Finding a good SEO company can be pretty difficult, most will call you and make promises they can’t keep like they will get you on the front page of Google in a week for a term nobody will search for. There are a lot of cowboys just like any industry.
That’s why it’s good to do some research in your online marketing company.
- Ask to see success stories of recent clients.
- Take a look at the work they do, make sure you can see what you are actually paying for.
- Don’t sign up for a long term contract unless they can perform in the short term.
- Ask what they can do that other companies can’t
- Ask for face to face meetings and regular updates on targets
Lastly make sure they have good impartial reviews. Recently topseos.com did a comprehensive list of the top SEO companies in the UK. theEword was ranked 9th in the top SEO companies list which is great as it proves all the hard work is paying off.
Recently the major search engines have worked together to help fix one of the biggest problems in SEO, The canonical URL. With this quick fix all you need to do is add a tag to the <head> section of the page and search engines will use this as an anchor to index the page.
since it is still fairly new we don’t know how it will work in the long run and if there are any side effects such as the pagerank not transferring.
The new tag looks like this
<link rel="canonical" href="http://www.open-source-web.com/">
But nothing can be that easy, obviously with a large site you wouldn’t want to write that out for a million pages so here is the PHP code to make it work.
$thispage = "http://www.";
$thispage .= $_SERVER["SERVER_NAME"];
$thispage .= $_SERVER["PHP_SELF"];
if($_SERVER["QUERY_STRING"]){$thispage .= "?".$_SERVER["QUERY_STRING"];}
<link rel="canonical" href="<? echo $thispage;?>">
With a basic redesign you probably wont have this problem but if you have rebuilt a website even with the same content if the URL’s have changed this will have a huge effect on your search engine presence as you will be starting from scratch. Your links from internal pages may not work, links from external sites wont work and you will lose your pagerank (if it ever mattered anyway.)
A good way to keep your sites listing after a redevelopment is to use a redirect. If you are using an Apache server you can use the .htaccess file to redirect.
Redirect 301 /oldpage.html /newpage.html
But some times this isnt the best way if you have to redirect hundreds of pages. The alternative is to use a header redirect in PHP. Most web based languages such as ASP or RUBY will do the same thing but with different code.
<?php
header("Location: /newpage.php",TRUE,301); to newpage.php
?>
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