First, a quick refresher:  URL prettying and 301 redirection can both be done in .htaccess files, or in your 404 handler.  If you're not completely up to speed on how URL rewrites and 301s work in general, this post will definitely help. And if you didn't read last week's post on RewriteRule's split personality, it's probably helpful background material for understanding today's post. [more...]

When you're covering poppin'-fresh, trending, news-worthy content, there's no time to sit around whittling miniature canoes and waiting for Google to come crawl your site and index your new content. That sort of passive attitude will allow your competitors to dominate all of that awesome Query Deserves Freshness search traffic and make enough money to go buy real, full-size canoes whittled by fine Native American craftsmen.  You'll be poor and jealous, and we just can't have that. Watch this week's video to learn several near-magical strategies to get your fresh content indexed faster than meth-fueled panther (that's fast, people)! [more...]

Apache webservers have a really cool and useful little feature called RewriteRule.  It's sometimes referred to as the Swiss Army Knife of URL manipulation, because it's got two very important, often-used abilities:

• URL rewriting: turning dynamic, parameterized URLs into readable, keyword-loaded URLs
• 301s: to tell the browser (or search bot) that a page has been moved

These are VERY different tasks, with VERY different results sent to the browser or search bot. [more...]

Does that mean, we now can drop this field? I don´t think so. Since there are other search-engines outside (such as Bing), that still use them, or the opposite is not known.

I still recommend the use of the keywords field in the CMS of big companys, because it´s easier for an search engine optimizer to see, what keywords are relevant for the given article (or which the writer had in mind) and to monitor, if this article ranks for the keywords. The alternative would be, to use the tagging of the article for the keyword meta-tag. Or to use the field for tagging, if the CMS does not have this field. ;-)

Erweiterung der Sitelinks in den Google-Suchergebnissen um Sprungmarken (Verweise/Textanker)

Diese Sprungmarken können nun in den Sitelinks der Suchergebnisse (SERP´s) mit einfließen. Hier der entsprechende Beitrag im Google-Blog.

Der Google Webmaster-Blog weist gleich darauf hin was zu beachten ist. Wer nicht mehr weiß, wie man solche Sprungmarken umsetzt, der sollte sich das Beispiel auf Selfhtml nochmal anschauen: Verweise definieren (passender Weise natürlich mit einer Sprungmarken-URL verlinkt. ;-)

The most obvious trend when it comes to SEO is “going local”. Ever since Google introduced Google Maps and Local Business Center and later added local search results to Universal Search displaying them on top of everything else businesses everywhere strive to be there. Additionally the proliferation of smartphones and netbooks accelerates this development even more.

You have to perform in local search and on sites that enable users to find local businesses in their respective area. Classic SEO is just not enough anymore for small business owners and location based big business [...]

A very good list of links to dig into the search-engine-optimization for local search.

Read the full article at: SEOptimise

Search is changing though, and there are always new elements coming into play. Since social media has come into its own, more opportunities and questions have come along with it. Now Microsoft is going for Google’s throat with a new search engine and an aggressive marketing campaign. What this means for the future of search market share is yet to be determined, but there’s no denying Bing is capturing some attention, and that means there are people searching with it. Altered your SEO strategy for Bing? Tell us why.

Chris Crum shows how to optimize for Bing and what social media can do for your SEO efforts. Check out the related articles at the bottom of the post.

Read the full article at: WebProNews

Did you know that the number of website hosts that have been submitting Sitemap files has almost tripled over the last year? It’s no wonder: the secret is out – as a recent research study showed, Sitemaps helps search engines to find new and changed content faster. Using Sitemaps doesn’t guarantee that your site will be crawled and indexed completely, but it certainly helps us understand your website better [...]

Google supports now Sitemaps up to 50.000 entries, so enough for the most websites. Also the webmaster tools have been updated. Check out the sitemap-options. There are also links to resources for coders, to produce the sitemap-files with the right syntax.

Read the full article at: Google Webmaster Central Blog

There is no single definition of advanced SEO. There are a few of attempts to describe what it might mean or consist of and what not but there is no entity or authority that could define such a broad term like advanced SEO.
I can’t define advanced SEO either. What I can do though is to collect 30+ advanced SEO tactics, techniques and resources.

These methods are no doubt advanced in the sense that they are new and progressive, sometimes more difficult than basic SEO or require special tools and expertise. Some of the tactics are no short term tactics, they’re probably strategies [...]

Tad Chef did a great job with collecting a big amount of useful links to the different topics of SEO.

Read the full article at: SEOptimise

Some of the informations to get are:

• where the web-crawler had problems
• if your meta-descriptions, titles and contents have duplicates
• keyword-statistics
• inbound links
• blocking unwanted site-links under your main entry in Google
• submitting sitemaps and see index-statistics
• checking your robots.txt
• deleting unwanted entries from Google search-index

If you already have a Google account, just go to the website, log in, or register a new account. BTW, you don´t need to have a GMail-account. Just use your regular email-address, or for security-reasons, get a free email-account somewhere else and use that.

You can now add new websites to WT, but make sure you take the “right” domain-name. Because www.kpi-agent.com is another account than kpi-agent.com. After adding the website, you need to verify, that you are in control of the domain. The easiest way is, to add an empty document with a special name (google***.html) to the root-directory. When you placed it on your webserver, let WT validate it and YOU ARE DONE.

For this website:
I want the people to use my blog-domain without “www.” and also the different alternatives (kpiagent.com|kpi-agent.de|kpiagent.de) should be redirected to kpi-agent.com. How to do that? With some URL rewriting, using a “.htaccess” file. If you already have one in your main web-directory (assuming you use an apache-webserver) just add the last two lines, directly under “RewriteEngine On”, or make a new one with this content (changed to your needs):

## use mod_rewrite
RewriteEngine On

## Force usage of kpi-agent.com
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !^kpi-agent.com$
RewriteRule ^(.*) http://kpi-agent.com/$1 [R=301,L]

The web-server sends a 301 status-code to the browser, means “Moved Permanently”, that even tells Google and other search-engines, to only only that URL for indexing.

BE CAREFUL:
If you already have external-links coming from different plattforms, you should be careful with this action, since this maybe destroys the PageRank relevance. In that case, if possible, try to contact the important websites to change the URL to your page, first!

If your already have a brand name, the people are typing your URL directly into the browserbar, or they use the google search, what more and more “normal” users are doing. Why? Because they are afraid of being redirected to “bad” domains, when they misspelled the URL. So you better be listed at position No. 1 in Google with your brand name.

Giving away money to Google, because you are not listed at No.1 with your brand name? This is were to start and save big money. Why? A known brand, should get a minimum of 30-35% of visits thru “direct traffic”. From the 50-60% of search engine traffic, the biggest chunk should come thru company or brand name keywords, if you haven´t done SEO till now! At the end, about 65-70% of your traffic is really coming thru “direct traffic”. Have that in mind, for later optimization!

So, are the SEOs right, when they say “use keywords in domain names”? Yes they are, but use this for landing pages or special websites for a specific topic, or as I would call it, for a “keyword cloud relevant content set”.

And another important thing about keywords in your domain name: If someone optimizes on those keywords, he maybe ranked above you, and gets your “brand name”-traffic. And again: You have to pay big money to google.

My advice: If you have a unique name: USE IT!