Any webmaster and marketer will know how important it is to keep track of their website ranking, keyword positioning, visits, ROI and so on…  There are a lot of interesting tools out there to help us. 

• Google Analytics – Visitor tracking, keyword positioning, goal setting, demographics and more…
• http://www.alexa.com – web traffic metrics, top sites lists, site demographics, hot urls, and more… 
• Google Webmaster Tools – detailed reports about your pages’ visibility on Google
• Yahoo Site Explorer – detailed reports about your pages’ visibility on Yahoo
• Bling Webmaster Center – detailed reports about your pages’ visibility on Bling (former LiveSearch)
• Keyword Spy – Research and track keywords in 3 search engines and 30+ countries.
• KPMRS – website rank monitoring services on various search engines
  for multiple keywords.
• XML-Sitemaps – Generate sitemaps online. Up to 500 urls Free.
• WP Google XML Sitemaps – This plugin will create a Google sitemaps compliant XML-Sitemap of your WordPress blog.

These are just a few tools I use the most, please share yours.

Technorati Tags: Analytics, Bing, Google, Keyword lookup, KPMRS, ROI, Search, SEO, Site Explorer, Sitemaps, Visitor tracking, webmaster tools, WordPress, Yahoo

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.htaccess files (or “distributed configuration files”) provide a way to make configuration changes on a per-directory basis in an Apache HTTP Server. This file, containing one or more configuration directives, is placed in a particular document directory, and the directives apply to that directory, and all subdirectories thereof.

This 301  Redirect can be used anytime you want to redirect a URL. Here are some examples of its use:

• Single page – Redirect 301 /old_page.html http://www.mysite.com/new_page.html

• entire site -   Redirect 301 /  http://www.new_site.com/

• change file extension (html to php in this case) -  RedirectMatch 301 (.*)\.html$ http://www.mysite.com$1.php

There are many other uses for Redirect 301 and mod_rewrite on Apache, if you are moving a site or redesigning a site with a new CMS make sure you redirect your old URLs to your new site. By failing to do so any user that clicks on a link to your old site (page) will hit a 404 ERROR page, this will affect your search rankings. 

The book “Professional SEO” has a good chapter in mod_rewrite and URL redirection, and is also great SEO manual

For a full tutorial on .htaccess visit the official Apache website.

Technorati Tags: .htaccess, 301 Redirect, Apache, MOD_REWRITE, Search Optimization, SEO, SEO Book

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Optimise your WordPress blog or site for search with a couple of plugins and the web tools provided by Google, Yahoo and LiveSearch. The All in One SEO Pack plugin for WordPress will let you manipulate the specific SEO content of your blog like page title, meta data and description. Defaults can be set in the admin area of the plugin on your dashboard and specific settings can be tweaked as you create or edit a post.

The other important plugin is the Google XML Sitemap Generator, which creates a nice sitemap for you. After installing this plugin you need to create the sitemap.xml and sitemap.xml.gz files in the root folder of your blog and change their permissions CHMOD  666. The easiest is to right-click on the files in your FTP client and change permissions under properties, 666 stands for Read and Write permission for Owner / Group / Others.  For more information see the README.txt included with the plugin. 

After installation go to the Admin area of the plugin on your Dashboard (Settings>>XML-Sitemap) and if the sitemap has not been generated yet click on the link Generate sitemap.

Search Engine Webmaster tools. (there are links to them on the XML-Sitemap admin)

1. Google webmaster tools – add your site and sitemap url, Google requires that you add a verification to your site either by adding some code to your home page or by uploading a html file to your root folder.
2. Yahoo Explorer – add you site url and upload a verification file to your root folder.
3. LiveSearch Webmaster Center – add you site url and upload a verification file to your root folder.
4. Google Analytics – create a profile for your site, doesn’t influence ranking but is  a great stats provider.
5. Google adsense, Scribefire QuickAds and TextLink – You can use these to place pay-per-click ads on your site (also does not influence rankings)

Constantly check these webmaster tools for stats on your site as they will tell you the errors you need to fix to make sure your site gets good search rankings with them.  By doing all this you have covered the basics and have a site that could rank well with search engines. There’s although a lot more to Search Optimization, a good source of information is the book  SEO Search Engine Optimization with PHP

Technorati Tags: Google, Live Search, Marketing, Search, SEO, Sitemap, WordPress, Yahoo

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The term SEO (Search Engine Optimization) has become a new phenomenon with marketeers.  As a programmer/developer it’s very hard to find a good book on such a broad subject but recently I found this great book. The authors go about explaining and guiding you through exercises that are relevant for both programmers and marketeers.  It contains detailed chapters on Website Content, Links, Webmaster tools and MOD_REWRITE. The code snipets found in this book can be used as a good reference guide to any SEO project.  This book is for PHP Programmers but they have also published a .NET version.

If  you develop with WordPress.org this releted post can also be very helpfull:  SEO and WordPress

Technorati Tags: Books, MOD_REWRITE, PHP, Programming, Search, SEO

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