Web Design Discussion

So you’ve built your website using a Content Management System such as WordPress and don’t want to display pages with dynamic URLs such as http://www.drostdesigns.com/?p=123. Search engines will still spider this type of URL however you miss out on including your main keywords plus the URL is difficult to spell and remember.

How To 301 Redirect Dynamic URLS Using Mod_Rewrite

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Need to redirect your old website to a new one?

Want to redirect non www pages to www pages?

These are a few of the questions website owners ask when they redesign their websites and want to preserve their rankings. For instance you have a static html site that’s been redesigned into a Content Management System (CMS) such as WordPress and want to make sure visitors accessing the old pages in the search engines get redirected to the new pages

What is a 301 redirect?

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Many website owners have unrealistic expectations when it comes to optimizing their site for the search engines when they speak with an SEO consultant. They think their site will immediately appear on the first page for a general keyword. For example if I do a Google search for “web design” it currently says there are 583,000,000 results. That means you have 583,000,000 websites competing for that phrase. It would take an extremely long time to rank on the first page.

Top 7 SEO Mistakes and how to correct them

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Most internet marketers will tell you to ONLY carry out keyword research to find a niche or develop a product. If you follow this advice you could spend lots of time and money developing your niche only to realize months later it was not profitable. Even if your keyword receives a high number of searches each month there is no guarantee it has commercial value.

Example

Some time ago I created a Google AdWords campaign centered on “italian recipes” because the average cost per click (CPC) was very low and there were several clickbank products available to sell as an affiliate. At the time the CPC was around 10 cents so I only had to spend $10 for 100 clicks. I ran the campaign for several weeks trying the different keywords I’d researched. I achieved a 2% click through rate but didn’t make one sale.

Why didn’t I generate any sales?

A search for “italian recipes” generates 1000s of free italian recipes. Why pay for an italian recipe cookbook when you can get the information for free from the Net? The keyword phrase “italian recipes” receives 1000s of searches each month but has little or no commercial value.

Irrelevant keywords Waste Your Time and Effort

• 90% of all keywords receive no traffic therefore you should only target keywords that get significant traffic.

• Many keywords that receive a lot of traffic have no commerical value therefore you should only target profitable keywords.

• 90% of most keywords are too competitive to get top search engine rankings. You should only target keywords that receive a high number of monthly searches and small number of competing sites.

How to research the market value of any keyword

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Every day I receive emails offering services which guarantee top rankings for my website in the search engines. This can be achieved very easily if it’s a keyword phrase no one is searching on or has no competition. For instance if you do a search on “tuatara schizophrenia” with quotation marks you don’t get any results. If I created a website on this topic it would immediately attain a top ranking however you wouldn’t get any visitors because there are no competing sites . When doing keyword research you need to find keywords relevant to your niche to attract search engine traffic. Irrelevant keywords can be costly.

What is a profitable keyword?

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So you’ve built your website and want to drive traffic to it from the search engines. You can’t expect your site to be seen on the Net if it is not optimized for the major search engines and have no links pointing to it from other websites.

Let’s look at the 2 most common factors that will improve your website google ranking:

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So you’ve got your website built but it doesn’t appear in the search engines even for your company name. Why not? Many new website owners think that once they upload their site to the net it will instantly be recognized by the search engines. This is not true. The search engines find your site through links. For example if CNN links to an article on your web page you’ll instantly receive thousands of visitors because they get redirected through the link on their site.

Should you submit your website to 1000s of search engines and directories?

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Most visitors enter you website through your home page. This is because it often contains your most important keywords and other websites link to this page based on your marketing strategies e.g. home page link in your article resource box. Don’t rely on the original optimization of your web page that was done several years ago.

Reasons to Re-optimize Your Home Page

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Are you currently generating free traffic to your website?
Are people finding your website in the search engines?
Is your website search engine friendly?
How can you increase your current rankings?

These are just some of the questions you should be asking yourself if you want to build a profitable business on the Internet. The best free traffic you can receive is from an organic listing in the search engines (websites listed on the left). Ideally your site should be listed on the first page for a specific keyword. If your website appears on the second page or beyond no one will see it. There’s no guarantee you’ll get a first page listing (because search engine formulas change and more competitors come online everyday) therefore you need to create a list of many keywords then integrate them into your web pages.

Step by step process on how to do keyword research:

1. Create a list of keywords

Use the free keyword research tools such as WordTracker or the Google Adwords suggestion tool to create a list of at least 100 keywords. For example here are the first 3 monthly results when you enter “keyword research” in Wordtracker..

keyword research…………….. 1,018
keyword research seo…………… 44
keyword research tool…………… 44
seo keyword research………………2

The longer your list the more keywords you can use in your website content. Your goal should be to dominate your niche by obtaining good rankings for all your keywords.

2. Select long tail keywords

Long tail keywords don’t have a high number of searches per month and have less competition than the popular keywords. Therefore it will be easier to attain high rankings for the them. In the above example you would use the second and third results instead of the first because there are less competing websites.

3. Create a list of competing websites

Enter each keyword into the Google search box with quotations around it to view the number of competing websites. The higher the number the more competitors you have.

Example

“keyword research”…………………11,500,000 (competing sites in Google)
“keyword research seo”……………41,910,000
keyword research tool………………1,410,000
“seo keyword research”……………….432,000

After doing a little more research you’ve discovered the first 3 searches have too many competitors but the fourth one has much less. You should now check the number of backlinks of the top 10 websites for this keyword. This will determine what you need to do to rank above a competing website.

4. Analyze the backlinks of competitors

These are links that point to a website. It’s one of the main factors Google uses to rank websites. The quality and quantity of backlinks will determine your rankings. If you can outnumber the backlinks of your competitors you will outrank them in the search engines.

Use Yahoo Site Explorer to check the number of backlinks for a web page or website. For example if the first website you check has 6000 backlinks you’ll need to get over 6000 to outrank them. That would take too long. If the second result only has 20 backlinks you could outrank them by building more than 20 to your own web page containing the same keyword.

5. Use the keywords in your content

Only use one or two keywords in the content of each web page. Include it in your meta tags, headings, sub headings, paragraphs and links. Don’t over do it otherwise the search engines will think you’re spamming them and lower your rankings.

6. Build backlinks to your website

Build backlinks to all your web pages using a combination of article marketing, video marketing, commenting on blogs, forums and social networking. Avoid getting backlinks from unrelated websites. Focus on sites that compliment or relate to your own.

7. Add unique content

As you add more content you increase the places visitors find your website. Instead of just finding your business through the home page they find it from other pages. Therefore make sure you optimize each web page plus build backlinks to it.

Related Article
How to Optimize Your Website for the Search Engines

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Generate free traffic to your website with:
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Herman Drost is the Certified Internet Webmaster (CIW)
owner and author of http://www.iSiteBuild.com
Web Design, Hosting, SEO

Before you make plans to redesign your website there are some seo secrets you need to know about that generate long term benefits. Many site owners SEO their websites after they’ve been redesigned because they didn’t receive any extra traffic or their traffic disappeared. Follow the SEO secrets below so your web site will easily be found by the search engines.

6 Website Redesign SEO Secrets Your Developer May Not Know

At the end of the year, many businesses start to think about redesigning their tired old website to breathe some new life into it. You may even be in the midst of a website redesign right now. If so, the first thing is to make sure you hire a design and development company that knows how to build the infrastructure of the website in a search engine crawler–friendly manner.

Beyond that, you need to address a number of additional SEO tactics before you get too deep into your redesign. The reason you need to keep SEO front and center during this time is twofold: so that you do not lose your previous traffic, but also so that you can gain additional targeted search engine visitors when the new site goes live.

Here are 6 SEO redesign secrets your developer may not know…ignore them at your own peril!

1. Creating Your SEO’d Site Architecture

Search engines look explicitly at how all your pages are linked together in order to determine their place within the site. Pages that are linked from every other page will be given more weight than those that are only linked from a few others. This is all considered a form of internal link popularity, or in Google language, internal PageRank.

Recommendation: During your redesign, don’t bury too deeply within the site any content that was previously bringing targeted search engine traffic. Ensure that any informational content that will be focused on the more competitive keyword phrases (for example, product and service pages) is high up in your site hierarchy.

In addition, all content contained in a specific category should be cross-linked via some sort of sub-navigation within that section.

2. Categorization and Avoiding Duplicate Content

When people are seeking information from a search engine, they usually have a question, a problem, or a need for specific information. The search queries they use at Google and the other engines reflect this. The more ways you can categorize your content for the various target markets you serve, the better.

Recommendation: Be sure that all top-level pages answer the potential searcher’s (your potential customers’) questions, and that it’s clear that your products and services can solve their problem. In addition, you also have to ensure that regardless of how someone found any piece of content on your site, they always end up at the same URL to avoid PageRank splitting and duplicate content issues.

For example, if a specific product can be classified as both a product and a service, it makes sense that it might be listed under both categories. However, the page (URL) that the potential customer eventually lands on, regardless of which category they started in, should always be the same.

3. New Content Management System and Changing URLS

If URLs must change in the redesign due to a new content management system or back-end coding, search engines may take some time to index the new URLs as well as give them the same weighting they gave the previous URLs due to URL age factors.

Recommendation: It’s critical to 301-redirect all old URLs to their relative counterpart within the newly designed website. This will pass the link popularity of the old URLs to the new ones quickly, as well as ensure that site visitors don’t receive 404-not-found errors.

This will be easier if the new URL naming is similar to the old one, because you can use automated methods. If URLs must change completely with no correlation to the names of the old URLs, and hand-redirects are required, you’ll want to at least redirect all the top-level pages, as well as those that you’re sure receive keyword traffic from search engines. But, ideally, every URL should be redirected if at all possible.

4. Coding of Navigation Menus

Links contained within the navigation of your website should be coded in a search engine–friendly manner so that they are visible and crawlable. Some DHTML and Flash menus are invisible to search engines, which causes the pages linked within them to not receive the internal link popularity they should receive.

Recommendation: Make sure all navigational menus are coded with CSS that is visible to search engines. In addition, avoid drop-down box links as the main form of navigation (CSS mouseovers are fine). You’ll also want to ensure that all content can be reached by hard-coded links – don’t force the user to go through any kind of search box menu because those are traditionally search engine unfriendly.

5. Custom HTML Elements

While some level of automation for titles, metas, headers, URLs, and alt attributes for images can be helpful, it’s critical that your new website’s content management system allow you to create custom descriptions for these as well.

Recommendation: Make sure the content management system has fields for custom title tags, meta descriptions, heading tags, etc. There should be no limit to the number of characters allowed in these fields either, because every page may need a different number of words and characters.

6. Session IDs and Other Tracking Links

It’s best not to use session IDs to track visitors, but if your system must use them, you’ll only need to feed the “clean” URLs to the search engine spiders – otherwise, they may get caught in an infinite loop, indexing the same content under multiple URLs.

You’ll also want to avoid any sort of campaign tracking links appended to URLs because these can split your link popularity by causing your content to be indexed under multiple URLs.

Recommendation: If this type of tracking is inherent in your system, use the canonical link element to maintain one URL for every page of content.

Don’t be surprised if your developer isn’t happy to receive some of these “secrets.” He or she may feel that their authority is being usurped or their creativity is being hindered. Just remember that it’s your website that you’re paying them to create in a way that will make you the most money possible. Let your developer know up-front that these things are non-negotiable. If they tell you that they can’t do any of the above, start looking around for a new developer – ASAP!

While there will always be a few unexpected bugs to work out when your site goes live, you won’t have to be afraid of losing your search engine visitors as long as you know what you’re doing. We’ve successfully helped many companies through this transition without any glitches. At the end of the process, there’s nothing like the feeling of having your beautiful new website launched. But more than that, there’s great comfort in knowing that the people looking for what you offer will continue to be able to easily find you in the search engines.

Source
6 Website Redesign SEO Secrets Your Developer May Not Know

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