Creating Sitemaps For Google, MSN AND Yahoo! – The Easy Way

Creating sitemaps for your site

If you own or maintain a website or intend to own one, wouldn’t it be great if you get frequent visitors who find satisfaction in getting exactly the information they need from your page?

While that satisfaction largely depends on the contents of your website, how you get to be accessed by website users is the most critical factor of website development.  For if your website can’t be reached universally, you defeat the very purpose of the internet: that is, to make information available to any website user from across the world.

How you get to be accessed is actually a matter of presentation style, organization, and most importantly, how fast and extensive search engines get to lead users to your website. Unless your pages are indexed in the search engines they can’t send you the free visitors you are all looking for.

Fortunately, the search engines want your content too and there are a number of ways you can help them, which they encourage you to do – by creating sitemaps of your website.  Sitemaps created for the various search engines will enable these search engines’ spiders to crawl faster, more systematically, and more extensively into your website’s pages.

By doing so, you get the maximum exposure you can.  Such exposure will boost your pride in having your pages viewed, read, and used by more and more visitors the way you intended them to.  On the financial aspect, the more visitors your website gets, the higher your website’s potential advertising value.

Now with the vast expansion of websites on the internet, it has become necessary to create different types of sitemaps, each having its own complexity in setting up

Creating an HTML sitemap linked to and from your home page is something savvy webmasters have been doing for years and perhaps is the simplest to create.  This sitemap is simply a list of pages contained on your site and enables the search engines spiders to easily find your pages, especially the ones that are linked deep in your website that they may have trouble finding otherwise.

TEXT Sitemaps

A text sitemap is simply a list of the URLs of your site in the form of a text file. These can then be submitted to search engines such as <a href=”http://submit.search.yahoo.com/free/request”>Yahoo!</a> to notify them that all the pages exist and by doing so invites their spider to visit.

XML Sitemaps

<a href=”http://www.google.com”>Google</a> launched <a href=”https://www.google.com/webmasters/sitemaps/login”>Google Sitemaps</a> as a way for webmasters to give them information they could use to better crawl their sites. This involves creating an XML Sitemap for which they provided their <a href=”https://www.google.com/webmasters/sitemaps/docs/en/sitemap-generator.html”>Google Sitemap Generator</a>. This can be the most complicated to set up using the tools provided by Google as you need to be running Python on your server. It’s perhaps the most important one too given the current dominance of the search engine.

Setting up all three types of sitemaps may seem a daunting task but luckily there are websites that take the strain out of this and you can create all three within a matter of minutes.

XML-Sitemaps.com is one such site. Originally developed to easily create Google sitemaps for webmasters without an understanding of Python, it has evolved through demand for new features.

It offers the Sitemap Generator that lets you build your sitemap online in four simple steps, for free!  The Sitemap Generator is easy to use and user-friendly even for average computer literates.  Just type in your URL and other parameters (e.g. frequency of change or update that your website will likely undergo, the priority of a specific URL relative to the other pages on the same website, etc.) and follow the ensuing instructions until you get to add your URL to the Google Webmaster account.  You will then be given the options to download your websites sitemaps in XML, HTML and TXT format.  If still you get stuck with a step, you may enquire and get assistance from its technical support.

Go check xml-sitemaps.com for more details or better yet, to get started!

The only limitation of the free sitemap Generator is that it allows only up to 500 pages per website.  Still, this limit is high.  Statistics show that out of the more than 64000 sitemaps generated using this service, the average website size was only 155 pages, way below the 500-page limit.  This figure is represented by 78% of all webmasters who have used the Generator.

However, in case your website falls beyond this limit, you may check out the PHP Sitemap generator script. Offered at a very reasonable price, this  stand-alone script is intended for unlimited-sized sitemaps, which is beyond the capacity of online services.

Whichever search engine or for whatever search purpose, sitemaps are clearly the fastest and most efficient way to navigate this digital highway. The best thing about it is, with these easy-to-use sitemap generators, you don’t have to be a computer geek to help keep this internet traffic moving.

Article Submissions are an important tool for Search Engine Optimization.

In today’s internet information age your online presence is not only sufficient to make profit. If you want to achieve online success your businesses needs continuous promotion.
Article submission refers to the submission of articles to the article directories to get hyperlinks from websites who wants to publish your content. It makes your website content rich as well as bringing back links for you. Article Submission can be used to catapult your website to the higher rankings in the search engines. The most striking feature about article submission is free, simple and easy for even a novice. One should need not to be a SEO expert for article submission process. The process is so simple and least time consuming that any unprofessional can do it with negligible efforts.
There are hundreds of articles directories publishing articles online and are either paid or free of cost. Online article submission sites are an interesting business model in this Internet Information Age to achieve your goals from the internet marketing.

Benefits of Online Article Submission:
- Article submission is a powerful method of getting quality incoming links to your site. It’s an easy way to build links and costs almost nothing.
- Article marketing helps to achieve life time links for your website.
- Search engines love links from content-rich pages and articles submission open your doors for the search engine ranking.
- Article submission helps to build your site as an authority site and builds your brand credibility in the market.
- Consistent submission of articles ensures a steady flow of quality backlinks to your site. It really works for your marketing campaign.
- Article submission is one of the most effective marketing strategies. Nearly every professional search engine marketer considers article submission as one of the main part in their link building process.
- Article submission drives actual visitors towards your website which can never be achieved through the traditional internet marketing tools. Traffic driven by articles submission is highly result oriented and targeted enough.

Most Common Mistakes during Article Submission:
Most of the individuals either professional or non professional do some very minor mistakes while their article marketing or article submission services.
- Most of us are confused about where to submit the articles as well as where to submit the articles. Reality is the platform used for the submission of the articles is not as important as the process used for the submission of articles or how one is submitting the articles.
- There should be a proper strategy while submitting the articles; it should not be done in a very hasty manner. Submission of articles to less popular directories can be a better strategy.
- Instead of submitting your articles to hundred of article directories using automation tools to speed up the submission process is more beneficial for any one using the article submission services.

How It Works?
When you write SEO driven relevant articles the next step is to submit these articles either using article submission software or through article marketing services. Articles can be posted in the article directories by article submission software which is the easiest and fastest method of article submission. It is less expensive and less time-consuming as well. The procedure is so simple, one has to obtain article submission software, load the articles in it, and press “submit”. The software will then submit the articles to article directories and will open a new way of marketing for your business.

Boost Your SEO Facts

Search engine optimization is a technological process, which is specifically built for web sites optimization. In searching process, this technology just searches all the precious things and rejects eth duplicates. Search engine optimization is as need as fuel for van.

Search engine improvement in direct we just say it SEO. In SEO metropolis consort e-fuzion the scheme place owner, intend the prizewinning solution for own scheme site. In SEO process, the technology particularly targets for audience and makes more traffic. In see engine optimization, it just increases the height of the site. In SEO, consort e-fuzion the methodical ness offers all the basic services like scheme development, scheme promotion, scheme organization and many more. A see engine refers the fine set of the scheme site. SEO optimizes the key text spacing and prominence. On tender search, engine improvement makes the targeted scheme tender most popular among number of scheme pages. It is most belike focuses on noises redaction band noises is the most pivotal bourgeois for on tender optimization. Actually, in see engine optimization, you encounter two pages digit is on tender and the incoming digit is off page. For getting more knowledge, the searcher needs to log in e-fuzion.com. The noises of your scheme place can ever use some theoretical enhancement. In addition, patch the re-wring is happen the contenter must keep in mind about the key words. For getting ranker see, engine improvement tries its best. In SEO, consort e-fuzion the contenter always, follow the unequalled and idealistic words, which are more attractive and beatific to read and listen. Keywords psychotherapy is the first travel in a trenchant see engine marketing campaign. Keywords should be chances to emit prospective client see characteristics. Through the database like articulate tracker or key articulate discovery, the scheme place owner can determine the most trenchant keywords for generating germane traffic. Search engine improvement searches assorted sites and choose the prizewinning one. The SEO metropolis consort e-fuzion makes the sites life more interesting and prosperous. SEO metropolis consort e-fuzion brings a new revolution in the online marketing. Through the theoretical enhancement, the searching impact makes the scheme place happier. In SEO metropolis Company, the e-fuzion methodical ness brings the prizewinning subject aspect for scheme place promotion. Which also helps revenue collection?

Fro the crowning discussion it is come to know that see engine improvement is just impact as a teacher. In addition, it enlightens the scheme place ranking providing the beatific technology. For building pages and upload the ranking, the scheme place makes the place more popular by selecting the better one. Search engine improvement is a process, which makes the sites happier and joyful.

Give A Big Hit To Your Website

You find elite and advance SEO Services used by the search Engine optimization that have very fast and rich experience in professional search Engine Optimization. Internet has made the life simpler and things very easier for each one. In these days by only a click of a mouse one can get the whole thing they needed. Search engine optimization is an online sponsorship technique that has helped many on line industry to achieve the heights of fame.

Before using you must be sure to select the right kind of SEO Services . SEO Services helps the clients internationally to reach their goals of online business. With their know-how tools and methods, they effectively and efficiently help to reach the top rank of the search engines results, gaining traffic and visibility to get profits. There are limited and advance SEO Services  and its techniques are used by the search engine optimizers who have very gigantic and rich experience in professional. There’s always a team of dedicated and professional SEO Services, who can really make the difference to your website by modifying a project for improved ranking.

There might be a great guidance given to the clients to develop customized strategies that will help boost their search engine rankings significantly. The aim behind this approach is to reach the top and help the customers reach there as well. The knowledge and experience used in this area will help you get a piece of the pie, which you might be losing otherwise to your competition. Search engine optimization Services will helps you to capture targeted traffic for the people who are already looking for the product or service you offer. It is commonly accepted fact that search engine optimization is probably the most effective internet advertising option.

Buying expired domains for PR, does it still work  ?
I’ve done some experiments over the past few months about expiring domains with PR to see if it is worth your while to catch these expired and deleted domains.

My idea why I would like to use expired domains is the notion that old domains are favored than new domains, and to get instant PR.

So I set out to find deleted domains with PR that I can register. One characteristic of domains I was looking for was that the domain still had a PR, and it was still listed in google.

I won’t be mentioning the actual domains here as I need to control the results and prevent people from making backlinks to these domains.

I registered about 4 domains, some have PR2 and PR3. Some have a few pages indexed, some have a few thousand. I also bought a couple of new domains for my new projects.

I found out that google rarely visits these domains so I need to prime it but with some fresh backlinks. After creating some backlinks to these domains, two domains eventually lost their PR. These two domains have only a few pages indexed in google. In one domain, I did a 301 permanent redirect to the new index page. This domain retained its PR. One key difference this domain has compared to the other two is that this domain has thousands of pages indexed in google.

In another domain, I did a 301 and redirect it to a fresh new domain. The result is that the new domain got indexed faster and more pages were indexed compared to another new domain I registered at the same time. However, PR was down to 0.

There is also a case where I did a 301 redirect from an old deleted domain with PR and never got any benefit from it.

In conclusion, there is still conflicting results on whether buying deleted/expired domains. Some works, some don’t. However, what seem to work is that…

a. Old delete domains does contain traffic from existing backlinks. If the old domain has tons of backlinks, it still does generate some traffic.

b. Other search engines such as yahoo and msn do not seem to have an biases against expired/deleted domains.

A Guide To Organic SEO And Its Benefits

What Is Organic SEO?

Put in the simplest manner possible, organic SEO is search engine optimization done manually using no black hat methods, no underhand methods and no automated scripting. It is the purest form of optimizing your website for the benefit of search engines, while still retaining interest for your site visitors, and done well it is exactly the thing that search engines are looking for in a website. Once they find it they will reward your site with better rankings and improved positions within the search engine results pages. Throughout the course of this article it will be referred to as simply SEO.

Understanding The Search Engines

Understanding Search Engines and their general concept is vital to the use of effective SEO methods. Search engines enable their visitors to enter a specific word or term, known as keywords. Once submitted, all pages containing those keywords that can be found in the search engine’s directory are listed on the search engine result pages. Each page is “ranked” according to relevancy, popularity and a few other factors. Therefore, in theory, the more relevant a page is to a given keyword the more likely it will appear at the top of the listings.

Introducing The Search Engine Spiders

Another important factor to remember about search engines is that they don’t use real people to crawl the billions of websites and judge how relevant they are. Instead they use automated software called a “spider” or a “bot” that does this work much quicker. The calculations that the search engine uses to determine the ranking of a website are called algorithms and in the case of the major search engines like Google, Yahoo and MSN these algorithms are changed on a regular basis. The changes and the specifics of the algorithms are not released to the public in order to prevent black hat SEOs from manipulating their sites to reach the top of the pile despite containing to information relevant to the search query or keyword.

Optimizing For Search Engines – Optimizing For Visitors

Of course to some extent, all of us reading this article are probably guilty of altering our web pages to meet the whims of search engines but it must be done in a positive and organic way. We understand that optimizing a page purely for the benefit of search engines spiders may massively detract from the actual value of the site to your visitors. Search engines understand this too, hence the evolution of the algorithms. With each new algorithm created and usually patented by search engines like Google, we are getting closer to a structure whereby sites are genuinely judged on their value to visitors. It may sound like an Isaac Asimov novel but the algorithms and the spiders are basically becoming more human like.

Basic Components Of SEO

The actual methods of optimizing your website are saved for another article, but the basic components of an SEO campaign are broken down into on page and off page optimization techniques. On page SEO includes factors like keyword inclusion, content optimization, page structure etc… whereas the main contributing factor of off page optimization is inbound links. There are many different factors to each of these areas and different SEOs will give you varying information on which factors are the most relevant to gain higher rankings. These extensive differences in opinion occur because nobody is certain of the algorithm criteria.

The Benefits Of SEO

SEO is probably the most beneficial way to conduct Internet promotion. It is highly cost effective, can yield long term results and the leads it generates are opt in and targeted. This doesn’t mean you shouldn’t consider trying out alternative methods of advertising your site. For many, banner advertisements, press releases (can actually be used as part of an SEO campaign as well), PPC campaigns and sponsored listings prove to highly beneficial and including these will help your site’s popularity.

To Cost Effectiveness And To Life

The cost effectiveness is easily determined when you look at the potential of an SEO campaign compared to the method that many consider to be the next best thing – PPC. A PPC campaign will usually cost you anywhere upward of 5 cents per visitor generated. This means that for every thousand visitors you receive you will have paid $50. Some fairly basic SEO work on a web site containing ten pages will generate this kind of traffic on a monthly basis relatively quickly.

$50 doesn’t sound much but consider that you pay this in one month to receive the desired one thousand visitors. Over the space of a year you will have paid $600, and so on. Now consider that you are competing for a relatively competitive keyword and you find that you need to be paying a minimum of 50 cents per click to generate just the one thousand clicks in a month. All of a sudden you’re paying $6000 per year and you are still only getting one thousand clicks every month. $6000 will buy you an awful lot of SEO work and you should find that within a few months you are generating a lot more traffic using SEO.

Targeted Leads

Targeted leads are the best type of leads you can generate. It means that the visitors to your site are already predisposed to the basic topic of your site and are interested in what you have to say. It means that they will be more likely to purchase goods or services from your site, click on affiliate links or click Google ads to earn you revenue. Because SEO leads are physically searching for the topic that your site relates to you are guaranteed that they are interested in whatever you’re offering. First of all they search using keywords relevant to your site. They then read the description and name of your site and this further compounds their interest in the page in question and click on the link. Already they have become highly susceptible to the message of your web page.

So Remember…

SEO is a webmaster’s greatest tool but treated badly it can quickly blow up in your face. By ensuring you stick to the very letter of the law and do not use any underhand methods you should soon benefit from powerful leads that will frequent your site and earn you revenue.

Conflicting SEO Expectations

SEO is undisputedly the best method for generating traffic and profits. That being said, you need to understand the inherent conflict that can arise with SEO
SEO is both the technical effort and art of getting your site ranked highly in search results on Google, Yahoo and MSN. There are two competing factors in the effort, time and volume of traffic, which can lead to clients having unreasonable expectations.

The conflict giving rise to misunderstood SEO expectations deal with keywords.  Obviously, an optimization program is designed to get you high in the rankings on various keywords. The problem, of course, is the more traffic a keyword produces, the higher the number of sites competing for rankings under the phrase. Inevitably, this translates to a longer period of time required to get top rankings.

Obviously, most clients want to obtain top rankings as quickly as possible. The best way to do this is identify those keywords that have decent traffic, but few sites competing for rankings. In such a campaign, clients see results relatively quickly, but they have fallen into a trap. Even if they go into the number one position across the top three search engines, they have limited the amount of traffic they can receive. This leads to frustration as revenues are effectively capped.

A proper optimization plan should focus on both short and long term rankings. When laying out the site, the home page and other centralized pages should be devoted to keywords with monstrous amounts of traffic that will require a lot of time to obtain top rankings on. To counterbalance this, additional pages should be built focusing on keywords for which there is less traffic, but for which high rankings can be acquired relatively quickly.

The exact time periods on this approach are entirely dependent on the subject matter of the site and the keywords involved. For a brand new site, one can expect to see rankings on MSN within a month, Yahoo in four to six months and Google in six to nine months. For an established site, the figures will be shorter but it is dependent upon the results of the keyword research in the specific field.

Understanding optimization is the key to having reasonable SEO expectations. A mix of short and long term goals is the best method of attack in nearly every situation.

12 Months Without SEO

It is more than a year now since I concluded that Search Engine Optimization (SEO) was, or was soon going to become, a waste of time. I had already, 6 months before then, said farewell to spending an hour a day working on getting reciprocal links.

What led, at the time, to what many would have said were very rash moves? After all, reciprocal linking was still being expounded, by all and sundry, as an essential way to get a good ranking, and the software tools were being actively marketed still. Search engine positioning software was still being heavily marketed and is still today; keyword density was a buzz term being branded around as if it were an essential science to be practised by all good SEO conscious webmasters.

What I did was to go back to marketing basics. I had received my marketing training back in the 1980′s and had practical marketing experience with my own business from the mid 1990′s. I was not born into internet marketing alone, so could still see outside the blinkers and the hype.

A very basic but important aspect of marketing is to know your market place. When it comes to search engine rankings, then clearly a major part of that market was the major search engines, Google, Yahoo and MSN, with Google being the clear leader then, and a year later today.

I started to think 18 months ago that as far as reciprocal linking went, it was becoming a spammers’ zone. Surely, I argued with myself, Google did not really want to rank a web site highly just because the web master had the tools and the time to chase around getting reciprocal links? It just did not make sense. And the same was true of buying links. Why should a web site rank highly because they have splashed out on buying links?

What Google, and the others, really wanted was to rank the best web sites for a particular search term, and it seemed only a matter of time before they sniffed out and extinguished the abuses such as blatantly artificial link building, Blog spam, scraping and extreme SEO’ing.

A year ago, I started two new web sites without any real thought of SEO. As a writer, I was happy to try to provide what search engines wanted: original content on what people were searching for. While I did provide title and description tags, everything else was just written on a go with the flow basis. The keyword phrase for any page would come out in the natural flow. I could just write to my heart’s content without using any tools checking keyword density.

The first of those new web sites 13 months ago was in the self improvement niche, which is highly competitive. I was expecting to be “Sandboxed” by Google because of that, and so it proved. But I just kept plugging away, sticking to my no-SEO principle. Of course, none of us outside Google knows for sure if there is such a thing as a sandbox, but there is undoubtedly a waiting time before a new site is thrown fully into the ranking melting pot.

In the self improvement case, the last Google update saw my site emerge from the sandbox after about 12 months. So, at last, I was able see whether my no SEO approach was to yield any positive results. Thankfully, a few high rankings were immediately apparent, including a few #1 positions. On one of those terms, Yahoo followed a few weeks later to the #1 position, while the site was #2 (now 1) at MSN.

Now, this is early days for that particular site, and there is much to do to get more high rankings. However, I am confident that SEO is infinitely more simple than some experts, especially those selling ranking tools, tend to have you believe.

Since I started that particular site, I have only made one major change, and that is convert all my web sites to CSS. Providing a content rich site that is easy to crawl for search engine robots is the most important aspect of the new, simplified SEO. In fact, following Google’s advice to webmasters is about all you need to do, and that is free.

Of course, those with software products to peddle will argue that I could do even better with their software. But if Google decides to blacklist that software as a manipulating tool, then all my hard work could be undone. So I will leave the others to chase shadows with ranking software, and just enjoy writing content. After all, that is what basic marketing told me to do.

SEO Link Building with Web Content Secrets

It’s the timeless question: how do you get other sites to link to you? The most commonly discussed ways are reciprocal linking (swapping links) and buying links. Yet there’s another important tool for building links that should be a part of your toolbox: distributing content in exchange for one-way inbound links.

Comparison with Other Linking Methods
•    Reciprocal Linking: The big advantage of content distribution over swapping links is that the links built are one-way, and therefore presumably more valuable. Of course, reciprocal links still have value, but relying primarily on them might hamper your SEO efforts.
•    Indirect Reciprocal Links: I link my site A to your site, so you link your site to my site B. The problems are that this can be a lot of work, and also, Google can detect indirect links if you do it more than once with the same group of sites, which might make your linking arrangements look like a link farm.
•    Paid Links: The problem with paid links is 1) the costs add up; 2) search engines are getting better and better at discounting paid links. According to Matt Cutts’ blog, “I wouldn’t be surprised if search engines begin to take stronger action against link buying in the near future…link-selling sites can lose their ability to give reputation (e.g. PageRank and anchortext).”

Kinds of Content to Distribute
•    Articles. This is the essential kind of content distribution, to the point that many people consider content distribution simple as “article marketing.” However, you’re missing out on a few other sources of links if you only do articles.
•    News blurbs. A lot of news-style sites will only reprint pieces of a couple of paragraphs. The good news is that often enough the whole point of these news blurbs is to include links to other sites, in a sort of “look what we’ve found” kind of way, a la Slashdot.org
•    Press Releases. There are some sites that aggressively reprint press releases. A press release is like an article, only in a very specific press release format, and frankly that’s not that enjoyable to read. I don’t know why some sites are so head-over-heels over press releases, but, hey, that’s their business. The good news is that even if you can’t write and don’t want to hire a writer, press releases (at least basic ones) are pretty easy to do.
•    Tools, games and other webware. Sites with popular tools, software, Flash games and other webware often let other sites use it in exchange for a link. The big potential downside is technical support.
•    Images. Images, especially charts and photographs, are important forms of content on the web. If you have great images on your site and people ask you to use them on their sites, require a backlink in exchange. The problem with images is that they are so easily stolen. Stolen words can be uncovered with a web search. You could try to watermark images with a copyright symbol, URL, and the link requirement. But in the process you’d make the image much less desirable.
•    Web design templates. These have been freely distributed for a long time. Yet they are even more easily stolen than images. Also, if you embed a link in the footer of a web template, what you’ll get back are sitewide links, which are often thought to be filtered out in search engines.

Maximizing Content Distribution Links’ Effectiveness: Anchor Text
Anchor text. You need optimized anchor text to rank high for any competitive keyword. That means you need your target keyword in the anchor text, and very importantly, variants of the target keyword (too many links with the exact same anchor text may be filtered). The problem is that some sites by default don’t let you choose the anchor text of the link to your site. So you need to: 1) look for sites that do reprint content with optimized anchor text; 2) specifically ask for your target anchor text to be used. Also, do keep in mind that a true natural linking structure will require you to have a number of links that are not anchor-text-optimized, typically with the URL as the anchor text.

How to Find Sites
Finding sites to submit content is the biggest challenge. You can start by asking around to any other webmasters you already have a relationship with. Next, web-search. The classic method is “submit article” + [keyword]. Most of the sites you find this way won’t be good candidates, which is why this can be a bit labor-intensive. I use offshore labor for this step, as well as a program that will sort and store all the search results into a spreadsheet; otherwise it might not be worth it. Then again, the same would be true for finding reciprocal linking partners.

Ethical Issues & Best Practices

Golden rule: remember that there’s a human being who has to approve your article for submission.
•    Read and adhere to all submission guidelines.
•    Avoid automation. There’s almost always some detail of submission that requires a human eye: a multitude of html formatting requirements, changing site themes, etc.
•    Don’t submit by email unless specifically instructed. Using a contact form prevents possible sp@m accusations.
•    Only approach websites that request content submissions.
•    Don’t misrepresent reprint content as original.
•    Don’t submit the same content too often. After about two hundred reprints, a lot of people will be seeing the same thing over and over again and possibly complaining.

In short, as SEO gets more competitive, having more and more linking methods at your disposal gets more and more important. Don’t overlook this important tool.

301 Redirect – The SEO way to rename or move files or folders

In this article I will discuss page redirection techniques, what works and what to avoid.

What is page redirection and why would you want to use it?

Let’s say you rename a page on your website, for whatever reason. Perhaps you decided to revamp your entire naming convention, perhaps you decided to restructure your site and need to move pages into different folders, or you just realized that you are missing valuable keywords.

Let’s elaborate a bit on the keywords issue, since it is part of your search engine ranking success.

Let’s say the page in question is about customized USB drives and you named it page1.htm. Then you read some SEO (Search Engine Optimization) articles and you found out that some search engines use words in the actual file name as search keywords. Next time you do a Google search, take a look at the results, most will have words in the actual file name (in the URL section) bolded, denoting a keyword match. Your USB drives page will definitely benefit if named something like custom_usb_drives.htm instead.

Now that you renamed your page, you just created a symphony of issues for yourself, for your users and for your position in search engine results.

Linking issues:

You will have to point every link on your site to the new page name. If your site is small, it should not be a big deal, but if your site is large, you will inevitably make mistakes, mainly forgetting a link or two. This will result in visitors getting the dreaded “404 page not found” error when clicking on your links, robots (also know as crawlers or spiders) avoiding you, etc. Also, if you are heavily relying on visitors from search engines, then again, people will get a “404 page not found error”.

Let’s use the previous example, for a long time your page1.htm was indexed by major search engines. If someone types “custom usb drives” in a search engine box, your page shows up on the first search results screen. That is fantastic, only if someone clicks on the link, they will be pointed to page1.htm, not to custom_usb_drives.htm, because the first page is the one in the search engine’s index. It will take time, sometimes months, before the search engines update their indexes with your new page name.

Lost Page Rank (PR) issues:

Google developed a proprietary algorithm that assigns a Page Rank (PR) to every page on the web. PR is a number from 1 to 10 (10 being the ideal) and is intended to be a representation of how useful and popular a given page is. PR is influenced by many factors, one of the crucial ones being Link Popularity. Link Popularity is a representation of how many “quality” or “relevant” sites link to your page. Without getting into too much detail, it is increasingly difficult and time consuming to achieve a high PR for your pages, especially if you don’t have a really unique website with exceptional and highly sought after content. If you are merely operating a commercial site, in a competitive market (such as selling custom branded USB drives, as in our example), then it takes a lot of time and hard work to build a good page PR.

When you rename a page and discard the old page, you also discard the PR of the page. Your renamed page will be seen as a totally new page, with 0 PR.

What is the solution?

I will start by enumerating some of the methods used by the non-initiated.

Not recommended solution 1: Duplicate content.

First thing that probably comes in you mind is: well, why can’t you just duplicate the page and let nature take its course. In other words, you will have two identical pages, one named page1.htm and one custom_usb_drives.htm. This gives you time to update all links and the search engines will eventually index the new page.

This solution is not viable because search engines will penalize you quite badly, ‘thinking’ that you are trying to scam them by using the ‘duplicate content’ technique.

Not recommended solution 2: Custom error message.

You could create a custom error page. However, you will lose rankings on the next search engine update as the file will appear to be non-existent. As discussed above, it could be some time before the page with the new name will be indexed and will appear in people’s searches. Also, your web site visitors will be frustrated by the fact that they now have to dig through your site to find the desired information.

Not recommended solution 3: An HTML Meta redirect.

You could implement a so called Meta refresh in a blank or customized page that has the name of the old page (in our example, page1.htm) that points to the new page. The redirect can be instant, or delayed by a predetermine amount of time. The delayed redirect has the advantage that you can place an extra message, such as “please be aware that the page you are looking for changed location….. etc., etc…. you will be redirected automatically to the new location”

In the past, this was probably the most used technique.

Without getting into the mechanics of the Meta redirect, which is basically a META tag statement you ad to your HEADER section, know that there are also Java Script techniques that achieve similar results.

What is bad about this is that this is a technique often used by spammers to trick search engines and it should be avoided, unless the page is in a section of your site that isn’t indexed (also known as spidered or crawled). Search engine spammers create a page that is optimized for certain keywords and phrases – it usually has no real content. The page is then picked up by some search engines, but when a visitor clicks on the search engine entry, they are redirected to another site, often unrelated. Most search engines have filters to detect this. Using this form of search engine deception will see a site eventually banned or penalized by major players such as Google.

The recommended redirect strategy  – 301 Redirect

A 301 redirect is the most efficient, visitor friendly, robot (spider, crawler) friendly and search engine friendly solution around for web sites that are hosted on servers running Apache. If you are not sure, check with your hosting provider.

A 301 redirect is just a set of commands you type into your .htaccess file.

When a visitor (whether human or robotic) requests a web page via any means, your web server checks for a .htaccess file. The .htaccess file contains specific instructions for certain requests, including security, redirection issues and how to handle certain errors.

The code “301″ is interpreted as “moved permanently”. After the code, the URL of the missing or renamed page is noted, followed by a space, then followed by the new location or file name.

First of all, you’ll need to find the .htaccess file in the root directory of where all your web pages are stored. If there is no .htaccess file there, you can create one with Notepad or a similar application. Make sure when you name the file that you remember to put the “.” at the beginning of the file name. This file has no tail extension.

Some hosting providers offer redirect services through their “control panels”, so you don’t have to perform low level changes on the .htaccess file itself. Instead, they provide a user friendly interface for this. Check with your hosting provider to see what the optimal way to perform a 301 redirect is in your case. I will continue the article with the barebones solution.

If there is a .htaccess file already in existence with lines of code present, be very careful not to change any existing line unless you are familiar with the functions of the file.

Scroll down past all the existing code, leave a line space, then create a new line that follows this example:

redirect 301 /folder/page1.htm http://www.you.com/folder/custom_usb_drives.htm

It’s as easy as that. Save the file, upload it back into your web and test it out by typing in the old address to the page you’ve changed. You should be instantly and seamlessly transported to the new location.

Notes: Be sure not to add “http://www” to the first part of the statement – just put the path from the top level of your site to the page. Also ensure that you leave a single space between these elements:

redirect 301 (the instruction that the page has moved)

/folder/page1.htm (the original folder path and file name)

http://www.you.com/folder/custom_usb_drives.htm (new path and file name)

The same format applies not only to renamed files, but also to files moved to a different location.

The 301 redirect is the safest way to preserve your rankings. On the next indexing (crawling, spidering), the search engine robot will obey the rule indicated in your .htaccess file and index the new page name every time a link or its internal database tries to access the old page. In the next update (again, this could take months), the old file name and path will be dropped and replaced with the new one. Sometimes you may see alternating old/new file names during the transition period, along with some possible fluctuations in rankings as things settle. Don’t panic, this is normal.

What if your site is hosted on a Microsoft IIS server instead?

If you have access to the server, do this: In internet services manager, right click on the file or folder you wish to redirect. Select the radio titled “a redirection to a URL”. Enter the redirection page, check “The exact url entered above” and the “A permanent redirection for this resource”. Click “Apply”.

If you do not have access to the server, ask your host to point you into the right direction.

In conclusion, the best and the most transparent way (to both human and robotic users) to rename and move files on your web site, while preserving your search engine ranks is the 301 redirect.