Search Engine Optimization
Search Engine Marketing

Thursday, November 6, 2008

non-www v/s www and 301 redirect

Many know that canonical domains can have a some impact on your site and it could be solved within moments with a few lines of code in the .htaccess file on an Apache Linux server.



Just a few lines of code like shown below:
first Url rewrite needs to be turned on with this line
RewriteEngine on

then to redirect all users to access the site WITH the 'www.' prefix (http://example.com/... will be redirected to http://www.example.com/...)

RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^example.com$ [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.example.com/$1 [L,R=301]

or to redirect all users to access the site WITHOUT the 'www.' prefix (http://www.example.com/... will be redirected to http://example.com/...)

RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^www.example.com$ [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://example.com/$1 [L,R=301]




Wednesday, October 8, 2008

Trouble Submitting website to Google using Xml Sitemap

Has you may have seen that we have been working really hard in the past few weeks to get our SEO Company website Redonads.com live and completed.

With the Redon Ads website we had taken a different approach to SEO, we used REP / Robots.txt to lock out search engines while still building links to SEO Blog and other mediums. We achieved considerable success as you may know with the homepage getting a pagerank of 3.0

Keeping the momentum going I wanted the completed sections of the site to start getting indexed and accordingly test the results achieved. I generated an XML Sitemap as I firmly that the best way to get a site indexed / cached by Google is by submitting an xml sitemap to Google.



But then Google Webmaster Tool won't co-operate, cause you can't submit a sitemap with pages that are blocked using REP (We HAD used REP to lock Search Engines from the entire website).

But Wait a minute! We also changed the Robots.txt file to unlock the completed pages, but Google Webmaster Tools won't give me an option to let them know that and then except my sitemap.

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Monday, September 29, 2008

Google PageRank: We don't get you.

Earlier our SEO division was part of eCreeds Web Design Company; but due increase demand for SEO services, some months back we started work on Redonads - SEO Company, the SEO division of Redon Solutions.

Developing a SEO website showing all the services we offer was top on our list, hence we had registered redonads.com, and put up a under construction page, for some reason we allowed the site to be indexed and also linked to it from our blog posts and comments.

Soon we saw that the site had a PR 0, when page rank was updated in July, that was quite understandable considering the website had no quality content. We didn't want the site to be launched with PR 0, hence we used Robots.txt Exclusion Protocol or REP so that bots are off limit till every single bell and whistle was in it's place on the website.

On 27th September Page Rank was updated again, and guess what the RedonAds website that's currently blocked using REP has got a Page Rank of 3.

PageRank is a mix of many things your backlinks and content are part of them, Now in the case of redonads content was out and PR was more inclined towards the backlinks, hence it did relatively well compared to July.

Hence my advice is if your site is underdevelopment its better you use REP than show a Search Engines under construction or half developed site. Further its a good idea to start building up those links even if the site not yet ready... You could do a blog post saying your site will be launched soon.




Wednesday, September 17, 2008

Using robots.txt or REP

We never used Robots.txt on our web design company websites as we thought its for keeping Search engines away, and we wanted to welcome search engines.

But you can also use it tell Search Engines to crawl your website, like this.
User-agent: *
Disallow:
or
User-agent: *
Allow: /

But we were noticing many requests for Robots.txt by MSN and Googlebot in our server logs, hence we decided what the heck might as well create a robot file.

Here we made our first mistake we made "robot.txt" instead of "robots.txt". Though this may seem like a No brainer, you would be surprised by the number of people who make this mistake.

Our main concern was that we had certain critical pages / scripts / folders which if we mention on our robots.txt file would be like putting up a board attack here. But then after a lot of discussions we came to this conclusion that we don't need to show these pages/scripts/folders in robots.txt file unless there was a link to it from somewhere it wouldn't be crawled anyways.

Now we have some experience in writing these Robots.txt files, which we would like to share here:

1. All Commands need to be Title Case for e.g. User-agent, Disallow, Allow and so on

2. Further it can be used effectively to curb the problem of duplicate content on your blog. For e.g. if your using blogger you will won't the permalink of blog post to cached as opposed to the Archive page or the labels page, so you write your robots.txt file in the following manner.

User-agent: * {this is for all Bots or you specify a bots name here}
Disallow: /Blog/2008_ {this will block all your archive pages for 2008 which are named something like "2008_09_01.html" while not blocking your permalinks like "/Blog/2008/09/04/blogpost.html"}
Disallow: /Blog/label/

if your using wordpress then you can block "wp-login.php" and your "wp-admin" folder using "Disallow: /wp-"

3. If your site uses session ids in the URL you may have a major problem with duplicate content, wherein the same page gets cached with different URLs thus causing duplicate content. A REP solution to this would be using "*", suppose your session ids start with "sess_id=" so you have urls like "...page1.htm?sess_id=nndndchh3nG" and "...page1.htm?sess_id=mnvmjenfcchh3nG", now both these urls are the same i.e. "page1.htm".

This is how you can block urls with session ids:
Disallow: /*sess_id

4. If you have a XML sitemap file in your site, you can reference that in your Robots.txt file for search engine to flow.
Sitemap: http://www.mysite.com/sitemap.xml

these are just some rules we use, depending on your site or blogs structure these very rules can be tweaked effectively to filter out duplicate content and let the juice flow most effectively.

If you still feel confused about using robots.txt, feel free to contact one of our SEO experts.

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Monday, August 25, 2008

All about SEO

With the rapid advancement in the field of internet marketing, a large number of people seem to be gradually waking up to the need of better SEO techniques. SEO or search engine optimization is the technique which is being used by a large number of websites to increase their page ranking in the search engine results. Some of the tricks used in SEO include optimum use of keywords in the web content, link building and selecting the right keywords. It is also equally important to make use of the sufficient kind of graphic images and written content in the web page so that it may feature in the search engine results and not fall under the category of spam.