Marketing on the Web On July 14, 2010, I will discuss how to maintain Pagerank when you update or launch a new website with the North Alabama Web Developers group. In this meet-up we’ll discuss Google webmaster tools, Google analytics, sitemaps, and using redirects to map content with the .htaccess file (emphasis will be on Apache/Linux hosting). Please visit the meet-up site for details and sign-up. https://www.meetup.com/web-99/calendar/13878846/ Slides from this discussion are here: Maintain Pagerank wh...
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New Ways to Address Duplicate Content
Duplicate Content has long been an issue with webmasters and is cause for concern because duplicating content dilutes your ranking in search results. Perhaps the most common cause of having duplicate content is in allowing both www. and non www versions of your site to exist. However, another place where I see duplicate content occur is when a customer has multiple domain names pointing to the same content. When you use multiple domain names, and there are good reasons to do this, you should pic...
MoreMod Rewrite for Better Living
I have written before about never deleting or renaming a page, but there are times when it is unavoidable. Restructuring a site, removing obsolete products and changing scripting languages (moving to shtml from php, or php from html) make this a common problem. I am in the middle of two large projects that will involve changing the names of many pages. These are both Joomla-based sites, so I am mitigating some of the problems by using sh404sef. It does a great job of helping you control page ...
MoreLaunching a new Website / Changing an existing one
Whether launching a new website or changing an existing one it is important to do a little upfront work. I have had a couple of clients come to me recently either wanting to toss out their old site and start over or who have sadly, already made wholesale changes to page names or content only to find that their website can no longer be found in search results. Things to consider when launching a new Website or changing an existing one: Never rename or delete a page (well almost). If you a...
MoreMod Rewrite Rules for Uniform Spidering
I mention in my earlier post that you should choose to use www or not , but regardless, stick with it. Another issue that arises is that you can't always control how someone else will link to your site. While many will include www. others will not. To insure that all you links are cataloged in the search engines uniformly, you should implement a couple of rules in your .htaccess file. A rule to insure www is (or is not) always used. To Redirect mysite.com to www.mysite.com Options +FollowS...
MoreNever Delete or Rename a Page
Well, almost never... I talk about the importance of page names on my SEO page. The trick is to design your site so that your page names and content are tuned for the top phrases in your industry. But what happens if you inherit a poorly designed site, the content becomes obsolete, or a generic term like "MP3 player" is suddenly secondary to a more popular phrase like "iPod"? In those cases, you create new content and use a 301 redirect (moved) to ensure any traffic to the old page is redire...
MoreTo www or not to www, that is in the URL …
This article has been updated to address additional questions received on this topic. I am frequently asked about whether you should include the www or not when setting up your your websites' URL. While many of us are predisposed to typing the www, most of the time including the www is immaterial as typing either www.mywebsite.com or mywebsite.com will usually be directed to the same place. So which should you use and when? The answer is either, but not both and here are specific cases to co...
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