SEO Training

The difference between a redirect and rewrite is:

• Rewrite is a Server-Side operation
• Redirect sends an immediate response to the Client

When creating a new page you should always either 301 redirect or rewrite from the old page. A 301 redirect tells a Search Engine that a page has been permananetly moved, so all the “link juice” or pagrank from the old page is eventually redirected from the old page. Imagine if you got lots of links from different websites to an old page, you then rename and delete the old page, all those links you got would be wasted. Consequently when your rewrite engine is on you should follow this protocal and let the Search Engine pass on all that link juice to the new page:

So in the .htaccess at the root of your website save:
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^website.com$ [OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^www.website.com$
RewriteRule ^olddirectory\/file\.html$ “http\:\/\/www\.website\.com\/newdirectory\/ fileinnewdirectory\-remember\-to\-escape\-hyphens\-and\-fullstops\.html” [R=301,L]

This is a quick way to control all your rewrites. If you want to do static ones on a php page:
<?php

// Permanent redirection

header(”HTTP/1.1 301 Moved Permanently”);

header(”Location: http://www.website.com/”);

exit();

?>

When starting to analyse your site, the best place to start with is the meta tags. All title tags should be unique for every page and should accurately describe the page’s content. They should be no longer than 11 words long and they should should not repeat your key keyword anymore than twice. A great title and description tag scanner and aggregator is xenu link sleuth, where you download your title and description tags for every page and there rewrite each title and description tag from there.

The next stage when analysing your site would be to have a look at the amount of backlinks your website has. You can do this with backlinkwatch or back link analyser from seobook. You should then compare the amount of links your website has with your competitors website.  If they have a higher number of of that keyword rich backlink you are trying to get to number one for, you should try and match that, to your competitor.

The next stage would be to look at the number of pages your website has. You can do this by going to yahoo site explorer and typing site:http://www.mydomain.com This will give you the amount of pages your site or any competing site has. You should try and match your competitor’s number of pages.