If you’re thinking of redesigning your website or changing your site’s architecture for any reason, its worthwhile to keep in mind the following SEO best practices:

1. Use the mod_rewrite (Apache) or ISAPI Rewrite (IIS) to map old URLs to new files

2. Analyse your major traffic entry pages and ensure that these pages are not deleted or changed unless it is absolutely essential to do so.

3. Do not permanently delete all pages until they have passed their popularity to the new pages on your site, this can be accomplished using the above mentioned  301 redirects

4. Contact link partners and ask them to change your link destination to new pages on your site.

If you follow the above 4 step you’ll ensure that you do not lose any traffic and popularity associated with you pre-designed site.

Good luck!

Image alt tags, have you heard of them?  If you haven’t let me tell you.

Image alt tags are basically the alternative text you see when you hover over an image.  Image alt tags describe what the image is about.

here is an example of the HTML code of an image alt tag:

Image alt tags & SEO

So why are image alt tags important for SEO?  Well, in a nutshell, its because search engine spiders can’t read text in images and can’t tell what an image is about. 

Because search engine spiders can read text, they’re able to associate the alt tag of the image with the image and therefore know what that image is about.

To get the full SEO benefit from your image alt tag, make sure to include your target keyword in the image alt tag.  However keep your image alt text concise and do not under any circumstance stuff it with keywords! Engines do not like that and can potentially penalise you for spam if you practice such technique.

Happy coding!

Keyword usage and placement is an art and a science especially if you’re competing in a highly competitive market such as mortgages or insurance.  There are basic best practices that need to be adhered to in order to give your site an edge over your competition.  Here is a quick guide on how and where to place your keywords:

• At least once in title tag,  maybe twice, but not consecutively.

• At least twice in the meta description tag - this also helps improve click through rate (CTR)

• In the <H1> heading tag of the page (located at the top), this is also good for usability as it confirms to the user what the page is about.

• Once or twice in bold, underline and/or italicised.

• 4 to six times in your document’s body text, but make sure it makes sense to your users.

• In the alt tag of an image,  this is a great way to optimise your image for image search and get some extra traffic from image search, this is part of optimising for universal search.

• DO NOT place your keyword in external link anchor text

• DO NOT place your keyword in internal link anchor text unless that link is pointing to a more specific kw phrase that includes the target term, like “loans” in anchor text for “cheap loans”

If you follow the above guidelines you’ll be well on your way to ranking highly in the search results pages.  The challenge now is to get other sites to link to your site using your target keywords!

Good luck!

A robots.txt file is a text file that manages the search engines that listen to its instructions. 

Major search engines such as Google, Yahoo and MSN all listen to the robots.txt file and obey the instruction placed in it.

What kind of instructions can you place in a robots.txt file?  Well for one you can allow or disallow search engines from spidering your site.  

Other uses for a robots.txt file include:

• disallowing search engine bots from spidering certain sections of your site such as private files

• setting the pace of how fast a robot can spider your site (this can help reduce bandwidth sage)

• completely banning certain engines from spidering your site while allowing other to spider all or part of it.

How do you set up a robots.txt file for your site?

Easy, you create a new text file and upload it to the root of your site (where you homepage index file resides).  In it you can place the following:

Placing this in your robots.txt file:

User-agent: *
Disallow: /

instructs all compliant spiders not to index anything in your site.

While placing this is your robots.txt file:

User-agent: *
Disallow:

allows all spiders to index your site.

You can also place this in your robots.txt file:

User-agent: *
Disallow: /tmp
Disallow: /logs

and it will instruct all compliant spiders not to spider the specified folders.

You can also be specific and place this in the robots.txt file:

User-agent: Googlebot
Disallow: /tmp
Disallow: /logs

and Google alone will not spider the specified folders.

Here is a list of the main search engines and their user agents:

AltaVista: Scooter
Infoseek: Infoseek
Hotbot: Slurp
AOL: Slurp
Excite: ArchitextSpider
Google: Googlebot
Goto: Slurp:
Lycos: Lycos
MSN: Slurp
Netscape: Googlebot
NorthernLight: Gulliver
WebCrawler: ArchitextSpider
Iwon: Slurp
Fast: Fast
DirectHit: Grabber
Yahoo Web Pages: Googlebot
Looksmart Web Pages: Slurp

To sum up, using a robots.txt file is yet another important tool a webmaster has at their disposal to manage the activities of search engines.

Link popularity has a major influence on search engine ranking.  Afterall, Google’s algorithm and what distinguished it from its earlier rivals such as Alta Vista, was based on exactly that … Link Popularity.

Given the importance of Link Popularity, its worthwhile to examine all link building methods and the best way to do that is to split Link Building into 2 sections: Traditional Link Building and Web 2.0 Link Building. 

Before we start, lets brainstorm various link building possibilities and classify them as tradtional or web 2.0:

Traditional Link Building

• Directories

• Link Exchanges

• Article Syndication

• RSS News Distribution

Web 2.0-related Link Building

• Link Baiting

• Wikipedia

• Blog Pingbacks

• Links in Blog Comments

• Links in Forum Signatures

• Social Networking

• Social Bookmarking

• Digging

The differences between Traditional Link building and Web 2.0 link building can be summarized as follows:

• Traditional Link Building (most of it) carries SEO benefits while Web 2.0 Link Building (agiain most of it) carries no SEO benefit, this is mainly due to the no-follow attribute that is associated with most web 2.0 applications.

• Traditional link building is a more labour intensive process as one has to go out and secure the links either by exchanging them or out right buying them.  Web 2.0 link building on the other hand is more viral and if done properly, spreads like wild fire.

• Traditional Link Building is a long term investment focusing on branding while Web 2.0 link building is an ongoing process focusing on day to day promotion of new content.

If you think of any more differences please feel free to comment.