Technical SEO

If your business built its own website, chances are you tested its features on a development server. Once you’ve completed the testing of your website on your development server, it is very important to turn off the server. Otherwise, you risk search spiders finding your test environment and crawling the pages. Suddenly, your test site is indexed and you have a duplicate of your entire site competing with your live site. Read more »

It’s almost amusing to see how a new year always brings some new way to look or define something. Many experts figured that “digital advertising” would be one of those evolving definitions that would bring a fresh new look to 2009, and they were right. Be careful when doing business how companies define the word “digital”. Advertising agency holding companies have made very little effort and investment in digital. What they call digital is Flash and Photoshop, what you or your clients are asking for is SEO and SMO. These are wildly different disciplines.

SEO and SMO firms don’t view Flash as digital marketing or advertising, not even close. If you want Flash, I can have you Flash by 3:00 PM today, no questions asked. However, Flash does not spider in search engines properly, requires plugins, doesn’t work on many mobile devices and is practically useless in providing any ROI for clients. You might as well get used to spoon-feeding Flash a healthy dose of “digital” pea mush and tuck it in at night with a bedtime story. Read more »

A common problem that site owners have is that occasionally they need to change things up. Maybe you upgrade your html site to Drupal or you need to reorganize your product categories. The concern is that you've done a lot of work to make those pages rank well and if you change their URL then they'll drop out of Google. If you are moving a bunch of your content around on your site but you don't want to lose your position in the search engines then it's a good idea to do a 301 Redirect. A 301 will tell the search engines that the file in question has permanently moved to a new location. Read more »

We all know the importance of making it easy for web crawlers to index our site. But did you know these important steps to take before the spiders come? Check back every Monday for our 10-week crash course on how to ensure that your website gets properly indexed…

Tip #1: Check the Title Tags.

In our opinion, creating great title tags can be one of the most valuable ways to help increase your SEO. Make sure you have relevant, keyword-rich title tags for each page you create. This will make it easy for web browsers to search and display your website. Read more »

301 Redirects are used to permanently redirect users, spiders, and search engines to a new URL.

If you need a 301 Redirect then here's how to build one:

(From Webconfs.com)

IIS Redirect

• In internet services manager, right click on the file or folder you wish to redirect
• Select the radio titled "a redirection to a URL".
• Enter the redirection page