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Use Robots.txt to disallow spiders
Posted in: Blog by admin on November 12, 2009
Use Robots.txt to disallow spiders from specific pages or sections
Robots.txt is a file in your server which tells various search engine crawlers not to crawl or index specific parts of your site. It can tell certain search engines to ig‐nore certain pages, or tell all engines to ignore your site altogether. Even for op‐timization, you might want to hide certain parts of your site from search engines. For example, if your site has a “terms and conditions” page which is similar to most such pages on other sites and serves no search purpose, or you don’t want bots to crawl your cgi‐bin directory, or have any other directories or pages with duplicate content, you can use this file to tell search engines to ignore them:
A robots.txt file looks like this:
User-Agent: [Bot or Spider name]
Disallow: [File or Directory name]
Read more…
Use CSS to reduce file size
Posted in: Blog by admin on
Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) is a style sheet language which makes your design more flexible and separates your layout code from the content of each page. CSS enables web designers to easily implement site‐wide changes without going into each page or accidentally messing with their content. CSS also reduces the size of your pages and makes it easier for spiders to find your content – the most im‐portant thing on your page – easily and quickly.
This is standard practice in the web industry any experienced Web design company should be using this methology.
Optimising Each Page
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Optimizing Each Page
In addition to optimizing your site design, there are a number of standard SEO practices that should be followed on each page of your website. Keep the follow‐ing tips in mind when creating a page:
- Each page should be optimized for 1‐2 keywords only. If you find it hard to narrow the content down to only a couple of keywords, consider dividing it into two or more pages.
- Every page should have at least 250 words of content, and the title should always contain keywords.
Websites That WORK
Posted in: Blog by admin on November 11, 2009
While the quality of your content is the most important feature of your website, the structure and usability of your website play a significant role in ensuring that search crawlers as well as visitors can access and understand information easily.
Building a user‐friendly website is crucial to building a website that is optimized for search engines. And since the entire point of SEO is to attract more visitors to your website, making a functional, easily useable website should be an obvious part of your traffic‐building efforts.
Using a Content Management System
Posted in: Blog by admin on October 10, 2009
Content Management or CMS system, allows users to easily update content on there websites and produce very complex looking sites with relative ease.
Over the past few years Web Content Management Systems (WCMS) like Wordpress, Joomla, b2evolution and ExpressionEngine have revolutionized the creation and design of sites by providing ready to use publishing platforms.
Create a sitemap
Posted in: Blog by admin on August 13, 2009
A sitemap represents the architecture of your website, clarifying the hierarchy of all your pages, starting with the home page. (See Pickaweb’s own site map as an example.) Even if your website is relatively small, creating a sitemap will give you a lot of SEO benefits: notably, it will make your site easy to crawl, help the flow of trust (PageRank) between your pages, and alert search engines to changes (new or removed pages) in your website. Site maps are easy to create and can be made in a number of formats, with XML being the most common and widely ac‐cepted. (You can find a free online site map generator here.)
Use 301 redirects for moved or deleted pages
Posted in: Blog by admin on July 15, 2009
Use 301 redirects for moved or deleted pages
What happens when you remove or change the location of an indexed page or your entire site? Users may continue to find it as a result in Google’s database, but when they arrive, they won’t find anything. Alternatively, if your old page has accumulated high rankings or trust (PageRank) in search engines, deleting or removing it will mean that you’ve wasted all that hard work.
Use either www or non‐www, not both
Posted in: Blog by admin on June 12, 2009
Use either www or non‐www, not both
A confusion between or use of both www and non‐www for your URLs can result in canonical issues in search engines, where ‘www.example.com’ might be mis‐taken as a duplicate of ‘example.com’. You can use the 301 redirect to force one of the two. For instance, to force the non‐www version to redirect to www, place the following code in your .htaccess file:
RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^example.com
RewriteRule (.*) http://www.example.com/$1 [R=301,L]
Use static URLs with keywords in the title
Posted in: Blog by admin on May 12, 2009
Use static URLs with keywords in the title
Static URLs are different from dynamic ones in that they are files hosted on your server. Dynamic URLs lead to dynamically‐generated pages when the page is re‐quested (e.g.: http://www.example.com/forums/thread.php?threadid=123). Such pages (with question marks and ‘=’ signs in the URL) are not SEO friendly since they can create duplicate content issues. For example, a dynamically gen‐erated forum index will have the same content as a dynamically generated ver‐sion of that page which is sorted by date of posting.
Wherever possible, also use keywords in the URL. For example, ‘http://www.example.com/123.htm’ is not as search friendly as ‘http://www.example.com/top‐ten‐SEO‐myths.htm’.
Link between pages using keyword‐heavy anchor text
Wherever applicable, link between your inner pages. Use keywords in the link text – for example, if you publish an article about how to choose a moving com‐pany and then write a blog post about moving or relocating, you can link be‐tween the two. “Read my article about how to choose a moving company” is a much better SEO strategy than “Read my article about moving companies here”.