Smoothape – Mutterings and Oddities

Almost 6 months ago I answered a question in a forum.

“How long will it take a website to get from a 6 to a 7? And does it really make a BIG difference?:whistling:”

There were a few answers, none of which I thought really helped the new user, so I put pen to paper, well, fingertips to keyboard.

This is a brief overview of what I would do to increase your Page Rank

1. Deleted duplicate content for the site
2. Followed up on inbound links, worked to get a good authority
3. Stopped all PPC & Ad Words campaigns
4. Started a blog, blogged 3-4 times a week
5. Created RSS feeds
6. Created a Twitter profile, talked to customers, linked news articles to our content
7. Fixed / Updated our profile in many, many, many online directories
8. Bought relevant domain names and created satellite sites for in-depth content and pointed them to landing pages
9. Created well structured landing pages (for #8, paper ads, etc.)
10. Checked our stats on a daily basis, to see which pages / sections are working, which are not
11. Ongoing – content review, updating pages, adding new content, archiving (not deleting) old content
12. Updating keywords on all pages, using the ‘long tail strategy’ for lower level pages
13. Increased our activity in the social media arena – became active in forums, etc.

and much much more.

The result – more fresh content, Google reviews our page every 48 hours. Our pages and Press Releases are fully optimized, more inbound links – people want to link to us as we are thought leaders, leaders in our field, Hospitals and .edu’s are linking to us. Our traffic has increased globally, not just in the US.

(this forum entry actually gave seed to two blog articles, one by the Inbound Marketing Software Giants, Hubspot – http://blog.hubspot.com/blog/tabid/6307/bid/4957/13-Steps-That-Transformed-One-Company-From-Invisible-King-to-Sought-Leader.aspx and my good friend Dan Ronken’s blog – Pull Not Push – http://www.pullnotpush.com/Pull-Marketing/bid/18469/Pull-Marketing-for-Healthy-Website-by-Savvy-Medical-Company-Part-I & http://www.pullnotpush.com/Pull-Marketing/bid/18544/Pull-Marketing-for-Healthy-Website-by-Savvy-Medical-Company-Part-II

This of course was for a site that was already a Google Page Rank of 6 that went to a 7, mostly due to the above changes. What are the steps to go to a page rank 8? Well, links and traffic are possibly the only way to achieve that, but it would mean adding a monumental amount of both.

Also, I have since created a new PPC strategy, corrected company profiles on numerous site, added facebook fan pages, created multiple twitter accounts for different depts / regions, mini regional sites, regional content, etc. 2010 is going to be a very busy year for this website. Check back soon, we may just get that PR8

There is a common fault I seem to find in every website I am asked to look at to help increase the search engine presence of. Naming convention. Maybe it stems from my time writing databases or computer programming, but I always chose to describe everything in as much detail as possible. Today we have 255 characters to work with, so let’s be descriptive.

Some tips.

- Give all of your images a good description.

- Use a very similar description in the ALT tag

- Microsoft Word and Adobe Acrobat documents both allow you to add Meta info and descriptions. So many parts can be optimized.

The document title, the files name, the author, the subject and of course the keywords. Make sure the content of the document follows the normal SEO rules and you will now have a fully optimized file ready to FTP to your site.

Here is an example for Acrobat.

SEO Help for Acrobat Files

It’s tough to pick a side. A new site is generally hidden and need a bit of promotion, however like any PPC (Pay Per Click) campaign, it only works as long as the money lasts. A good SEO plan will start slow and snowball, so why not use PPC’s to fuel traffic in the early days? SEO is essential to give longterm results, once the site is established you can once again use PPC campaigns when necessary, such as you promotional times.

When you first launch your site you have no links, you have not been indexed by any search engines, you will not rank for any keywords, so PPC is essential to get noticed.

Once your first PPC campaign has completed you can then use the results to see which keywords converted best, pump the details back into your SEO plan and you should have a site that performs well and is more cost effective.

301 Redirect

301 redirect is the most efficient and Search Engine Friendly method for webpage redirection. It’s not that hard to implement and it shouldpreserve your search engine rankings for that particular page. If you have to change file names or move pages around, it’s the safest option. The code “301″ is interpreted as “moved permanently”.

Below are a Couple of methods to implement URL Redirection

ASP Redirect

< %@ Language=VBScript %>
< %
Response.Status=”301 Moved Permanently”
Response.AddHeader “Location”,”http://www.new-url.com/”
%>

CGI PERL Redirect

$q = new CGI;
print $q->redirect(”http://www.new-url.com/”);

ColdFusion Redirect

< .cfheader statuscode=”301″ statustext=”Moved permanently”>
< .cfheader name=”Location” value=”http://www.new-url.com”>

IIS Redirect

In internet services manager, right click on the file or folder you wish to redirectSelect the radio titled “a redirection to a URL”.Enter the redirection pageCheck “The exact url entered above” and the “A permanent redirection for this resource”Click on ‘Apply’

JSP (Java) Redirect

< %
response.setStatus(301);
response.setHeader( “Location”, “http://www.new-url.com/” );response.setHeader( “Connection”, “close” );
%>

PHP Redirect

< ?
Header( “HTTP/1.1 301 Moved Permanently” );Header( “Location: http://www.new-url.com” );
?>

Ruby on Rails Redirect

def old_action
headers["Status"] = “301 Moved Permanently”
redirect_to “http://www.new-url.com/”
end

Redirect Old domain to New domain (htaccess redirect)

Create a .htaccess file with the below code, it will ensure that all your directories and pages of your old domain will get correctly redirected toyour new domain.

The .htaccess file needs to be placed in the root directory of your old website (i.e the same directory where your index file is placed)

Options +FollowSymLinks
RewriteEngine on
RewriteRule (.*) http://www.newdomain.com/$1 [R=301,L]

Please REPLACE www.newdomain.com in the above code with your actual domain name.

In addition to the redirect I would suggest that you contact every backlinking site to modify their backlink to point to your new website.

Note* This .htaccess method of redirection works ONLY on Linux servers having the Apache Mod-Rewrite moduled enabled.

Redirect to www (htaccess redirect)

Create a .htaccess file with the below code, it will ensure that all requests coming in to domain.com will get redirected to www.domain.comThe .htaccess file needs to be placed in the root directory of your old website (i.e the same directory where your index file is placed)

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

Please REPLACE domain.com and www.newdomain.com with your actual domain name.

Note* This .htaccess method of redirection works ONLY on Linux servers having the Apache Mod-Rewrite moduled enabled.

How to Redirect HTML

Please refer to section titled ‘How to Redirect with htaccess’, if your site is hosted on a Linux Server and ‘IIS Redirect’, if your site is hosted ona Windows Server.