Recently I received an email from someone asking the following question:

“I have followed the tips given in your e-book, and have implemented all the keyword strategies, however we are still not ranking in the top 10 for the keywords we need to rank for.  What are we doing wrong?”.

I thought I would answer that question here on my blog, as I’m sure others have asked this same question (I know I have).  I have tried ranking for certain keywords that I *really* wanted to rank for, have optimized the hell out of a page, have linked to that page using the appropriate anchor text, etc., etc. And still I don’t rank for that keyword or term.

There are a few reasons why this may happen, but here is the most common reason:

The keywords you have chosen may simply be too competitive.

1. By competitive, I mean that there are many, many other pages trying to rank for that same keyword.  Go to Google and do a search for the keyword you are targeting.  For instance, let’s say you own a web design firm. Try Googling ‘web design’.  383,000,000 results. What do you think your chances are of ever ranking for that term?

2. Another way of telling how competitive the term is is checking out who is currently ranking for that term. For the term ‘web design’, for instance, the top 3 ranking websites are the Wikipedia entry for web design (pagerank of 7), NVI Solutions (pagerank of 5), and WebDesign.org (pagerank of 6; and obviously has that key term in it’s url) . Now ask yourself, how does my site compare in terms of relative pagerank, and number and quality of backlinks? Is it worth my time, money, and effort to target that term, when there are likely other, related terms I could more easily rank for? For instance, many sites that rank for highly competitive terms like ‘web design’, likely have paid inclusion into large, well respected directories like Yahoo. Are you willing to pay the $299 USD per year to be included in that directory?  (and that is no guarantee that you will rank highly…it just ups the odds).

3. Another good, easy (and free) way to check how competitive a term is is to use the Google Keyword Tool. Type your keyword or term into the search box, and then look below to see a) how many searches are performed each month for that term (be sure to use ‘exact match’ or ‘phrase’ under ‘match type’ for more accurate numbers), and how many other sites are bidding on that keyword, by looking at the green box (a fully filled in green box means highly competitive, half full means moderately competitive, no green means no or very little competition).  Keep in mind that using the Google tool for competitive analysis will give you a general idea of how competitive that term is, but can also be off.

4. Use a keyword difficulty tool, like the one below. Type your keyword into the tool, and it will give you a general idea of how hard it will be to rank for that term (a higher % means it will be more difficult, a lower % will mean it will be easier to rank for).

Keyword Difficulty Check Tool © SEO Chat™ Keyword Enter a keyword or keyword phrase Enter Captcha To Continue To prevent spamming, please enter in the numbers and letters in the box below Report Problem with Tool.

5. Trial and Error is the only surefire way to know how hard it will be to rank for a given term. Do your best to choose highly relevant terms that appear to have low competition. Optimize your page(s) as best you can, and get as many links to that page as possible (preferably with that term as the anchor text). If, after several months, you are still not ranking for that term, it may be time to rethink your keyword choice, and try something else.

My general rule is to choose low competition terms, and therefore not have to work as hard for them. This way I can spend my time creating valuable content, rather than spending it trying (often fruitlessly) to rank for more difficult terms.

What do you think? Would you rather target more difficult terms and work harder on on-page optimization and trying to get inbound links, or choose easier, longer-tail terms, and simply work at adding more content?

I wrote a guest post a few days ago for 5 Minutes for Mom.  It’s my attempt to explain the basics of what SEO is and why you need to do it! You can read it here.

Recently I have been trying to help someone set up a redirect from the non-www version of their site to the www version.  So, when someone types in:

http://domain-name.com

it will automatically resolve to

http://www.domain-name.com

In my SEO training, we were taught that this is an important task in SEO.  It is actually possible that the two domains above could be two entirely different sites, with entirely different content.  Of course, in most cases, both will contain the same information, because they are the same site.

For this reason, the search engines don’t automatically assume that both the ‘www’ and ‘non-www’ version of a domain are one and the same - this is why it’s important to tell the search engines which domain you prefer through using the .htaccess file.

Using .htaccess to Redirect

.htaccess is a simple file you would upload in the root directory of your site.  You create the file in a text editor like Notepad or TextEdit, and add the following code:

Options +FollowSymlinks
RewriteEngine on
rewritecond %{http_host} ^domain.com [nc]
rewriterule ^(.*)$ http://www.domain.com/$1 [r=301,nc]

This will ensure that if you type in ‘domain.com’, it will automatically redirect your visitor to the www version on your site.  This is not only helpful for visitors, but will signal to the search engines which version of your domain you want your ‘link juice’ going to.

*Note: this will only work if your host works with Linux servers with Apache mod-rewrite. If you try the above and it’s not working, ask your host if it is possible.

Is Redirecting Using .htaccess Necessary for SEO?

As I mentioned earlier, I have always heard that this is very important for SEO (it’s often referred to as canonicalization). I list this as one of the top ’secrets’ in my e-book, and since it’s such an easy and quick one to do, many people start off with it.

This gal I was trying to help was having trouble getting it to work with her site.  She contacted her web host, who also tried, and couldn’t get it to work.  She then sent me her FTP info and I attempted to get it to work on her site as well - no cigar.

Finally, I think in exasperation, her web host emails me to say that he strongly disagrees that this is a necessary or even particularly beneficial task for SEO (he went so far as to start a discussion over at Google Webmaster about it…apparently I am a ’spreader of misinformation’).

My typical response to such accusations is to double check my facts…after all, if I really am wrong about something, of course I will want to know that so I can change my view.  It is conceivable that there has been a change in the SEO world that I am not aware of…yes, even I am prone to such human errors

The Facts about 301 Redirect for SEO

I asked SEOMoz, leaders in the SEO industry if choosing a version to redirect to is still necessary for SEO. Their response is that it IS still important, and it IS industry best practice to do so:

“As regards canonicalisation - it’s definitely still best practice to redirect it. While google is pretty damn smart at picking it up these days it’s still not clear whether it completely resolves it (i.e. passes pagerank across if links are split) or if it only displays one version (but you still lose some links). Either way, I think it’s still best practice and makes things as easy as possible for Google to crawl your site. This is especially true if you have multiple different subdomains, e.g. blog. www1. forum. etc etc”

And Matt Cutt’s view on this on his blog:

“Suppose you want your default url to be http://www.example.com/ . You can make your webserver so that if someone requests http://example.com/, it does a 301 (permanent) redirect to http://www.example.com/ . That helps Google know which url you prefer to be canonical. Adding a 301 redirect can be an especially good idea if your site changes often (e.g. dynamic content, a blog, etc.).”

And the ‘best answer’ on the post I mentioned above:

“Penalize? no. [edited to add, in my e-book I don't say anything about a penalty for this...only that pagerank may be diluted*] They’ve never said that, there are benefits however to having one page show up as one page only and not with multiple versions.  So much in fact Google has devoted considerable resources to help you help them, so I sure wouldn’t just blow it off and say it isn’t important.  There are still people linking to http://www.example.com/index.html for their home link, so they can never “penalize” people for not having a clue.”

*Dilution of Pagerank:

If you have half of your inbound links pointing to http://example.com, and half pointing to http://www.example.com, you may be diminishing your link popularity, and therefore your pagerank.  Telling the search engines that one version (the www, or non-www version, doesn’t matter which), is your primary domain, will ensure that all your valuable incoming links are being ‘counted’ towards the same domain and providing the greatest SEO benefit to your site.

The Short Answer

The short answer is YES! It’s still important to choose a version and stick with it.  Make sure when you link internally you are consistent, using either http://example.com, or http://www.example.com.  In your Google Webmaster account, indicate which version is your main one (I believe it’s under ‘preferences’).  Finally, be sure to redirect to the version you’ve chosen, using a 301 redirect in your .htaccess file.

Hope this helps someone!

It appears Google has updated it’s toolbars once again today (didn’t they just do that about a month ago?).  I am pleasantly surprised by the update, even though we all know by this point that pagerank is only one factor in determining the quality and importance of a site.

I’m guessing the update is still in process however - I have one older site that went from a pagerank 4 to a 5, while a newer one with very few links went from a 0 (it’s a private membership site, with no attempts to get incoming links) to a 5 as well (!).  I’d be very surprised if this was the end of the update.

This will be a dry post for anyone not specifically looking for this info, but am so *thrilled* to finally have the answer to this dilemna that I had to write about it!

There has been much talk in recent years about the importance of signaling to the search engines that the ‘www’ and ‘non-www’ version of your site are one and the same.  Since the search engines see these two urls as 2 different sites, you may be diluting your pagerank, or being dinged for duplicate content.

For months, I have been looking for the solution to the following problem: I have several websites, all hosted under one main hosting account.  My main domain is www.fussybaby.ca, and all the rest of my sites are add-on domains, which are essentially sub-domains of www.fussybaby.ca.  This means, for instance, my Her SEO site can be found as

www.fussybaby.ca/herseo

www.herseo.fussybaby.ca

www.herseo.com

(I’m thinking it may be able to be found by another url too, but am drawing a blank).

This means that there are at least 3 ways my [extremely sparse] content is being found - this means 3 version of the same content - aka DUPLICATE CONTENT.  Uh-oh.

The problem has been that I have been unable to figure out how to 301 redirect an add-on domain.  In the root folder of my Fussy Baby site, I had the following in my .htaccess folder:

RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^fussybaby.ca [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.fussybaby.ca/$1 [L,R=301]

This meant that anyone typing in fussybaby.ca, would automatically be redirected to www.fussybaby.ca.  This is very good.

But, anyone typing in herseo.com, would NOT be directed to www.herseo.com.  And that was NOT good.

I have fiddled for hours, trying to tweak the .htaccess file to have the add-on domain (herseo) redirect, without success.

Then tonight, thanks to this guy, it works!!

The code:
Options +FollowSymLinks
RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^fussybaby.ca [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.fussybaby.ca/$1 [L,R=301]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^(www\.)?herseo\.fussybaby\.ca [NC,OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^!www\.herseo\.com [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.herseo.com/$1 [R=301,L]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^herseo.com [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.herseo.com/$1 [R=301,L]
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} ^/herseo($|/.*$)
RewriteRule ^.* http://www.herseo.com%1 [R=301,L]

I don’t even know exactly what it is about the code above that makes everything work, but it works, so I’m not asking any questions.

If you actually find this post interesting, you can read more at my post on htaccess www redirect.

You may be wondering where the content of this blog has gone!  My MacBook crashed a few weeks ago, and with it went my blog.  Lesson learned: Remember to make backups of your Wordpress database, not just your files!

Please bear with me as I attempt to recreate the posts that were here previously.

In case you are looking for my ‘Top 10 Product Review Blogs for Mom Entrepreneurs’ post, I will list them below.  These are the top review blogs in terms of pagerank (just one of many factors to be considered when choosing a product review blog…but a good measure of importance, nonetheless):

5 Minutes for Mom

Cool Mom Picks

The Mommy Blog

Mighty Junior

Classy Mommy

Book Room Reviews

Moms Favorite Stuff

Mom Generations

The Mommy Insider

Mighty Goods