Changing a website’s entire URL structure can be both a blessing and a curse, if done incorrectly you can permanently damage a proportion of your overall SEO.

You may change the URL structure of your website to improve aspects such as on-site SEO and/or site usability such as product filtering.  This can change nearly all of the addresses (URL’s) that are used to view each section of the website which can cause multiple issues as shown below:

- Google and other search engines remember your old links. Search engines don’t waste time crawling your entire site every day or so they remember the significant pages within their index. If you made a site-wide change to the URL structure of your site then the search engines will be following many broken links on your site.  In less than a day Google could lose 90% of your content and they will hold your site back (sandbox it) if nothing is done with these broken links in about 3-5 days.

- People bookmark sections of your website. Someone may have a favorite part of your website to visit, perhaps the blog or a certain category. If you change the site’s structure and move content to other folders or addresses then that person’s bookmark becomes useless and they may get frustrated that they can’t find the information they were looking for again.

- Links from other websites have great SEO benefits. Google’s main ranking factor is the number of in-bound links from other sites to yours.  These links are scored more highly if they link deep within a site and are surrounded by content related to the site’s page that they’re linking to.  Changing your site’s URLs would make these internal links now broken links, the top level domain links won’t be effected (e.g. a link to http://www.example.com) but inner page links would (e.g. a link to http://www.example.com/category.html).  The link would still pass on link power to your site but it wouldn’t be as powerful as before, plus people who click on the link will not find the page they were looking for.

So how do you make sure these problems are resolved?

Google can ‘sandbox’ a website for up to around 3 months whilst it slowly crawls and re-instates it’s index with the website’s new URL layout.  Below are tips to make this transition as painless as possible and to ensure that you do every possible thing to get the new URL structure indexed and keep high rankings with existing SEO efforts:

- Use 301 Redirects for every page of content that has moved. A 301 server redirect tells the user or search engine spider that the page on this address has been moved permanently.  Google takes upto 2 weeks to finally get the message but it’s what they directly recommend webmasters to use.  301 redirects also pass on page rank to the new page which means that they are not only useful for users and search engines they also keep your SEO in-tact!  The 301 redirects can be created through the “.htaccess” file and can redirect whole folders as well as individual pages.

- Create a useful 404 page. Any broken links to your site should bring up your 404 error page.  Somebody may link to your site and accidentally type in the wrong address or you may miss out a 301 redirect so a 404 page will capture any people lost on your site.  The 404 page should contain a list of the most commonly visited sections of your website, you can also include the navigation bars, footer and header if you want it to look neat.  If your server doesn’t automatically goto “/404″ or “/404.html” then you may have to set the 404 page location in the “.htaccess” file.

- Update your XML sitemap. An XML sitemap contains all of the different URL’s from your entire website and it should be linked to within the “robots.txt” file.  This is the first port of call for any search engine spider so make sure it has your new URL structure within it.  You can submit your XML site map to many search engines, most noticeably in Google’s webmaster tools; make sure to re-submit the new structure to all the major search engines as they may not look at it for many days.

- Link to the new sections of your website. There’s nothing better than telling search engines to take a look at something than making fresh links.  If Google finds 3 or more external links to a new section of a website then it seems to crawl it faster than if you just had internal links to that section, another trick to get the new section indexed quicker is to create powerful links to the XML sitemap itself so it finds every link going.

- Remove Canonical Links. If you have an ecommerce site that uses session ID’s or filterable navigation (using Magento) then use the canonical meta tag to ensure the best version of each product page is indexed.  You could lose potential sales if Google re-indexed one your product pages with say a navigation setting set to “pink products only” for example.  Affiliate session ID’s can also appear in Google’s index instead of the main URL; if you run affiliate marketing then someone could be making masses of profit by having their tracking code at #1 in Google just for when people type your brand name into the search bar!

Checking things are all in place…

After all these techniques have been implemented you should check every single URL in Google to see that it redirects to the appropriate page on the new site.  Use the search term “site:example.com” into Google to see all of the pages that have been indexed on your site; if any bring up 404 errors, blank pages or server error messages then add them to the “.htaccess” file a.s.a.p.

Also check Google’s webmaster tools for any errors and see if your XML sitemap is submitted and upto date.

Good luck for implementing a site-wide change, if done with a logical structure of categories then you could see much improved ranking in Google and even perhaps a larger number of indexed pages.

We are currently working to improve the search engine position of a new remote control blinds brand called Controliss. We are undertaking a combined SEO company strategy and targeted PR and Marketing Campaign to activate a market and generate greater pull through for online sales and trade sales.

We are developing the brand image as well as improving the web design, website architecture, UI interface design and user experience. This immediate visual and online sales generating approah will be combined with a targeted offline marketing campaign.

Controliss sell a high quality product range focussing on stunning ranges, and the highest level of technology available for home automation. The core product range includes

Electric Roller Blinds

Electric Roller Blinds

Electric Venetian Blinds

Electric Venetian Blinds

Electric Wood Blinds

Electric Wood Blinds

To find out more about our SEO Company and how we can work with you please call us on

0845 544 1764

We have been considering our brand and position in the market as an SEO company. Our best results are driven through a comination of design, conversion methodology, technology and search engine targeting. We generate most revenue for our clients business with emphasis on the subtlety of online marketing and brand combined with pure search engine position and channel selling. For our own site we realised that although it converted enquiry, it looked a little like a market stall visually and lacked brand strength.

We have been working with our web design department for our agency as a whole to generate a coherent brand identity across a range of company sites.

Heres or new design

Real Web SEO - New Design

To find out how we can help with your online strategy , design and marketing please call us on 01159 418122

Real Web SEO are looking for a new team member to join our ranks. The role will involve handling clients of all sizes, from Global recognisable brands to SME clients. We pride ourselves on the standard of our work and the results we gain for clients so, experience and proven results are a must. Our SEO Company sits within a larger marketing organisation and we provide diverse career path opportunity.

Please send CV’s to info@realwebseo.com and contact us directly on 01159 418 122

Real Web SEO

When looking at your Webmaster Tools which features do you normally look at? The lazy SEO’er will just click through the links on the left hand side of the page, hoping that nothing stands out as odd or wrong.

If you’re new to Webmaster Tools or just find it a little daunting, one thing you can actively look for is the number of pages that have been indexed in comparison to the number your have submitted.

Look at the example above for RealWebSEO.com: we’ve submitted 150 URLs and 145 have been indexed by Google, so that’s 97% of the submitted URLs have been indexed. As a basic rule, we would say that if 80% or more of your submitted URLs are indexed then you’re doing a good job.  Using tags on a WordPress blog can bring up multiple pages of content that is pretty similar, a good XML sitemap plugin for WordPress could fix this issue.

How can you get more URLs indexed?

- First things first, have you submitted your sitemap? Some people will say this isn’t important but you don’t start a race with your shoe laces tying your shoes together do you? No, you have the very simple and basic systems in place from the very start. If you don’t have a sitemap then use an auto generator but do glance over it yourself just to check everything is as it should.

- Check your robots text. It almost doesn’t seem worth mentioning as it is so basic but it is one of those things that will stop indexing in its tracks!

- Is all your content unique? If you have pages with blocks of text that are similar across many pages then Google will not bother to index them all.

- The same goes for meta information, make sure that all pages meta titles, keywords and descriptions are different.

We see examples of slow websites everyday and are shocked that web designers and developers are getting away with ecommerce sites that are doomed from the off-set.

How many times have you visited a website only to have to wait whilst some fancy header or screen wide background loads up?  This isn’t just slowing down how quickly a visitor views information on the site and annoying them, Google now considers page speed as a ranking factor!

Ecommerce websites are the main culprits of image or Flash heavy websites that take a long time to download as they usually display many products on the home page.  The only excuse to present products in high quality images surrounded by a beautiful looking backgrounds is if your selling something very high end such as helicopters or speed boats.

Do you have full quality images on your website? That will lose you a percentage of traffic; get the images cached, reduce their file-sizes, reduce their dimensions and then see sales rise.

Do you have masses of Java, CSS or Flash? That will lose you even more percentage of traffic; take out un-nessasary script, gizmos and be efficient with any other code, you’ll see sales rise and people with older computers can actually use your site.

Do you have a slow server? You’ll find it harder to rank in Google for a slow loading website and guess what you’ll lose a percentage of impatient site visitors too, get on a decent server, it could be the best £30 a month you ever spend.

Do you host your own videos? A sudden influx of video viewers could spell disaster for your server speed, this will slow down any other requests on the website i.e. for everyone else trying to use it.  Host videos on free hosting sites if they are low key, if you expect thousands of views in a day then you may want to invest in a video hosting service that can handle the sheer amount of data.

Do you use frames? Frames allow you to open up a webpage inside another webpage, sometimes popular with property or holiday websites.  Usually the browser opens up the first page and then the inner iframe page, apart from being unpopular with Google this can take an age to load and may never even start to show before a visitor is gone to another competitor website.

Here at Real Web SEO we always use the website Amazon.co.uk as a baseline for the best mix between page speed and conversion optimisation.  Other great examples are Ebay and Kelkoo; all these sites know how to optimise their website to squeeze every last percentage of conversion rate out of their sites and spend millions per year perfecting the results.

Remember Google now check your website’s page speed and for good cause, slow websites annoy website visitors and are therefore less useful.  The fantastic tool for FireFox ‘YSlow’ gives a great report on how a website is performing – you can download YSlow here.

Every percentage of visitors you lose on your website will cost you money and a double negative will have a multiplied effect on the bottom line, it’s time to get optimising for page speed…

How many Search Engine Marketing techniques do you use? 1, 2, more….?

There are four different ways to maximise your online marketing campaign, some with short term gains, some with long term gains:

1. Pay Per Click Advertising

The quickest way to make sales online is to go directly to the search engines and pay for traffic.  Now this is a risky technique as you may end up spending more than you profit from back!

Using a PPC system such as Google’s Adwords allows you to advertise besides search results when people type in certain phrases or words into Google.  You pay every time someone clicks on your advert, not every time it is shown so you only pay for the traffic you receive which makes it controllable and scalable.

You may need for example 50 clicks for everytime you make a sale so if each click costs on average of 10 pence and each sale makes you £2 then you could be quickly throwing your money down the drain.  The only way to improve this is to either sell more expensive products, make sure the adverts are more targeted or improve the conversion rate of your website.

Our advice is to start slowly with PPC advertising and once positive results come out of the stats you can ramp things up and up until you saturate your chosen online market.  Refining the keywords you target and the amount of money you’re willing to spend on each click will increase profits further and should be an on-going day-by-day process.

2. Search Engine Optimisation

This is the most lucrative of all the search engine marketing techniques and involves getting your website placed highly when someone types in a certain keyword or key-phrase.

SEO involves several techniques to make your website look more popular to search engines such as Google, Bing, Ask and Yahoo.  The more popular your website appears to the search giants the higher they will place you for searches related to your website.

The three main areas of SEO are website structure, website content and links from other websites.

Being number 1 in the search engines can draw between 30-40% of online searchers to your website, image how easy it would be to sell your products when there’s hundreds of people visiting your site per day!

3. Press Releases

SEM isn’t all about targeting results in search engines you can get your brand awareness up publicly by piggy-backing on other successful websites.  Press releases are an instant way to market your brand or website but will be short lived in the ever changing face of online news and gossip.

Launching a press release can get an article about your brand shown on many press release websites and maybe even perhaps news and magazine websites too. All these sites have great power in the search engines any many people are likely to see them whether they are visiting the site or searching for related keyword in the search engines.

If you have a new product or brand then kick-start it off with an impressive press release and get yourself noticed!

4. Affiliate Marketing

Why sell your products when you can get thousands of other people to do it for you as well?!

Affiliate marketing means that other website owners will place your advert on their site’s and expect a acquisition cost per sale they pass on to your website.  Websites related to your niche may want to make money by selling a product related to it.  When a website visitor clicks on your advert on another website they are tracked using web ‘Cookies’.  If they end up purchasing a product on your website then you will owe the external website owner (affiliate) either a percentage of the profits you made from the sale or a fixed cost per sale.

There are hundreds of affiliate websites which offer products and services from thousands of ecommerce websites.  If you sold for example ‘gym equipment’ and you allowed affiliates to advertise your products for a commission then you could find your product being advertised on several sites in niches such as ‘weight loss’, ‘muscle gain’, ‘fitness’ etc.

Sticking your product/brand into an affiliate website takes time (and usually money) to set up.  Companies such as the National Lottery and Boots make many millions of pounds per year from affiliate marketing; it was a key factor in making Amazon and Ebay so popular too.

Conclusion

If your ecommerce business is only doing one or two of these marketing strategies then it’s missing out on the bigger picture!

Search engine optimisation is the most important part of SEM yet affiliate marketing alone can bring your adverts onto thousands of related websites and could also make you serious money.  For a quick fix then try the latest online PR methods or find a pay per click expert and turn clicks into profit, good luck!

You probably know that the number of external links effects your search engine rankings but do you know the importance of what those links say?

The ‘anchor text‘ is the text displayed on an a link for example here is a link to RealWebSEO.com with the anchor text “SEO Nottingham”: SEO Nottingham

The text on a link can be set to anything you like, bad examples of internal of external links are:

- Image Links (as seen on many navigation bars)
- Links that have un-descriptive anchor text such as “Click here”
- Links within a large list of links with no surrounding content

Google looks at anchor text and uses it as a ranking factor for when that keyword is searched for.  If you had 10,000 links from many other websites with the word “Free Jam” on the anchor text for example then you could be sure to rank highly when people type in “Free Jam” into Google!

Anchor text can be so powerful that the keywords within the anchor text don’t even need to be on the landing page of the website for it to get ranked. George Bush fell victim to a ‘GoogleBomb’ of the anchor text “Miserable Failure” where his personal profile came up when “Miserable Failure” was searched for in Google.  Don’t believe me? Here is BBC’s report on George Bushes Anchor Text Mishap.

So if you are doing SEO and gaining external links then make sure you get your main keywords into the anchor text.  An even better method is linking to the specific pages or categories on your website with the appropriate anchor text, you may even see the internal page appear in the keyword search instead of your homepage.

One of our clients SunglassesSave.com sells SunGlasses which has an average of 1.5 Million exact searches locally per month shown below:

We have created hundreds of thousands of external links to the homepage alone with the anchor text “sunglasses” and recently SunglassesSave.com have leaped to position #4 for their main keyword!  If all these links had the anchor text “Click here for Sunglasses” for example then it wouldn’t be nearly as high in Google’s results.

So the key is to get not only as many links as possible to your site but to make sure the anchor text is targeted towards your main keyword too.

There is a future issue to consider with external links… placement and surrounding content.

Evidence shows that Google is looking at text surrounding a link as well as the anchor itself.  If the link is surrounded within related content then it will be more powerful that if it was say in a blogroll or footer bar.  This makes links from news articles and large blogs even more valuable, they have massive amounts of SEO power, few out-bound links and content rich pages and categories surrounding the links.

Placement of the link may also be a factor in Google.  Links at the top of the page in theory would get clicked more often than say footer or sidebar links so I could image site-wide footer links being demoted in the near future, we’ll have to see!

Whether it be for announcing exciting news or boostering on-site SEO, every business can benefit from having a content management system (CMS), also known as a blog on their website.

Let me first explain the advantages of having a blog and then convince you why WordPress, which is totally free, is the best option for the blog software on any site:

Advantages for having a blog CMS on your website

• - Once setup, ANYONE can post on a blog without ANY technical knowledge
• - All of your posts are displayed in a clear and logical manner
• - People will find out relevant information from your blog
• - Web 2.0 technologies such as RSS feeds and blog commenting allow people to directly interact with your business (if wanted)
• - A freshly updated and ‘alive’ website will be favoured over a ‘stale’ static website by Google, so blogging enhances on-site SEO

So blogging can be used by anybody and regular blogging can have a positive impact on your business whether it be through increased public relations or enhanced on-site SEO (search engine optimisation).  The hardest and sometimes most costly part of blogging is finding someone to regularly write content for it!  If you have a large company then it should be the job of your marketing manager or public relations officer to handle the blog content, if you are strapped for cash then why not put aside 40 minutes a day to blog about your business?

Advantages of using WordPress for your Content Management System

• - WordPress is FREE to download, use and modify
• - WordPress is the most popular CMS – see the trends against Joomla and Drupal
• - When you create a post on WordPress you have a WYSIWYG editor which is similar to creating a document in Microsoft Word
• - WordPress can be themed in many different styles without moving around content, most styles are free to download and use
• - Catergories, Tags and link structure is automatically created in WordPress, all you have to do is post content and the website is built automatically around it
• - Each post you create is automatically ‘Pinged’ out to Google and other sites, Google indexes them within 5 seconds on it’s search engine!
• - There are more WordPress developers than any other platform meaning that the system is well known and prices are competitive
• - There is a large community of WordPress enthusiasts which update the software platform and can solve many challenges

So as you can see WordPress is massively popular, it is also recommended by Google’s very own front man Matt Cutts in his 2009 conference.  Here at RealWebSEO we install a WordPress blog on every site we optimise for and use it’s advantageous features within several different SEO methods.  We work alongside JunoWebDesign.com who have developed their own unique WordPress plugins especially made for on-site SEO in mind.

Whatever your business is you can get a great deal of positive results from blogging on the world wide web, so get out there and promote yourself!

If you consistently work hard and perform the right steps in SEO you create a “snowball effect” with the amount of traffic you receive, read on to find out more…

Starting out on SEO is like trying to fight your way out of a crowd of people, there are usually hundreds or thousands of websites out there targeting the same keywords as you who would love to be number one in the search engines.  The way to get out of this scramble is to work hard on the three key ares of SEO: on-site optimisation, off-site optimisation and content generation.

Once a website has broke free of the crowd the traffic levels usually increase at an exponential rate!

On-site optimisation should be the first part of your SEO efforts,  if the site is catergorised correctly and takes advantage of social networking systems such as WordPress then you are set for the other two key areas of SEO.

Off-site optimisation gives your site the initial kick it needs in search engines such as Google.  Linking back to your website from many other websites makes it look popular to the search engines and you will start seeing traffic for obscure “long tails” keywords that appear on your site.  An example of a long tail keyword is perhaps “Wimbledon yellow tennis balls” for a Tennis related website.
Continued off-site optimisation will bring in more and more traffic from search engines and from more and more precise keywords.  An example for a more precise keyword would be “Cricket Bat” for a Cricket related website; these precise keywords can have many thousands of searches in the search engines and could bring an amazing amount of traffic (visitors) to a website.

Content generation is ideal for gaining more traffic through longer tail keywords; the more you write about your subject, the more unique phrases or words you could rank for.  If you have a social media feed broadcast from your website then you can build external links just by simply blogging.  Spreading news about your content around the internet can also bring in in-direct traffic to your site, someone may have read a snippet of your article on an article site and decided to visit your main website from a link within it.

Continuing off-site optimisation and content generation will give you more power in the search engines whilst at the same time make you rank for more and more keywords.  Blogging and interacting with social networks can create a buzz around the content you produce, some of the biggest bloggers in the world get tens of thousands of people reading each blog post they produce and several hundred links towards to content they write; you can reach a stage where you can blog for backlinks which in turn promotes your blog, a snowball effect.

When people use search engines they usually click on the first results that comes up, this means that a ranking increase from position #3 to position #1 for your main keyword could incredibly bring in around four times the amount of traffic!  Below are some old Google statistics in the click through percentages for each position:

Money made from higher rankings can be poured back into website promotion whether it be offline advertising, PR or again more SEO.  This snowball effect can keep rolling until you have maximised the total possible share of the market you can realistically expect.

Our client DuffleCoatsUK.co.uk used this approach and now ranks #1 for every “duffle coat” related keyword you can imagine in Google.co.uk, give the search a go to see it’s results now if you wish.  Since creation they have gained traffic from 4,000 unique search phrases and have even recently got to position #2 for the single word “duffle”!

So get the (snow)ball rolling and stick at SEO until you break out from the crowd and gain momentum; who knows, you could do exactly the same system on another top-selling product or valuable keyword afterwards and really be successful!