Page Size: - Page size is the size of the HTML code on your web page, size of images, external
CSS and JavaScript doesn’t effects to your page size. The lower is the size; the lesser will be
the load time of your page. Search engines and visitors like sites which load fast on browser.
You can use Page Compression techniques to reduce page size and load time.

Page Caching: – If your site is a database driven website then you must use page caching to
lower the server load. Mostly, in database driven websites, whenever a user request a page
server must connect to the database to acquire information about page before sending that
page to browser. Page caching will decrease you server load by using a pre compiled page or
pre cached page it will connect to the database only once and store a cached version of page or
static HTML version of that page.

robots.txt:- The robots.txt is a file that contains a small text of code that instructs to search
engine robots. It indicates to search engine what part of your site is off (allowing/blocking) for
some or all search engine robots.

sitemap.xml:- A XML sitemap is a file that lists all URLs of sites which are open for
web crawlers. An XML sitemap helps search engines to crawl the site more effectively,
URL Canonicalization: – In simple words if I say something about URL Canonicalization it is
use of different URL for same page. What happens is that search engines get confused about
the correct URL to index? To get rid on this problem you can use MOD_REDIRECT.

Nested Tables: – Use of HTML table within another HTML table is referred to as nested table.
It will result in a slower load time because when this kind of a page is loaded in a browser, the
latter has to find the end of table before displaying entire page.

Images Expires Tags: – Image expires tag prevents your regular users’ browser to re-fetch the
unchanged images from your server, thus saving your bandwidth usage. Image expires tag will
help the user browser to cache the images until the specified expiry date.

Inline Styles: – Inline Style or CSS will help to reduce the code by using repetitive codes and
styles into external file. It will also help in faster page loading.

Cloaking

Cloaking is case when the content presented to the search engine spider is different from that viewed by the user. When search engine spider is identified as a user, the server-side script renders a different version of the web page, which is somewhat different to what’s presented to the user.

Content Hiding

Content Hiding is a widely adopted SEO malpractice which is largely done for keyword spamming. Content can be hidden by adding keywords on page in a font colour same as the background colour. What happens is that the text exists on page but visitors are not able to see the same. However, search engine spiders read this hidden text and index the page accordingly.

Links To spam sites

A webmaster has no control over incoming links. However, a webmaster always has full control over link on his own site, otherwise known as outgoing links. Google knows that all links on your site have been placed by yourself. So, if a spammed site was giving links to your site, it would simply be disregarded by Google. However, when your site provides links to a spam site, it is instantly reprimanded by Google.

Hence, stay away from Spammed site or else your website may be penalised by Google.

The main point to keyword research is, you need to know what potential clients are searching for through search engines, then make it as easy as possible for them to be directed to your website, so they can see the product and service you have to offer, otherwise they will surely end up on one of your competitors websites!!

One of my pet hates is, seeing people that have invested their own hard money and trust into a company to have no return of investment from there outlay, 80% of the time this is down to the keywords getting a low amount of searches or even NON  so it generates no traffic to their website.

From this, I see time after time companies coming to us after using other SEO companies looking for some advice and help in getting there return of investment from the outlay of their SEO project.

So how to go about finding you’re Keywords/Phrases?

You will know what you will want to achieve from your website and who your competitors are in the online market. Select the top 5 websites and go to their home page, and then follow this process!!

1)        Right click on your mouse and “View page Source” What this does is direct you to the inner working of the website content.

2)        Press Crtl+F, and a search bar will pop up “depending on your browser it may show on the top right hand of the page or bottom left”.

3)        Type in KEYWORDS

From this it will highlight the word as shown below, and just after that are all the keywords that you competitor has placed in their content,

4)        Make a note of the key words, if you do come across cities and country names I would leave them off your list and from the example above “holiday industry” these are the words I would choose as a starting point.

Family holidays, child-friendly holidays, family friendly holidays, holidays with children, child friendly hotels, child-friendly self-catering cottages, family campsites.

5)        And duplicate the process though you’re 4 other competitor’s. You will inevitably come across duplications but from looking you should gather a good range of keywords.

6)      Go to Google SEO keyword tool.

7)      Type in all the key words you have found “one per line” in the Word or phrase box, tick the “Only show ideas closely related to my search terms”… complete the security Question and click search.

8)      From here you will have a list of your key words plus extra ones it has generated for you… “How kind of Google J ” you now need to refine this by going to the column on the left hand side of the site and “Unselecting” Broad and “Select [Exact]

From all of this you will be able to see the local Monthly Searches “.co.uk” / Global Monthly Searches “.COM” and the amount of times the keywords have been searched for and the possibilities of traffic to your website when getting to page 1 of a search engine!

There is many tools on this site and it is user friendly have a play about with it and you will find you can download the keywords in to Microsoft excel so it is easier to view.

This is only the starting point of keyword research but it will give you an insight for when you call an SEO company / PPC company that you are working on the correct keywords that get a good amount of traffic for your industry and can generate a return of investment… And you don’t end up paying for a key word that gets 32 local monthly searches per month!

I will do another Blog with regards to key words looking at this in more detail. In the meantime if you have any questions please feel free to drop me an email Matthew.booth@seonext.co.uk

Static URL: — http://www.example.com/catalog/cloth/0010/

Dynamic URL: — http://www.example.com/catalog.asp1category=cloth&prodID=0010

Static URLs are always good for search engine indexing and attract decent traffic. On the contrary, Dynamic URLs are generated by Database driven websites, which generate content with help of dynamic scripts like PHP or JavaScript.  Mostly websites, or rather portals, having thousands of pages choose a dynamic website over static website.

Risk with Dynamic URL: – Dynamic URLs were very risky with SERP point of view, because they can cause Canonical URL Issue, and hence are not favoured by Search Engines. Typically Static URL Rank in SERP is better than that of Dynamic URL, because they get indexed quicker than the latter. Static websites are much easier for end users to view and understand, which increases the click count and average website time.

A Search Engines always want to index unique URLs, they disregard the URLs after a specific number of variables such as ? & =;

For Ex.:–

http:// www.example.com /forums/thread.php?threadid=125&sort=date
http:// www.example.com /forums/thread.php?threadid=670&sort=date
http:// www.example.com /forums/thread.php?threadid=139&sort=date

All three URL are three different pages  but if search engine cut off the URL after ? mark then

http:// www.example.com /forums/thread.php?
http:// www.example.com /forums/thread.php?
http:// www.example.com /forums/thread.php?

Another Issue with dynamic websites is that they generally don’t have any keywords in URL, which is quite important from an SEO point of view.

Solution: — Now What! What you will have to do to resolve this problem? Should you recode every single page of your site into static site?  Is it a feasible solution?  Here’s what you can do:

MOD_REDIRECT:–

Write the code in .htaccess  and replace the same on www.example.com /forums

Options +FollowSymLinks

RewriteEngine on

RewriteRule thread-threadid-(.*)-sort-(.*)\.htm$ thread.php?threadid=$1&sort=$2

Notice the change in the URL:–

Before:-

http:// www.example.com /forums/thread.php?threadid=125&sort=date

After:-

http:// www.example.com /forums/thread-threadid-125-sort-date.htm

Solution For Directory Type URL :–

Write the code in .htaccess  and replace the same on www.example.com /forums

Options +FollowSymLinks

RewriteEngine on

RewriteRule thread/threadid/(.*)/sort/(.*)/ thread.php?threadid=$1&sort=$2

RewriteRule thread/threadid/(.*)/sort/(.*) thread.php?threadid=$1&sort=$2

Before:-

http:// www.example.com /forums/thread.php?threadid=125&sort=date

After:-

http:// www.example.com /forums/thread/threadid/125/sort/date/

Recoding every page may not be the best of the solutions. Using minimal scripts, you can easily make your dynamic URL search engine friendly and this will help with your SEO .

JavaScript is not similar to other web development technologies used on the Internet; it is a client-side technology rather than a server-side technology. In simple words, when a user views your website which has JavaScript, the same will be downloaded to that visitor’s computer and executed on its own. Unlike any other server-side technology, code will not be executed on the server where the webpage is located. Due to this particular reason, search engine crawlers are not able to read your webpage

So, if you want to update your site’s content frequently, try using JavaScript; search engines will never know the difference .

If you want to use JavaScript on site, take care of following:–

1. WebPages should display all the real content and media with JavaScript disabled.
2. All front pages should functionally work with JavaScript disabled.
3. WebPages should look the same with JavaScript disabled.
4. Don’t use JavaScript when you can accomplish the same thing with server-side coding.

JavaScript is great for forms, validation, and other parts of your webpage that are not crucial to the meaning of your page.

1) What exactly are Directory Submissions?

For the uninitiated, it is the technique of writing relevant content and later submitting the same at websites known as article directories, which also list articles from other writers. Although some directories might be absolutely low on quality, you may also come across quite decent publications.  Some directories allow links, while others do not even get indexed.

2) How do you decide which directories should you submit your work at?

The first thing you can do is check out the Page Rank of the directory. See if it is indexed. Make sure they allow you to submit your links. Also, check if they are being no-followed.

Let’s just say you might have found a suitable Article Submissions Directory. Write a keyword-rich article based on your particular niche and post the same on it. Since it enjoys a pretty decent page rank, it is only obvious that it would attract a lot of traffic and, hence, your article is sure to be indexed. And what do you get? You get link votes, the value of which depends on the ranking and integrity of the article directory.

In case yours is a new website it would probably have a pretty weak backlink strucutre. Article Directories such as Ezine, ArticlesBase, Suite101, Buzzle, Helium and GoArticles help you get useful backlinks that further help you get your site indexed and feature on search pages in no time.

Directory submission is, indeed, a great way to attain quick popularity among search engines for your site. Generally, people use these directories to get easy access (read backlinks) through a number of popular sites which webmasters may use to enhance their websites from the point of view of search engines.

What exactly are canonical URL’s

Canonical URL’s are basically different URL’s which point to exactly the same page on a website. Normally these url’s occur due to carelessness or lack of knowledge of the person/company who made your website and if you are getting SEO done and your seo company was unable to figure it out its a BIG blunder on their part. Matt cutts from google has explained this issue here : http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/seo-advice-url-canonicalization/

Some Common examples of Canonical URL’s and how does it effect your rankings :

• Your website is www.bluewigets.com but when you click on the logo or on the home button (or home text) you are redirected to a page with URL www.bluewigets.com/index.htm or ww.bluewigets.com/index.php . This is one of the most common case of canonical URL’s.

  Now as you can see both the url’s www.bluewigets.com and www.bluewigets.com/index.html contain exactly the same content but google will consider them as 2 different pages. This can result in distribution of authority of your page into 2 pages which is actually a single page.

  This can also lead to duplicate content issue as google will think that both of these different pages contain duplicate content.

  I have seen some very big company websites having this issue when we started working on their websites.

• When you are able to open your site by typing both www.sitename.com and sitename.com and both open as it is in google that means google might index all the URL’s with and without www thus its always recommended to redirect one to the other (see code at the end of the article for how to).
• When you have a printer friendly version of each article on your website :



• When your category structure of site automatically generates different versions of the same page :

How to correct this issue :

Canonical URL issue can be corrected by doing a 301 permanent redirect from different variations of your page to the variation you like the most. For example in the case when you have canonical url’s as www.bluewigets.com and www.bluewigets.com/index.html you can 301 redirect www.bluewigets.com/index.html to www.bluewigets.com

How to do a 301 permanent redirect

*I recommend that professionals should handle 301 redirects but those who like to DIY here are the details

I ll explain you the method of doing 301 redirect for the case where your website has both www and non www versions.

We can do a 301 redirect by writing a piece of code in the .htaccess file on the server (its located in the root folder on the server). If the file does not exist you can create one and upload it into the root folder of your server.

The code mentioned below will redirect non www version to www version of your site :

Options +FollowSymlinks

RewriteEngine on

rewritecond %{http_host} ^sitename.com [nc]

rewriterule ^(.*)$ http://www.sitename.com/$1 [r=301,nc]

I hope our visitors are able to make use of this article and grow their organic traffic by figuring out the canonical URL issue and then getting it corrected.

Feel free to contact us in case you have any doubts and we will be happy to help, You can also fill in the Free SEO consultation form and we will be happy to give a detailed seo proposal where we will point out all the technical issues and also propose a plan which you should follow to reach top of google for your target keyowrds.