Yahoo Dynamic URL ReWriter »

From the Yahoo Search Blog comes the announcement of the Beta version of a pretty cool tool which will rewrite your dynamic URLs.

Login to Yahoo Site Explorer, identify all the pesky parameters (prod=1&sid=23yadh56) in your URLs and Yahoo will strip them out and spit out a spanking new URL for you. Then, you will have fewer duplicates on your site and it will be crawled faster.

Web Searcher Research From SES »

Here is an interesting highlight from Search Engine Strategies conference in San Jose, CA. Stuart McKelvey from TMP Directional Marketing gave the results of a study of how people use the search engines for local search:

• The most common activities resulting from the online search were in-store visits and contacting the business via telephone.

Meaning: People search for your web site and then contact you “offline”.

• The majority of respondents (61%) went on to make a purchase at a local store, most often by visiting the store and making an in-person purchase.

Meaning: Similar to the first one above. People check you out on the web and then decide whether or not to visit in-person.

• Additionally, nearly 8 out of 10 (79%) searchers believe that businesses that are listed at the top of the search results paid to be there.

Meaning: People are still relatively uneducated when it comes to Search Engine rankings. You do not have to pay Google to be listed #1. You just have to get some help from someone who knows how to get your web site ranking highly.

• Over 60% of these searchers believe that the top results are the most relevant to their search.

Meaning: Search Engine Optimization is really vital to the success of your online business. Don’t fall for someone promising a specific ranking or someone with no “live” results to show you. Make an educated decision.

Check out SEO Roundtable for more SES news.

Top-Ten Placement On Google, Yahoo and MSN »

Have you ever seen an Search Engine Optimization firm advertising an irresistible offer like that? Chances are, you have. In fact, if you subscribe to WebPro News eNewsletter, you receive an offer for that very thing about 314 times a month.

And you don’t have to look very hard on Google to find about 100 million companies that will make that same promise.

Unfortunately, many web site owners don’t know that joining forces with a firm making promises like that is a terrible idea. All they know is that they want their web site to show up above their competition. Small businesses seem to fall victim to that ploy most often.

A company that makes that type of promise might get your web site ranking for some obscure terms for which no one on the planet is searching and, therefore, the competition for those terms is basically nil. Or they might get your site ranking for some more competitive terms by using what are called “black-hat techniques”. Those spammy techniques can get you great rankings for a month or two – until the Search Engine catches on. Then, your site begins to drop like a stone or it gets banned from the index altogether.

In the end, there are no such things as guaranteed top-ten placements. Good Search Engine optimization (SEO) is a marathon, not a sprint. A good SEO firm knows how to position your web site, but it is the Search Engines themselves that make the final decision as to exactly where you are placed.

Make no mistake, some SEO firms are certainly better than others and making the wrong decision can cost you hundreds or thousands of dollars. However, make your decision based on, among other things, the live results that they can show you, not on a promise of top-ten results.

If a firm could guarantee, I mean really guarantee a specific spot on the Search Engine indexes, they certainly would not have to advertise because they would have more business than they could handle.

For more tips on selecting an SEO firm, check out Mark’s article on Search Engine Watch. If you want, let us complete a thorough survey of your web site and present you with a comprehensive report of our findings and how to make improvements.

Few Days of Web Server Issues »

Ok, after a few days of Web server issues, I think the blog is back up and running. It was totally my fault and this problem illustrates the importance of getting your .htaccess file correct.

If you are not a web developer OR you are not concerned with your web site’s search engine rankings, you will probably enjoy the rest of this post about as much as watching grass grow.

When I first noticed the server problems, I was as confused as Paris Hilton in a 4th grade math class. “What is going on”, I wondered (sidenote – those were not my exact words. As Mark Twain said, “Under certain trying circumstances, profanity provides a relief denied even to prayer”).

So, being a card carrying member of the tin foil hat club, I naturally feared the worst. I checked all the usual suspects responsible for sites crashing – hackers, a sudden onslaught of traffic (aka DOS), etc. Nope, nothing so sinister as that.

Then, it hit me like a visit from my inlaws. I remembered that I recently did some URL rewriting through the wonderful .htaccess file. Basically, I was using Redirect 301 to redirect old URLs to the new ones. Like a doofus, I created the .htaccess file, uploaded it and then left town for a few days without checking to make sure all was well with what I had just done.

So, I quickly checked the .htaccess file line-by-line. Bingo – I had written ONE LINE incorrectly. In fact, ONE component of that one line was out of place. Here is what I had written:
Redirect /blog/2007/02/clear-your-web-browser-cache/ 301 http://crystalcoasttech.com/blog/clear-your-web-browser-cache/

However, it should have been written like this:
Redirect 301 /blog/2007/02/clear-your-web-browser-cache/ http://crystalcoasttech.com/blog/clear-your-web-browser-cache/
Notice the placement of “301” in both examples. D’oh. Something so small as that and yet it brought the entire blog to a screeching halt. Let this be a lesson:

1. Make sure to write your code in the correct format.
2. After you upload new code to your site, make sure you check everything for errors.

If I would have followed either one of those rules, I would not have had these problems. One of the main purposes of using a .htaccess file is to help preserve search engine rankings. However, by not having my .htaccess file written correctly, I actually did more harm than good.

EDIT 8/10/07 – I really do know how to write .htaccess files. I started each line with “Redirect 301″ and then I was pasting the URL to be redirected. The problem was that I accidentally pasted the URL between “Redirect” and “301″. D’oh.

Google “unavailable_after” Tag »

Last week I mentioned that Google was putting the finishing touches on its latest META tag – unavailable_after. Now, it is officially ready for use, according to Dan Crow on the official Google Blog.

If you have a temporary page that you will eventually want to drop out of Google’s Index, this is the tag for you. For example, if you want Googlebot to stop crawling / indexing a specific page after August 31, 2007 at 1:00 p.m. Easter Standard Time, here is the syntax for the “unavailable_after” META tag:

Once Googlebot comes across that code, that particular page should drop out of the Google index about a day later. Perfect for pages that are advertising limited time offers on your web site.