Flex 3 Blog | SEO | PHP

I had alittle problem… Our corporate blog was originally setup on TypePad.com. While this is fine I guess for most people, we wanted to leverage this blog’s SEO coolness (Parker Lewis Can’t Lose Anyone?) and apply it to our main website. In order to do this, we needed to have the blog on our main domain. (smartmarketingnow.com/blog) Simply moving the blog wouldn’t keep the link juice going through. We would have had to start over building inbound links to the new blog address. This simply wasn’t an option I wanted to pursue. While searching for the answer to this problem I came across many others also wishing to know if this was possible. So here ya go, without further delay,

How to move your TypePad blog to another location and keep your link juice:

The key to this is using a META Refresh inside your TypePad posts. In TypePad you have the option of adding in HTML code. Now, usually you don’t want to add this redirect to the post introduction. The best place is the post body which only should show up on it’s individual page, pointing to your new page.

So, you’re probably asking, WTF would a META Refresh help me do anything? Good question!

Here’s why:
Google and Yahoo accept undelayed meta refreshs as 301 redirects

So, we set our META Refresh to a 0 delay and eventually Yahoo & Google should pickup on this when they re-index you. The code I used in my TypePad posts looked like:

<meta content=”0;url=http://www.smartmarketingnow.com/blog/” http-equiv=”refresh” />

Of course change the URL to match the exact post you are editing. You don’t want to redirect all your posts to the main page of your blog. Redirect them to the new page that represents the same/very similar content. At this time I am still waiting on Google to update our index entries to reflect these changes. I will let you know if I need to make any changes.

I stumbled upon SocialMarker.com yesterday. This tool is pretty sweet. You can submit your news/blog articles to tons of social networking sites. It opens each page one at a time in an IFRAME. They give you global navigation at the top which allows you to quickly go back and forth between the different sites with ease. I would highly recommend you check it out if you’re trying to get indexed or build your inbound links.

1. Internal Deep Linking

• 

  The WikiPedia definition is: “Deep linking, on the World Wide Web, is making a hyperlink that points to a specific page or image on another website, instead of that website’s main or home page. Such links are called deep links.”

  Now the deep linking we are talking about is the linking you can control. The links that reside on your pages, that point to other pages on that same website. For example, on our corporate site, www.smartmarketingnow.com, we see the following sentence at the bottom of the homepage:

  

  
  “But there are effective ways to market your legal and financial services — ways that are driven by the key elements of the real buying process.”
  

  Here we have created a link points to our “services” page. This is a good strategy for building page importance with the search engines. Not only are you telling the search engines which pages you think are most important, you are also building your link count.

  There is an additional benefit you can capitalize on in certain circumstances, which is:

2. Optimizing Link Text

• In our example above, the link text has been optimized in this sentence for our business (Law Firm Marketing). If our sentence looked like this instead:

  

  
  “But there are effective ways to market your legal and financial services — ways that are driven by the key elements of the real buying process.”
  

  We would be telling search engines, to associate our “services” page with the words: ways, that, are, driven. None of these words fall into our top list of SEO terms we optimize for. Instead, we gain the associations of: legal, financial, market, services, which are right up our ally for Law Firm Marketing.

3. Use Tools

• If you are doing SEO related tasks for more than one website you can become easily overwhelmed. If you aren’t using any SEO specific tools, you should be. They will save you hours and hours of time. The tool we’ve been using around here lately is from a company called HubSpot.

  Currently unlimited access to the web-based tool is $250.00 per month, per website. It is expensive. However, for us, it’s totally worth the investment. I do hope at some point they come out with either yearly pricing options, or bulk site discounts. As it could be cost prohibitive to use across the board.

  The beautiful thing about this tool, in my opinion, is the ability to see how my biggest competitors are ranking on keywords. It’s hard to imagine, so I’m including a screen-shot I put together with a few sites.

  

  This is one of the several, very useful tools you get for your $250.00 a month.

  I’m sure there’s tons of tools out there that kick-ass, if you’ve used any you think rock, plug em in a comment.

4. Duplicate Content

• Duplicate content can cause a search engine penalty. Even internal duplicate content. Imagine this, you have three products pages. Each page has the same copy through-out, the only difference is the images of products that show up. I have to imagine, search engines see duplicate content like Andie MacDowell kept seeing Michael Keaton in Multiplicity. Annoying

  Don’t do that. That is bad. There are multiple ways around this problem. Some better than others no doubt. You could write original text for each page. This might be a real pain in the ass though, depending on how many pages you have like this. We encountered this problem recently. We had several pages with duplicate content, with only one image being different on each page. We didn’t care if Google indexed each image, as long as the first page was getting the maximum benefit from the search engines. I used Javascript in this case to swap out the images in an “onclick” event instead of having several pages, we now have one.

  A couple 301 redirects and problem fixed.

5. 301 Redirects

• 301 Redirect? What the hell is that?
  301 Redirect is a type of redirect. 301 is a permanent redirect. Basically, simplistically, search engines assign a rank of relevance towards specific pages on your website. This can happen in multiple ways. The biggest impact can be from external links to your homepage or internal pages on your website. So you might be asking, “What’s a redirect?“. Now that we understand what a redirect is and we know that a 301 redirect is permanent, you might be wondering why we would need to do this.

  Reasons for using a 301 redirect
  Reasons for using a 301 redirect include: redesigned website, changed page names or internal site structure. Lets say we are redesigning our website. We create new pages based on what our needs are for the current site. We have consolidated some pages together, and broken apart pages that used to be one page. In order to retain our search engine rankings we need to establish redirects for all the pages that no longer exist to pages that do exist. Hopefully we are also redirecting to pages that contain similar information to the page we deleted.

  Setting Up Your Redirect
  Now we should know which pages need to be redirected and where they need to be redirected to. How to configure your redirects is going to depend on your server configuration where your website is being hosted. If you’re lucky your on Apache and we can use a simple file called “.htaccess”. If your on IIS and don’t admin your own webserver that really sucks for starters. But you do have some options.

  Redirect Methods

  • .htaccess
    Create a file called “.htaccess” in your webroot that contains something like:
    redirect 301 /old_file.html http://www.somesite.com/new_file.html

    Save the file, and upload it. If you have htaccess support, when you visit, somesite.com/old_file.html your browser should automatically redirect you to: new_file.html

    Since we’re in our htaccess file already, make sure you aren’t splitting your website traffic.
    You would want to change the website I have listed here as it our site; not yours

    
    RewriteEngine on
    RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^smartmarketingnow\.com
    RewriteRule (.*) http://www.smartmarketingnow.com/$1 [R=301,L]
    

    This tells the search engines that any requests made to: http://smartmarketingnow.com should be redirected permanently to: http://www.smartmarketingnow.com. Since search engines consider each sub-domain to be unique in terms of SEO, you shouldn’t be splitting traffic between www and non-www.

  • PHP
    If you don’t have access to htaccess & the pages you deleted were PHP pages, you can use PHP to implement this redirect.

    First, create a PHP page for each file if you deleted them already. The PHP code you need to put in each page is:

    
    <?PHP
    header(”HTTP/1.1 301 Moved Permanently”);
    header(”Location: http://www.somesite.com/new_file.html”);
    exit;
    ?>
    

  • ASP
    Same process as redirecting with PHP, except the code is different of course

    
    <%@ Language=VBScript %>
    <%
    Response.Status=”301 Moved Permanently”
    Response.AddHeader “Location”, “http://www.somesite.com/new_file.asp”
    %>
    

  • JSP
    Same as before, etc..

    
    <%
    response.setContentType(”text/html”);
    response.setDateHeader(”Expires”, 0);
    response.setHeader(”Location”, “http://www.somesite.com/new_file.jsp”);
    response.setStatus(301);
    %>

  • C#
    You get the idea by now:

    
    <script runat=”server”>
    private void Page_Load(object sender, System.EventArgs e) {
       Response.Status = “301 Moved Permanently”;
       Response.AddHeader(”Location”,”http://www.somesite.com/new_file.aspx”);
    }
    </script>