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Thursday, March 25, 2010

Matt Cutts Suggestions for Link Building

As you may know from my earlier posts I have had a couple of hours to watch a few Google webmaster videos and thought I would summarise them on my blog. A particularly interesting video was on the best methods for link building apart obviously from the Golden Rule of excellent content.

The first point Matt made was to avoid ANY kind of paid for links. That does not mean however that you cannot pay for work by an SEO company, like ourselves, to help you build links, it just means that you should avoid any situation where the only reason someone has linked to you is because you handed over cash, either to them or a link building company.

I like Matt’s video because all of the methods he suggests are good honest “vote for me” type methods. Here are his suggestions together with my comments and observations;

The Occasional Rant!
Although you should not make a habit of this as it will soon turn people off, the odd rant about bad service or your own particular gripe, can because it is controversial draw people to your website and if you can manage to be humourous too then all the better.

Answer People’s Questions on Forums etc
Many have nofollow on any links so you will not get pagerank directly from the forum but if people like your help and advice then they will visit your website and bookmark you. I love helping on forums, webmaster help and Yahoo and find when I look at my analytics my websites get a lot of traffic from these sources.

Original Research
When Google announces a change in the algorithm for example, research how that affects your business and write a blog post on it. Everyone likes up to date stuff and many new releases will have glitches so find those out and let everyone know and they will love you for it.

Newsletters
If you keep your customers up to date with your business and offers they will click on the links in your newsletter, visit your website and possibly buy more from you. Don’t let their attention wander to your competitors.

Social Media
Use twitter, facebook, forums and blogs.

Try to Get an Invitation to Speak at an Event or Conference
The majority of the delegates will probably visit your website and bookmark your pages.

“50 Best” Lists
Although as Matt says these have been rather over-used they are still worth doing once in a while although less important than the other methods listed here.

Every Business Should Have a Blog
Use your blog to put on amusing stuff that helps define who you are, build a reputation for knowing your stuff and add useful tutorials on “how to do” whatever your area of expertise is.

Provide Free Useful Online Services
If there is apart of your business that you can put online and offer for free then do so as these online tools will often be bookmarked and used often. I, for example, visit a particular online image optimiser many many times a day when setting a website up. I do have other PC based tools that will do the same job but the online tool is so easy to use I prefer to return to that one each time.

Make Sure Your Website Architecture is Good and that it is Easy to Bookmark Your Pages

Make Useful, Funny or Informative Youtube Videos.

Gill Keeble
SEO Commercial- SEO For Your Business

Posted by admin at 11:14:57 in Link Building
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Saturday, February 6, 2010

Redirecting On a Zeus Server

Zeus Page Redirects

When you move a page on your website you will want both the users and the search engines to know where it has moved to and be redirected there automatically. This is vital if you, firstly, don’t want users to get the annoying ‘Page Not Found’ error message from a page they’d previously bookmarked or clicked on in Google and, secondly, for keeping hold of the search engine page rank for the page that you’d spent ages building up.

There are a number of methods available for doing a redirect (such as using META redirects) but the only truly search engine friendly way is to add some lines to your .htaccess file in the root of your web folder.

Firstly get the .htaccess file either via FTP or a File Manager type program provided by your domain host. Then, after making a backup of the file, edit it in a text editor such as notepad. If the file doesn’t exist yet in your root web folder, then you can just create a new file in your text editor and then save it as .htaccess.

At the end of the .htaccess file you will need to add a line for each file/folder you want to redirect in the form:

redirect permanent old-url-path[*] new-url

Each parameter is separated by a space (spacebar) character, where:

‘redirect’ is an instruction that a page has moved.
‘permanent’ implies that the page has been permanently moved. There are other options but this is the only one that keeps hold of your page rank.
‘old-url-path[*]’ is the old path to where the page used to be (The * is an optional wildcard).
‘new-url’ is the absolute url to the new page.

Note the ‘new-url’ can be the path from the root of your web site (eg /folder/file.txt) but to be completely reliable you should include the domain also (eg http://www.yourdomain.co.uk/folder/file.txt) – this can be just copied from your browser address bar.

Here are some examples:

Page Moved

You’ve renamed your page in the root folder from ‘old_file.htm’ to ‘new_file.htm’:

redirect permanent /old_file.htm http://www.yourdomain.co.uk/new_file.htm

You’ve moved your page ‘file.php’ from the ‘subpages’ directory to the root directory:

redirect permanent /subpages/file.php http://www.yourdomain.co.uk/file.php

You’ve spaces in the original page name ‘old file with spaces.txt’, so you need to put it in double quotes:

redirect permanent "/folder/old file with spaces.txt" http://www.yourdomain.co.uk/folder/new_file.txt

Folder Moved

You’ve renamed a folder from ‘old_folder’ to ‘new_folder’ and the files are the same within:

redirect permanent /old_folder http://www.yourdomain.co.uk/new_folder

Domain Moved

You’ve moved all your pages, files and folders from www.old_domain.co.uk to www.new_domain.co.uk , in the .htaccess file on the old domain:

redirect permanent / http://www.new_domain.co.uk

Multiple Pages to Single Page

You want all pages on your domain to redirect to the home page:

redirect permanent /* http://www.yourdomain.co.uk

You want all pages in ‘folder1’ to go to a single page ‘page.htm’:

redirect permanent /folder1/* http://www.yourdomain.co.uk/page.htm

You want all folders starting with ‘folder’ (eg ‘folder’, ‘folder1’, ‘folder2’, ‘folder345’) to redirect to ‘new_folder’:

redirect permanent /folder* http://yourdomain.co.uk/new_folder

Once you are happy with the changes, save the file and upload it to the root of your web site. Test thoroughly the changes by typing the old web address into your browser and making sure it redirects to your new page.

NB. Zeus servers are different to Apache however in that they cannot deal with redirects where the path name, that you are wanting to direct, contains file.php or file.html etc. ie if you try and set up the folder to page redirect as shown above but with a file name in it it will not work.

redirect permanent /index.php/folder1/* http://www.yourdomain.co.uk/page.htm

will not work.

We have searched the internet but cannot find the answer to this. If you know how to achieve this on a Zeus server please let us know.

Posted by admin at 13:20:34 in General, Link Building
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Thursday, February 4, 2010

Redirecting non-www to www on Zeus Servers

Duplicate content is a problem that can penalise your search engine ranking. If your domain is present at both ‘http://yourdomain.co.uk’ and ‘http://www.yourdomain.co.uk’ then a duplication exists. This can cause dilution of the benefit of links to your website as some websites may link to the non-www and some to the www domain. A redirection needs to be set up to redirect the non-www domain to the www version. Although there are plenty of instructions on the internet as to how to achieve this on Apache servers there is very little information relating to Zeus servers.

Here is how you redirect a non-www domain to the www version on a Zeus server.

Firstly, you need to create a text document (Notepad will do) and put the following code into it…

match IN:Host into $ with ^yourdomain\.co\.uk$
if matched then
set Response = 301
set OUT:Location = http://www.yourdomain.co.uk%{URL}
set OUT:Content-Type = text/html
set Body = Go <a ref="http://www.yourdomain.co.uk%{URL}">here</a> instead.
endif

NB Replace ‘yourdomain’ with your website domain name (in 3 different places above) noting that on the first line each ‘dot’ in your domain name needs to be preceded with a back-slash.

Save this file as ‘rewrite.script’. Once saved, the file needs to be uploaded to your website in the ‘root’ directory either by FTP or other file manager interface provided by your website hosting company (refer to your ISP for details).

Now, when you type in ‘yourdomain.co.uk’ into your browser, you will automatically be redirected to ‘www.yourdomain.co.uk’ and so will the search engines.

Posted by admin at 09:42:57 in Link Building
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Tuesday, February 2, 2010

Does Backlink Text Matter?

Yes it does. There are some websites which will come up high in searches for a keyword that is not even on their website -not in any page titles, headings or body text. The reason this happens is because the website has many other websites linking to it using that particular keyword in the link text.

For example, if everyone who linked to this blog did so using the following as the link text;

<a href="http://www.seo4all.co.uk/blog/">Yahoo Stats</a>

then over time you would find that this site would come up relatively high if someone put the phrase “Yahoo stats” into Google despite that phrase, as far as I recall, not being anywhere on this website.

Consequently, if you have any input when other websites link to your site do think carefully about what you want the link text to be and use this as an opportunity to use the types of phrases you feel searchers may put into Google to find your type of website.

Posted by admin at 08:09:48 in Link Building
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Thursday, January 21, 2010

site: Searches and Webmaster Sitemap Reports

Having just completed the Google Webmasters Quiz I thought I would cover this point.

When you carry out a site:www.website.com search you can often see that the number of indexed pages differs from your Sitemap report in Google Webmaster Tools. This is because the Sitemap report only covers the URLs you’ve submitted in your Sitemap file. Your site: search covers whatever Google has in its index and the index can contain historical pages that no longer exist and, hopefully are now subject to a 301 redirect. Remember too that the site: search may not include pages you have recently added to your website. If you are using php on your website and have not used the canonical meta tag then you will have in the site: search many urls containing session ids which all point to the same page. This should indicate to you to implement the canonical meta tag. Multiple urls all pointing to the same page may result in duplication problems and in addition the benefit of incoming links to that page may be diluted over the various urls for that page.

Do also be aware that using the menu link for your home pages as /index.html will result in duplicate urls for your home page and again a dilution of the benefits of incoming links as some people will link to www.site.co.uk/index.html and some will link to just www.site.co.uk however both urls go to the same page, your home page. You can remedy this by ensuring that your menu link or home button link is www.site.co.uk/ or indeed just “/”.