Defining Chaos In Order

While everyone agrees that a clean URL is important in SEO (Search Engine Optimization), I think it’s valued a lot less than it ought to be (in other words; it’s more important than most think). Whenever you search for certain keywords, those keywords are highlighted in the title, description & url of the search result pages.

The Title & Description speak for themselves. The title is what used to get the most attention, and the description may not mean a lot in SEO-points itself (content & semantics are they way to go), but its value is mostly to get users to click from the search result page, onto your webpage. It’s your entry-path. Your pursuading argument to win a visitor.

And that’s what the URL has been graduately evolving into. Nowadays, internet users tend to ignore the webpages’ title, and look at the URL in result pages.

Take the following search result for “dedicated servers“.

While the title is displayed in a larger font than the URL, most people will look straight down at the URL to see if their keywords are present. Because after all, if the webpages’ filename contains our keywords, it’s bound to contain the info we’re looking for. Right? ;-)

It also has the advantage of getting a lot of information, in one tiny spot. The domain name usually contains the company title – which is often stuffed at the end of a webpage title, to contain more keywords. It usually indicates a language as well, so you know straight away what you’ll dive into.

Thus it’s important to change URLs such as

domain.com/index.php?module_id=4501&lang_id=501&product_id=2101

to

domain.com/en/productinfo/teddy-bear-slippers/

A clean URL, that shows what the page will contain, in a blink of an eye. 

While the Title-tag remains a great asset to get good rankings, it’s no longer the deciding factor to get users to click through. It’s time to spend some time, personalising & keyword-izing (if that’s even a word) your URLs!

Matti Seo keywords, mod_rewrite, seo, url

There are hundreds, if not thousands, of parameters that will define the search engine ranking of a website. This ranges from the classical layout of your website, with a correct semantic structure (h1, h2, h3 header tags, <b>, <strong> and <em> for emphasis, …), to using proper alt & title tags for your images and hyperlinks. Even correct use of follow/no-follow on your links, URL formatting & structuring, incoming links, linkjuice, keyword-usage, title mark-up, … etc all play a role in how your website will rank for certain keywords.

These are all widely discussed, and information can be found just around the corner if you’re looking for it. But there’s also the aspect of hosting in SEO, which isn’t covered that much, at all. Read more…

Matti Seo factor, google, hosting, sem, seo, serp

At Google’s webmaster central blog, they’ve posted an interesting article about how Duplicate Content Penalties work in reality – the short version; it doesn’t even exist. Read more…

Matti Seo duplicate content, google, sem, seo

At Google’s Blog, they’ve declare this week the 404 Week At Webmaster Central. It’s meant to discuss how “page not found”-errors are still throwing a 200 status code (which means “OK”), instead of a 404 statuscode (“Page Not Found”).

This issue is called a “Soft 404″, because the user gets a clear message stating the page no longer exists, but crawlers assume (because of the 200 statuscode) that the page does exist, and they keep indexing it. Read more…

Matti Seo 404, google, page not found

Let’s say you have an old web-page that’s no longer in use. Of course, you’ll want to redirect your users to the correct (new) page. Using PHP, you can modify the headers of a web-page to redirect them to the correct page.

< ?php
header("Location: http://www.mydomain.com/newpage.html");
exit();
?>

This will cause the user who visits the web page with this code, to be redirected to http://www.mydomain.com/newpage.html (or any other page you specify).

That’s all fine, and works well. But what if Google indexed your old web page, and still directs traffic to it? What if search-results in Google only display the old page, instead of the new one? What if, one day, you decide to take the old page offline? Read more…

Matti PHP, Seo 404, header, PHP, redirect

Ever found a URL ending with “.0″ (that’s ‘dot zero’) when searching for an item in Google? You probably haven’t, because it’s impossible to get a URL that ends with “.0″ listed in the Google search-result pages.

Read more…

Matti Seo .0, google, seo, urls

Only a small update, I’ve fixed some errors in the length of title- and description tags for Google, Yahoo! and MSN search results, added a whee bit of a layout (where Wordpress sort of ‘inspired me’) and added a Google SERP (Search Engine Result Page) preview.

Also fixed an ugly alt- and title-tag bug for images, where a regular expression sort of backfired on me.

Feel free to explore it over at http://seo.mattiasgeniar.be/

Any input would be greatly appreciated, tell me what to improve, what needs extra work, what should be left out and what is completely and utterly wrong. Also, be sure to report any bugs you might encounter.

Ps; I’ll release the source code for this analyzer too, once it reaches a semi-stable, semi-complete, semi-useful status.

If you’re interested, you can read more about the initial launch of the SEO Analyzer.

Matti Seo seo, seo analyzer, serp

I’ve been planning on making it for a long time, and for some mystery I’ve found myself with some spare time … The result? A first Beta (or call it Alpha, if you will) of yet another free SEO analyzer. It’ll crawl a pre-defined webpage, and tell you whether or not you’ve made good use of the meta-tags (description, keywords, revisit, …), <H1/2/3>-tags, alt & title attributes with images, … Read more…

Matti Seo analyzer, google, optimization, seo, Seo