Gabriel Harper's Blog

The Apache Web server supports URL rewriting with the mod_rewrite engine. Placing custom rules in an .htaccess file lets you do all sorts of useful things to keep your URLs tidy. One really handy thing you can do for search engines and visitors is redirecting traffic from www to non-www version of your domain (and vice versa).

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Whatever Google is up to with PageRank lately, it’s quickly losing my interest. PageRank was never meant to be a reliable measure of search engine performance, but it was usually “in the neighborhood”. After the last few PageRank updates, I’ve found myself relying almost completely on other tools due to the extreme gaps I continue to observe.

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Google’s Webmaster Guidelines no longer suggests having relevant sites link to yours. They also removed their suggestion of submitting your site to relevant directories. This was brought up in Google Groups recently, and subsequently on the big Webmaster forums Digital-Point and Sitepoint. However based on the logic of these threads, which get pretty heated over Google vs. directories, Google is also suggesting that we don’t have relevant sites link to us!

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Google is against paid links.  They have made this clear by asking Webmasters to report sites that sell links, repeateadly blogging about how paid links are bad, and by evidently selecting sites to torture in their search algorithm for participating in link sales. Obviously a lot of people are upset about this – publishers want to sell advertising on their site as they see fit, and not hire programmers to understand things like “nofollow”. Search engine marketers don’t want to be subjected to Google’s guessing games. Who will be next for Google to torture?

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Many years ago I didn’t know what a search engine friendly URL was. Now I practice human readable “search engine friendly URLs” whenever possible. When I stumbled upon the concept and started moving away from dynamic URLs to friendly, keyword rich URLs I noticed a direct and immediate positive impact on how much I was crawled and how well I was ranked in Google. Is that still the case? I still use friendly URLs whenever I can, but there doesn’t seem to be a lot of agreement on the subject.

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I’m taking the plunge with vBSEO on Fury-Tech Forums. $149 for vBSEO is almost twice as expensive as a leased vBulletin license, so like many vBulletin owners I’m tentative to say the least. To make things worse, they want $117 to remove vBSEO branding from your forum. On the bright side of things, I should have a reliable SEO solution for vBulletin – where Jelsoft is really lacking in my opinion.

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Rand Fishkin of SEOMoz.org makes several points in this new video diminishing the value of Web directories. I believe Rand made some good points about general link quality that directory owners need to think about whether they like it or not. However his video is an example to me of how little he understands directories. The fact that he says DMOZ is “good” only elucidates this.

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Search engine optimization is a complicated subject, and it takes time and hard work to gain an intuitive understanding of SEO. Even the strongest intuition can’t predict all of the eccentricities of search engine algorithms, though, and there are some simple SEO strategies that a Webmaster of any skill level can implement. These are ten SEO strategies that I incorporate in all of my Web sites.

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So, you’ve got this great web site. The whole world needs to know about it, but right now your only traffic is from localhost. You’ve got all this great content, nice and tidy HTML, super SEO’d links, the whole nine yards. So where is the onslaught of traffic you expected? Why doesn’t anybody care? Well, before people can care they need to know you exist.

1. Trade banners with complementary link partners. Lots of them.
2. Create a list of complimentary web sites that publish news and events for sites like the one you run. Send a link, summary, and polite note to every one of them when you publish new content.
3. Don’t act like your link back is some special privelege. Getting a few hundred hits a day does not make your web site significant, and nitpicking your own linkback requests will eventually hurt you by creating enemies, not partners. In other words, if you have a link request for a highly related article with good content and the site has a PR of 1, who cares. Don’t base all of your affiliate decisions on the numbers, think about what is going to be appealing from the perspective of your visitor and you will be investing in the future of your web site.
4. Create an opt-in newsletter, and send regular updates and links to new content to your subscribers.
5. Create a “Tell a friend” link on your content pages to encourage visitors to advertise your site for you.
6. Identify related link directories that follow good practices and submit your URL.
7. Apply for a link at DMOZ if applicable. Once. And never whine about not getting listed, just hope for the best.
8. Take advantage of any publicity, like press releases, to mention your site. But don’t abuse your boundaries.
9. Post a URL to your web site in the signature on any forums you are a member of.
10. Have some stickers made up with your domain name and give them out. Stick one on your car if you are truly serious about it!
11. Go into crowded public places and scream your URL at the top of your lungs. Then run.
12. Pick up a fabric printing kit for under $10 and make some t-shirts with your URL on them.
13. If you haven’t already, create a logo and name that are catchy, easy to remember, and highly related to the type of site you are running.

I feel inspired to post this blog as a reminder to all those Webmasters who think they can get away with neglecting not only useful and relevant content, but allowing obvious spelling and grammatical errors in some very important places.

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Every professional webmaster and site owner needs to maximize traffic to their web site. Affiliate programs, link exchanges, search submission programs, and pay-per-click services offer many ways to promote yourself, but webmasters around the world still pour countless hours into Search Engine Optimization (SEO). Google is the biggest target and it is no surprise, with over 55 billion searches made on their site in 2003.

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