10.25.07
Posted in SEO
at 12:08 pm
I am noticing that a lot of web developers consider HTML old school and something to avoid. This is a very bad trend. People need to realize that web pages are documents that need to be cataloged and searched. If you don’t use a universally accepted standard to mark them up companies like Google and Yahoo will have a harder time figuring out what a page is about.
HTML is a standard to define the elements in a text document. An HTML only document looks very ugly and plain in a web browser. Using HTML to design your web page is very old school and does not look very good. At the dawn of the Internet HTML provided 2 roles one being markup and the other design. We now have CSS that takes over the job of defining how something looks. People are so caught up in how a web page looks they forget about the markup side of a web page.
Any good SEO should know this. Part of the job of an SEO is to educate developers about this topic. We are document markup experts. Companies need to have an SEO on staff to make sure the developers don’t lose site of this.
Technorati Tags: seo, html, markup language, css, google, yahoo
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08.03.07
Posted in Microsoft, web design, SEO, Other Search Engines, Google
at 1:10 pm
I have a new site that our company is working on. I noticed that in google all of a sudden we have all of our pages listed in Google with very weird things added to our URLs.
http://www.mysite.com/(A(XobqNFPtxwEkAAAAMzk3ZTU
4NzQtZGFjZS00OGUxLWExYzYtZDBiYjc1Mzg1N2YwP7fq1em0HKYJ5
vYMP8lm4NCf3241))/subdirectory/Default.aspx
I found out that this works on any IIS server. Even on www.microsoft.com. I have no idea what this is. I do know it is a bad thing for SEO and any site hosted on IIS needs to address this. This goes back to what I say about site architecture. Your site needs to have a URL policy set up and enforced. Nobody can go to any page unless that URL is already known to the site owner. This means no page can be access from 2 or more differnt urls. The site owner needs to redirect any rogue URL to the correct one and 404 anything you can’t predict. What this does is create duplicate content that the search engines do not like and can even hurt a sites rankings.
Read the rest of this entry »
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06.27.07
Posted in SEO
at 6:45 am
I had a post the other day about how to make search engine friendly URL’s using coldFusion. I had a comment that asked “Is it still necessary to remove the “?” and other symbols from CF code so search engines can read them?” Instead of answering with a comment I thought I would create a post about it. The simple answer is no. Google and the other top search engines have figured out how to do deal with dynamic URL’s. There are many sites that rank well using them. Having a “?” or “&” in your URL is not considered a negative or a positive by the search engine algos. What they do have a problem with is session ID’s. Do not use those. Read the rest of this entry »
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06.23.07
Posted in SEO
at 6:30 am
UPDATE: I don’t want anybody to think that I am saying it is wrong to have a client link to your site. My only point is that it should be done with permission and that when people are looking to hire an SEO they should not consider an SEO good just because they rank for SEO terms. I am mostly talking about local SEO terms.
One thing I have noticed is that a lot of SEO’s and web designers put a link on all their clients’ sites to themselves. They then turn around and try to claim to be good at SEO because they rank locally for seo or web design. That is not SEO. Most of the time it is not even ethical because they do not tell their clients what they are doing. They also then turn around and send a link to their clients to help them rank. I’m not saying that putting links on your client’s site is wrong I’m just saying it does not make you good at SEO. Some of the people that rank for top SEO terms suck at SEO. It is not hard to rank for a term in your own industry specially if you do a lot public speaking and write a book. It is hard is to get a client in a different area than you are and get them to rank for a hard non-local 2 word phrase. When choosing an SEO do not be impressed by the fact that they rank for SEO terms. Check their back links and see if they have a ton of links just from clients.
Technorati Tags: seo, backlinks, search engine optimization, search, search engine, web design, back links, local search, website, web site
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06.21.07
Posted in SEO, Tutorials
at 4:19 pm
I have a client that has a site in coldfusion and I needed to fix their URL’s so they are search engine friendly. I don’t have access to the server so I needed a coldfusion solution. What I wanted was to make it so there were no ?, &, or = signs in the URL and convert them to /’s. I also wanted to 301 redirect the old URL’s to the new URL’s. Here is what I came up with
<cfset urlstring = cgi.path_info>
<cfloop from="1" to=#ListLen(urlstring,"/")# index="i">
<cfif i mod 2>
<cfset paramName = "URL." & ListGetAt(urlstring,i,"/")>
<cfelse>
<cfparam name="#paramName#" default="#ListGetAt(urlstring,i,"/")#">
</cfif>
</cfloop>
<cfif cgi.QUERY_STRING contains "=">
<cfset moveUrl = #rereplace (cgi.QUERY_STRING,"[=?&]","/","ALL")#>
<cfset newUrl = #cgi.path_info# & "/" & #moveUrl#>
<cfheader statuscode="301" statustext="Moved permanently">
<cfheader name="Location" value="#newUrl#">
</cfif>
Technorati Tags: coldfusion, cold fusion, CFML, seo, url, Search Engine Friendly URL’s, google, search engine
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04.05.07
Posted in SEO
at 12:41 pm
I was just reading search engine land and read probably one of the best posts I have read in a long time. There have been some people talking about how easy 95% of SEO is and that it is up there with snake oil salesmen. Todd Friesen (aka oilman) goes into the 5% that is not easy.
On a side note I thought it was funny that Oilman is defending us “snake oil salesmen”
Technorati Tags: seo, oilman
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