Webmaster-Talk

The Job of an SEO or SEO Company isnt always just about getting high rankings, it includes analysing a website in terms of On-Page SEO looking for possible errors or problems. So, before you go aiming for that next Search Engine Ranking, run your site over this basic SEO Checklist or at least keep it in mind for when you next start a site:

• Make sure all your page titles are unique
• Have a sitemap with links to all your ‘main’ pages on it, all your pages if theres less than 100
• Link to URL’s consitently, www.domain.com/index.php or www.domain.com (preferable), just make sure you stick to one
• Setup a 301 redirect from the non-www version of your site to the www version
• Make sure that you have no broken links, i.e linking to pages that dont exist
• Try not to have any pages that are just advertised as ‘Under-construction’
• Check that all your text is visible to humans and spiders the same goes for possible cloaking or ’sneaky java’ snippets

Learn more about SEO from the following resources:

For Vbulletin: VbulletinSetup For Wordpress: SEOForWordpress Everything Else: Check out the site next to my name if you wish

Of course this isnt a fully detailed guide and just a basic checklist, theres more to SEO than making sure all your pages are only so many levels deep or tweaking your meta-tags till you think you have them perfect. SEO can be an enjoyable experience, finding creative ways to gain backlinks and getting ideas to improve your brand reputation.

Glen Allsopp (ViperChill)

Believe it or not, I honestly dont think there is enough SEO (Search Engine Optimization) information on the web. Why? OK, say I said to you ‘You have no idea what SEO is but you can use any site you know about to learn it’…where would you go?

If you cant think of a few great resources pretty much instantly then you have to join me in thinking more SEO information is required. What are the current great SEO Resources?

• SEOmoz Beginners Guide
• SEO Blogs (Aaron Wall, JimBoykin, Oilman, Matt Cutts)
• General Article Websites
• SEO Book ($89)

Of course there are other places and resources you may have thought about, but in essence,

Hello everyone my name is Sohaib Thiab and this is my 1st blog post here, its my pleasure to be a part of the EF blogging team!

If you’r into web development , you’ve probably heard of AJAX by now and know what benifits it has, so I am not going to go through defining AJAX and the cool featrures it has that we’ve all seen applied in Google Maps for example, if you need to know what AJAX is click here.

As great as AJAX is, it has some seriuos implications on search engine spiders and their abitliy to index your content, as you probably know, search engine spiders follow links on your pages and index content in the destination page, follow any links there and so on, however with AJAX, there are no unique urls which is the biggest problem in optimizing a heavy AJAX based website, without unique urls, you cant optimize each page for its target keywords, modify its title tags and headers tags which are the abc’s of SEO.

Websites such as Netvibes and Pageflakes are almost impossible to SEO, but those websites have no real use of being SEO’d in my opinion, they depend on link popularity and most importantly, viral marketing, thats how netvibes got 15,000 members in the 1st day of its launch.

There are some solutiuons to make an AJAX based website more search engine friendly using mod_rewrite, which is basically by using optimized title and header tags initially, mod_rewrite will solve the issue of unique urls, however optimizing the content and title/header tags in other pages is another issue that cant be fixed. At least to my knowledge.

In conclusion, if your planning to start a new website, my advise is not to use a a fully AJAX based website unless its a unique idea that will go viral, otherwise use some AJAX boxes here and there but never develop the whole frontend with AJAX. Again, don’t do this only if your depending on search engine traffic, if your planning on word of mouth, banners ads or PPC, by all means go ahead and use AJAX everywhere you want. Its also a good idea to get high quality links pointing to your AJAX website with your main keywords in anchor text, of course thats a good idea with non-ajax based websites as well