301 redirects and other types of URL webpage redirection.

Why SEO Professionals Seems Obsessed with 301 Redirects?

Minimizing Duplicate Content

It is common in many web design and development projects to have some cases of duplicate content. Although many people say this is a negative search engine ranking factor and some view it like a penalty, Google claims there is no penalty as explained by Google Engineer on Search Quality, Greg Grothaus.

Although a penalty or not, Google is aware of the duplicate pages and attempts to choose the best page and this is where it can make mistakes. Google tries to add diversity to the SERPs so they do not appear to be posting the same page over and over which makes a better search user experience. And in this process, the page you may be attempting to optimize and rank well might be filtered out and replaced with another page with duplicate or highly similar content. Come to think of it, this is ideal for the searcher since this filters out many spammy type of blogs also called splogs for spam blogs. But this problem can also exist internally. And this is where the 301 redirect is used. A 301 redirect means a permanent redirect which helps guide search engines consolidate cases of duplicate content.

Consolidating Link Popularity and PageRank

Links as you have probably heard over and over, help in SEO. Links are like votes of authority, votes of trust, votes of credibility. And the more links you have, the better it helps in ranking in search engines, although it is not only about quantity, but quality where links should be relevant and not spammy.

If a link goes to a page that redirects, a 301 redirect is the only type of redirect that will pass on the link metrics to the destination page. If not the proper redirect was in place, you can be passing precious link juice to another page that would have been beneficial to the destination page loosing this ranking boost benefit.

Some URLs change, but the content still generally remains the same

On old websites, even new ones, URLs may change. It could be due to a website redesign, or a discontinues product or service, a abolished department, a change in product description or whatever case that makes some old URL disappear. Using a 301 redirect will fix problems of missing pages that used to exist. There are mainly two benefits here:

1. Link Popularity metrics are transfered over to the destination page.
   If ever the old URL may have gained some links you may or may not be aware of that helps in the ranking of a missing page will be passed over to the new equivalent page if a 301 redirect is in place.
2. The user experience of not getting lost on your website.
   Visiting a page that no longer exist, either because you clicked on a link on another website, or from a search engine or was saved in your bookmarks can sometimes cause frustrations and this may make or break a  possible sale or lead online. Redirecting users to the right place helps avoid possible lost traffic.

Now just because you have to do a redirect and telling this to your web designer, web developer, network administrator, company IT guy may not be sufficient enough if they are not that familiar of the types of redirects and why it would be ideal to do a 301 redirect. Read more on the different types of redirects below. (more…)

As most of us know, Google has formally launched “personalized search” in an effort to continually improve each individual’s search experience in their engine.  The goal is to track user’s search behavior in order to continaully improve and “personalze” the relevance of results.  When these discussions first began, many SEO’s and Internet marketing companies feared that this would mean the end of Search Engine Optimization as we know it.  We are still waiting to see what affect this will have over the coming months but from the information disseminated thus far, it seems that most of the fundamental best practices will still apply. 

So How Does this Impact SEO for Our Clients?

The truth is, some of the important areas of focus that these changes bring to light, have really always been important.  The end goal of SEO is to grow a business through relevant natural search traffic that leads to conversions (whatever those conversion goals might be).  You can chase rankings all day long but if the result is not good quality traffic and conversions that lead to growth, there is something missing.  The key things that still matter are:

• Focus on traffic and conversions more than rankings:  Of course, we are still always going to look at rankings but now more than ever, we really need to combine the focus on rankings and the resulting traffic.  If a site sees an increase in rankings but stagnant levels (or decreasing levels) of traffic, personalized search may be posing a negative effect and the strategy shoulf be adjusted.  On the other hand, if rankings see a slight dip but traffic is improving, the site might be experiencing better results from the shift to personalized search. 
• This has of course been important for a long time but there is a renewed focus on “brand” quality:  The quality, interactivity, value, and user experience of a website will always impact traffic, bounce rates, repeat visitors, and link popularity.  Google is now placing more emphasis on this with personalized search.  This can create challenges for new businesses that may not yet be a “trusted brand” yet.  However, it certainly does encourage any business to develop great content and have a good user experience. 
• Other sources of traffic might have a positive impact on natural search results:  It seems that all traffic sources will now be taken into account with Google’s personalized metrics.  This could mean that paid search traffic and other key drivers to a website might positively (but indirectly) impact natural results within the personalized search spectrum.  It will be interesting to see the results of this in the coming months.

How Should We Be Adjusting Our Strategy and Campaigns?

Best practices still apply.  As mentioned above, we must conitue to improve user experience, brand loyalty, content, and traffic (from all sources).  Continue to follow best pratices for basic SEO coding and making all pages accessible to the search engines, use a keyword strategy relavent to your business goals and that is aligned with your user’s search behavior, continually develop good content, and earn great inbound links by being proactive in your industry.

I was recently speaking at the 2009 PubCon in Las Vegas on both an Organic Site Review Clinic & an SEO Site Design Panel.

The Organic Site Clinic on Wednesday November 11th was only myself & Alan K’necht of K’nechtology where we were aligned on foundational & canonical SEO for the sites we reviewed as we are both sticklers for proper back-end coding.

We even came across a site that was using a MORE link to hide content at the bottom of each of their pages – the site will remain unnamed

Later that Wednesday after lunch I was on an SEO Design & Organic Site Structure panel with Ted Ulle of Converseon, Lyndsay Walker of Canada’s Web Shop, Scott Polk of Search & Social Media.

Moderating this motley crew was Christine Churchill of KeyRelevance with QA moderator Taylor Pratt of nFusion.

We all agreed we would keep our presentations to under 5 minutes so people could ask plenty of questions and get some great takeaways rather than just simply hearing us talk on and on, on stage.

I spoke on foundational SEO concentrating on what I term the big 3 of the .htaccess, robots.txt, & Webmaster Tools – I included my presentation below:

Ted went over some great foundational design information while Lyndsay went into coding advice and Scott provided some great tips, but where I disagreed with Scott is on using file extensions over directories.

I like & respect Scott Polk as he is great speaker with a wealth of knowledge & experience coming from Bruce Clay thus I didn’t want to undermine him publicly so I simply nodded in agreement with Ted on stage with him stating he prefers directories.

All things being equal a page at abc.com/xyz.html has just a good chance to rank as abc.com/xyz/ but with the directory page you have the added benefit of not having to change reference links if you go to another web page format such as php, asp, cfm, etc plus I feel its better organizationally since you can place related pages & files in this directory giving them added keyword weight.

Scott stuck to his guns on extensions over directories while also being correct that you can simply resolve the new web page format issue in the .htaccess, but I still contend directories are better long term both organizationally &  for SEO.

What do you think?

Google Webmaster Tools have launched some new features. One of the most relevant tools for SEO’s, marketers, and website developers is called Fetch as Googlebot (in the “Labs” section). This tools allows you to chose any URL on a given website and run a test to see what Google sees when it requests that URL from your server. 

For example, if you want to test a home page or new page on your website you can use this tool to obtain the exact HTTP responses that Google receives from your server.  Simply paste the URL into the tool and click “Fetch”.  You will then receive a report showing the page code. 

So how is this different than just viewing the source code?  This tools shows you specific HTTP header info that is no contained in the source code because it comes from the server, not the page.  This allows you to find potential discrepancies in what the server is showing and how the page is coded. 

The Fetch as Googlebot tool is great for:

• Find discepancies in how the page is coded and what the server shows to Google when it requests a page (URL)
• Finding bugs that may exist in the site
• Testing 301 redirects
• Testing the site for potential “hacking”
• Ensuring that your SEO strategy is consistant for page code and how the server is showing Google

True SEO strategy is of course a lot more involved that just choosing some keywords and implementing those into your site structure, content, and off-page strategies (link building).  Just like any other marketing effort, SEO should start with a foundation of core business goals.  Whether you are doing this for your own company, outsourcing to an SEO company, or a hybrid of the two, make sure to follow these steps for building a great strategy that the whole company can stand behind.  This article spends less time on the technicalities behind on page SEO and places more emphasis to how marketing and off page efforts enhance the overall strategy.

Define the company goals:  The “discovery” process is probably the most important opportunity for getting the strategy defined right out of the gate.  The company goals will of course the be applied to the keyword research and keyword assignment.  This discovery process should involve company owners, executives, marketers, content providers, and possibly accounting.  The bottom line is that everone has to be on the same page as to what drives the company forward, what keywords relate to both the brand and the products/services, etc.  You should also look at what keyword phrases drive revenue (or have the potential to drive revenue). 

Apply the goals to the keyword strategy:  Even companies that have been doing “SEO” for a while often need to put on the breaks and redefine the strategy.  You can of course apply all the research you need to help you refine the goal (i.e. competitive analysis, website analytics, etc.).  Start by dialing down on your top 25 or so “money” keyword phrases.  Make sure the list is a mix of both broad and long tail terms.  This task is more complicated than it sounds and can take time.  For example, if you have an e-commerce platform and sell hundreds of products it might seem impossible to dial down to 25 keywords.  Keep in mind this is a starting point and should be developed throughout the campaign.

Apply keyword strategy to the keyword assignment:  Now that you have your list and everyone from the CEO to the marketing team has signed off on it, apply the keywords to the website.  Keyword assigment should start with the home page and work down from there.  Remember to follow best practices such as charater limits, the use of hypens to separate title words as opposed to underscores, page hierarchy, etc.

Make sure to have a blend of SEO and “marketing” in the application:  SEO is not just about having your top keywords associated with the page in the title tag.  Getting rankings is only the first step.  You then have to entice clicks.  If your not getting the clicks, who cares about the ranking.  That is where marketing comes into play.  Your title pages are what will appear for your search result listing so make sure you use a structure that is appealing as well as keyword appropriate.

Have a comprehensive off page strategy:  The fundamental goal of the off page SEO effort is to distribute content and build links.  Good links start with compelling content.  The old link building strategies won’t do you much good anymore.  The natural link building efforts take more time, more energy, and forces you to develop great content that people want to consume and share.  This may include but is not limited to the use of blogging, social media, SEO focused PR, engaging your local community, engaging you online communities, and continually developing great articles, blogs, videos, podcasts, and any other content that is relevant and that will add value to your users.

Social Marketing has become the latest buzz word in the internet marketing industry.  Organizations, companies, and bloggers are now using this method to convey their messages to their intended audiences effectively and quickly.  There are many tools, perhaps too many tools at their disposal to be able to create effective messages.

Some of these tools include the ever growing FaceBook, a social networking site that has grown from being exclusive to college students, to an internet marketing vehicle for companies, bloggers, and yes, even celebrities.  There are many other social networking sites besides FaceBook such as MySpace, Bebo, Xanga, and even Ning which allows you as a user to custom create your own little social network.

In addition to social networking sites there are also micro blogging sites.  These micro blogging sites such as twitter, tumblr, and Pownce (now Six Apart), have been great vehicles for launching the latest news, keeping tabs on the recent elections, and simply updating your friends and followers alike of your daily activities.  All of these tools, from social networking sites, blogging, microblogging, and doing search optimization, can become rather overwhelming for most companies, and surely so for people.  All of these tools have gotten a term coined by the marketing industry, called social marketing.  If you have a business, a blog, are a celebrity, or a large corporation, it becomes more and more important to hire professionals to do social marketing for you.

The days of getting the message out via static images in newspapers and magazines are over.  Television ads are also not as effective as before as more and more people have turned into engaged consumers, instead of passive consumers.  Consumers want to choose what to view, what to buy, and what to admire.  To become successful and get  your message out there, you need to be actively involved in all of these social marketing tools.  However, if you dedicate your time to that, you may not have the time of day to effectively run your business.  Perhaps now is the time for you to think about social media marketing by talking to people and see what they think about it, as well as do some research on your own.

There has been a lot of confusion over JavaScript and how it affects SEO efforts.  Some search engine optimization consultants or experts suggest not using JavaScript at all and some suggest minimal use.  Others will tell you that it is about where you place the JavaScript on the page.  The truth is that JavaScript does not have an adverse effect on SEO if used properly.

Before we go any further we should discuss how the search engines crawl a page and how JavaScript is used by most website developers.  When the search engines find a page it will see a mixture of content and code.  The idea behind good SEO strategy is to have a good ratio of content to code on the page.  Good SEO practices will also ensure that the search engines can find the relevant content quickly and easily.

Traditional website development usually calls for the JavaScript code to be placed at the top of the page.  This is more of a practice than a rule.  It actually does not matter where you place the JavaScript code on the page.  The required functionalities will work no matter where the code is placed.  As mentioned above, it is common practice for an SEO company to place the JavaScript code at the bottom of the page in order to allow the search engines to find the relevant content first.  The idea behind this is that when the spiders get to the page they do not have to sift through a bunch of code before they get to the content.  We must however keep in mind that the spiders will not stop once the find some content.  They will crawl the entire page until they come to the end.  That is why it is a good practice to have a solid balance between code and content.  Placing the code at the bottom of the page is fine but does not really guarantee that the page will be seen as more relevant.

A good solution to this which improves SEO and site speed is to create simple external JavaScript files where the code can be placed.  This file only contains the JavaScript and can include any related functions and style sheets.  When the JavaScript needs to be used for functionality throughout the site it is simply referred to in one small line of code on the page rather than having several long lines of code taking up space.  This saves the search engines time by not having to filter through the code and helps them focus on the keyword rich content.  It also decreases the overall length of the page which fosters faster crawling by the search engines.  It saves the user time because the externalized JavaScript files save bandwidth.  Pages load fatser and the user stays happy.

Using external JavaScript and CSS is great when you have certain functionalities repeated throughout the website.  They can be “called” upon once and simply refered to throughout a user’s time on the site.  Externalizing the code creates a higher ratio of SEO optimized content on the page.  The search engines can then focus on the title tags, mata tags, H1’s, and all the supportiing content without the distraction of extra code.

The bottom line though is that if the site is content rich, has a good struture for search engine optimization, and functions well it doesn’t matter too much where the JavaScript code is placed.  But to be safe, externalize the files and create a simpler, faster environment for the user and the search engines.