For those of you out there that like to stay up-to-date on current SEO practices, I know of a few websites you might be interested in.  There are literally thousands of websites out there that claim authority on the subject, but I’ve found that most of them just repeat what they’ve heard, regardless if whether they know their advice to be true.  That being the case, I’ve narrowed my selection down to a few good sites that I recommend everyone in the SEO community read for reliable, up-to-date information on the latest and greatest in the wide world of Search Engine Optimization.  They include:

1. SEOBook Blog
2. SEOmoz Blog
3. Bluce Clay Blog
4. Search Engine Journal
5. Search Engine Watch
6. Search Engine Land
7. Matt Cutt’s Blog
8. Netmark Essentials’ Blog

We don’t use gimmicks or unscrupulous search engine spam techniques that could get your site removed and “blacklisted” from search engines. Instead we perform legitimate optimized writing and programming that meets search engine rules and makes for top search engine positioning that lasts and continues to perform well for months and, in many cases, years.
Here are some of the questions we believe you need to ask before hiring a SEO company:
•    Find out how long the SEO company has been in business (in the SEO world 3-4 years old is very old)
•    Does the SEO firm or its principals have marketing experience background?
•    Will they perform an analysis of your competition’s websites to understand why the other sites rank highly?
•    What will the SEO company base their keyword recommendations on? Keyword research is a necessity to determine relevant, targeted keywords in order for a SEO campaign to succeed.
•    What are realistic traffic expectations for your site? Obscure keyword phrases may bring top ten or #1 ranking positions but if only a trickle of people search for the term each month, it likely won’t result in increased sales.
•    Does the SEO company differentiate between “traffic” and “qualified traffic”? Bulk unqualified traffic arriving at your site for irrelevant keywords is unlikely to convert to a sale or new customer. Does the SEO firm understand what it takes to create a sales conversion? More than likely, you as a business owner knows!
•    Does the SEO company fully comply to search engine’s posted best practices and a strict no-spam policy to avoid your website being penalized, possibly indefinitely, by search engines?
•    What methods will the SEO company use to increase traffic? Will they make changes to your existing web page coding or will they just be adding or revising meta tags? Will they be performing search engine optimization copywriting and editing to add relevant keywords to your visible page text? Will they be adding new pages, or possibly redesigning your navigation to make it more search engine friendly?  Do they recommend an entire redesign when it is not necessary?
•    Does the SEO company use Latent Semantic Analysis for proper keyword placement?  Do they know the proper keyword density needed?
•    Is what the company does standard for everyone, or are certain techniques used for your specific needs? (Keep in mind that the same shoe does not fit all companies feet, so to speak)
•    How many pages will they be optimizing in your website?
•    How many people actually work at the firm? 90% of SEO firms have 4 people or under.  Are they going to have the resources, time, and man power for your campaign?
•    How much, if any, of their strategy relies on pay-per-click advertising and how much will that cost? Remember, pay-per-click is like leasing vs. buying a car. When you stop paying, the traffic stops. We sometimes recommend pay-per-click advertising for specific marketing strategies, but not for ongoing search engine visibility. Pay-per-click is not a long-term solution unless you have deep pockets. Obtaining “free” search engine positions in natural search engines, such as Google, is the preferred - and longer-term - route to more qualified traffic.
•    If the SEO company is offering high ranking guarantees - how is that possible when no-one can control or influence the search sites? Even Google’s own published guidelines states: “No one can guarantee a #1 ranking on Google. Beware of SEO’s that claim to guarantee rankings, or that claim a “special relationship” with Google, or that claim to have a “priority submit” to Google. There is no priority submit for Google.”
•    How will your website traffic be monitored and measured? What type of reports will you get and how often will you receive them?
If you can feel good about all of the answers to these questions about your SEO firm, you have probably made a good decision.  Why wouldn’t you hire an SEO firm that is willing to go the extra mile to follow strict standards to make sure you see success?

A 301 canonical redirect is a way to get all of the web pages on a site to point to a certain address. For instance, if you wanted all of your non www-prefix pages going to pages with a www prefix, you would use a 301 canonical redirect.  A more concrete example would be taking the page http://something.com and redirecting it to http://www.something.com. This is the 301 redirect part. Canonicalization allows all pages to point to other sites. For instance, a 301 canonical redirect could point all pages with the format http://something.com/morestuff to http://www.something.com/morestuff.

So why would anyone want to do this? From an SEO perspective, this is a very important optimization technique. Search engines don’t look at non-www prefix websites and their corresponding www-prefix sites as the same. If people place links to each of these URLs then you are in essence building a link campaign for different URLs. 301 redirects centralize these pages and allow all link juice to go to a central page.

There are various techniques to achieving a 301 redirect depending on the type of website or the server the website is on. If the website is hosted on an Apache server, one needs to access a file called .htaccess and modify with the following code:

RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !^www\.example\.com$
RewriteRule (.*) http://www.example.com/$1 [R=301,L]

In most cases this will work. It will not work on a website hosted on an IIS (Microsoft) server, however. If this is the case, one can add the following javascript code to the global header or footer to achieve the same effect:

<script type=”text/javascript”>
var pathd=”http://www.moorenonprofitlaw.org”+location.pathname+location.search;
if (location.hostname.substring(0,3) != ‘www’)
window.location.href=pathd;

But be forewarned. Some search engines such as Google do not understand Javascript and will therefore  not help you with you SEO efforts. According to Google Webmaster Help:

“When a redirect link is embedded in Javascript, the search engine indexes the original page rather than following the link, whereas users are taken to the redirect target. Like cloaking, this practice is deceptive because it displays different content to users and to Googlebot…”

If you page is an ASP page, you can use the following redirect code:
<%
If InStr(Request.ServerVariables(”SERVER_NAME”),”www”) = 0 Then
Response.Status=”301 Moved Permanently”
Response.AddHeader “Location”,”http://www.”& Request.ServerVariables(”HTTP_HOST”) & Request.ServerVariables(”REQUEST_URI”)
Response.End
End if
%>

Or the following if it is an ASP.NET page (I’ve found that the redirect only works if interested right after an <html> tag):

<script runat=”server”>
protected void Application_BeginRequest(Object sender, EventArgs e)
{
HttpApplication app = sender as HttpApplication;
string domainName = “example.com”;

if (app != null)
{
string host = app.Request.Url.Host.ToLower();
string requestUrl = app.Request.Url.PathAndQuery;

if (String.Equals(host, domainName))
{
Uri newURL = new Uri(app.Request.Url.Scheme +
“://www.” +
domainName +
requestUrl);

app.Context.Response.RedirectLocation = newURL.ToString();
app.Context.Response.StatusCode = 301;
app.Context.Response.End();
}
}
}
</script>

If you want to add code to a .php file, the following should work:
<?php

if (substr($_SERVER['HTTP_HOST'],0,3) != ‘www’) {
header(’HTTP/1.1 301 Moved Permanently’);
header(’Location: http://www.’.$_SERVER['HTTP_HOST'.$_SERVER['REQUEST_URI']);

}
?>

There are several different ways to achieve the 301 canonical redirect and sometimes it takes some code tweaking to get it to work properly, but this is a start.

The rules change daily: First you should understand that search engines are enhanced every day. What I mean by this is the people at Google, Yahoo, MSN, and all the other major search providers out there are working hard every day to improve the quality of their search results. These search providers are continually adjusting how they find information, store it and rank it; among many other adjustments that are being constantly applied.  Their thinking is this: If we (as a search engine) can continue to provide the most relevant results to the user (you) for the terms they are searching, you will more than likely continue to use our engine.  Many people are constantly trying to defraud the results and manipulate the traffic to their own websites (relevant to what you want or not).  The major search engines (Google, Yahoo, MSN, etc…) are actively trying to keep these people at bay.
How they operate: Search engines (also known as spiders and crawlers) crawl and index the Internet constantly by first visiting the websites they already know of, then following links. They collect information by following the links from page to page and site to site looking for new information. As they gather information (text and images, etc., from the sites they visit, generally referred to as content), it is reported back to their main databases where it is compared and updated if necessary. In doing so, they employ their “Algorithms.” Think of this as “today’s rule book.” In short, it determines everywhere they go, what they keep (or cache) and how often they do everything they do. But most importantly, it determines how they rank your website based on keyword and key phrases, page titles and how they compare to page content, every type of tags (heading, title, bold, super, strong, etc…), the theme of your site and how the text content supports that theme and a great deal of other criteria.
Search Engine Algorithms: Make no mistake, search engine algorithms are highly complex. We estimate over 1600 or more lines of code written!  Everything that they are and do affects your page rankings. (On a side note, page ranking is the indication of how much Google trusts your website) Our experience is that almost nothing is off the table; keyword and key phrases, tags, titles, how content matches those tags and the theme of your page, and site, information such as how many searches were performed that resulted in searchers clicking on your link in the search results; how many links on other sites link to your site, and even how valuable those links are based on the sites where they are found. The upside to all of this is that the top search engines do a good job these days in providing us with quality information. The downside is that you will have to spend a considerable amount of time developing a high quality, extensively detailed and informative website to garner their attention and achieve high search engine rankings.
In short, SEO requires constant attention to both your site and the industry, so be prepared to give some quality time (if you are attempting this yourself) to achieving good rankings. It doesn’t come easy.
Caution: We recommend that you disregard the advertisements from services and software providers that guarantee great rankings by submitting your site to hundreds of search engines. Automatic submission software does nothing but resubmit your site over and over to the same search engines. Google, for one, clearly asks that web masters/developers not do this. This slows the submission process for legitimate “manual” submissions and can cause your site to be penalized with lower rankings. They already know your site exists there is no need to keep telling them over and over…..

Now let’s look at a few other important general understandings. Since we know that search engines are now placing more weight on the overall “value” of your website, we need to look at a few key ways they determine the value of your site.
Organizing your home page: Your home page is the most important page of your website when it comes to achieving good rankings with a search engine.  Its content and how it is assembled and organized can make or break how well your website is ranked. When you begin to consider what will be on your home page, consider your future visitors. Your goal is simple: to help anyone who visits your website to find detailed information as quickly as possible.
Links to your website: The more, the better. This is hands down, one of the most important measuring tools utilized to value your website. The idea is that if there are hundreds of links to your site, in other words, many other websites that feel your information is worthy of a link from their website, your information must be better than average or than sites similar to yours that do not have a large number of links to them. Think of this as a third-party endorsement.
Good links and great links: The placement of or types of links to your website is also important. A link to your website from a directory listing is good, but not as good as a link embedded in text on another site that is about the subject of your website. For example, say there was an article about how to build a wooden table. And in that article, the author makes reference to and recommends a particular type of saw that you happen to sell on your website. If there was an embedded text link to your website in the middle of that paragraph allowing anyone who reads the article who may be interested, to find that saw and possibly purchase it, that would be an embedded link. Embedded links are great links and weighted considerably more than other links. Believe it or not, search engines can actually tell if the embedded link is related to its surrounding text.
Keywords & Key phrases: You might think you know the words and phrases everyone uses to search for the subject of your website, but not so fast. The industry lingo and words you and your peers use every day in describing your services and products may not be the key words or key phrases “most” searchers are using when performing a search. When composing and optimizing your website’s text content, take the time to verify that the keywords and key phrases you think are the most popular/searched, are in fact, the top keywords and key phrases. Google offers a very useful tool that can provide some good information on this. Enter any word or phrase that you think is good at: http://www.google.com/webhp?complete=1&hl=en and Google will let you know how often it appears in sites that are listed with Google. This can be used to determine how popular a keyword or phrase is, and also to determine how stiff the competition is for that keyword or phrase. We use other software tools to clearly identify key words and key phrases when performing search engine optimization.