SEO Strategy

Recently a client of mine decided to move his main site from his established domain to a newly registered one. He wanted to move his content from a domain with a hyphenated name (e.g., my-domain.com) to one without the hyphen (e.g., mydomain.com), and at the same time he registered the same name with a different extension - mydomain.co.uk.

I advised him that simply replicating the content from his initial domain (my-domain.com) to a new one would probably result in a duplicated content penalty. Furthermore, considerable work had been done to build up links to the original site, and it was too bad that this work was simply going to be written off.

Redirects

His team had decided to implement a “redirect” to the new site from each of the no-longer-primary domains. In other words, all of these would redirect to the primary domain:

my-domain.com
my-domain.co.uk
mydomain.co.uk

…redirected to

mydomain.com

An Alternative to Redirecting

Now I was not sure what to advise, since redirects are not something I normally use. I prefer to use the secondary domains as part of a “traffic funnel” to focus on slightly different keywords, with links to the primary domain.

With this approach, the secondary (or “feeder”) domains must have unique content, correctly optimized for specific keywords within your target keyword group. For example, one of these feeder domains may be a Wordpress blog with several relevant optimized posts, with each of them linking to different pages on the primary domain. The blog can even be added to on a regular basis to keep the search engines coming back.

This approach is part of the “neighborhood” SEO strategy I have mentioned in various other places.

But if you really want to do redirects…

If you decide that creating or keeping up a number of secondary domains is not something you want to do, then redirecting should be done correctly.

One standard method is to use some “meta-refresh javascript code” to handle your redirects. You put a piece of javascript code on each page you want to redirect from - for example, on the home page - and specify the number of seconds before the redirect takes place.

As Mario Sanchez points out in an article on this subject, “Search engines don’t like this method, because of the potential for abuse: you could write an optimized page for a non-competitive search term, and then automatically redirect your unsuspecting visitor to whatever URL you want.”

This method has two other drawbacks. First, it does not transfer previously accumulated link juice or page rank (PR) from the old page to the new one. And second, it does not automatically redirect to the appropriate page when, for instance, someone clicks an external link and is taken to one of your internal pages.

There are other alternatives and complications that come with redirects, but the bottom line is that if you want to stay on the good side of Google, you should be using what is called a “301 redirect”. This is a “permanent” redirect rather than a “temporary” one (”302 redirect”).

Both of these (301 and 302) are set up to redirect all pages within the domain. But one major difference is that a 301 redirect passes all link juice and PR from the old pages to the new ones, whereas a 302 redirect dilutes these between the two domains - assuming that since it is just a temporary redirect that the old domain will continue to exist and function.

As Sanchez says, “From a search engine perspective, 301 redirects are the only acceptable way to redirect URLs.  In the case of moved pages, search engines will index only the new URL, but will transfer link popularity from the old URL to the new one so that search engine rankings are not affected. The same behavior occurs when additional domains are set to point to the main domain through a 301 redirect.”

Generally speaking, doing either a 301 or 302 redirect is quite easy. If you are using cPanel to administer you domain, you just login to your domain control panel, click on “Redirects”, specify where you want to point your domain, and select either “temporary” or “permanent”.

Resources:
301 Redirects and Search Engine Optimization
Redirects and SEO Best Practice

This series of videos describes how to get a video running on your website - right from video creation to where your video should be hosted, to how you embed your video in your site. This is #1 in the series and discusses the pros and cons of self-hosting vs. hosting your video on a video-sharing site like Youtube or Revver.

It is common practice to put the website navigation bar along the left side of each web page within a site. If you have done any web page building, and if you have reflected at all on the problems of SEO, you have probably recognized that a left nav bar may very well have a negative SEO impact.

Why? Because it is often the first thing read (after the header) by the SE spiders. Most of us who have done any SEO research have concluded that the content at the top of a page (main headline, first few paragraphs, first few links) establishes the theme of the page and tells the spiders what the page is about.

So we assume that most of our optimization efforts should be devoted to the text at the top of the page: put your desired keyword phrase in the main headline (h1), a number of times in the first couple of paragraphs or sentences, and possibly include it in an outbound link to another highly relevant page within your site.

But if you’ve got a navbar before your primary content (in the left column), then chances are you’ve got a bunch of different keywords and outbound links (to other pages in your site) that seriously dilute the focus of your page. This means that you are counting on your page title tag and headline in the header area to do all the heavy SEO lifting.

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The current video in the Stompernet series called “Going Natural 2.0″ is about web design and how it has a direct bearing on the usability and conversion rate of your web pages.

This is not news to most web or graphic designers. Most of us have assumed all along that the way things are laid out on the page is an important factor in the way people interact with the content on a page, and the extent to which they are attracted to certain elements, and encouraged to or discouraged from acting on the call to action on the page. In other words, we assume that graphic design has something to do with “conversion rate”.

The Stompernet video takes this concept beyond the vague notions that most of us have about the importance of design and shows how an analysis of eye movement on the page, and the way we focus our “foval” vision on quite small areas can have a direct influence on the tendency of site visitors to stay engaged and ultimately click where we hope they will click.

The major assumption behind the presentation is that we only focus on a small area at any given time and that important elements on a page should therefore be grouped so that each of these units makes sense when standing on their own. The theory - backed up by eye motion and conversion rate studies - also dictates that chunks of text - like a side nav bar for instance - should be broken up with clear sub-headings. This makes each sub-division easier to digest and therefore more likely to be read. Which in turn should increase conversion rate because readers are more likely to find what they are looking for.

Once this is pointed out it seems fairly obvious. But the fact that something is obvious has never prevented people doing the exact opposite. Most of us simply go on gut instinct when designing our websites. Eventually we may start paying attention to usability principles. This video makes the equally obvious suggestions that we should do so right from the start if we want to give our site visitors a satisfying experience and get the best results possible.

Like the other videos in this series, this 31 minute video goes well beyond the usual cheap and dirty marketing videos we are used to seeing on Youtube or Revver. It is professionally produced and the content is deep, stimulating, and well presented.