I will try to explain the 301 redirection using an example. I had a a url as follows

http://www.referencedesigner.com/rfcal/cal_03.php

Obviously the url is not SEO friendly. I wanted to make it SEO friendly for the term vrms. The following url seemed to me a bit more SEO friendly

http://www.referencedesigner.com/rfcal/vrm-to-vpeak-conversion.php

I wanted to mention that at the time of writing, the search term vrms result in position 3 for this url. I am not sure if renaming the url and using the 301 redirect is going to improve the search ranking, but it is not bad to try.

So here is the change what I did in the file called

http://www.referencedesigner.com/rfcal/cal_03.php

I added the following code at the top of it.
<?
Header( “HTTP/1.1 301 Moved Permanently” );
Header( “Location: http://www.referencedesigner.com/rfcal/vrms-to-vpeak-conversion.php” );
?>

I let the code below it as it is, although I think it could be removed without any loss.  Then I copied the original  cal_03.php file to another file called vrms-to-vpeak-conversion.php. That is it. When I am searching for the vrms term the google search is still showing the
http://www.referencedesigner.com/rfcal/cal_03.php in its search result. I expect that to change to http://www.referencedesigner.com/rfcal/vrms-to-vpeak-conversion.php over period of time. I also expect to improve my search position. Am I expecting too much ?

In my link building article a list of 16 blogging sites were indicated where anyone could write blogs. In this article, the list is extended to include 12 more blogging sites. This makes it to a total of 28 blogging sites. A note – Once you create blogs in these sites it is recommended that you create backlinks of these sites in the bookmarking or other places to get better results. There are other ways of creating the links but this will be covered in other topic.

http://www.webs.com/

http://doodlekit.com

http://www.webspawner.com/

http://www.webjam.com/

http://www.webnode.com/

http://www.yola.com/

http://myfirstblog.net

http://quizilla.com

http://www.gather.com/

http://www.tumblr.com/

http://www.ning.com/

http://blog.com/

http://referencedesigner.com/blog/id?=715

we may like the url to be

http://referencedesigner.com/blog/seo-url-dashes-vs-underscore.

Sometimes people design their website, so that they write the url with underscore in place of dashes as in

http://referencedesigner.com/blog/seo_url_dashes_vs_underscore.

One must note that google processes underscore in a different way than the dashes. In case of undersore, it thinks that the underscore is a part of the url. So when we write c_sharp, it attempts to gives preference to search for c_sharp and possibly less importance to csharp or c sharp. In case, where the url is c-sharp, google gives preference to search for “c sharp”.

It is therefore recommended that dashes are preferred over the underscore wherever possible when creating SEO friendly urls.

The Fujitsu Lifebook MH380 Netbookis powered by Atom N270-based Amilo Mini Ui 3520.  The MH380 has a 10.1-inch, 1366 x 768 display, a 250GB capacity hard-drive and 1GB of memory. It also has Intel’s newest Pine Trail 1.66GHz processor.

The 2.97lb netbook manages manage up to 7hrs of runtime with its 6-cell battery – which is impressive. The Fujitsu have made both WiFi b/g/n and Bluetooth standard as part of the netbook.

The operating system is  Windows 7 Starter. The netbook has a webcam and includes VGA, USB 2.0 and audio in/out. Fujitsu plans to start selling  LifeBook MH380 from January, priced at around $449.

I hope readers who arrived here with the intention of finding Fujitsu Lifebook MH380 Netbook review are not disppointed. Now here is the main reason I wrote this blog. I am writing another identical blog Fujitsu Lifebook MH380 Netbook review SEO Experiment # 1. The two blogs are identical as far as the contents are concerned. The backlinks of both the blogs will be created in an identical way. The first Experiment that I want to conduct is to see what is the effect of the duplicate content on the Search Engine Result Page ( SERP). Do both of them come to top ? Does only one come to top and second one is completely neglected.

The coming days will verify this and I will write a separate blog about the results. Stay tuned.

I am writing this bolg with two purpose. The first purpose is to write a review about the Fujitsu Lifebook MH380 Netbook. This purpose is not the main purpose. I am writing the review with the aim of optimizing the webpage for the keyword “Fujitsu Lifebook MH380 Netbook”. The reason I chose this keyword is that it gives only about 17,000 webpages and should relatively be easy to come to the top of the google.

The Fujitsu Lifebook MH380 Netbookis powered by Atom N270-based Amilo Mini Ui 3520.  The MH380 has a 10.1-inch, 1366 x 768 display, a 250GB capacity hard-drive and 1GB of memory. It also has Intel’s newest Pine Trail 1.66GHz processor.

The 2.97lb netbook manages manage up to 7hrs of runtime with its 6-cell battery – which is impressive. The Fujitsu have made both WiFi b/g/n and Bluetooth standard as part of the netbook.

The operating system is  Windows 7 Starter. The netbook has a webcam and includes VGA, USB 2.0 and audio in/out. Fujitsu plans to start selling  LifeBook MH380 from January, priced at around $449.

I hope readers who arrived here with the intention of finding Fujitsu Lifebook MH380 Netbook review are not disppointed. Now here is the main reason I wrote this blog. I am writing another identical blog Fujitsu Lifebook MH380 Netbook review SEO Experiment # 2. The two blogs are identical as far as the contents are concerned. The backlinks of both the blogs will be created in an identical way. The first Experiment that I want to conduct is to see what is the effect of the duplicate content on the Search Engine Result Page ( SERP). Do both of them come to top ? Does only one come to top and second one is completely neglected.

The coming days will verify this and I will write a separate blog about the results. Stay tuned.

Here is a simple method to generate and submit your sitemap to google.

http://www.ezdia.com/expert/vikasshukla

http://www.ezdia.com/expert/alokjain

It however, turns out that the keywords A and B are not equally easy to be optimized. As an example it turns out that the Keyword A results in 2,00,000 results in google while keyword B results in just 120,000 results ? Obviously Keyword B is much more easier to be optimized since the number of search results  are far less. We stay content with just 5000 search result and have it optimizes.

SEO experts use the term Keyword Effectiveness Index (KEI) to combine these two parameters. The Keyword Effectiveness Index is defined as

KEI =  (P^2/C)

where

P = Number of search volume of the Popularity of the Keyword.
C = Number of Search results or the competiveness of the Keyword.

Here P^2, means square of P.  Popularity of the Keyword is another term for the search volume. The more the people search for a keyword the more popular is the keyword and hence the name. Competitiveness is another term for the number of search result. The more is the number of the search result, the more competitive is the keyword.

Next time you need to decide which keyword should be used to optimize the webpage for, you should calculate the KEI for all possible keywords and choose the one that has the highest v alue.

You may also like to check List of 50 social bookmarking sites

You have a portal that you had developed a while ago. When your portal was designed, you did not know about Search Engine pPtimization. The pages of your portal looked like

http://www.referencedesigner.com/cat.php?i=3&page=2

http://www.referencedesigner.com/cat.php?i=3&page=3

This obviously is not a user friendly url. The url forms one of the most basic parameter for the page to be optimized. You will rather like the pages to contain the keywords that represents the content of the pages. If your portal is still at the beginning stage, try to see if you can modify your url so that it represents a SEO friendly url.

What if your portal has hundreds or thousands of pages already there and it is not possible for you to make changes.

The Solution

Fortunately .htaccess and the rewrite rules and solve your problem is many situations – or you may like to give it a try.

The .htaccess file is a special file that enables you to control how your hosts server deals with your website and webpages. .htaccess is used for several kind of redirection, including 404 page redirection and 301 redirection. Before you start making changes to .htaccess, make yourself known to facts about .htaccess. Errors in .htaccess files can be lead to serious issues.

The .htaccess file is sometimes not visible from your FTP program. So you may like to use your host’s cpanel to see this file, access it and modify it.

Here is an example of how .htaccess file can be used to change the url.

url that needs to be forwarded

http://www.referencedesigner.com/stories/3/Barak-Obama-New-President/2.html

The url to which the contents are sourced

http://www.referencedesigner.com/story.php?id=3

Here is a typical Rewrite Rule that will accomplish this task.

RewriteRule ^stories/([0-9]+)/[a-z0-9_-]*\.html$ /story.php?id=$1 [QSA,L,NC]

Note that this will also require changes in the website. Often a little bit of tweek here and there serves the purpose. But you may have to take the help of a specialist SEO cum developer to achieve the result.

.htaccess is a powerful tool. If you care about the SEO and redirections in your website, you must know how to use it.

Google always check if the content on your webites is a copy of some other content. If it is, it penalises the website. The website that is penalised is the one that is indexed later. Once penalised it will be difficult to bring the website on the top of the search engine.

Use Copyscape

If you are using a content writer to write content for your website, always check copyscape to ensure that the contents are original and the sentences are not copied from somewhere else. As an added precaution, make some editing changes here and there after you receive the contents from a content writer.

Implication on changing the website url

Many times website owners are told that their urls are not user friendly. So an earlier url that was something like

http://yourdomain.com/profile/profileid?=1000000234

is changed to

http://yourdomain.com/profile/vikasshukla

Now, the content of the two links are same. The content of the url http://yourdomain.com/profile/vikasshukla is same as the content of the url http://yourdomain.com/profile/profileid?=1000000234. Since the url http://yourdomain.com/profile/vikasshukla was created later, google may think that this is a copy paste of an original content and may penalise this link. Google then penalises the web page that was created later on. In other words, we loose the advantage of making the url SEO friendly.

What should you do

You must involve an SEO expert at the begining of the architecture of a website design. Changing the url for making the SEO frienly may not be best option. This highlights just one of the several aspects of the making a website SEO friendly.

Vikas Shukla is the lead architect of Hardware Design at BL Healthcare. He also provides consultancy for SEO and social media marketing.