Keywords and copywriting for SEO

I'm often asked to evaluate copy for the web after writing my article on "Writing Effective Website Content for SEO" and one of the key issues that always crops up is - how do I know what keywords to target? I mean how do I actually know what my users are searching for?

Well this is a tough one, no doubt about that, but there are tools to help you out... Such as Google Adword's Keyword Tool which gives you stats on terms used in your site (or on a descriptive term you supply to it). This will enable you to determine what keywords users are searching for; but, more importantly, which keywords are relevant to your site without much competition. Therefore you can really target keywords your competitors might not be using but potential customers are.

Another wonderful site is Word Tracker. They really know their stuff and write great articles to help you with your copywriting - which are provided for free.

The key for me though is what to do before your site goes live...

I'm a strong believer in that fact that good SEO is actually free. Writing good semantic code and filling it with well written copy is going to be much more effective than paying people to advertise your site for you. Interesting content attracts interested users - and those are the ones you want!

A couple of my sneaky little tips that I find really help with SEO are:

Everyone knows the importance of shared/syndicated content these days... With the likes of Digg, and other community sites, sharing content has never been bigger for the SEO fanatic among us but what have they taught us? And why has no-one caught on yet??

Intelligent site searches: let's face it a user comes to your website and can't find what they are looking for... They use the search and (hopefully) they find it. What most people don't do however is actually analyse what people put into their searches. Simply by doing this you can get a sneak preview inside your users' head. For example 100 people searched for "mobile technology"... Great so now I know I need to focus on those keywords more in the content I write and use those keywords in links to those articles... Simple and yet very very effective.

Content tagging & tag clouds: I adore this little classic that came from the (marketing buzzword) Web 2.0 "phenomenon". What better way to get an insight into what people are looking for than community based content tagging? Why oh why is this such a neglected feature in e-commerce solutions I shall never know - I mean WAKE UP users tagging your products with search terms??? What could be better than that!

ASP.net 2 and the infamous Response.Redirect method

OK any of you working with a CMS system based on ASP.net which utilises the Response.Redirect method to handle links will undoubtedly have come across this issue - those of you using ASP.net in general and considering using Response.Redirect should also read on...

Response.Redirect makes a round trip to the server and returns a 302 redirect in the headers. Now if you're in anyway concered about SEO you'll know that the majority of search engine bots won't follow 302 redirects (temporary redirects).

I actually came across this after monitoring Google on a DotNetNuke project which utitlises the LinkClick method (which pretty much handles all links in the TEXT/HTML module). So I know that any links to LinkClick.aspx?xxxx&yyyyy will return 302 redirects before going onto my real "seo-freindly" url... Which of course is a BIG problem.

Well after badgering around for what seems like weeks (but is probaly only a few minutes) I began to think about the global.asax file and how it handles requests.

I know there is the Application_PreSendRequestHeaders (which is processed just before we bat the response headers back to the client) so this seems like an appropriate place to check and rewrite the headers and this is actually quite a simple piece of code...

Sub Application_PreSendRequestHeaders(ByVal sender As Object, ByVal e As EventArgs)
If Response.StatusCode = 302 Then
Response.StatusCode = 301
End If
End Sub

Obviously you'll want to be specific in your catchment but you get the idea. I tested this with LiveHTTPHeaders and it seems to have the desired affect - a 301 redirect. I'll let you know if Google likes it after Mr. Google-bot has come back to see my client's site. IN the meantime if your desired affect is to redirect to another file on your server I'd suggest you use the Server.transfer() method which doesn't make the round trip to the server.

Also check out Matt Cutts blog article about this very issue

DNN setting the date format for the calendar control

Having recently been frustrated by the lack of support in DNN to change the format of dates (yes I know about the web.config setting and yes I know about the built in language settings - it still didn't work when using DataSprings DynamicForms module which otherwise is simply superb).

Anyway if you're experiencing the same issues that we did then there is a simple solution.

In the "js" folder you'll find a file named "PopupCalendar.js".

I won't bore you with the various ways in which you customise the look and feel but if you need to change the date format (in my case to the United Kingdom dd/mm/yyyy) here's how...

Simply scroll down until you find the lines:

//default localized short date format if not provided
if (popCalDstFmt == "")
popCalDstFmt = "m/d/yyyy";

This is where the date format is set if you didn't pre-specify a format on the call to the popupCal method.

You can simply override this by adding the following line straight after this function... In our case:

//force UK date format
popCalDstFmt = "d/M/yyyy";

...and voila you're ready to rock and roll!

Hope this helps some other frustrated developers!

Cheers
Jon

Royalty free stock images - Introducing Fotolia

One of the things us web development people always struggle with, especially on smaller, low-budget projects, is where to get stock photogrpahy from. Often places like Getty Images or organising a bespoke shoot are simply too expensive for low budget sites so you either have to source your own images, use the client's, often limited back catalogue or the new(ish) era of social networking - community royalty free sites...

Our old favourite used to be istockphoto but, in years gone by they had quite a limited stock - not any more however as they recently relaunched with video and flash animation - they are definately worth a look!

However we've just come across Fotolia. These guys seem to have taken the whole social networking "file-sharing" idea to a completely new level and allow users to make money from their own images by simply uploading them to the Fotolia catalogue... Great I hear you cry - "I can make some dough"... Well yes and if you are looking for an image for a low budget site this site has a rapidly growing portfolio which, being based on the old community upload is likely to get massive... Huge! In the immenent future.

Check 'em out at http://www.fotolia.com/

Adding a logout link to the control panel in DNN

DotNetNuke is a great tool but because it's written by developers sometimes basic GUI options have been omitted. One of these is adding a logout button the control panel - especially if you don't want a login/out link on your main webpages!

It's actually really simple to do this just navigate to the "admin/ControlPanel" directory of your site.

There are two different control panels: "iconbar" and "classic" just open up the Web Control that represents the one you are using: classic.ascx or iconbar.ascx.

Next you'll need to register the DNN:Login tag and associate it with the "Login" Control. To do this add the following line under the control declaration so your file will look like this:

<%@ Control language="vb" AutoEventWireup="false" Explicit="True" Inherits="DotNetNuke.UI.ControlPanels.IconBar" CodeFile="IconBar.ascx.vb" %>
<%@ Register TagPrefix="dnn" TagName="LOGIN" Src="~/Admin/Skins/Login.ascx" %>

Then to add the link itself just add the line:
<dnn:login runat="server" id="dnnLOGIN">

...Wherever you would like the link displayed... Simple!

Here's an example file for you to download: iconbar.zip

Code Required launches our bookshop online!

That's right with the help of our friend's over at Amazon we've gone all ecommerce and added a list of our favourite books onto the website so you can see which books we use and grab them for yourselves!

The store is based on Amazon's store and uses their checkout too so you even get the knowledge that you're shopping safely and securely with one of the World's leading bookshops!

Check it out at: http://www.coderequired.com/bookshop/

Telling search engines where your sitemap is...

Those of you interested in SEO really need to get to grips with the sitemap:url line in your robots file... The what? I hear you cry... Well let me explain.

For a long time now there has been an accepted protocol for sitemaps that many of the top search engines have adopted (check out: http://www.sitemaps.org/ for more info) but it's always been a bit of a headache going to each of the big search engines and telling them about your sitemap so that robots can index it right?

Well Google introduced the Webmaster Tools dialogue so that you could tell Google where your sitemap was and use it's tools to evaluate any crawl errors (404s etc). Well there is a really really simple way to tell all of the "big four" (namely Microsoft, Yahoo, Google and Ask).

All you need to do is add one line to your robots.txt file and those search engines will find it. So what's the line?

Simply:

sitemap:<url>

Where <url> is the URL of your sitemap file. In our case:

sitemap:http://www.coderequired.com/sitemap.xml

Still not sure? Check out sitemap.org's Informing search engine crawlers article