What do you mean you can't get me to rank #1??

One question that always comes up when people ask about SEO (search engine optimisation) services is "does that mean I'll rank number one on Google?... But Company X said they'd guarantee they could get me to number 1".

You've all heard it right? Well the guys at Google have further updated the Webmaster Blog post:
"What's an SEO? Does Google recommend working with companies that offer to make my site Google-friendly?"

I really do urge that anyone offering SEO services and equally anyone looking for SEO services should look at this article NOW!

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

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

Integrating site searches

A common query for a lot of websites we build is "can we have a search site function?". As advocates of making the web as usable as possible and subsequently the sites we build as near as damn it to perfect (pending our client's spec's of course ;-)) we're all behind this concept but what if you're simply building a basic website, maybe one without a CMS, or a simple CMS system that doesn't use a database, to index content?

We've built several of these sites as you can well imagine and it's often led to bespoke search apps built or for those less "corporate" minded clients Google's Search API more than suffices but to seemlessly integrate it into your sites costs the client money... Which we all know they don't like to part with - so what are the alternatives?

Paid search solutions are everywhere - just whack "site search" into Google and there are hundreds - for the record we think PicoSearch is one of the better ones - but what about free solutions?

Well on our previous Code Required site we used KSearch which was great but pretty complicated to setup - especially on shared servers when you may not know your perl or site roots without some pretty indepth investigation.

Anyway, before I bore you all to death, we're loving our latest find, it's free, simple to integrate and even comes with a setup installer (which we didn't try ourselves as we went for the more laborious manual approach)... Damn it get on with it... It's called "Perlfect Search" from Perlfect Solutions.

So why do we love it so? Well number one it's free; two: easy to integrate; and three: easy to customise.

The biggest draw for us though was many of these free Perl search scripts scan the WHOLE of your documents so you'll get unrealistic search results. For example, let's say, you have a global navigation included in all your documents with leywords in (not uncommon right?) then this will get indexed.

Perlfect Search is different - by simply adding some basic comment tags aroound blogs of code you want the indexer to ignore you get pretty accurate results to your searches.

For those who, like us, couldn't find these tags or advice on how to implement them simply surround the blocks of code you want Perlfect Search to ignore with:

<!--ignore_perlfect_search-->

and

<!--/ignore_perlfect_search-->

...That's it!

Nice one Perlfect!