The Rank Magic Blog
Do You Need an XML Site Map?
January 30, 2010 ::: We often get asked
by our clients if they need an XML Site Map. Google has promoted these, but
a little knowledge is a dangerous thing. An XML site map is a way to tell
the search engines what pages you have on your site and allow the search
engines to easily find, spider, and index your pages.
For a large eCommerce site with hundreds of products and multiple ways to
get to them, an XML site map can help the search engines a lot. When I say
"multiple ways to get to" a product, I'm referring to the pull down
navigation many eCommerce sites use. You might search this way: (widget |
style = waterproof | color = blue, size = large) and someone else might
search this way: (widget, size = large, color = blue | style = waterproof).
Although both are looking for the same thing and end up on the same page,
the URLs of the pages will be different.
If that's the kind of web suite you have, you'll benefit from having an XML
site map.
But if you're like most of our clients (a local service business) and if
you've set up search engine friendly navigation for your site, then there's
no need at all for an XML site map.

Watch How You Redirect Traffic to Your Site
January 21, 2010 ::: If you change your
domain name, you'll need to redirect all your old pages to their new web
addresses. Otherwise, people going to your old domain won't find it ... and
may think you're out of business.
If you restructure your site, you may need to redirect people from old pages
that aren't there anymore to your new pages. Otherwise people get the
dreaded "404
Page Not Found" error.
There are several ways you can redirect people from one page to another, but
almost all of them will hurt your search engine rankings. Your webmaster or
web host is probably familiar with these:
-
JavaScript redirect is a technique sometimes
used by search engine spammers to show one thing to people and something
else to search engines. Avoid this like the plague.
-
Meta refresh redirect is an old type of
r3edirect that's fallen into disuse, and for good reason. It won't pass any
SEO value. Don't use this.
-
302 temporary redirect has been reported to
cause trouble with your rankings in the search engines, so I recommend
against it. This seems to be the kind of redirect many webmasters use by
default, and they may need to be asked not to use it.
-
301 permanent redirect tells the search engines
the content has been permanently moved to the new location, and as a result
the new location should inherit the link popularity of the original page.
Always use this kind of redirect.

Raise
Brand Awareness with Social Networking
January 15, 2010 ::: Now that Google is
showing real-time results from
Twitter, Facebook
and other social networking sites, you may want to consider using those
sites to improve your brand awareness. Increasingly, businesses are
realizing,
as reported in the Online Marketing Blog, "search doesn’t just happen on
Google,
Yahoo and
Bing". Depending on how
you look at it, YouTube
may be getting the second largest number of searches, after Google and
before Yahoo.

January
11, 2010 ::: It can be very revealing to see a page on your web
site the way Google does. Google's spider, Googlebot, doesn't see
your page the same way you or anyone else sees it. Graphical text is
incomprehensible to it, as an example.
Google Webmaster Tools now has a helpful tool called Fetch As Googlebot,
that lets you see your web page as Google sees it.
The result is a bit geeky and shows your code as well as your normal text
content, but it can help you figure out why your page doesn't rank for an
important keyword. You'll need to log in to
Google Webmaster Tools and claim your web site (if you haven't already
done that). Then on the left, click on Labs and then Fetch As Googlebot. It
takes several minutes for Google to get you back the results, but it can be
worth the wait.

6
Website Redesign SEO Secrets Your Developer May Not Know
January 4, 2010 ::: If you're
redesigning a web site that has decent visibility in the search engines,
you're at risk of de-optimizing it and seeing some of your rankings drop or
even disappear. We've seen some businesses get their web sites redesigned
without consideration of SEO and end up with a site that could never be
found in the search engines. About the worst case scenario is having your
new design be
an all-flash website.
Here are six issues you and your web designer need to keep in mind when
redesigning your web site to preserve your rankings.
6 Important Web Design Issues
-
Make sure you have search engine
friendly site architecture
-
Avoid duplicate content on eCommerce
sites
-
Properly redirect any renamed pages
-
Search engine friendly navigation menus
- avoid DHTML and Flash navigation
-
Retain the ability to specify headers,
titles, URLs, alt attributes and meta tags
-
Be careful with session IDs - feed only
clean URLs to the search engines
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You'll want to know more about each of these.
You'll find a terrific discussion of them all here, along with some
specific recommendations..

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