Search Engine Optimization

It’s no secret, Google is bringing it’s vision of cloud-based computing to reality with it’s recent release of the Chromebook as well as it’s constant launching of new and innovative cloud-based applications. For Google, one of the main limitations is the high speed internet infrastructure that most Americans use to get online. We live in an expansive country which means laying down new cables to create more bandwidth is a slow and costly endeavor, much slower than the pace at which our technology is innovating and sucking up all that extra bandwidth. Google found a novel way to mitigate this limitation, by leveraging it’s Search Engine market share to manipulate the web ecosystem to run slimmer. By introducing Page Load Times into the SERP algorithm, Google has incentivized web developers to develop the web on lighter, cleaner, more standards-based markup. This solves the bandwidth capacity issue by having the entire web cutting all their fat, freeing up unneeded bandwidth without having to wait for ISPs to upgrade their lines. Since Google has such a large market share, most users will still trek over to Google without even realizing a change in their search experience. But, their results will slowly begin to show the slimmer sites nearer to the top, which will result in more users clicking the slimmer sites even further freeing up bandwidth by essentially herding users to areas of the web where they will collectively use less bandwidth. Google is a trend setter and is sometimes flat out copied (both domestically and abroad),...

A website can generally be accessed by entering the site’s domain directly (domain.com) or by including a leading “www.” subdomain. This offers increased usability in that users can enter the site in either way but lowers overall SEO in that web crawlers index both addresses as separate sites and will penalize the site for duplicate content. This is easily fixed by forcing on or off the “www.” subdomain while allowing the users to enter through both addresses. To do this you can modify your .htaccess file in your site’s root folder by adding in the following mod_rewrite condition. If you have issues with your permalinks or cache after including this condition, move the snippet to the beginning of the .htaccess file. The codes send a 301 redirect while doing their thing so search engine crawlers know that this is a permanent redirect and to reallocate the pagerank data from the defunct subdomain’s pages over to the main domain’s matching pages. To force site to use “www.”: To force site NOT to use “www.”: These two snippets allow for the domain to use other subdomains while forcing the two main domains into either subdomain schema you’d like.The following snippets will force any subdomain that might be inputted into your preferred subdomain schema. To force site to use “www.”: To force site NOT to use “www.”: If you don’t have a .htaccess file in your site’s root, you can quickly whip one up by opening notepad and saving the file with one of these conditions as “.htaccess”...

Keyword density is simple enough to understand, the more targeted keywords your page contains, the more likely that term will be associated with that page as a keyword. Since the keyword tag is more-or-less obsolete these days, keyword density is the way search engine spiders and crawlers determine what keywords that page will come up for. Some things to think about when considering keyword density and your copy is that the more superfluous copy you use, the less dense your keywords become. Avoid using terms like “click here to view” on links or other such flowery verbiage to describe items unless a legitimate call to action is necessary. Look to your navigation links for an easy area to chop away at copy used across all pages of the site. The header and footer are other places to find copy to cut. Keyword density in the title is also important but what’s important to consider here is that the higher keyword density occurring sooner in the title, the more firmly associated those keywords will become with that page. In other words, start out with your top keywords early and often and leave the less important copy for the end. Also, be sure to keep the keywords within the first 70 characters to ensure maximum impact.