Blog Category: SEO and PPC

Here’s a great tip for viewing what’s in Google’s index:

site:yourwebsite.com

Here are some varations:

site:yourwebsite.com word
This returns all pages that have “word” on them.
Example: “site:aldebaranwebdesign.com jill” will show all the pages on my site that are in Google’s index that contain the word “jill”.

site:yourwebsite.com inurl:word
This returns all pages that have “word” in the URL of the page.

site:yourwebsite.com -inurl:word
This returns all indexed pages except where “word” is part of the page’s URL.
Example: “site:aldebaranwebdesign.com -inurl:blog” will show all the pages on my site that don’t contain the word “blog” in the path.

It’s good for search engines, like Google, to only have one version of your website indexed. To Google, the www.yourdomain.com and yourdomain.com are not the same. You can use this code on Apache servers inside a .htaccess file. It’s worked for me on several different hosting companies.

To redirect to without www version:

RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^www.yourdomain\.com
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://yourdomain.com/$1 [R=permanent,L]

To redirect to the www version:

RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^yourdomain\.com
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.yourdomain.com/$1 [R=permanent,L]

When starting a web design, clients often need to select a domain name, and one of the debates that happens is whether to go for branding, or for a keyword-rich domain. Here’s Matt Cutts from Google weighing in on this topic, albeit from 2011.

A potential client who is a golf teacher asked me to review her existing website. It got me to wondering about whether adding an “s” to lesson would bring in more traffic – do people search for “golf lesson” or “golf lessons”? Here’s the answer.

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You’re a small business owner and you are developing a new website. How do you know what the best keywords are to select? There are many tools web designers can use to calculate the number of searches and assess the competition for particular keywords. Here’s a very fast, free Google tool you can use to check out the potential search traffic for different sets of keywords by region.

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I often recommend adding a blog to my small business clients’ websites – and I do this to improve their website traffic and search engine rankings. How can adding a blog accomplish these goals?

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I recently had a client who had her website that was under development reviewed by another web design firm, and one of their suggestions was to change all the text navigation links from text to images. Is this a good idea?

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I’ve had several clients ask me this, because either they’ve noticed it on other people’s websites or had some SEO person tell them this – that they need a keyword meta tag.

Google has not (for many years) used this meta tag, and therefore, it’s simply a waste of time to put them in a website. If you don’t believe me, listen to this video from Matt Cutts from Google: Read the rest of this entry »

Really. Eric Schmidt, Google Inc’s Executive Charmain told Boston University Students to:

Take your eyes off that screen and look into the eyes of the person you love. Have a conversation, a real conversation.

Read the full article on Huff Post. How do you folks feel about this sentiment coming from Google. It made me raise one eyebrow.

I’ve been updating my business address on local search, and was having trouble getting it done on CitySearch. This article covers the different things I did to have it updated.

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