photo credit: meneame comunicacions, sl

A largely missed concept with webmasters is how to use 301 redirects.   They are the only safe SEO redirect.

With regards to SEO and the duplicate content penalty, you should redirect all non www requests on your domain to www unless there is a special case where this is required for site functionality.   This means…

http://tdcreative.net is 301′ed to http://www.tdcreative.net
http://tdcreative.net/my-post is 301′ed to http://www.tdcreative.net/my-post

Any person involved with SEO should know this and it can be achieved with a few lines of .htaccess code placed in the public root of your FTP, sometimes public_html or httpdocs.  An example….

Options +FollowSymlinks
RewriteEngine on
rewritecond %{http_host} ^your-domain.com [nc]
rewriterule ^(.*)$ http://www.your-domain.com/$1 [r=301,nc]

Simply add this code to the top of your .htaccess file.

Very simple, very effective.

This is a post expanding on the backend / developer site structure.

Is it perhaps the most important thing of a site. It aids the following factors;

1. User navigation
2. SEO factors
3. Search engine indexing
4. Useability
5. Conversions

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Across my sites, I try to use a common file structure. I even make sure that applications I decide to install or use use this file structure to some extent and if they dont use it, I dont use that application and write my own or find another. Simple.

photo credit: totalAldo

A common site structure is necassary in terms of the site shell and the generated content the site produces (HTML/CSS/JS etc…).

In terms of a site structure, here is one that I tend to try to find and use from a developers point of view. A site structure like the one listed below will help to maintain the site, address problems and ensure that each site component is individual from another.

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Here is a quick tip.

When you are developing a new website, think about howyou will track the site.  Thinking ahead is the key to a succesfull website.  If you can track a website properley and see how visitors behave, then you can fix these problems and make your website work better.

Here is an example of tracking tips

• Make a thankyou page where you can see how many times it has been hit through a funnel of pages you have setup.
• Make your site easy to make sitewide changes including any javascript tracking code.
• Setup referrer tags to track exactly where users come from on the site.

If you have any more quick tips, feel free to post them here and share them with others.

photo credit: vrypan

The number of sites now running Google Analytics is now insanely large…yet I have seen so many which forget a simply privacy policy notice which is noted in the Google Analytics terms of service.

Every website should have the following notice on their website in a prominent place if you are using Google Analytics.

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