I’ve worked on so many sites now in relation to SEO, page ranking, website analytics and converison rate optimization and I’ve come to the following conclusion:

SEO doesn’t actually exist.

This is the following process you use (is this really SEO) ???

1. Ensure your website is technically correct;
   1. Title Tags
   2. Meta Tags
   3. Page structure + copy
   4. Site hierarchy
2. Clever link building with appropriate keyword research

I mean seriously - this isn’t search engine optimisation.

Its basic webmaster techniques (technicalities) and simple marketing (what will potential customers be looking for?).

I’m sure you have all seen screenshots where adsense earnings have topped $1,000,000 or seen some other form of “earnings” where these earnings” are just out of this world.  Most of these are probably altered in one way or another - they did this by using the javascript browser hack.

By putting a simple line of javascript into the URL bar once you are on a page of your choice you can edit the content in any way you wish - in designer mode.  Now you can fake your “earnings”.

javascript:document.body.contentEditable=’true’; document.designMode=’on’; void 0

Try it yourself

photo credit: Nikolay Bachiyski

An honest opinion? Wordpress.org.

Wordpress.com has various pro’s and con’s of which will be covered in this post. Many of the negatives of wordpress.com do not exist when you choose wordpress.org as your solution.

In a nutshell, wordpress.com is a hosted solution wheras wordpress.org is a blog you own, you install and you run on your own hosting.

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photo credit: Matthew Oliphant

Its been said many times on this blog to try and at least blog once a day. Why? It drives traffic. People like new content to read, search engines like to index new content. OK - lets be realistic, if you run your blog as a hobby sometimes you cant make a post every day, then that leads to another day, then another and you end up not blogging for a month *cough* not guilty *cough*.

If you get a fantastic idea in your head you want to share - you do actually go home after work at night and blog about it. Its just getting those ideas. Here are some of the ways to get ideas to write about;

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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.