Tip #1 to improve ranking of a website: Adhere to the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) standards

The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) is the organization that oversees the standards for the internet and internet coding. Having code that meets W3C standards is considered to be a “sign of quality.” It is thought that having signs of quality on a website can help with rankings in the search engines. Therefore having fewer W3C validation errors means that your site could gain a higher Google website ranking.

To help meet W3C standards, follow best practices, such as formatting your site with CSS rather than HTML tables, avoiding using deprecated (outdated) code, and so forth.

Tip #2 to improve ranking of a website: Add a robots.txt file to the root domain

A robots.txt is a plain text file that tells the search engines where they are not allowed to go on a site. Having a robots.txt file, even a blank one, is considered to be a sign of quality. It shows that you acknowledge that search engines are allowed on your site and that they may have free access to it. Learn how to add a robots.txt file to your site.

Tip #3 to improve ranking of a website: Correct 404 errors on the site

This may seem like a small thing, but 404 errors (broken links or pages not found) do reflect upon the quality of the site, which has some bearing on website ranking. Correcting 404 errors shows that your site is up to date and is being maintained. We recommend that you routinely review the site for these errors and correct them whenever possible.

Tip #4 to improve ranking of a website: Create a search engine sitemap.xml file

Search engines love site maps, as they help them index sites more completely and efficiently. Having a standard site map page is a must, but you also want to have a site map written specifically for the search engines: a sitemap.xml file. This file contains every URL on your site and should be submitted to your Google Webmaster Tools account to increase your Google website ranking. Check out sites such as XML-Sitemaps.com to create your free sitemap.xml file.

Manufacturers often provide copy about their products so that retailers can use it to describe those products to potential buyers. Although this copy may be useful to people who arrive at a retail website, manufacturer-created copy causes multiple duplicate content issues from a search engine optimization standpoint.

You may be asking: why should I care if duplicate content issues cause problems for the search engine spiders?

Take a look at search engines from a search engine company’s perspective (Google, Yahoo, Bing and so forth). Each of the search engines want online searchers to choose to use their services, right? To get this to happen, a search engine focuses on providing the best results for each search query; to quote the most successful of the search engine companies about one of the ways that they accomplish this: “Google tries hard to index and show pages with distinct information.”

To accomplish the goal of providing searchers with distinct information, search engine spiders may not index all pages that appear to have duplicate content – and, when a page is not indexed, it cannot be returned in response to a relevant query being typed into a search box.

In other words, un-indexed pages cannot receive ANY of the traffic generated by people using search engines to find products and services – and that’s a big problem for any company, including yours.

Here, in more detail, is why manufacturer-created copy can cause duplicate content issues for websites.

Descriptions created by manufacturers:

• Tend to be short; search engine spiders typically need at least 150 words of original copy to “get” what a page is about.
• Tend to be similar – or sometimes even identical – to other descriptions within a site; when this happens, search engine spiders may not index all of the product pages.
• Tend to be found on multiple websites; it is therefore likely that only some of the sites using this duplicate content will appear in the search engine results pages in response to relevant queries. Your competitor’s site may be presented in the search results, instead of yours.

Fortunately, The Search Guru provides SEO copywriting tips to combat the problems associated with manufacturer-generated copy.

Our SEO copywriting tips include:

• Prioritize the importance of your pages; this is especially important on a larger site. Top priority pages may include:
  - Landing pages for types of products and/or services
  - Pages featuring products and/or services with larger profit margins
  - Pages featuring products and/or services that form the core of your current sales strategy

• Create original content for as many of your pages as possible, in the order of their importance.
• Optimize the content to help the search engine spiders understand the theme of a page/site, so that YOUR pages can effectively be returned in response to relevant search queries.

Continue to watch The Search Guru blog for more SEO copywriting tips and much more.

Organic SEO tip #1: Examine on-page elements

On-page elements are the elements that affect organic search engine optimization that can be controlled by the designer or developer. Use the following checklist to help increase online sales leads to your website.

Title tags (the single most important on-page element). The title tag is like the headline of your advertisement in the search engine results pages (SERPs). The title tag should:

• Be unique and relevant to the page topic
• Contain keywords, a benefit statement and a call to action

Header tags (the second most important on-page element). Header tags (also called H tags) highlight important text for the search engines. H tags should:

• Be used on every page
• Highlight the main idea or headline (H1)
• Highlight secondary ideas or sub-headlines (H2)

Meta description tags. The meta description tag is like the body of your advertisement in the SERPs. The meta description tag should:

• Be unique and relevant to the page topic
• Be written succinctly in paragraph form
• Contain keywords, benefit statements and calls to action

Website basics. These basic elements are crucial for organic search engine optimization. Make sure your website includes all of these elements:

• Robots.txt file
• Site map
• Sitemap.xml file

Clean up basics. These all have some bearing on search engine rankings. Examine your website to see if you need to:

• Correct 404 errors
• Clean up HTML code
• Compress images
• Add ALT tags to images

Organic SEO tip #2: Examine off-page elements

Off-page elements are the elements that affect organic search engine optimization that cannot be controlled by the designer or developer. These include elements of a good link building campaign – the quality of your inbound links and the anchor text linking back to your website. When was the last time you freshened up your link building campaign?

Generating sales leads is easier when you use these proven SEO strategies to support your organic search engine optimization efforts!

Here at The Search Guru blog we’ve posted previous entries discussing canonical issues and how they can cause duplicate content in the search engine index. To refresh your memory, canonicalization is the process of the search engines having to choose the best URL to index when there are several choices. To a search engine, http://www.mysite.com and http://mysite.com look like two different sites that have exactly the same content, which can trigger the Google duplicate content filter.

One way to address this is by implementing a 301 redirect from the non-preferred to the preferred version of a URL. We show you how to do this on a Unix/Apache server and a Windows server.

Use the canonical element as well to fix Google duplicate content.

The canonical element was introduced by Google about a year ago, but you may not yet realize its power. The canonical element (also referred to as the canonical tag, although it is technically not a tag) shows Google which version of a URL to include in the search engine index.

The canonical element goes in the <head> section of the page and tells Google the preferred URL of the page. The element looks like this:

<link rel="canonical" href="http://www.mysite.com/"/>

Remove duplicate content with the power of the canonical element.

Recently a client’s site contained articles that were accessible through multiple URLs on the site. They wanted to keep this user-friendly feature, but multiple copies of the articles were in the search engine index.

The solution? Determining which URL would be the “main” URL of the article and adding the canonical element to the main and secondary URLs. For instance, http://www.mysite.com/articles/how-to-article was decided to be the main URL. http://www.mysite.com/articles/how-tos/how-to-article was a secondary URL. The canonical element
<link rel="canonical" href="http://www.mysite.com/articles/how-to-article"/> was added to both pages to indicate which one should be indexed. Neat, huh?

Keep similar pages out of the search engine index and avoid Google duplicate content.

Duplicate content can really wreak havoc on retail sites, when product pages can be very similar to one another with the same copy and product specs. The only difference in the content may be a size or color. By adding the canonical element to product pages, you can effectively keep Google from indexing similar pages on your site – and keep from getting penalized!

Let’s say your site has 300 pages in the Google search engine index and 315 in the Yahoo! index. Those numbers are pretty close; it looks like both spiders are crawling and indexing most of your content.

But what if your site has 300 pages in Google, and 620 in Yahoo!? This indicates that there may be a deeper issue affecting your site.

Canonical URL, duplicate content and 404 error pages are three common reasons why page counts can differ.

1. Canonical URL

Canonicalization is the process of the search engines having to choose the best URL to index when there are several choices. Two of the most common ways a canonical URL can occur are:

• www vs. non-www
• http vs. https

The search engines can mistake http://www.mysite.com and http://mysite.com as two different sites with exactly the same content. This is also true for http://www.mysite.com and https://www.mysite.com.

2. Duplicate content

Google duplicate content, and duplicate content in Yahoo!, can occur as a result of a canonical URL as mentioned above. This may trip the Google duplicate content filter which can cause pages from your site, or even your entire site, to be removed from the search engine index.

3. 404 error pages

The Yahoo! search engine index is slower to crawl new pages and therefore tends to hold onto old pages longer than Google. If your site’s index count is inflated in Yahoo!, you may discover that Yahoo! has indexed 404 error pages occurring on your site.

All of these search engine index issues can be corrected using a 301 redirect.

A 301 redirect is a permanent redirect from one URL to another. Implementing this redirect will correct canonical issues and remove duplicate content and 404 error pages from the indexes.

Find the challenge of fixing these issues daunting? Let The Search Guru technical consultants help. Want to find out what other issues your site may have? Request a free SEO gift session today.

Your website speaks a hidden, coded language. When other computers come to visit, it may give them things like a 200 code, 301 code, 302 code or 404 error message code. Each of these codes are meant to tell a visiting computer what is going on with your site.

So, how often does another computer visit your site? The answer is basically the same number as the number of visitors you get. Your site is really just a computer and your visitors are looking at a computer that talks to your computer and translates what is said. Status code listings are among the ways your site’s computer and your visitor’s computer talk to one another. Search engines are also computers and understanding how to optimize http headers and status code listings will improve your rankings.

200 code – OK

Most pages return a HTTP header status code of 200. This tells a visiting computer that the URL they came to is a good page. There are no problems. A search engine will index this page as usual.

301 code – Permanently moved

If you restructure your site, you may need to rename folders and files. This means that the URL of the old page will no longer work. Visitors may have bookmarked or search engines may have indexed the old URL. You do not want to lose the visitors to the old URL so you need to know how to optimize http headers. A 301 code tells the visiting computer that the page has moved and provides them with the new page. Search engines will update their index and visitors are automatically forwarded to the new page.

302 code – Temporarily moved

If you have problems with your site and you need to move a few pages for a few days, you would use a 302 code. This tells visiting computers that the page is temporarily moved and provides the temporary URL. Search engines will return every few days to see if the page is returned but will not update their indexes. Visitors are automatically forwarded to the temporary page until the 302 code is removed.

404 error message code – Not Found

The dreaded 404 error message code is one that you should try to avoid. A 404 code means that there is no page at the URL the computer is visiting. While search engines will not immediately remove a page from their index if they continue to get a 404 error message code, they will eventually take the URL out.

Besides this, a 404 code reflects poorly on your site. Site with a high number of 404 code pages are considered to be lower quality, which can affect your rankings.

The answer on how to optimize http headers is by providing the correct status code listings.

Never let a page simply return a 404 error message code after you move it or take it down. Using a 301 or 302 code will make sure that no visitors to your site will ever be left with nowhere to go and that search engines know you care about your site.

If you are relatively savvy about SEO, you know that your site should have a robots.txt, a human site map and a sitemap.xml. These are considered to be basic elements that you add to a site for SEO purposes. But did you know that you also need a canonical redirect?

Fixing canonical issues is important. A canonical issue can wreak havoc on your site in the search results. It can cause the search engines to penalize your site and remove pages from your site from the results. And all it takes is a simple oversight on your part with your site.

Is your site susceptible to a canonical issue?

When we talk about canonical issues, what we mean is does your site properly handle www versus non-www URLs. As a quick test, type http://yoursite.com into the browser. Be sure to leave off the www. Does the URL redirect to the www version? If not, you are susceptible to a canonical issue. (Unless you choose to display your site without the www, in which case, the site should redirect the www to the non-www version)

Search engines have a hard time understanding that http://yoursite.com and http://www.yoursite.com are the same thing. To a search engine, these two URLs look like two different sites that have exactly the same content, which they then penalize. This situation can be easily avoided by using a canonical redirect.

Learn how to fix a canonical issue.

Fixing canonical issues means that you do a canonical redirect so that if someone (search engine or human) tries to go to the wrong version of your URL, they will be redirected to the correct version.

We have an excellent tutorial here on how to fix a canonical issue on a Windows server. For a Unix server, fixing canonical issues is normally done with an .htaccess.

Using a canonical redirect will help your site avoid having unnecessary problems. Fixing canonical issues is easy and should be a standard part of all sites.

If one ever wondered if search engine engineers were a whimsical lot, one only needs to looks at the names of search engines’ spiders to find the answer. Googlebot, Slurp, Ask Jeeves and ia_archiver are some of the spider names used by the most popular search engines on the web.

Which search engines uses spiders to fetch documents?

Using a program called a spider, search engines continually search the web looking for new pages and reviewing documents they already have in their index. You may ask, “Which search engine uses spiders to fetch documents?” and the answer is, “All of them.” Without a spider, search engines would not be able to find new pages.

Why name a spider? Search engines don’t have to.

The main purpose of spider names is so that search engines’ spiders can be easily identified in your site logs. When was the last time you looked at your logs? Today, with the availability of free tracking software, such as Google Analytics, many people never look at their logs, but if you do, you will see the spider names from the search engines appear all over it.

Think of it as a courtesy. Certainly the search engines’ spiders could arrive at your site under the name “Mozilla” which is how most web browsers appear in your logs, but the search engines don’t wish to be rude. By using spider names, they let a site owner know that they have been by to visit.

Why you should care about search engines’ spiders and their names.

You can use this information to find out when the last time the search engines’ spiders came to your site or a page on your site. The more important they think a page is, the more frequently they will visit a page. If you look at your site logs, you will see the spider names and will be able to tell if the search engines have picked up the latest changes on your site.

Name of each spider, search engines they belong to:

Knowing a little more about search engines spiders and the spider names will allow you to get a better insight into what the search engines know about your site. Tune in next time when we go over how you can give directions to spiders about how, when and if they should look at pages on your site.

Use WordPress SEO plugins to make basic search engine optimization free and easy.

WordPress is a widespread and easy to install content management system. Because of this, many small – and even large – businesses have turned to WordPress to power their site. One of the nice features about WordPress is the abundance of free WordPress plugins that allow you to easily customize your website.

Increase the power of search engine optimization on your site today!

Let’s look at these plugins:

All in One SEO Pack – One of many named WordPress SEO plugins, this one is easy to use. You can write your own title and meta description tags or the plugin can generate unique ones for you.

Google Sitemaps – When Google announced that they would start checking for XML sitemaps, many site map tool plugins were released that allow your site to generate an XML site map as you build your site.

Similar Posts – Considered to be one of the WordPress navigation plugins, this tool can help build your inter-site linking. By comparing page content, this plugin links pages on similar topics to one another.

Top 10 Posts – Another one of the WordPress navigation plugins, this plugin will help to reinforce linking to your best pages.

KB Robots.txt – Having a robots.txt file helps create perceived site quality for the search engines. This plugin makes it easy to upload and change a robots.txt file from inside the WordPress admin interface.

Human Sitemap Generator Plugin – Unlike other sitemap tool plugins, this plugin creates a human friendly site map page. Sitemap pages help both human and search engine visitors find all the pages of your site.

There are hundreds of free WordPress plugins to customize your site – and remember! WordPress SEO plugins can help your WordPress powered site do better in the search engine results.

Do you have a list of favorite WordPress plugins? List them here!

Once you create a header tag for a web site, you will discover that using heading tags really is easy. Use the
<H1> and the font is really big. Use the <H6> and the font is really small. Because of this, it may be tempting to think that html H codes are meant to indicate html font codes. This is not the case and <H> tags should not be used as html font codes. Using them correctly can help boost your site in the search engine results pages. Let’s take a look at how to correctly create a header tag for a web site.

The origin of html basic code makes using html H codes important.
Heading tags were part of the original html basic code that was created by Tim Berners-Lee and company. A few weeks ago, I talked about how the history of html basic code and why the Internet’s academic roots make heading tags important to search engine optimization today.

Create a header tag for a web site with the correct text.
Simply using html H codes on your site is not enough. You must use them correctly in order for them to be effective. The purpose of heading tags is to highlight the main ideas on a page. So:

• <H1> – Main idea
• <H2> – Main points that support the main idea
• <H3> – Supporting points that support each of the main pointsHeading tags are not html font codes.

Heading tags are not html font codes.
Using <H> tags as html font codes will highlight random, even irrelevant, words on the page. Use CSS for html font codes, not html H codes.

If you give some thought about how you create a header tag for a web site, your site will benefit by performing better in the search engines.