Why SEO Needs Your Web Content
October 24, 2008 | Barry Wise | Search Engine Optimization, Web Design
20 Comments
A client recently approached me to discuss redesigning their website, optimizing it to rank well in Google, and contracting me for some basic marketing and promotion. Now, this has happened to me a few times, so I don’t want to single out any one client (and I wouldn’t mention them by name even if you asked me). But their thought process was, well, we’ve got about 100 or so pages indexed right now, but we want to get rid of them and pare that down to just a half dozen or so really sales-driven content pages.
My question, of course, was Why?
Tags: barry wise, google, marketing, nj, organic search, Search Engine Optimization, search rank, search results, seo, Web Design, yahoo
Photos from the Hunt: Steeplechase Horse Racing in Far Hills, NJ
October 19, 2008 | Barry Wise | News
3 Comments
We had an early start this year. I was on the Morristown train by 8:30 yesterday morning along with a few thousand other early party-goers, heading to the Steepchase Horse Race in Far Hills, NJ. Better known simply as The Hunt (aka the Hunt for beer, the Hunt for a ride home, the Hunt for pretty much anything except class, dignity and sobriety), this is a massive tailgate party for what I’m told is a horse race which goes on all around the infield festivities. Everyone from Northern New Jersey (or, as it seems, everyone who is anyone) is probably aware of the Hunt party at Moorland Farms in Far Hills, NJ.
Tags: far hills, horse racing, horses, hunt, new jersey, nj, party, steeplechase, tailgate, train
A Case for Using NoFollow in Your Internal Link Structure
October 15, 2008 | Barry Wise | Search Engine Optimization
4 Comments
A while back I mentioned how much better the web would be if all of us small blog owners banded together in the “dofollow” movement and removed the nofollow attribute from our comments and links to other websites. The theory I espouse is that major commercial websites (like wikipedia.org) have enough links coming to them, we don’t need to give them any more; however, smaller blog-style sites need all the help they can get. So use nofollow links to link out to the big boys and dofollow links to the rest of the unwashed masses.
I still think that’s a good theory and a great way to run your blog, but it doesn’t necessarily work with a decent-sized informational or service website. If you’ve got anywhere between a couple hundred to a couple hundred thousand pages indexed (or hoping to be indexed) in your website, then you’re going to need to consider a proper internal link structure. Hopefully this was put into practice when you originally designed the site and mapped out the site architecture. You did do that, didn’t you?
Tags: barry wise, google, internal links, pagerank, Search Engine Optimization, search engines, seo, Web Design
SEO Canonical URLs And 301 Redirects In Windows IIS 6, IIS 7
October 9, 2008 | Barry Wise | Code Samples, Search Engine Optimization
11 Comments
Some readers have emailed me asking why I’m only writing about canonical URL and redirect issues for the apache/linux platform and haven’t given any advice on how to fix these issues on Microsoft Windows IIS/ASP.NET servers. So in the interest of equal time, I figure I had better present fixes for both old and new versions of IIS. In IIS 6 it can be corrected with global.asax, but with IIS 7 Microsoft added URL redirect support to the web.config file. First a URL redirect fix for the older versions of ASP.NET on IIS 6:
Tags: 301 redirect, asp.net, canonical urls, IIS, Microsoft Windows, search engines, seo, Web Servers
SEO Issues with Duplicate Content: Htaccess, Robots and URLs - Part 2
October 6, 2008 | Barry Wise | Code Samples, Search Engine Optimization
3 Comments
This is Part 2 of a series on SEO and duplicate content issues. In the first part I discussed using your Apache .htaccess file with 301 redirects on Linux servers to fix canonical URL problems.
OK, now that I’ve answered the question of canonical URLs, let’s get back to that pesky duplicate content issue. Hacking your .htaccess file solved one problem, but what if you have different URLs which all point to the same content? Something like this …
Tags: duplicate content, google, htaccess, robots, search engines, seo, sitemap, yahoo
SEO Issues with Duplicate Content: Htaccess, Robots and URLs - Part 1
October 4, 2008 | Barry Wise | Code Samples, Search Engine Optimization
2 Comments
There’s a lot of important SEO issues to talk about here, so I am breaking this blog post into two parts. First let me start by explaining why this blog post came about. I recently encountered a problem with a client who was on a shared hosting platform with really bad tech support (you know the type - godaddy, 1&1, hostgator, etc.). The problem was the site’s home page was answering on too many URLs. For example, the following URLs all delivered the same content:
Tags: 301 redirect, canonical urls, google, htaccess, live, msn, pagerank, Search Engine Optimization, search engines, seo, yahoo
