Search Engine Optimisation Techniques

There are many search engine optimisation techniques but some may end up with you getting a ban from the search engines. If you have a website that you want to be at the top of Google, then read on to ensure that you are not inadvertently doing the following with your internet marketing and website.

Search engine optimisation and duplicate content

Late last year Google updated its algorithm to hunt out and penalise sites that simply published other people's pages on their website. There are two things to consider in this area.

Are you publishing other people's work? If so you'll need to make your page unique. Add different headers and footers. Add in your own paragraphs. You can see how close your pages match others by using www.copyscape.com
Of course the best way to develop a long term presence is simply to write unique content. Although this takes a longer time the rewards are worth it. If you want a long term presence and are thinking of starting a site, it is likely that your site will not produce rewards for at least a year. Plan for the longer term.

Your web site and duplicate content

Believe it or not you may have inadvertently added in two versions of your site into Google and the other search engines.

You see, the search engines treat a site like www.yourdomain.com Differently to yourdomain.com

Here's how to check if you have a problem.

Go to google.com and type in site:www.yourdomain.com and note the number of pages that Google returns.

Now do the same for site:yourdomain.com - are the results different?

If they are the same then you are OK. If they are different you have a potential problem.

You can check to see if your site is re-directing properly by simply typing in yourdomain.com into your browser. What happens? Does it stay as yourdomain.com (problem) or change into www.yourdomain.com (OK) ?

Website 301 redirect

If you have a problem as described above or even just to double check everything is OK, you need to set up a 301 (permanent) redirect.

If you have "cpanel" you can simply edit your ".htaccess" file in your route directory and ensure you have the following piece of code:

RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^yourdomain\.com [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.yourdomain.com/$1 [L,R=301]

Website 404/ page not found

Here's another potential problem. If a page is not found on your site what happens? If you point it back to your index page the search engines may pick this up as duplicate content (ie: they have followed a link from another site to yours - your site say "hey, no page found" and send the spider to your index page. They think that the link from the other site has the content of your index -- and that's duplicate.

Simply set up a customer "404" page. Do it yourself via cpanel or contact your host

Links to your site and out of your site

Next time I'll re-visit getting links to your site and the people you link to may also get you banned!.

Website Optimisation Guide

I have also put together a step by step guide on how to vastly improve your search engine rankings. If you want your website to appear at #1 then simply follow my tips.

You can also discuss this at my search engine optimisation forum

All the best

Peter Hale
www.teneric.co.uk

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