Web Design Blog

Most people now know that a good way to improve the rank of your site in the search engines is to increase the number of good quality inbound links. Most people tend to think this would go to their homepage, but Deep Linking is also another method which could be more beneficial.

Put simply, a deep link is a link pointing straight at a page within your website, other than your homepage. For example, I could link directly to my Affordable Web Design Packages page. For usability, this is great, as it saves the user having to find that specific page when directed to my homepage. Now they are there at the specific content I was initially targeting.

Deep links are also good for search engines too. It is rumoured that it is better to have 5 links to 5 separate pages within your website, than it is to have 5 links all to the same page. This gives it a more natural flow in the eyes of the search engines - as if people are genuinely linking to content that is within your website.

Remember still to use descriptive title tags and anchor text, as shown below, and you should be on to a winner!

Warwick Web Design
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Leamington Web Design

Labels: Search Engine Optimisation

We have no doubt all seen bespoke or custom error pages on websites before. But what point do they serve, and how do you implement them?

Well, there are two good reasons for having them in my opinion. I'm sure there are blog posts out there covering a whole multitude of reasons, but I have just two.

The first, less important example in my opinion, is user error. If a user manually navigates to a missing page on the server by typing the URL incorrectly, it is always more pleasant to be greeted by a bespoke error page than a boggo 404. This page can then have links to the homepage, the sitemap, or any pages that you think might be of particular interest within your site.

The second reason is for the interim period between deleting files off your server and the search engines catching up.

You should all be adding pages that are no longer on the server to the robots.txt file as you go along, and you can also request for example Google to remove the URL within the Webmasters tools. But as we all know, this isn't instantanious.

Ask yourself the question - if you clicked on a search result from a search engine and was presented with your broswer default 404 message, would you bother visiting the sites homepage to find out more by altering the URL yourself? Doubtful. More than likely the back button would quickly be pressed, and you would move on to the next result.

However, have the user greeted by a page from your site with a polite message to say this page is no longer available, and offer some alternatives, and there is a likelehood you will still hang on to that visitor.

This is all great. But how do you implement it?

Well, it is surprisingly simple. You need two things, the error page, and a simple text editor such as notepad.

Once you have created your error page, save it with a filename of, for example, error.shtml or 404.html, whichever file extension suits depending on your project.

Then, in your text editor, paste in the following information:

Replace "mydomain" with your domain name, and specify which filename you require the browser to redirect to depending on which error is thrown.

Go to File > Save, and ensure that the filetype is set to "all files". Name your file simply .htaccess and save the file.

Upload this to your root directory, and try it out!

As ever, if you have any questions or comments, post them up and I shall reply as soon as I can.

Labels: Search Engine Optimisation, Web Development

Firstly, apologies for not posting up any new snippets of information for a little while; JB and G have just taken on another couple of freelance web projects, so we have been rather busy with new designs, concepts and ultimately builds.

Our latest venture is a redesign, build and SEO of Ian Haring Photography, a wedding photographer from Warwick.

You can keep tabs on the new sites progress at our own site, in our web design portfolio.

Still, onwards and upwards, and today I was sent a link to a video demonstrating the benefits of a couple of SEO plug-ins for the world's greatest browser, the trusty Firefox. Nothing ever replaces doing things by hand, but hey, it's nice to have a plug in to help out too.

It also means that you can quickly check items on your site if you are not overly wise to SEO, along with checking your competitors. If you think your site could do better, then that's where services like our JB and G Search Engine Optimisation packages might be beneficial to you.

Labels: Search Engine Optimisation