and how to handle certain errors.
The code "301" is interpreted as "moved permanently". After the code, the URL of the missing or renamed page is noted, followed by a space, then followed by the new location or file name.
First of all, you'll need to find the .htaccess file in the root directory of where all your web pages are stored. If there is no .htaccess file there, you can create one with Notepad or a similar application. Make sure when you name the file that you remember to put the "." at the beginning of the file name. This file has no tail extension.
Some hosting providers offer redirect services through their “control panels”, so you don’t have to perform low level changes on the .htaccess file itself. Instead, they provide a user friendly interface for this. Check with your hosting provider to see what the optimal way to perform a 301 redirect is in your case. I will continue the article with the barebones solution.
If there is a .htaccess file already in existence with lines of code present, be very careful not to change any existing line unless you are familiar with the functions of the file.
Scroll down past all the existing code, leave a line space, then create a new line that follows this example:
redirect 301 /folder/page1.htm http://www.you.com/folder/custom_usb_drives.htm
It's as easy as that. Save the file, upload it back into your web and test it out by typing in the old address to the page you've changed. You should be instantly and seamlessly transported to the new location.
Notes: Be sure not to add "http://www" to the first part of the statement - just put the path from the top level of your site to the page. Also ensure that you leave a single space between these elements:
redirect 301 (the instruction that the page has moved)
/folder/page1.htm (the original folder path and file name)
http://www.you.com/folder/custom_usb_drives.htm (new path and file name)
The same format applies not only to renamed files, but also to files moved to a different location.
The 301 redirect is the safest way to preserve your rankings. On the next indexing (crawling, spidering), the search engine robot will obey the rule indicated in your .htaccess file and index the new page name every time a link or its internal database tries to access the old page. In the next update (again, this could take months), the old file name and path will be dropped and replaced with the new one. Sometimes you may see alternating old/new file names during the transition period, along with some possible fluctuations in rankings as things settle. Don't panic, this is normal.
What if your site is hosted on a Microsoft IIS server instead?
If you have access to the server, do this: In internet services manager, right click on the file or folder you wish to redirect. Select the radio titled "a redirection to a URL". Enter the redirection page, check "The exact url entered above" and the "A permanent redirection for this resource". Click "Apply".
If you do not have access to the server, ask your host to point you into the right direction.
In conclusion, the best and the most transparent way (to both human and robotic users) to rename and move files on your web site, while preserving your search engine ranks is the 301 redirect.
page redirect,redirect,page rename,rename,website,web,site,web site,robot,spider,htaccess,301,301 redirect,404,meta redirect,meta refresh,java redirect
In this article I will discuss page redirection techniques, what works and what to avoid.
What is page redirection and why would you want to use it?
Let’s say you rename a page on your website, for whatever reason. Perhaps you decided to revamp your entire naming convention, perhaps you decided to restructure your site and need to move pages into different folders, or you just realized that you are missing valuable keywords.
Let’s elaborate a bit on the keywords issue, since it is part of your search engine ranking success.
Let’s say the page in question is about customized USB drives and you named it page1.htm. Then you read some SEO (Search Engine Optimization) articles and you found out that some search engines use words in the actual file name as search keywords. Next time you do a Google search, take a look at the results, most will have words in the actual file name (in the URL section) bolded, denoting a keyword match. Your USB drives page will definitely benefit if named something like custom_usb_drives.htm instead.
Now that you renamed your page, you just created a symphony of issues for yourself, for your users and for your position in search engine results.
Linking issues:
You will have to point every link on your site to the new page name. If your site is small, it should not be a big deal, but if your site is large, you will inevitably make mistakes, mainly forgetting a link or two. This will result in visitors getting the dreaded “404 page not found” error when clicking on your links, robots (also know as crawlers or spiders) avoiding you, etc. Also, if you are heavily relying on visitors from search engines, then again, people will get a “404 page not found error”.
Let’s use the previous example, for a long time your page1.htm was indexed by major search engines. If someone types “custom usb drives” in a search engine box, your page shows up on the first search results screen. That is fantastic, only if someone clicks on the link, they will be pointed to page1.htm, not to custom_usb_drives.htm, because the first page is the one in the search engine’s index. It will take time, sometimes months, before the search engines update their indexes with your new page name.
Lost Page Rank (PR) issues:
Google developed a proprietary algorithm that assigns a Page Rank (PR) to every page on the web. PR is a number from 1 to 10 (10 being the ideal) and is intended to be a representation of how useful and popular a given page is. PR is influenced by many factors, one of the crucial ones being Link Popularity. Link Popularity is a representation of how many “quality” or “relevant” sites link to your page. Without getting into too much detail, it is increasingly difficult and time consuming to achieve a high PR for your pages, especially if you don’t have a really unique website with exceptional and highly sought after content. If you are merely operating a commercial site, in a competitive market (such as selling custom branded USB drives, as in our example), then it takes a lot of time and hard work to build a good page PR.
When you rename a page and discard the old page, you also discard the PR of the page. Your renamed page will be seen as a totally new page, with 0 PR.
What is the solution?
I will start by enumerating some of the methods used by the non-initiated.
Not recommended solution 1: Duplicate content.
First thing that probably comes in you mind is: well, why can’t you just duplicate the page and let nature take its course. In other words, you will have two identical pages, one named page1.htm and one custom_usb_drives.htm. This gives you time to update all links and the search engines will eventually index the new page.
This solution is not viable because search engines will penalize you quite badly, ‘thinking’ that you are trying to scam them by using the ‘duplicate content’ technique.
Not recommended solution 2: Custom error message.
You could create a custom error page. However, you will lose rankings on the next search engine update as the file will appear to be non-existent. As discussed above, it could be some time before the page with the new name will be indexed and will appear in people’s searches. Also, your web site visitors will be frustrated by the fact that they now have to dig through your site to find the desired information.
Not recommended solution 3: An HTML Meta redirect.
You could implement a so called Meta refresh in a blank or customized page that has the name of the old page (in our example, page1.htm) that points to the new page. The redirect can be instant, or delayed by a predetermine amount of time. The delayed redirect has the advantage that you can place an extra message, such as “please be aware that the page you are looking for changed location….. etc., etc…. you will be redirected automatically to the new location”
In the past, this was probably the most used technique.
Without getting into the mechanics of the Meta redirect, which is basically a META tag statement you ad to your HEADER section, know that there are also Java Script techniques that achieve similar results.
What is bad about this is that this is a technique often used by spammers to trick search engines and it should be avoided, unless the page is in a section of your site that isn't indexed (also known as spidered or crawled). Search engine spammers create a page that is optimized for certain keywords and phrases - it usually has no real content. The page is then picked up by some search engines, but when a visitor clicks on the search engine entry, they are redirected to another site, often unrelated. Most search engines have filters to detect this. Using this form of search engine deception will see a site eventually banned or penalized by major players such as Google.
The recommended redirect strategy - 301 Redirect
A 301 redirect is the most efficient, visitor friendly, robot (spider, crawler) friendly and search engine friendly solution around for web sites that are hosted on servers running Apache. If you are not sure, check with your hosting provider.
A 301 redirect is just a set of commands you type into your .htaccess file.
When a visitor (whether human or robotic) requests a web page via any means, your web server checks for a .htaccess file. The .htaccess file contains specific instructions for certain requests, including security, redirection issues and how to handle certain errors.
The code "301" is interpreted as "moved permanently". After the code, the URL of the missing or renamed page is noted, followed by a space, then followed by the new location or file name.
First of all, you'll need to find the .htaccess file in the root directory of where all your web pages are stored. If there is no .htaccess file there, you can create one with Notepad or a similar application. Make sure when you name the file that you remember to put the "." at the beginning of the file name. This file has no tail extension.
Some hosting providers offer redirect services through their “control panels”, so you don’t have to perform low level changes on the .htaccess file itself. Instead, they provide a user friendly interface for this. Check with your hosting provider to see what the optimal way to perform a 301 redirect is in your case. I will continue the article with the barebones solution.
If there is a .htaccess file already in existence with lines of code present, be very careful not to change any existing line unless you are familiar with the functions of the file.
Scroll down past all the existing code, leave a line space, then create a new line that follows this example:
redirect 301 /folder/page1.htm http://www.you.com/folder/custom_usb_drives.htm
It's as easy as that. Save the file, upload it back into your web and test it out by typing in the old address to the page you've changed. You should be instantly and seamlessly transported to the new location.
Notes: Be sure not to add "http://www" to the first part of the statement - just put the path from the top level of your site to the page. Also ensure that you leave a single space between these elements:
redirect 301 (the instruction that the page has moved)
/folder/page1.htm (the original folder path and file name)
http://www.you.com/folder/custom_usb_drives.htm (new path and file name)
The same format applies not only to renamed files, but also to files moved to a different location.
The 301 redirect is the safest way to preserve your rankings. On the next indexing (crawling, spidering), the search engine robot will obey the rule indicated in your .htaccess file and index the new page name every time a link or its internal database tries to access the old page. In the next update (again, this could take months), the old file name and path will be dropped and replaced with the new one. Sometimes you may see alternating old/new file names during the transition period, along with some possible fluctuations in rankings as things settle. Don't panic, this is normal.
What if your site is hosted on a Microsoft IIS server instead?
If you have access to the server, do this: In internet services manager, right click on the file or folder you wish to redirect. Select the radio titled "a redirection to a URL". Enter the redirection page, check "The exact url entered above" and the "A permanent redirection for this resource". Click "Apply".
If you do not have access to the server, ask your host to point you into the right direction.
In conclusion, the best and the most transparent way (to both human and robotic users) to rename and move files on your web site, while preserving your search engine ranks is the 301 redirect.
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