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Most search marketing experts are full of advice for folks who are struggling with weird looking URLs that search engine spiders really don't like. I should know, because I have always been loaded with that kind of advice, too.

I mean, here is an actual URL I saw on the Web site for Sears a few years ago:

http://www.sears.com/sr/javasr/dpp.do?vertical=Buying %20Guides&cat=Televisions&BV_UseBVCookie=Yes&splash=true&n-state=http://www.live.bguides.webcollage.net/_wc/televisions_1.html~~~G!0B6765CD4C51!XRHzYAguDp1SwH5C~~~~@http://guides.sears.com/server/sears/bguides-televisions-showcase

You can't make this stuff up.

Now, not only is that a URL that only a dynamic Commerce engine could love, but it's one that both search engines and normal people avoid. Spiders probably won't index it and other sites won't link to it.

So what do you do if you have funny URLs? Not necessarily THAT funny, but you have a few dynamic parameters dribbling off the end of your URL, with question marks and equal signs and other weird-looking stuff?

There are some standard things that people (yeah, people like me) advise:

• URL Rewrite. Depending on how you serve up your pages, your Web server probably has some way to rewrite those URLs from something crazy to something intelligent.
• Redirects. Sometimes, you can change odd URLs (such as those with metrics parameters dumped at the end) so that many weird-looking URLs reolve to one URL. Just be sure to use 301 redirects instead of other methods, or the search spiders will ignore your instructions.

But suppose that stuff is beyond you? Or you don't even have access to your dynamic Commerce server? Or your shared hosting plan doesn't allow you to do redirects the required way?

That would probably mark you as a normal person who does not beep when you talk. Is there anything that you are allowed to do that you actually have a possibility of being able to do?

Well, you actually have an option in some of these cases. If you have several weird URLs that you are trying to map to a single URL (such as those pesky metrics tags at the end of what is basically the same page), check out the <canonical> tag. The search engines all pay attention to it now and if you can code HTML tags, this should be something you can do.

But there is a bigger lesson here. Just because you can't personally do something doesn't mean it can't be done. If your host or your Web server doesn't allow you to do these things, then complain to them and think about switching to someone new, if that is possible. If you are simply incapable of doing this stuff (I understand), get help from someone who knows how.

Weird URLs seem like a nit in search marketing, but they can have serious consequences. If your URLs are the size of a small Latin American country, you need to do something.

Check out our small business news site.

Google is today rolling out a key upgrade to the algorithm powering its search engine which is based on "Australian-made" technology originally developed by a PhD student at the University of New South Wales.

[From Google search gets Aussie algorithm update - BizTech - Technology]

Tags: SEOTools, article software, seo,

Redirect Checker

Tags: 301redirect, redirect scripts

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Tags: google, image search,

People often ask me where is the best place to gather your keyword lists. It depends on what you are trying to achieve. If you are building a list for your SEO strategy you don’t need a list of hundreds of keywords. If your building a list for your Pay Per Click campaigns and wanting to target thousands of keywords then something www.wordtraker.com or www.keyworddiscovery.com may do the trick. You can also use a program like Keyword Elite  which is fine for small projects. When building a list for SEO i believe that the best source of keywords is Google. As you re most likely optimising for Google anyway what better source is there? For a site that already exists this is easier than If are starting from scratch and if you already run a Google ad-words campaign and track the results with analytics it become evan easier as you will probably already have enough data to pick your keyword list. If your site is brand new and you don’t have an Google Adwords account should should sign up to adwords to get access to the google adwords tool or use something like Keyword Elite.

From Google Ad-words you can run a keyword report on all your keywords to date. Make sure you set the time frame to “all time”. You can then download the file as a .csv or in an xsl format. Don’t worry if your keyword list is not that comprehensive as we will build it out later.

From the list rank each of the words from one to three based on which of the terms are most relevant to your site. You may also want to pay close attention to the CTR (ad impressions to clicks %) as the higher clicked through keywords will generally be the words that users find more relevant to your website which is very useful information. You can also take a look in analytics at that keywords and see how long visits where for that keyword. Normally the longer the visit the more relevant the user found the keyword to your site. If you have goals or events set up in analytics take a look at which keywords result in goals.

If you think your list is light on take the top keywords you ranked at 1 and 2 and feed them in the the google keyword tool in ad-words. Once you have more keywords download them into a spread sheet and repeat the ranking process. Note that google will also give you the search traffic for each keyword. Although the don’t give you exact search numbers they are still very useful when selecting your keywords.

Now you have a basic keyword list in the next blog we will take a look at how to implement them to your site.

"Website Design Melbourne, Web Site Development, Web Sites, eCommerce Shopping Carts, CMS, SEO, PPC, SEM"

Every second web designer claims to be an SEO specialist these days but often thats how there page titles are written. Anyone that has a page title like this knows very little about SEO and if you hired them for SEO your wasting your money.

Firstly its spam. Secondly it does not invite me to click on the link. This may have worked in 2001 but not now. Google is so much smarter than it used to be and this kind of page title would set off all sorts of spam filters.

Its not that hard to make page titles with keywords that humans will click on. Your page title needs to make a brief statement about what the page offers (with well thought keywords of course). Done right, this will not only help towards getting the page ranked but also ensure that humans are more likely to click on the listing.

You would probably go for something like this in as a page title instead of the above.

"Melbourne Website Design – Specialists in Web Development, eCommerce & Content Management Systems."

Google will only display the first 7 or so words in its search results anyway so you need to ensure that you message gets across in the first part of the sentence.

If you really want to target all those terms you will need to break that title up into 4 or 5 new pages and have a descent internal linking strategy to ensure that the related pages are linked to each other properly. The more relevant pages in your website the better off you are in terms of search engine optimisation. 

With plenty of research i think i have nailed the formula to getting the links under your site listing as i have now achieved this for 6 very competitive keywords that i have optimised for. Its not easy and it will take time but it can be done.