Jordan Kettner

Question: Does Good CSS Help SEO?

Posted on 25. Jan, 2010 by Jordan Kettner in Ask Jordan, Search Engine Optimization

Here is an interesting question from Paul in California.

Does CSS have any effect on SEO?

-Paul, CA

Good question Paul,

The short answer is yes, but it is quite minimal. About a month ago Google added a page speed analyzer into Google Webmaster Tools which is a signal that page load time is about to become a part of the Google algorithm.

It is also important from a browser compatibility point of view. It is always a good idea to make sure that your website is up to par with current XHTML standards.

Internet Marketing News – January 11-17

Posted on 18. Jan, 2010 by Jordan Kettner in Internet Marketing, Search Engine Optimization, Social Media

Here are some interesting Internet marketing articles that I found last week. Enjoy!

Internet Marketing Articles

• Single vs Double Opt-In – Have you ever wondered if you should have single or double opt-ins for your email campaign? This article helps to clear the air.
• Is Your Brand Built On Mirrors or Core Values? – Very inspiring article from Outspoken Media about creating remarkable core values for your business and living them.
• How Do You Get Your Arms Around the ‘Brave New World’ of B2B Marketing? Where Do You Start? – Great post by Adam Needles about where to start with B2B marketing.

SEO Articles

• 7 Overlooked Sources of Keyword Data – Here is a great article with several unique ways of conducting keyword research

Social Media Articles

• The 10 Stages of Social Media Business Integration – Great article for companies who are asking “where do I start with social media”.
• Social Media’s Halo Effect on Organic Search – Pretty interesting article on how tweeting about a haircut increased organic traffic.
• Social Media Predictions for 2010 – Good post by Scott Monty (Ford Social Media) about upcoming trends.

Reputation Management – How SEO Can Help

Posted on 21. Dec, 2009 by Jordan Kettner in Internet Marketing, Search Engine Optimization, Social Media

In the last year or so, the phrase ‘reputation management’ has been coming up in more and more conversations with clients who are trying to suppress negative information on the internet.

Here are some strategies that you can use to protect your brand image online.

1. Domain Names – If you are a large B2C company especially, you will want to make sure that you own domain names like CompanyNameSucks.com. This will protect the image of your brand, and keep unhappy customers from easily ranking on the SERP with negative information. It is also a good idea to own domain names like CompanyNameNews.com, CompanyNameMedia.com, CompanyNamePress.com and so on. Domain names that have your name and official sounding words like News, Media, Press Release, etc need to be protected.
2. Own The SERP – Another common strategy is to create a series of mini-sites to make sure that your company owns the entire search engine results page for a branded search. If someone searches for “Company Name” in Google, you want to make sure that they see your official site, LinkedIn profile, Facebook Fan Page, Twitter account, and mini sites that are owned by you.
3. Social Media – Listen to what your customers are saying. Make sure that you are meeting their needs to the best of your abilities. Also, make sure that you are actively promoting your positive company initiatives, charity events, and news. This helps your company image when someone stumbles across your Twitter account, or Facebook Page.

301 Redirects For SEO

Posted on 16. Dec, 2009 by Jordan Kettner in Search Engine Optimization

A 301 redirect is the most SEO friendly way to tell search engines that a page has been permanently moved to a different location.

Why Pages Change Locations

There are several reasons that websites need to change their page locations. Pages often change locations due to:

• New Folder Structure – The folder structure on the site has changed because of a site redesign or to incorporate new keywords into file names.
• New File Extensions – The website has changed development platforms. For example if you have changed your site from .html to .php or .aspx then all of the .html pages need a permanent redirect
• URL Consistency – If you want your URL to be http://www.domain.com vs http://domain.com then you can use a global 301 redirect to handle this request.

Why Use a 301 Redirect

There two main reasons that 301 redirects are recommended for all page re-locations.

1. Old bookmarks – Many people have bookmarks on their browser or websites like http://delicious.com/, when you change the location of your page, a 301 redirect will send them to the page that they were looking for.
2. Page Authority – If you have a popular page that has many inbound links and is ranking well in search engine, you will want to preserve this ranking if the page has to move, or if the file extension is changed.

Although 301 redirects are the most SEO friendly form of redirection, they do not necessarily pass all of the authority from the old URL to the new URL. Nobody knows for certain, but most search marketing experts agree that Google does not recognize all of the link authority with a 301 redirect.

What is an .htaccess file?

A .htaccess file is just a text file that can be created with notepad and saved with the name “.htaccess”.

To add a 301 redirect to your website, you will need access to your .htaccess file (if you are using an Linux server). The .htaccess file contains specific instructions for certain requests, including security, redirection issues, and how to handle certain errors.

When a visitor or search engine spider requests a webpage the web server will look for a .htaccess file before it loads the page. This gives the website owner an opportunity to add instructions to the web server before it loads the page on behalf of the visitor.

Two Types of 301 Redirects

There are two main types of 301 redirects:

1. Individual – These redirects need to be manually setup to tell search engines that http://www.domain.com/red-widgets.php has moved to http://domain.com/widgets/red.php
2. Global – These are site wide redirects. This works well if you are changing the file extention on all of your pages, or want to either add or remove the “www.” to each URL.

Individual 301 Redirects

Here are the steps that you need to follow to add an individual 301 redirect to your Linux server.

1. Open your .htaccess file with notpad, Dreamweaver, or any other text editing program.
2. Insert the following text in your .htaccess file: redirect 301 /red-widgets.php http://wwwdomain.com/widgets/red.php
3. Save the .htaccess file and re-upload to the root directory of your website.

Here some syntax best practices for .htaccess files:

• Do not include the domain name (http://www.domain) for the first URL.
• Have a single space between each URL.
• Have a blank line between each 301 redirect.

Global 301 Redirects

Here are the steps that you need to follow to add a global 301 redirect to your Linux server.

Redirect ALL files on your domain

redirectMatch 301 ^(.*)$ http://www.domain.com
redirectMatch permanent ^(.*)$ http://www.newdomain.com

Redirect http://domain.com to http://www.domain.com (need mod_rewrite enabled)

Options +FollowSymLinks
RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^domain\.com
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.domain.com/$1 [R=permanent,L]

or

Options +FollowSymLinks
RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^domain\.com$ [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.domain.com/$1 [R=301,L]

Redirect New File Extentions

RewriteEngine on

RewriteBase /
RewriteRule (.*).htm$ /$1.php

SEO Reminder

Don’t forget that sometimes it may take a while for search engines to re-cache the files on your website. Depending on the frequency of your website updates, it might take up to 6-8 weeks before the search engines notice the change to your URLs. If at all possible keep all old URLs on the website until the search engines have re-cached the new pages.