*The following tip was Christine Laubenstein of WordStream*
A good way to get an edge over your industry competitors is to optimize your website for image search. Many companies focus their search engine optimization (SEO) efforts on their website copy, with little regard for the pictures. Take advantage of their inaction in this area by boosting the search engine visibility of your images, and therefore your website.
Why should you care about image search?
There are several reasons why you should want your site to rank high in image search results for your keywords.
Pagination can cause some serious indexing and ranking problems, yet it is sometimes hard (if not impossible) to avoid. For large database-driven sites and web catalogs it creates duplicate content problems (with multiple pages within one category / tag having one and the same title tags), as well content discovery issues (with the crawl not willing to go deep to the site and thus discovering product pages listed on pages 10-20 or deeper).
There's...
It may be not a frequent situation but it may happen so that you need to remove a page from Google SERPs really fast. What's the best way to do that?
Try this:
Exclude the page in Robots.txt + remove the pages using the URL removal tool in Webmaster Tools.
Return 410 status code for the page (to show the page is gone for ever);
Don't do this:
More and more people are searching for images over the Internet. This results into tons of untargeted traffic that means more spam, more pain for servers and no benefit at all.
The thing is most popular search engines (including Google) is text-based. It won't know that your image is about flowers if you call it apple.jpg, use "apple" in the alt text or just tell something about apples in the text located near the image.
Therefore there...
*The following tip was shared by Eric Gesinski from Tulsa SEO*
Editor's note: While this issue is well discussed in SEO circles, the post serves as a good reminder - don't miss it!
One element to SEO that web designers sometimes miss is a big one: canonicalization. While you may know about it, you have to realize the impact it has on SEO is a major one. This is an issue that is...
Dealing with error pages that might keep Googlebot wondering what to do (and wasting Googlebot's time is never a good idea for your site Google crawl rate) is a too often-discussed issue. That's why we return to it again and again and again trying to share some tips and clarifications.
The problem is, we can't do without them because error pages always pop up during the...
A broken link hurts both your site usability and SEO. Users feel disappointed when clicking a link to land nowhere and search engines certainly don't want them to: so if they find a lot of broken link on your pages, this may hurt your reputation.
Anyway, it is quite clear that broken links are bad. But there's hardly any website out there that has no broken links at all - because it is hard to keep...
The following tips are from Ran of Wood and Beyond
Here are my 2 tips as to how we deal with product discontinuation to preserve some SEO value and to shift authority gained from indexed products. Hopefully you'd like my tips and I suspect other e-commerce sites might benefit from them as well.
Problem:
Having products discontinue or out of stock is a real challenge for us,...
This question is being asked so often that I just decided to go ahead and write a post about that:
You notice Google report a 404 page on your site;
You go to your site and fix the error (delete the link to the non-existent page or just fix the broken URL);
Your Google Webmaster Tools account is still reporting the error
Is there any way to tell Google the error is fixed?
Currently, the only question to this question...
Thinking of the URL structure of your future site is a very important step. Give it more time to make sure you plan everything ahead.
One thing to take into consideration here is whether your site URLs need an extension at the end or not (examples: .html, .php, etc).
Two contradicting points of view are based on the following:
