Technical issues are often taken for granted when people are devising their SEO plans. These technical issues can make or break your SEO plans so you should pay attention to them.
Yea I know you aren’t a technical person but you don’t need to be. Here are some easy ways any non-tech person can make sure their technical seo issues are taken care of by simply using notepad and text files.
.htaccess file
Love .htaccess files, don’t fear them. They can help you do really cool stuff. .htaccess files are text files that simply have a weird filename of “.htaccess”. I don’t know why they have no characters to the left of the (.) but they don’t. I do know my desktop computer doesn’t like naming files that way so I name them 1.htaccess and then use my ftp program to rename them “.htaccess” once I have uploaded the file.
#1 – Deal with Canonical issues (non www. auto redirect into www.)
It generally is best to only have all of your pages appear on your site with www. or without www. in the url. This will avoid duplicate content issues. Honestly I think accidental duplicate content on your own site is generally not a big concern. I do worry alot about difussing my link popularity. Link popularity is vital to search engine rankings. I want all my links pointing to one version and not to have the value divided across two version (non www. and www). If you want your content to always automatically redirect to the www. version simply add this and of course change the domain to your own.
~~~~copy below this line~~~
RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^yourwebsite\.com [nc]
RewriteRule (.*) http://www.yourwebsite.com/$1 [R=301,L]
~~~~stop copying~~~
#2 – 301 & 302 Redirects (automatically move visitors to where you want them)
Do you have a ton of backlinks pointing to a page that you deleted? You don’t need to lose that link popularity. Simply use a 301 redirect to have your web hosting computer automatically redirect your visitors browsers to the new location. 301 redirect are called permanent redirect and the search engines will transfer the link popularity. 302 redirects are for temporary redirects and will not have the same link popularity benefits. In other words use 301 and avoid 302 if you want link popularity. To add a 301 redirect just add this code to the .htaccess text file.
~~~~copy below this line~~~
redirect 301 /oldlocation http://www.newlocation.com/page1.html
redirect 301 /oldlocation2 http://www.newlocation.com/page2.html
redirect 301 /oldlocation3 http://www.newlocation.com/page3.html
~~~~stop copying~~~
Robots.txt File
This is a text file that actually uses the .txt file extenstion. Oh my how refreshing! You are so gonna rock this
#1 – Keep it simple whenever possible
You don’t even need a robots.txt file. If you don’t have one the search engines won’t be blocked from any of your content. I would suggest you at least upload a blank robots.txt file just to avoid having a ton of 404 file not found errors. You can do alot of cool things with robots.txt but many of those cool things are not officially part of the robots.txt protocol and thus will not be supported by all search engines. The most common cool thing is the wildcard feature. Using wildcards aka pattern matching in your robots.txt allows you to block files that containing a matching string of text. Google, Bing and Yahoo support it but many smaller bots don’t support it.
#2 – Touch it once, verify it twice
If you are gonna try to do anything fancy or for that matter anytime you upload a robots.txt VERIFY IT. Google has a free robots.txt validator that you can use in their webmaster central area. I can’t count how many times people have uploaded an untested robots.txt that had a typo which prevented the search engines from crawling their site and thus prevented their site from ranking in the search engine results. Don’t be lazy, be careful and always test your robots.txt after every time you touch it.
Log File
#1 – Make sure every domain is maintaining a log file of all activity.
Some cheaper hosts do not automatically turn this on. If you do not see a log file (it is basically just a text file) then ask your host to make sure it is on. I would recommend you have your log file save as much information as possible. I would strongly suggest you archive them. In case you ever have a really big SEO issue your log file will be able to provide great clues and insights that may help to solve the issue. You may not be able to make sense of all the data in the log file but you can send the file to an expert who will be able to analyze it for you. If you have no log file you have nothing to give to the expert.
#2 – Non-tech people may be scared when dealing with log files. Relax, its just a text file.
I’m sure you have used notepad before. Take a deep breath and start feeling confident because you should feel confident with dealing with a simple text file. Using notepad (or whatever program you prefer) search the log file for “301” redirects by simply searching for the number 301 (i told you it would be easy). Make sure you don’t have a 301 pointing to another 301, that just aint good for your link juice. Also search for “302” redirects and strongly consider switching them to 301 redirects. Search for 404 file not found errors. Those 404 errors could be leaking link juice so either upload the missing file or turn it into a 301 redirect.
Technical SEO is only intimidating if you let it be. Be confident and go do some great techincal SEO with your notepad program. This will help you to better understand the situation when you need to deal with the more serious technical issues that do require a Phd. If you ever find yourself in that position go ask Vanessa to help point you in the right direction.