Farhan Fawzer

Redirecting Canonical pages

This is one of the most interesting questions I ever had to ask someone, what is your website address? is it http://www.example.com or http://example.com ?

The guy was confused, he asked me whats the difference they are both the same. Well they aren’t the same for certain search engines and particularly Google. The web crawlers have had always thought example.com without the www and with the www are two different sites.

This can have a huge impact on your SERP (Search Engine Result Pages), as the PageRank value is shared.

A 301 permanent redirect would solve this issue. Set up a redirect on the preferred version of your website, either from the www version to none www or vice versa, is the best solution and make things easy for Googlebot.

Check how your pages are indexed on Google by typing “site:www.example.com” (without quotes) and obviously replacing example with your domain.

If the pages of the results show only one version of your website indexed, that’s fine if not you may have to set up a redirect as mentioned above.

Happy SEO

By Farhan Fawzer A leading SEO Specialist from Sri Lanka

Farhan Fawzer

Google Instant View

Google just added a very useful option to its line of search results. The all new Google Instant View on the right hand corner (Magnifying glass icon) of the result page, when a user clicks the icon it will display a snap shot of the website, this will enable the user to decide if it is useful to visit the website. However if the website uses flash on the whole page, it is unlikely that the page will be displayed instead a broken snippet appears. At the time of writing this Google had announced that they are working on optimizing flash for its crawlers to retrieve data and show on Instant View.

I’m beginning to make the most of this tool, as I used to forget the URL of a previously visited website. Google Instant View helps me to save the time I spend on opening the wrong website.

From a SEO’s perspective, I’d not be surprised to see an increase of visits to well designed websites. As I mentioned earlier, if your website is flash based, no matter how creative your site is, it will not look good on Google Instant View.

Try it yourself at www.google.lk and click the icon on the right.

Happy SEO

By Farhan Fawzer SEO Sri Lanka online services

Farhan Fawzer

Creating a Google Sitemap for your website

Today lets take a look at Sitemaps and how to submit them to Google.

A Sitemap is an XML file that contains the URLs of all the web pages in your site. You create this file and submit it to Google so that Googlebot will read it. You can specify certain parameters in the file such as the location (URL) of your web pages, when they were last modified and how frequently the pages are updated

It is important from a SEO’s point of view to tell Google where all of your web pages are, so you can improve your website visibility in their index. Submitting a Sitemap to Google may improve your rankings by getting an unlinked or deeply linked page into the index that wasn’t previously. It is worth to create an XML Sitemap for Google, if you are concerned about search rankings and SEO.

There are a number of sites where you can generate a free XML Sitemap.

The following steps will take you through to create and submit a Sitemap of your own.

  1. Firstly, you need to have a list of your websites URLs.
  2. Visit www.xml-sitemaps.com nothing to worry about it is 100% free. Type your websites URL and hit the submit button and your XML Sitemap will be generated. 
  3. Once you have your Sitemap you must now submit the Sitemap to Google. Visit www.google.com/webmasters/sitemaps/login and login with your Google account. Don’t have one? Don’t worry – that’s free, too.
  4. Don’t forget to update your Sitemap if you change the URLs or add new pages to your site.
Hope you found this information useful
Happy SEO
By Farhan Fawzer SEO Sri Lanka online services

Farhan Fawzer

Domains and SEO

How important are domains when it comes to  search engine optimization. Choosing the right domain can play a major role when it comes to optimizing your website for high competitive keywords. Best advice is to have at least one keyword as part of your domain.

As part of the algorithms of search engines, domains are also given a considerable amount of weight on search engine results pages. There are over 200 algorithms used by Google to rank a particular website. Over using keywords on domains can have your website penalized for spamming.

However, hyphens on domains are used to separate two words which is also fine with search engines but this might lead some returning users to end up on your competitor’s website.

e.i Instead of typing www.my-website.com it is very much possible that users type www.mywebsite.com

So next time when you choose a domain for your website watch out folks.

Happy SEO

Farhan Fawzer

Exciting News From Bing and Yahoo!

At the time of writing this post I have been exhausted after a holiday down south over the long weekend. I was away from the www or rather 1’s and 0’s game.

Coming to the topic, have you noticed a similarity in SERPs (Search engine result pages) of yahoo & bing lately, both search engines rank your website almost exactly. If you haven’t noticed yet, Bing & Yahoo are joining force and presently testing Bing results in Yahoo!

Both parties are very happy with the progress. The similar results first gave me quite a shock as I was comparing the data gathered by using SheerSEO. I personally think, this is a great move, joining forces by both well established search engines. However, on the other hand Google has made its name in the game so strong, so it is not easy for Bing or Yahoo to battle it out individually. This kind of a merger was very much needed and will definitely have the strength to compete with the giant Google.

Hoping to see the response from Google and the repercussions of the never ending SEO battle.

You may also find more info at the official link at http://goo.gl/a9iY

Happy SEO

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