Here are 4 useful website analysis tools you may not have known about….
Optimising your WordPress Pages for Search
WordPress is an immensely popular blogging and content management system. Its popularity is because of its ease of use, flexibility and reliability.
In addition to these commendable attributes WP is also very good at being search engine friendly. With a few simple steps you can optimise you WordPress site and pages for search.
Here they are….
17 tips for writing a Search Engine Friendly Good Webpage
There a few things to keep in mind when writing a good webpage. Originally this post was entitled ‘Tips for creating a Search Engine Friendly Webpage’ but I scraped that because I think sometimes common sense rules are disregarded in favour of out-dated SEO techniques. Instead I decided to concentrate on a set of more general rules, some that apply to search engines and some that don’t.
301 Redirect with .htaccess
If you want to perform SEO chances are you’ll need to use a 301 redirect at some stage. If you’re using Apache web server you’ll probably have to do this through the .htaccess file. This blogpost explains why we use 301 redirects and how to execute them on an Apache server.
What is a 301 redirect?
Basically it is a way of telling a web browsers or search engine that a web page or site has been permanently moved to a new location.
What is a robots.txt file?
Robots.txt is a small text file located in the root directory of your website. It’s job is to tell search engine robots what content on your website what not to visit.
Why would I want to do this?
The main reason why you want to do this from an SEO standpoint is to avoid duplicate content issues. For example if you have a printer friendly page on your website you would not want this indexed because it would be competing with the main page.
How to avoid Duplicate Content
Duplicate content is when you have identical or near identical pages within your website. This is a fairly big sin as far as Google and other search engines are concerned.
There are two reasons for this:
- Search engines think you stole or just reproduced content from somewhere else
- Your webpages are unecessarily competing with each other for rankings
Most of the time this is not intentional and many websites have duplicate content without even realising it. The main cause of this is sites making the same content available via different URLs.
Fantastic. But how do I identify and avoid it? Below are some of the main causes and solutions to this problem.
Link Building: 8 Quick Wins
Quality inbound links are still the most important factor towards appearing on Google and other search engines. They will help your pages to build PageRank and in turn, help you climb up the rankings. It is usually a slow and gradual process however, particularly for new websites as there’s a load of competition out there.
Blogger, Twitter Whatever Meetup – April 21st
As part of the latest round of ad-hoc meet-ups in Dublin (Ireland) .. we decided to run another Blogger-Twitter-Whatever (BTW) meet up.
We’ll be back in O’Byrne’s Beverage House on North King Street for this one from about 8 onwards.We love O’Byrnes for their selection of craft beer and their old style, laid back atmosphere.
The event itself is designed to open up the web community to more people and to generally get people talking and networking in a relaxed, fun atmosphere. There will be plenty of people from the online marketing community there so if this is an area you’re interested in, this event is for you.
Where online commerce lives
Everyone is familiar with e -commerce. Most of us have booked flights online and have probably booked accommodation too. Many of us have bought clothes, gifts, books, games, computers or other products.
Many businesses have an online store as part of their website and selling online is a major part of their business. There are many free and commercial e-commerce solutions. Magento, osCommerce and VirtueMart are some of the free options. BigCommerce, Shopify and Volusion are some commercial options and accept monthly payments.
Businesses do not even have to set up a merchant account but can use a payment processor such as PayPal, or gateways such as Realex Payments or Sage Pay.
Local Search for Local Businesses
Location is becoming more and more relevant to search. Search engines already return results based on a users IP address with local businesses often outranking larger organisations. They also display a separate set of local results for local businesses prominently on the page. This trend is set to continue and if anything become more and more common.
This is good for local businesses as it levels the playing field and represents a huge opportunity to compete with their larger counterparts. By focusing on local search, and optimising your web pages for geographic locations, you can attract more traffic to your site. I’ve listed some tips below that will help you to achieve this.
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- Local Search for Local Businesses
- Top 10 SEO tips for small business owners
- Quality content is your bait
- Social Search Showdown
- Where online commerce lives
- 4 Handy Website Analysis/CRO Tools
- Optimising your WordPress Pages for Search
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17 tips for writing a
Search Engine FriendlyGood Webpage - 301 Redirect with .htaccess
- What is a robots.txt file?