“OMG it’s so simple, just 301 to the new URL!!!”

Fed up of hearing that and not being sure what it means? Too many people in the SEO world seem to think that everyone on the planet should know what it means. But if you’ve never come across it, then it can seem like an alien language.

Here, I’ll try to make things easy to understand so that it’s a concept you’ll grasp. If you have any problems, or they don’t work then all you have to do is get in touch with me!

The “301 Permanent Redirect” is the most efficient and search engine friendly method for redirecting websites. You can use it in several situations, including:

• to redirect an old website to a new address
• to set up several domains pointing to one website
• to enforce only one version of your website (www. or no-www)
• to harmonize a URL structure change

There are several ways to setup a 301 Redirect, below I will cover the most used ones:

PHP Single Page Redirect

In order to redirect a static page to a new address simply enter the code below inside the index.php file.

php
header("HTTP/1.1 301 Moved Permanently");
header("Location: http://www.newdomain.com/page.html");
exit();
?>

PHP Canonical Redirect

The Canonical 301 Redirect will add (or remove) the www. prefixes to all the pages inside your domain. The code below redirects the visitors of the http://domain.com version to http://www.domain.com.

<?php
if (substr($_SERVER['HTTP_HOST'],0,3) != 'www') {
header('HTTP/1.1 301 Moved Permanently');
header('Location: http://www.'.$_SERVER['HTTP_HOST']
.$_SERVER['REQUEST_URI']);
}
?>

Apache .htaccess Singe Page Redirect

In order to use this method you will need to create a file named .htaccess (not supported by Windows-based hosting) and place it on the root directory of your website, then just add the code below to the file.

Redirect 301 /old/oldpage.htm /new/http://www.domain.com/newpage.htm

Apache .htaccess Canonical Redirect

Follow the same steps as before but insert the code below instead (it will redirect all the visitors accessing http://domain.com to http://www.domain.com)

Options +FollowSymlinks
RewriteEngine on
rewritecond %{http_host} ^domain.com [nc]
rewriterule ^(.*)$ http://www.domain.com/$1 [r=301,nc]

ASP Single Page Redirect

This redirect method is used with the Active Server Pages platform.

<%
Response.Status="301 Moved Permanently"
Response.AddHeader='Location','http://www.new-url.com/'
%>

ASP Canonical Redirect

The Canonical Redirect with ASP must be in a script that is executed in every page on the server before the page content starts.

<%
If InStr(Request.ServerVariables("SERVER_NAME"),"www") = 0 Then
Response.Status="301 Moved Permanently"
Response.AddHeader "Location","http://www."
& Request.ServerVariables("HTTP_HOST")
& Request.ServerVariables("SCRIPT_NAME")
End if
%>

Based in Nottingham and looking for a local SEO Company? Here you go.

Trand Media have provided SEO Services for a few years now, making us the most up-and-coming SEO company in Nottingham. We have a proven track record that our competitors can only dream of.

We offer search engine optimisation (SEO) to lots of companies in Nottingham from small businesses to global clients and what’s more we don’t charge sky-high fees for achieving great results.

We don’t just get results, we get great results and we often deliver things that our clients never dreamed about before!

Our combined knowledge and ability, plus our passion for success ensures that  Trand Media are the first choice when selecting an SEO company in Nottingham

SEO Setup Fees? Nope – we don’t charge setup fees (and never have). Quite simply, there is nothing to set up and don’t let any other SEO companies tell you otherwise. We will be happy to explain why setup fees are not necessary – just call us.

What about minimum contract fees and timescales? Nope we don’t sting you with these either.

• We do not lock you into long-term contracts such as 12, 18 & 24 month contracts.
• We have a minimum contract of 3 months with one month’s termination allowing you peace of mind
• SEO is not a quick fix – It takes a minimum of 3-6 months to start seeing results because search engines have measures to prevent websites cheating their way to the top (spamming)
• The longer you do SEO the better your results and better your ROI

How quick can I expect SEO results?

Supposing you have £200 or £2 million pounds to spend on SEO, when you start you must do so slowly and steadily. There is no fast way to get you a top 10 ranking in the free listings. If you were to suddenly get 10,000 links to your website in your first week you could very well trigger an alert with the search engines and your site could be de-listed for several months – maybe longer. No one can fool the search engines for long and they have more information on your website than you realise so it’s best to do things right.

Everyone loves tips, right? Everyone loves a good list too, I hear?

Everyone loves a good tip, right? Here are 55 quick tips for search engine optimization that even your mother could use to get cooking. Well, not my mother, but you get my point. Most folks with some web design and beginner SEO knowledge should be able to take these to the bank without any problem.

1. If you absolutely MUST use Java script drop down menus, image maps or image links, be sure to put text links somewhere on the page for the spiders to follow.

2. Content is king, so be sure to have good, well-written and unique content that will focus on your primary keyword or keyword phrase.

3. If content is king, then links are queen. Build a network of quality back links using your keyword phrase as the link. Remember, if there is no good, logical reason for that site to link to you, you don’t want the link.

4. Don’t be obsessed with PageRank. It is just one isty bitsy part of the ranking algorithm. A site with lower PR can actually outrank one with a higher PR.

5. Be sure you have a unique, keyword focused Title tag on every page of your site. And, if you MUST have the name of your company in it, put it at the end. Unless you are a major brand name that is a household name, your business name will probably get few searches.

6. Fresh content can help improve your rankings. Add new, useful content to your pages on a regular basis. Content freshness adds relevancy to your site in the eyes of the search engines.

7. Be sure links to your site and within your site use your keyword phrase. In other words, if your target is “blue widgets” then link to “blue widgets” instead of a “Click here” link.

8. Focus on search phrases, not single keywords, and put your location in your text (“our Palm Springs store” not “our store”) to help you get found in local searches.

9. Don’t design your web site without considering SEO. Make sure your web designer understands your expectations for organic SEO. Doing a retrofit on your shiny new Flash-based site after it is built won’t cut it. Spiders can crawl text, not Flash or images.

10. Use keywords and keyword phrases appropriately in text links, image ALT attributes and even your domain name.

11. Check for canonicalization issues – www and non-www domains. Decide which you want to use and 301 redirect the other to it. In other words, if http://www.domain.com is your preference, then http://domain.com should redirect to it.

12. Check the link to your home page throughout your site. Is index.html appended to your domain name? If so, you’re splitting your links. Outside links go to http://www.domain.com and internal links go to http://www.domain.com/index.html.

Ditch the index.html or default.php or whatever the page is and always link back to your domain.

13. Frames, Flash and AJAX all share a common problem – you can’t link to a single page. It’s either all or nothing. Don’t use Frames at all and use Flash and AJAX sparingly for best SEO results.

14. Your URL file extension doesn’t matter. You can use .html, .htm, .asp, .php, etc. and it won’t make a difference as far as your SEO is concerned.

15. Got a new web site you want spidered? Submitting through Google’s regular submission form can take weeks. The quickest way to get your site spidered is by getting a link to it through another quality site.

16. If your site content doesn’t change often, your site needs a blog because search spiders like fresh text. Blog at least three time a week with good, fresh content to feed those little crawlers.

17. When link building, think quality, not quantity. One single, good, authoritative link can do a lot more for you than a dozen poor quality links, which can actually hurt you.

18. Search engines want natural language content. Don’t try to stuff your text with keywords. It won’t work. Search engines look at how many times a term is in your content and if it is abnormally high, will count this against you rather than for you.

19. Not only should your links use keyword anchor text, but the text around the links should also be related to your keywords. In other words, surround the link with descriptive text.

20. If you are on a shared server, do a blacklist check to be sure you’re not on a proxy with a spammer or banned site. Their negative notoriety could affect your own rankings.

21. Be aware that by using services that block domain ownership information when you register a domain, Google might see you as a potential spammer.

22. When optimizing your blog posts, optimize your post title tag independently from your blog title.

23. The bottom line in SEO is Text, Links, Popularity and Reputation.

24. Make sure your site is easy to use. This can influence your link building ability and popularity and, thus, your ranking.

25. Give link love, Get link love. Don’t be stingy with linking out. That will encourage others to link to you.

26. Search engines like unique content that is also quality content. There can be a difference between unique content and quality content. Make sure your content is both.

27. If you absolutely MUST have your main page as a splash page that is all Flash or one big image, place text and navigation links below the fold.

28. Some of your most valuable links might not appear in web sites at all but be in the form of e-mail communications such as newletters and zines.

29. You get NOTHING from paid links except a few clicks unless the links are embedded in body text and NOT obvious sponsored links.

30. Links from .edu domains are given nice weight by the search engines. Run a search for possible non-profit .edu sites that are looking for sponsors.

31. Give them something to talk about. Linkbaiting is simply good content.

32. Give each page a focus on a single keyword phrase. Don’t try to optimize the page for several keywords at once.

33. SEO is useless if you have a weak or non-existent call to action. Make sure your call to action is clear and present.

34. SEO is not a one-shot process. The search landscape changes daily, so expect to work on your optimization daily.

35. Cater to influential bloggers and authority sites who might link to you, your images, videos, podcasts, etc. or ask to reprint your content.

36. Get the owner or CEO blogging. It’s priceless! CEO influence on a blog is incredible as this is the VOICE of the company. Response from the owner to reader comments will cause your credibility to skyrocket!

37. Optimize the text in your RSS feed just like you should with your posts and web pages. Use descriptive, keyword rich text in your title and description.

38. Use captions with your images. As with newspaper photos, place keyword rich captions with your images.

39. Pay attention to the context surrounding your images. Images can rank based on text that surrounds them on the page. Pay attention to keyword text, headings, etc.

40. You’re better off letting your site pages be found naturally by the crawler. Good global navigation and linking will serve you much better than relying only on an XML Sitemap.

41. There are two ways to NOT see Google’s Personalized Search results:

(1) Log out of Google

(2) Append &pws=0 to the end of your search URL in the search bar

42. Links (especially deep links) from a high PageRank site are golden. High PR indicates high trust, so the back links will carry more weight.

43. Use absolute links. Not only will it make your on-site link navigation less prone to problems (like links to and from https pages), but if someone scrapes your content, you’ll get backlink juice out of it.

44. See if your hosting company offers “Sticky” forwarding when moving to a new domain. This allows temporary forwarding to the new domain from the old, retaining the new URL in the address bar so that users can gradually get used to the new URL.

45. Understand social marketing. It IS part of SEO. The more you understand about sites like Digg, Yelp, del.icio.us, Facebook, etc., the better you will be able to compete in search.

46. To get the best chance for your videos to be found by the crawlers, create a video sitemap and list it in your Google Webmaster Central account.

47. Videos that show up in Google blended search results don’t just come from YouTube. Be sure to submit your videos to other quality video sites like Metacafe, AOL, MSN and Yahoo to name a few.

48. Surround video content on your pages with keyword rich text. The search engines look at surrounding content to define the usefulness of the video for the query.

49. Use the words “image” or “picture” in your photo ALT descriptions and captions. A lot of searches are for a keyword plus one of those words.

50. Enable “Enhanced image search” in your Google Webmaster Central account. Images are a big part of the new blended search results, so allowing Google to find your photos will help your SEO efforts.

51. Add viral components to your web site or blog – reviews, sharing functions, ratings, visitor comments, etc.

52. Broaden your range of services to include video, podcasts, news, social content and so forth. SEO is not about 10 blue links anymore.

53. When considering a link purchase or exchange, check the cache date of the page where your link will be located in Google. Search for “cache:URL” where you substitute “URL” for the actual page. The newer the cache date the better. If the page isn’t there or the cache date is more than an month old, the page isn’t worth much.

54. If you have pages on your site that are very similar (you are concerned about duplicate content issues) and you want to be sure the correct one is included in the search engines, place the URL of your preferred page in your sitemaps.

55. Check your server headers. You want to be sure your URLs report a “200 OK” status or “301 Moved Permanently ” for redirects. If the status shows anything else, check to be sure your URLs are set up properly and used consistently throughout your site.

But just how difficult is it to understand them?

When talking to clients about their website, and their search engine optimisation needs, we come across various “I heard from a friend..” or “I want to rank for this keyword, why can’t we” and every so often we’re asked “Just what is a keyword”.

So we thought, why not post about it?

Keywords are the backbone of any good SEO campaign. When somebody searches Google for a product, a question, an idea or just because of bordem, they are using a keyword. If you have a website about basketballs, it’s only natural that it will start to appear for basketball related searches.

Look at him!!

That’s great, I hear you say; “We’ll be pulling in thousands of visitors a day if we rank for basketball! Heck, why not rank for Google!”

Alas, that isn’t the case.

“But I heard from a friend that if you put the keywords in the META keyword tag then you’ll rank for them. Why don’t you do that with our website?”

Fortunately that ship sailed a long time ago. Once upon a time, Google would look at the meta keyword tag to decide what keywords you were aiming to rank for. That was great in the early days. Until people decided to use keywords that didn’t describe their website, but for keywords that they felt would bring them the most visitors. You would often see a car sales website with keywords such as “Cars, sales, buy, used, new, finance”. They would be stuffed with non-relevant information. People thought they could automatically appear number one for the term “Cars” or other highly sought after keywords.

It doesn’t work any more. It hasn’t for a long while. It doesn’t harm your website, but at the same time doesn’t give any benefit at all. You can see, if you look at a websites source code and they still use it, what keywords a competitor is aiming for. You could then try to get in on the action. We think that, as a whole, is the sole reason you shouldn’t use them. Don’t give anything away.

If you have a website that sells Dog Coats, it’s only understandable that you want to appear when someone searches for that keyword. But lets write a few facts and help better understand why it might not always be best to go for it:

Dog Coats is a highly competitive, non-action keyword. You might spend months and countless amount of money to get to the number one spot. Great! You’ll be rolling with the big dogs, bathing in £50 notes. Ah, not quite.

If someone searches for Dog Coats, they might be after a range of different resources. Remember, you own a website that SELLS them.

They could be looking for more information about them, when they were invented, why they were invented. Cute little dog’s in coats to post on Facebook. The list is endless. The point being that, there is only a 1% chance they are looking to buy one. The other 99% of people who will click on your website aren’t. The user might not be in a buying frame of mind.

Ever walked into a shop and had someone try to sell you something you don’t want? This is a similar concept.

All the time, money and effort could just be wasted.

We hear you sigh; “But surely 1% of 100,000 searches is still 1,000 people a month to my website!!” Well, bear with us while we do some more insightful maths.

We want to get people coming to your website who are looking to buy. What search will they use? Well normally it would be something such as “Buy Dog Coat”. That 3 letter word has suddenly changed the time of market the website would be aimed towards. The user is already in a cash-splashing mood and looking for a fine retailer like yourselves.

So all of a sudden you’re number one, it isn’t as difficult to aim for as Dog Coats and your visitor stats are through the roof.

“BUT WHAT ABOUT THE MONIES!!” Well, that’s coming. More maths this time.

Let’s say that Buy Dog Coats gets roughly 500,000 searches a month. Half of what was searched than Dog Coats, but it took half the time, half the effort and half amount of the money spent.

But suddenly, you’re getting people buying. They want to buy a coat for Max, Rover and the clan. That’s because they searched using an Action Keyword.

We could say that, with a nice website and great content that you get 10% conversion of 50,00 visitors. That is suddenly a 5-fold amount of buying customers of 5,000!

So from going away from that amazing, ego-massaging search term to something that is slightly different, your website captures a totally different user, in a totally different frame of mind.

We could go even further! You sell dog coats from a shop in Sheffield.

Let’s us a figure of 10000 searches a month for “Buy Dog Coat Sheffield”. A small amount compared to the previously chucked about figures, but bear with us.

So we have people in your city, money burning a hole in their pocket and on the look out for a new coat for their dog. They search Google. You’re number one on the listings and they go to you. Suddenly because you’re local, people can go to your shop and try it for size (On their dogs) they want in on the dog coat buying action. The previous figure of 10% of conversions rockets up to 70%.

That’s now 7,000 buying customers!

All for a keyword that wouldn’t take much work, much money but the return on investment is absolutely insane!

In Summary

Don’t be blinded by your ego and don’t think that ranking for such a luxury keyword will get you the nice house and the nice cars.

Keyword research is key. Think about what someone will search when they want to find you.

Please also note that these numbers aren’t real. We made them up for this article.

We do a lot of work on Web Designer Forum. Not in a freelance capacity or outsourced, but by simply answering questions and give our opinion on different topics. Because of this, we’ve become a well-respected source of knowledge.

Through this, we have picked up some really top clients that have always been grateful for what we have done. But when we logged in the other day, we noticed a post about us called Public Testimonial of Jason Dexter seo. (We use our own personal accounts on there, so that opinions are not always those of Trand Media).

So we raced to open it up and noticed that a client of ours, Martin (You may remember him as he asked us to provide help with his Leeds Photography website) has written what we think is quite an awesome post about us!

He goes into detail about how we’ve helped over the last few months and taken time out to give advice where it is needed on the forum.

Why not go and have a look yourselves? Head on over to Web Designer Forum and check it out!

We started by changing the content around, as we found that some pages were serving no purpose and had old information. Once we had started this task, we agreed to go with a totally new design!

Having decided upon a new look, we then opted to ensure that the design is responsive. This means that no matter what browser you use or what device you’re on, the whole website responds and changes shape. Go ahead, resize your browser!

We also gave our search engine optimisation a new lease of life and you will find us much better in search engines for those hard-to-find answers!

I think you’ll agree that we now look even better.