Some common situations for when you want to implement a 301 redirect are:

• You want to move your entire web site to a new domain for example if you want to change the domain name of your website or you are merging 2 websites into 1 website location.
• You changed the URL of an existing web page to a new URL, or updated the URL of an older web page where the old URL may still exist in user bookmarks, incoming links from other websites, or indexed in the search engines.

How to create a 301 redirect:

Creating a 301 redirect within a .htaccess file is the simplest way to set up a 301 redirect.

If your website doesn’t have an .htaccess file, you can create one using notepad or a text edior. When you are done entering the below 301 redirect information, save it as .htaccess and make sure that you place the period before the word htaccess and remove any other file extension such as .txt. You can remove the file extension after uploading the file, but the .htaccess file won’t work if there is an additional file extension at the end.

To 301 redirect a static web page, enter into your text file:

redirect 301 /olddirectory/oldfile.html http://www.domainame.com/directory/file.html

• Replace /olddirectory/oldfile.html with the location of your old web page that you want to redirect
• Replace http://www.domainame.com/directory/file.html with the location of the new webpage.
• Be sure not to add http://www to the first part of the 301
• Save the file and upload the .htaccess with your 301 redirect into the root of your domain.
• If you already have information in your existing .htaccess file, just edit the existing file and add the 301 redirect information above in a new line.

To redirect an entire site to a new location, use the 301 redirect code below:

redirect 301 / http://www.newdomain.com/

• Replace www.newdomain.com with the URL of the new domain or location you want to redirect your entire website to.

Additional 301 Redirect References:

• Google FAQ on 301 Redirects
  http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=93633
• Matt Cutts on 301 redirects video (Does anchor text carry over through 301 redirects)
  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=70LR8H8pn1M

No related posts.

Advanced Web Ranking

Three very important but always time consuming tasks of starting, running, and maintain your SEO program for your business or clients are keyword discovery, monitoring your search engine rankings for inclusion, improvement or decline (change) in rankings, and competitive research and ranking.

Fortunately, for those who are willing to give up some of the manual work and let an automated tool either do the research and reporting work for you almost in its entirety, or supplement your manual work there is a well known tool called Advanced Web Ranking.

Advanced Web Ranking, as a SEO keyword research tool can be very helpful in providing the data you need so that you can concentrate on creating great content for your visitors and other websites to link to, as well as optimizing your pages and websites for the best possible rankings they deserve.

Let’s be honest, in most cases if your website doesn’t appear on the first page of organic results when a user performs a search query at a search engine on keywords or phrases that your site represents or covers, you don’t exist. Of course the higher-up on the search engine results pages the better, but exact positioning (i.e. a guaranteed #1 ranking) is out of your complete control in many cases due to many signals and factors including personalization results returned based on the users past search patterns and geographical location.

With Advanced Web Ranking, after the easy initial set-up you can sit back and let the software retrieve the data you need to aid you in your search engine optimization efforts.  You can

1. Check your website rankings for a single keyword or phrase or list of keywords and phrases in a wide variety of search engines to see how you currently rank. Use this list to work on improvements and then run the program every couple weeks to see if you have improved on any of the terms.
2. Check which competitors rank for the terms you have chosen to retrieve data on. Advanced Web Rankings gives you the top ranked sites for keyword and search engine combination’s you have chosen. Upon this data retrieval you can do some competitive analysis by knowing and who has the top rankings for the terms you want to ranking well for in order to do some more intensive research
3. Generate a huge list of interactive reports that are as easy as a click on a tab. These reports include:
   1. Current Rank – report that provides information on the rank evolution of your chosen websites list that you are monitoring for the keywords you have chosen (for a single search engine), so that you can see performance over a time period, with KPI’s indicating Position, Previous Ranking, Change (green for improvement, red for decline), what Page the result is on, and your best position to date since you have been running the program. This is more focused on the websites
   2. Keyword Rank – this report provides rank evolution for all of the keywords in your list for all of your websites on a single engine and provides the same KPI’s as the Current Rank report. Unlike the Current Rank report which focuses more on the websites, this provides data on both websites and your keywords together.
   3. Search Engine Rank – report that provides you with your current search engine ranking across all selected search engines for all of your sites for a selected keyword.
   4. Top Sites – displays all the top ranked websites and their position for your selected keywords and search engine. This saves a lot of time as to manually get this information you would go to each search engine and do a search query and then document the top sites returned in the given results. You can also dig deeper to see further into a specific date comparison to what changed.
   5. Overview – this report is the grand-daddy dashboard and splits the report into 3 sort-able sections – Websites, Keywords, and Search Engines giving you an all-at-once glance at your keywords, each of your websites, and your search engines and how you rank in each and an icon to notate improvement or not in your date range comparison.
   6. Visibility – This as the report is named, shows your visibility across multiple search engines. It will provide data on how many first place rankings you have, how many in the top 5, top 10, how many moved up or down in rankings,  how many pages have been dropped, a visibility score, your overall ranking,  how many new rankings you have, and so on. Great top-level executive overview, but drilling down makes it actionable for you.
4. View Graphical Evolution Charts that show you the data retrieved but in a graphical view to quickly scout out opportunities, problems, and overall performance. Current charts available are:
   1. Current Rank Chart
   2. Keyword Rank Chart
   3. Search Engine Rank Chart
   4. Visibility Chart
   5. Overview Report

A convenient feature that Advanced Web Ranking has is the ability to set it to gather data at any specified interval of time that you desire, be a daily, weekly, bi weekly, or any other possible reoccurring time frame you desire so that you can easily maintain a performance schedule of your SEO efforts. After running the reports, you can opt to have it uploaded to your server via FTP for download, save it locally to your computer, or even emailed to you or your clients.

I’ve repeatedly gather this information manually for many years, and depending on the size of your keyword list and the amount of websites you have (or amount of clients you are working for), not to mention just the initial keyword research that has to be done, this can take days to get to. Add in the additional time it takes to manually keep this information updated at a minimum of monthly intervals and you have spent too many hours on data retrieval that Advanced Web Ranking could easily take care of for you.

For more information on Advanced Web Ranking, a complete list of features and screenshots along with information on the different versions they offer, check out their website at http://www.advancedwebranking.com/.

ADVANCED LINK MANAGER

Another very helpful SEO software tool, which is used for link popularity management and link building, offered by Caphyon LTD, makers of Advanced Web Ranking is Advanced Link Manager.

With Advanced Link Manager you can analyze the link popularity of your websites or webpages by:

1)      Easily finding out what other websites are linking to your website, and what keywords they are using to link to you.

2)      Discover who is linking to your competitors websites

You can also use Advanced Link Manager to find potential linking partners in your niche or market.  Using its data retrieval information to find others in your niche or market based upon your keyword list, it will give you a list of who to contact that you may want to exchange links with. The more quality websites that link to your website, especially using appropriate keywords, is one of the signals used by the engines to help you rank better. Even use it as a link manager tool to make sure those who you have link trades with are maintaining their end of the deal.

With its Webpage Analyzer feature you can analyze pages of your website or even against your competitor’s websites and get data back to help you find new ways of improving onpage optimization, saving you hours of research.

For a full list of features of Advanced Link Manager, and the ways it can help you optimize, organize, and maintain your link popularity, view the Advanced Link Managers features page.

Now what are you going to do with all that extra free time you will have?

Related posts:

1. SeoQuake – Free SEO Optimization and Competitive Research Tool   SeoQuake is an very useful Free SEO toolbar for...
2. Advanced Segmentation to be Included into Google Analytics. Google this past week announced some new enterprise features to...
3. 5 Quick Fix SEO Tweaks with Lightning Fast Results Today’s post is a guest post from Justin Palmer, Justin...

They focused on 3 areas in the redesigned Bing Webmaster Tools to help you optimize your websites for Bing:

1. Crawl – to provide you with more information on crawl issues (redirects, exclusions, etc.)
2. Index  – browse the Bing index to verify which directories & pages have been indexed
3. Traffic –  ability to analyze up to six months of crawling, indexing, and traffic data

Bing Webmaster Tools is still not as robust as Google Webmaster Tools in the information it provides, but it is a step in the right direction. I look forward to additional features they have in the works in the coming months.

Related posts:

1. 18 Twitter Tools for Business & Marketing Use There are many free Twitter tools and apps available today...

“It’s going to take how long?” - A classic question when it comes to delivering SEO results. After all, everyone knows results today are far more valuable then results tomorrow. At times, SEO can be a business owner’s worst nightmare. Why? Because a good SEO will not promise results in a specific amount of time because there are too many variables. There are, however, several “tweaks” that can bring immediate results to your site if implemented properly. Below is the low-hanging fruit I always look to first.

#1 – Add Internal, Non-Navigational links In my opinion, too many SEO’s focus on obtaining external links while ignoring the low-hanging fruit on their own site. Google is craving informative, contextual links located within a paragraph of page content. Too many sites rely on only navigational links to inform search engines about their content. Contextual links, in contrast with a navigational link appearing on every single page, tells Google you’re linking to a relevant, specific piece of information. If your site has a blog or articles, make sure to sprinkle a few keyword rich links within their content.

#2 – Add a Keyword Phrase(s) to the Title Tag I cringe every time I stumble upon a site with only “Company Name, Inc.” in the title tag. For pages on your site that are already ranking well and have PageRank, adding an additional keyword to the title tag can yield first page ranking for that phrase instantly, assuming the title tag isn’t already too overloaded with keywords. Of course there’s other factors to be considered here, including whether or not your title tag will be readable in the SERPs with this additional phrase.

#3- Remove Keyword Phrase(s) from Title Tags On the other hand, sites with very little incoming link equity will benefit by removing extraneous keywords from an overloaded title tag, focusing only on the phrases that matter most. If your Title tag has 20 keywords in it, ask yourself how many are actually relevant to that page. Then ask yourself how many of these phrases are supported by the page itself, in other words they occur somewhere on the page besides the Title. If they are not supported elsewhere, remove them and create a different page.

#4 – Indented Listing If you already have a page ranking for an important keyword phrase, snagging a second, indented Google listing can effectively double your SERP real estate. How do you get an indented listing? Here’s a 3 step process that works for me.

#5 – Narrow your Focus on Broad Keywords Let’s suppose you’ve done your SEO well, and you’ve landed a first page result for “laptops bags.” You also sell leather laptop bags, and want to rank for this phrase as well. By simply sprinkling the word “leather” into your page content, meta description, and image alt tags, you can leverage your ranking for leather bags, and likely place yourself in a decent position, sometimes without needing the term in the title tag.

Strategical, long term SEO is more complicated than this post suggests. But fortunately, there are always “quick fixes” out there, like the 5 tips listed above. Let’s hear from you. If you had only 3 hours to SEO a website, what tactics would you use?

No related posts.

Example:
You are going on vacation to a cold climate (let’s say the North Pole). You know you need to buy something to keep yourself warm, but you’re not sure exactly what options are out there because you live in a year round warm climate. So you do a search on the keyword phrase extreme cold weather coats. You end up at a website by clicking on a paid search ad that appeared when you typed in the phrase and notice that they have a section for cold climate coats and even list the temperatures they can withstand.  You think to yourself, wow this is great, now I have a better idea of what’s available and I kind of like Brand X Model 4567, but I am not going on the vacation for another 4 months so I am not going to purchase anything today because I don’t have the extra money. Forty-five days later you win $200 on a scratch-off ticket that you found and decide that you are ready to purchase a coat with your extra money, you do a search on Brand X Model 4567 since you knew the exact coat you wanted to buy now and end up back on the same website as before and purchase the coat.

The difficulty in measuring the value of these Upper Funnel Keywords is that they don’t produce single visit conversions -you can’t see the whole picture of entrance to conversion in your analytics data in a linear fashion.

For instance, a single visit conversion would show start to finish in one visit from entering your site to making the purchase. Here you easily have the whole picture from the PPC keyword that triggered the ad that they clicked on to enter your website and their entire path to the purchase.

With Upper Funnel Keywords, a typical scenario would be that the visitor arrives at your site from these keywords or phrases,  looks around, leaves, comes back another time reads more information, exits your site again, then finally comes back a 3^rd time and makes a purchase.

Most only know how to measure the keywords that produce single visit conversions and thus deem these Upper Funnel Keywords more or less valueless because their value isn’t easily seen in a typically known fashion. The ROI isn’t easily visible.

In the example given earlier, the keyword phrase you searched on first, extreme cold weather coats, was the Upper Funnel Keyword phrase. You didn’t purchase during that visit of your initial search, but you did eventually go back and purchase based on the information you learned during that first visit. Had another website come up with a different but possibly similar featured coat that you liked, you would have purchased from there and a different coat. So there was definite value in that first search as it gave you the information you needed to make a decision, but you just didn’t purchase then. Now imagine if you were only looking at single session conversions, you would only be able to confirm that Brand X Model 4567 was a valuable keyword because a sale was associated with it. But in reality, without having a presence in paid search for extreme cold weather coats a sale wouldn’t have been made – thus showing the importance of being able to look at multi-session conversions to contribute back value (and ROI) to the Upper Funnel Keywords.

Avinash Kaushik on his Occam’s Razor blog this week made a powerful and very instructionally clear post on how to measure the success of Upper Funnel Keywords and I suggest you read his post for the details on how to do so.

Related posts:

1. Tips to Analyzing Poor SEO eCommerce Conversions Scenario: Like clockwork as you do every Monday morning at...