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.

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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.

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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.

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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:

1. Search engines think you stole or just reproduced content from somewhere else
2. 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.

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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.

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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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In my last article Top 10 tips for small business owners, I mentioned the importance of good content. Some people think that SEOs are trying to fool people into thinking this, and that there is some kind of dark art to achieving high rankings. This really isn’t the case.

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There is huge potential for small businesses in Ireland to excel online. There is less competition between smaller businesses and an opportunity for innovators to get ahead of the game. Here are some tips to help you succeed… Read More…