Web Design

Handling duplicate content

Posted in: Blog, Hosting News, Web Design by Paul McEwan on March 10, 2010 | No Comments

Trying to increase search engine relevance by duplicating content within a website is an old trick that search engines figured out a long time ago. In those days some SEO people went so far as to duplicate and publish the website hundreds of times with links all point ot one final landing page at the real site. If you try that today, it will not only fail but it will set you to the back of the SEO bus. When building a new website or signing up to a template site where all the content is provided (and therefore duplicated hundreds of times), sooner or later handling the duplicate content needs to be dealt with. How do we do this? Let me count the ways.

If you are signing up to a site where all the content is provided then please edit it all. Every last bit. No time? Hide the pages you will come back to later.

If you have a high traffic web site receiving most of the visits and another one you are planning to move to as a new re-designed website, (giving it a new URL and a fresh new look),  then you don’t want to lose all that traffic from that old site. But you can’t keep both sites online because they will have duplicate content and that is something often penalized by search engines. How do you proceed?

The best practice is to do a 301 redirect. The 301 message on the Internet is handled by the search engine as: moved permanently. Here is how you can make a 301 redirect for your web page:

With PHP:

The code needs to be placed in the Header section of the website, so that the search engine can read it first.

Header( “HTTP/1.1 301 Moved Permanently” );
Header( “Location: http://www.new-url.com” );

With .htaccess:

RewriteEngine on
RewriteRule ^old\.php$ http://www.domain.com/new.php [R=permanent,L]

The code above will direct all the traffic from the old.php to the new.php page.

With the rel=”canonical” directive:

If you run an online store and want to sell a custom made handbag, which is available in several colors, and decide to dedicate a separate page on your site for each color, then you have about 3 or 4 identical pages. You can use the rel=”canonical” element to direct all traffic to the page with the most popular color.

This will lead a search engine to point all the traffic from the similar pages to the page you have specified. This code needs to be placed in the header section of all the web pages you wish to lead somewhere else.

With the URL Redirection Manager in the Web Hosting Control Panel:

If you don’t like to meddle with code, or with new file creation, or anything like that, you can use the handy URL Redirection Manager available with all our shared web hosting plans, where a simple web interface will allow you to choose which pages to be redirected and what redirection code to be used.

Don’t forget to contact us if you need any help with this or anything else.

Click here to add SEO

Posted in: Blog, Marketing, Web Design by Paul McEwan on January 6, 2010 | No Comments

Adding Search Engine Optimization [SEO] to a website isn’t as simple as pushing an “Add SEO button“. If there happens to be anything like “click here to add SEO” on your website you can rest assure it’s a marketing thing. Even if it works, developing a website so that the SEO can be turned on or off is all about up-selling. It gives third party sellers something to give away as incentive.

From a marketing point of view it’s smart but it feeds on what people don’t know about SEO.

It would be like an electrician wiring your house but wanting more money for the light switches to work.

We Host WordPress Websites

Posted in: Blog, Web Design by Paul McEwan on January 2, 2010 | No Comments

We host websites, in particular, WordPress websites. We’ve been hosting for some time but have kept it under our hat because it’s an added service we provide. Not a money making venture we want to market. If you design for a living then the websites you design better have a good place to live.

When a client comes to us with a need for a website we have our own place to publish it, support it, renew it and look after it. Our hosting is one of the best out there with 24/7 support 365 days of the year, video tutorials and free scripts including Worpress which works correctly without any server configurations.

We are so happy with our hosting we just couldn’t keep it under our hats any longer and have even started a new news section for it at http://tribalyell.com/category/blog/hosting-news.

We are so happy with our hosting we’re going to open the doors for self serve sign-ups. Stay tuned for the public sign-up section.

The Art of Design and Client Relations

Posted in: Blog, Marketing, Web Design by Paul McEwan on November 23, 2009 | No Comments

A lot of the worlds best designers (or at least the ones who win all the awards) get fired a lot. Whether it be a creative marketing campaign, advertising campaign or some other idea that got canned and unused often will still get submitted and win a lot of awards. So what does that say? Are most marketing designers producing mediocre work because that’s what their client wanted?  “Build me a website like that guys” scenario.

It’s important to note that industry standards and mediocre are not the same thing.

The new direction of TribalYell puts creative energy first. We’re going to put our foot down on that. We know more than the client who is hiring us what leads a person to read a website and what causes search engines to find it and we know it well. If we don’t then we deserve to be fired and the question needs to be asked, why were we hired in the first place if they know more? Always doing exactly what the client asks turns around and bites both  of you in the rear eventually. The fix can be costly.

We’ve never been fired but if we are it will be for doing our work really well.

Does Google fail?

Posted in: Blog, Marketing, Web Design by Paul McEwan on November 12, 2009 | No Comments

“Google doesn’t fail very often” a friend told me over lunch the other day. “If some SEO company can trick Google into bringing up the search ranking of a website then Google fails”

It’s an easy case to make because if it were true, (if Google could be easily tricked), then every spam business would be doing it. And they are not. Nope, Google displays some pretty relevant results. And you have seen it yourself when a superior styled site is beat by some frame based site from Ma and Pa Design Farm. The difference is in the sites’ activity.

Brian Clark from Copyblogger writes, “Search engine algorithms come and go but human nature remains” in his post SEO Copywriting is Dead.

SEO is your content, your incoming links and how active those two things are. Everything else is tweaking that may or may not help. For the amount of energy your going to spend, don’t worry – just write (or get someone to write) – and get some incoming links.