SEO Techniques: 3xx Series Redirections
Ever seen those 300, 301 or 302 error messages while browsing websites over the Internet? We, pretty much, find them on every website. Typically, they perform in the background, unnoticed, and implemented with general ignorance, yet useful from the SEO perspective. However, redirects are often misunderstood, contradicted, and there is plenty of misleading information as well as advice available everywhere!
But, then again a 301, 302, or even a 307 redirect can be search engine friendly. While many of you may find this post a tad boring, I suggest you still stay tuned for my explanation on everything related to 3XX series redirections. Once you are done, digg, stumble, reddit, this post before you get to something more interesting! And, thanks in advance…
Redirects are typically a part of the HTTP protocol rather than a part of SEO or search engine practices. In order to clearly understand this aspect of the HTTP protocol, you need to first understand the ground basics of HTTP. There is truth in the fact that search engines have a different take on some of the redirects but if you must use the server sided redirects, you must learn to use them in a way that is beneficial for you.
HTTP 1.0 is pretty much outdated and its time for HTTP 1.1. A 3xx series redirect should be looked upon as a forwarding request. Let me explain that with an example. If you have sent a mail to a friend who may have shifted to a new address, chances are that your mail will either comeback to your address undelivered or then be abandoned by the US mail department. But when you type in a URL for a site that has changed to a new location, you are redirected to the new location by the server.
These type of redirects – 301, 302, 307 etc – instruct the user agent on the manner in which yours and future requests similar to yours need to be performed. But what you must remember here is that, since search engine spiders try to imitate the mannerisms of human traffic with the content requests, you must choose the right type of redirect request for them as well as the end users.
In any case, I am not propounding on the fact that 301 redirect is the best choice here. So let’s take a look at the individual values of these 3xx series redirections as are stipulated for HTTP 1.1.
Note: The reasons listed below are only some of the common recommendations — you CAN change them by the local equivalents in such a way that the protocol doesn’t get changed. Simply said you can translate these reasons as well as rephrase them.
• 300: Multiple Choices
• 301: Moved Permanently
• 302: Found (Elsewhere)
• 303: See Other
• 304: Not Modified
• 305: Use Proxy
• 307: Temporary Redirect
Now coming back to the importance of these redirects in SEO, it must be said that 301 and 302 are important. The 307 redirect that was introduced around the same time as HTTP 1.1 can still confuse search engines, even the likes of Google!
Gain Search Engine Optimization Benefits from Text Ad Links
Many webmasters have asked me, ‘How can I generate traffic to my website and boost my rankings on search engines?’ While I make a living from such people, I’d like to share with you a great tool to boost your website traffic as well as rev up your search engine rankings and that is text link ads. A text link ad is a keyword phrase that is hyperlinked to another page. For ex: if you own a website that sells handbags, you can buy a text link ad for ‘handbags’.
Text link ads or text ad links are important aspect of off page optimization and one of the many factors that search engines use to determine the credibility of your website. I am listing down some SEO benefits of text link ads that can help you generate traffic as well as bring in better returns.
The quantity and quality of incoming links to your website is very important. A website that has more incoming links is considered popular by search engines, and therefore, an important website. Back linking is also one of the all important factors that search engines use to determine the ranking of your website on their result pages.
Additionally, you must remember that not every incoming link to your website is important. Only a link that has more incoming links than yours will bear greater weight age than the one with a lower link count.
On the other hand, despite having a text ad link from a website that has a larger count of incoming links, you still may be at a SEO disadvantage. Why? Because websites are typically categorized as good or bad. Bad sites include: free for all sites and link exchange websites, while other sites are good sites and valued more by SEs such as Google.
Text links are also called anchor texts. Defined as a text found inside a link, anchor text looks like this:
<a href=”http://www.yoursiteonly.com/>Text Ad Links</a>
The term Text Ad Links is an anchor text. Anchor text link is important as most people who link to your website would use your website’s keywords to describe your site. An anchor text points to your website and helps SEs determine the keywords your website should be pageranked for.
Now that I have explained about text ad links, you may be curious to know where you can find them. Honestly, there are many ways that you can use to find suitable text ad links for your website. To start with you can directly contact the website owners or the webmasters of the sites you are interested in. While this is a significantly time consuming method, it can also lead to some disappointment unless you have great convincing power!
The other method is to create a resource like feature that draws other webmasters to link to your website. This is not a very effective method and may or may not solicit much response.
The third way to obtain text ad links is to buy them. Yes, an easy but resource driven method, purchasing text ad links allows you to have complete control over the quality of links on your website for long term. Buying text ads increases your chances of being noticed by SEs manifold.
But remember, text ad links are not for all. Use them only if they are part of your long term SEO strategy!
For more such resources and information, subscribe to our 14-day free trial of SEOintelligence.com by clicking here.
Effective Guidelines of a Good Taxonomy
Taxonomy for small websites is quite easy and obvious to fix (for most folks!) but in larger websites, especially the ones where the readership expertise is not as high as that of the authors, taxonomy designs can make a lot of difference.
The general rules of taxonomy design, as we apply it to a fictitious website showcasing art forms from all over the world:
1) Unless the site has a vocabulary that all anticipated users are well versed, it should also be in alphabetical order. You need to try and keep the number of vocab terms to around 30-40 characters max.
2) If the vocabulary has something a ‘parent-child’ structure then you need to think of dividing it into different segments, as it can become quite big to handle and will end up making your site look poorly structured to the search engine spiders/users.
Example: If you have an online arts shop focusing on Traditional Arts then under the Europe segment, you can have (I didn’t chose these, did I? Long night…):
• Lapp
• Celtic
• Sami
• Australia
(I know weird huh?)
The above representation depicts the way in which your internet shop has classified different art items.
Taxonomy has a multiple usage in language options, hence one gets the opportunity to use two different vocabularies instead of one. You can use one vocabulary for the Regions and the other for Cultures within different regions.
3) Several Terms: A perfect taxonomy will be too complex (encompassing every combination possible) therefore we will need to make it more manageable and cut it down to the basic elements into layers. You can use multiple taxonomy terms and start building context that can be captured with the help of ‘views’ or ’segments’. In reality, there are only a handful of web sites that need to show around 3-4 filters to their users even if they have more filters. All this can lead to a defined structure with many layers.
For example: If you have a website that needs to showcase small towns in a particular region or country like the US, your basic taxonomy structure ’segments’ or ‘views’ could look like:
1. Top level - States with 50 items
2. Each State with Counties
3. Each County with settlements
Now you can click a particular settlement and what you will actually get is a “views” screen that has filters for different terms within that settlement like Culture, News, Announcements, sports etc.
4) Expertise: Taxonomy is basically considered to be a user communications categorization issue. If you have a specific budget for your website then you can hire a taxonomy specialist or consultant to re-organize the content of your website. But please be careful regarding who you employ, it is always advisable to have at least one face-to-face meeting with the taxonomy expert. This will help you to understand if the expert has understood your requirement.
5) Legacy issues: Taxonomies always will create a legacy issue (I can speak to this from experience at Overture/Yahoo!). If you have uploaded ‘tagged’ data then it will be extremely difficult to make any changes to your taxonomy structure except for adding new terms. Most of the changes will be forward looking and clean up the newly produced pages to the new specs…and simply augment the historical content as best possible.
Why spend sleepless nights understanding the Taxonomy details? Try SEO Intelligence’s 14-day free trial and say goodbye to SEO Taxonomy nightmares!
Learning How Best To Promote Your Page/Blog
The learned men from the virtual world have long said that websites and/or blogs need to be promoted to bring in the crowds or eyeballs (as per Internet Lingo)! If you own a website or a blog site, and have been wanting to promote it since long, this article is for you.
Promoting a blog is not rocket science, but does require some basic knowledge and understanding of the scope of work involved and the various methods for promotion at your disposal. Typically, you can promote your blog in tow ways.
A) Promote your entire website and/or
B) Promote just some particular blog posts or articles
Though both forms work in almost the same way, there are some differences.
A) PROMOTING YOUR BLOG SITE
Some of the best ways to promote your blog site are:
Submit your blog site through pings: Submit to search engines and website directories. Submit is what everyone will tell you. Well not us, because we don’t believe in clichés.
Nowadays, most blogs work on WordPress, which has a built-in functionality that allows your blog to be introduced to most of the big and popular search engines and more. WordPress pings your post even before you publish it and says ‘hello’’ to search engines and other tagging services across the virtual world thereby, getting your message across to everyone, quite effectively. Adding effective and SEO content is the only thing you need to do now!
Since your aim is to penetrate the many layers of the SEO world, you could take the initiative and submit your blogs/blog posts to other search engines and link directories outside the purview of Google and Yahoo.
If you have some budget for your website/blog promotion, you can use the services of easy-to-use Self-Promotion Website service that allows webmaster and website managers like you to promote your website for very little money or for free. Using this service you can promote your interest to hundred of search engines, directories, not just in your country but even to foreign language SEs and link directories.
Another great way for self-promoting your website/blog is to become as visible as possible by being active. Posting interesting posts, at least 3 times per week, interacting with the people who comment on your blog, putting comments on other people’s blogs, and generally, getting involved around the Blogosphere will help you get noticed.
B) PROMOTING IMPORTANT BLOG POSTS
Think you have written a very important post that has also become very popular? Time to promote it! By submitting the post to various search engines and link directories, you can attract attention to both the post and the blog!
Comment on other people’s blogs. This does several favorable things for your own blog. People can trace back to your own blog site, and the links you get back to your blog, the more favor you’ll find with search engines, and higher your rankings.
Remember the more you participate, the more visible your blog will become; for if you want to get noticed you have to make your self noticed!
So, if you are ready to be recognized, sign up for the free 14-day trial account with SEOintelligence and take advantage of our cutting edge SEO tools.
Understanding TrustRank Algorithm
You may have heard about TrustRank and yet still not know what it really is. So here’s some information on just what TrustRank is, and what the algorithm is that runs it.
TrustRank is basically a ‘enhanced’ set of link analysis techniques that was first penned/described in a paper by Yahoo! research staff and Stanford University researchers. According to the paper, “TrustRank is used for semi-automatic separation of useful web sites from those that are spam”.
Most ’spam pages’ are created solely with the intention to mislead different search engines and gain rank disingenuously. These spam pages are created mainly for commercial (mainly affiliate) reasons and use different types of SEO and SEM techniques to achieve high rankings on the Top 3 Search Engines or SERPS. Although it is fairly easy for experts to identify spam technically, it is a extremely time consuming and expensive process to manually evaluate each and every page.
One of the most popular methods of improving page rankings on any of the search engines is by artificially increasing the perceived importance of any web document via complex linking tools. Even Google’s PageRank uses similar ways to determine the actual relative importance of any and all web documents that might have been subjected to different types of manipulation.
The TrustRank Algorithm
The TrustRank algorithm is a specific formula used for rating the overall quality of different websites. The TrustRank algorithm was initially published by Gyongyi, Garcia-Molina and Pedersen in 2004. The important idea behind the TrustRank algorithm is quite similar to that of the PageRank algorithm which is, to take the linking structure into account for generating a measure for the type of quality a particular webpage has. This algorithm is considered by many experts as a further development on the existing PageRank algorithm.
Protecting Your Website from Canonical Triggers
There are times when search engine spiders can get lost and will not be able to locate or index your website. Even search engine spiders get confused! Let’s look at the following example:
office.com
www.office.com
office.com/index.html
www.office.com/index.html
https://office.com/index.html
https://office.com
Now there are some servers that use the mod_dir, which is capable of creating additional issues through redirecting a domain without using the trailing slash to a domain using a trailing slash. Hence office.com will be redirected to office.com/. This is quite a rare occurrence but still it can become an important issue. Most experts would say that you need to always make it a point to add trailing slash in any link that you want to use for the purpose of link building. In fact, this is also the right way of linking to a website.
Canonical stands for Authoritative Path and this is how the search engines are able to understand that the pages belong to your website. Since most of the times, you will be dealing with robots hence, you have to take some extra precautions because robots aren’t programmed to think and so, can’t think at all.
If one of the robots notices a page that has anywhere from 2 to 5 different paths then it will mark them as additional pages and not the main page. There is a high probability that the search engine spider might get confused seeing so many paths and hence might even duplicate all your pages and in the process place importance on an unimportant webpage. The fact of the matter is that it will end up putting priority on the index.html page instead of your domain. This is exactly the reason why you need to have a proper home page link like “http://www.office.com/” or even “/” but never use something like /index.xxx.
Canonical issues exist in different forms and create problems although these problems are not a regular occurrence thanks to different sitemap programs as well as the increase in awareness factor.
Duplicate Content Issues
This is another major issue and is related to Canonical issues. If you use the same contact form with several dynamic variables then duplicate pages will be created. So your form might look like contact.asp?id=New York or even as contact.asp?id=Florida. This basically means that Google will see the page in different ways and might end up treating it as spam.
There is a simple fix for the duplicate content issue and it can be done by… Read more
Guide To Do-It-Yourself Search Engine Optimization
Now we all know that for success over the Internet, search engine optimization is sacrosanct. But did you also know that search engine optimization doesn’t always require the assistance or knowledge of an SEO expert? In fact, webmaster can search optimize their websites themselves. While I have been part of the SEO brigade for some years now, I started off doing SEO for my website without any expert help. Let me share with you some of my secrets on do-it-yourself search engine optimization.
Get to Know SEO: The technique of writing keyword rich content, fixing the website code, adding META tags, etc that make your website search engine friendly is known as SEO. Search engine optimization is implemented to make your website or blog site accessible to all search engines such as Google, AltaVista, Yahoo!, and MSN among others. These search engines store your website information in their vast databases and help the internet users to look for information/services/products related to your website.
Implementing DIY SEO techniques: The DIY SEO techniques are easy to implement and can be used in all the webpages of your website/blog site; they can resolve many design and content issues as well. That being said, it’s best to start with one page of your website, clean up all the basic optimization issues, and move on to the next page and so on. So, we’ll start at this point. Look for consistent as well as redundant issues and fix them in all the webpages/blog pages. This assures you and search engine robots/crawlers to scan your website content and collect information and stack it on their databases.
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Black Hat Vs White Hat Links
If you suffer from the “Google Syndrome,” I don’t really blame you. Sleepless nights, stressed days and plenty of headaches, all to figure out how to rank well on Google…that’s Google Syndrome! Can’t really blame you for behaving the way you do, after all Google Search accounts for more than 50% of all Internet search traffic.
Desperation can make you use wrong ways to accomplish top page rankings, but you’ll soon be found out and banned. The best way is to use the right technique or White Hat as opposed to the wrong technique or Black Hat technique to achieve higher page rankings.
Get to know White hat and Black hat Links Better?
A throw back to the good old westerns, where the good guys wore ‘white hats’ and the baddies wore ‘black hats,’ SEO’s hats are no different in meaning and connotation. White hat SEO Techniques is the recognized way to optimize website for Search Engines. Google especially bans sites that employ Black hat links to pull in traffic. With relatively no or only short-term benefits, Black hat links that bring you initial rewards, die a slow and terrible death. No more will your website show up on Google Search, nor will you be able to run a business over the Internet. And all the money and time invested will be an utter and complete waste.
Black hat links and SEO doesn’t promise you a prosperous and recognized tomorrow like White hat does. Nor do Black hat SEO techniques work for a long period.
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Enabling SEO Through Mod Rewrites
Mod rewrite tools are used by web developer’s to enhance SEO. In this age of competition, the Mod rewrite tools provide a distinct advantage to webmasters who can use them to avoid duplicate content, redirect relocated urls, provide search engine friendly urls, and on the whole strengthen the overall website SEO. Duplicate content can be quite a nuisance and pose problems for webmasters. Hence the best solution is to use mod rewrites, which works on the principles of the process of ‘Canonicalization’ and is capable of taking care of duplicate content that plagues most webmasters.
The Canonicalization Process
By using the process of Canonicalization, you will be able to pick the top or best URL from the numerous choices or web URLs presented by search engines. Let’s take an example to understand this better:
http://www.SEOintelligence.com/
http://SEOintelligence.com/
http://www.SEOintelligence.com/index.html
Technically speaking, all the above URLs look different and there is a high possibility that the web server might return totally different content for any of the above urls. But in 99% of the cases the web server will return the same content for all of the above urls. Meaning that your actual site content get’s lost! The best way to avoid search engines from returning duplicate content, is by redirecting the IP address and non-www to the www hostnames as well as the /index.html page. Here’s how you can do it using a Mod Rewrite tool:
Rewrite Engine to:
# Redirect IP addresses and non-www to www
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !^www.SEOintelligence.com$ [NC]
RewriteRule (.*) http://www.SEOintelligence.com/$1 [R=301,L]
NOTE: In the above case when someone requests for the url http://SEOintelligence.com/index.html, then he/she will be redirected to the following url: http://www.SEOintelligence.com/index.html
Using Taxonomy to Organize Content
One of the rarely used terms, Taxonomy can be used effectively to organize content on your website. The dictionary defines Taxonomy as the science and practice of classification. What really needs to be understood is how a scientific application like Taxonomy be used for organizing content? Let’s take an example to define the use of this classification methodology. As you are probably aware, there are more than a hundred odd genres in music and some of the most popular ones include rock, pop, metal, jazz and R&B. When your music is classified, you will find it easier to generate a list of genres and in particular you’ll be able to subcategorize the many sub genres of music that can include classic rock, psychedelic rock, garage rock, punk rock, etc. Some of these can further be classified into several sub-sub-genres. This classification of different genres and sub-genres in a meaningful and organized manner via content is known as Taxonomy.
Taxonomy modules are used more often for classification of content, and especially on Drupal websites. If you use Drupal 5 then you will find that the naming of various Taxonomy modules are hugely inconsistent across all administrative interfaces. For example: ideally, it should be Administer>Build>Taxonomy Module page but in reality, the vocabulary has been administered via Administer>Content management>Category page. The module for Taxonomy will permit setting up of vocabularies as a user defined tag, which is known as ‘folk taxonomy’ or any other customer defined term. The Taxonomy module has the capability to organize different taxonomies into specific vocabularies that may consist of single or multiple terms. Some of the principles that are applied to define a vocabulary within a Taxonomy module include:
1. Specific terms as part of every vocabulary. Having unlimited number of vocabularies that will contain unlimited number of terms.
2. You can further divide or categorize each of the vocabulary terms into several hierarchies that are dependent on the various settings for a specific vocabulary.
3. These vocabularies can also be designated as ‘Free tag,’ which means that users can create brand new content and will not require to classify the content using terms belonging to a pre-defined “controlled vocabulary.” Instead, all users will be able to freely define tags or terms.
4. As a user, you will also be able to allow different terms in the vocabularies for defining commonly related terms. This function is quite similar to the see also provision in dictionaries.
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