Internet Business Consulting Services Corporation
Web Marketing
Wordpress MU how to redirect non-www to www
Nov 17th
You installed Wordpress MU on Apache and wrote few blog posts. Now when you go to your site by typing the www version of url (ex: www.yourblog.com) the url automatically get changed to non www version? But you want to get the www version instead?
Ok. This is what you have to do
1) Login to Wordpress Mu admin
2) On left side menu “Site Admin” -> “Blogs” and click on your blog
3) Change site url from http://yourblog.com to http://www.yourblog.com
4) Scroll down and press “Update options”
Now all non-www requests will be redirect to www version.
(The procedure is similar in regular Wordpress where you need to change the “Blog Address URL” in admin -> Settings -> General)
Of course to work this you need to have apache mod_rewrite installed and activated on your server.
Keeping only one url version is search engine friendly. Say you allow your site to be accessed by all these urls. www.yourblog.com, yourblog.com and yourblog.com/index.php. All these point to a same page. This can be lead to pagerank splits, Backlinks split and lastly you’re risking getting filtered for duplicate content by the new filters at Google.
For these reasons it is better you keep either www or non-www version activated but not both.
Determine the best way to automate Sitemaps
Nov 16th
In simple terms, a sitemap (or site map) is a list of all the pages in your website. Sitemaps provide two benefits: easier navigation (for visitors of your site) and better visibility by search engines.
With the rise of modern SEO techniques the importance of the sitemap has been growing. Sitemaps are the best way to inform search engines about changes on your website.
As a development company, we always apply current SEO techniques on our customer’s websites to ensure that they get top ranking on search engines. Not only on Google, but Yahoo, Bing and Ask.com etc. as well.
Including sitemaps is one of the important tasks we perform when developing sites for our clients. And this is done either manually or dynamically according to the customer needs.
Typically a good site with lots of content changes regularly. In this case it is expensive and tedious to continually update the site map. For this reason, we feel that in some cases it is important to be able to auto generate a sitemap.
We evaluated some sitemap auto generating tools and following are some of the solutions we like:
- Google XML Sitemaps [ http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/google-sitemap-generator/ ]
- It is a plugin for Wordpress sites, which automatically updates the sitemap and notifies all major search engines every time you create a new post/content.
- Addme.com [ http://www.addme.com/ror-sitemap-generator.htm ].
- An online tool dedicated for sites developed using Ruby on Rails (ROR)
- Google Site Map Generator [ http://www.neuroticweb.com/recursos/sitemap/ ]
- Another simple online tool to generate site maps.
- PHPClasses.org [ http://www.phpclasses.org/browse/package/2612.html ]
- A class library which can be integrated with PHP sites.
It is obvious that selecting a sitemap generating mechanism is depending on several facts such as the nature of the site, sever side technology used etc. So making the correct decision is up to your experience in SEO and web development team.
Contact us if you would like help generating a sitemap for your site, have general web marketing, seo, or web design questions…
RDFa vs microformats for Google Rich Snippets
Nov 16th
We are in the process of implementing Google Rich Snippets into a customers web site. Specifically to provide ratings to travel vendors and travel destinations, which will appear in search results on Google as google snippets. These will be delivered in Cake PHP. Also we are considering using it for some product ratings for e-commerce sites delivered in Ruby on Rails. We may even consider adding it to WordPress sites as a way of rating the content described on the page.
Of course the immediate concern was which technology to use microformats or RDFa? Not that it should be a big concern but we have to support whichever technology we implement.
Searching microformats vs RDFa on, brought up a ton of articles, and in depth debates on the subject.
Understandably so, since microformats appear to be more adopted, and the other is developed by W3C.
I think Googles approach is a good one, they support both of them so we can use whichever standard we prefer.
As a development company we inherit a lot of work started by other development companies, so we will also support both. If we are creating or adding them from scratch to a site however, we will choose RDFa.
Initially I thought the opposite because microformats seemed more intuitive and easier to implement. After more research however, it seemed that RDFa would win out in the long run, and be more flexible. No one can know for sure though and I guess the best solution for everyone would be for them to just merge as a standard.
For more detail on the subject Evan Prodomou has a good write up RDFa_vs_microformats
How many links are there to my site
Nov 13th
Unfortunately the tools used to do this don’t always work perfectly, but a few simple ways to check the links to your site are:
Checking your links on Google:
link: yourdomainname
example:
link: ibcscorp.com on google
Checking your links on Yahoo: (same way)
link: your domain name
example:
link:ibcscorp.com on yahoo
This is very trivial perhaps, but on Yahoo, if your site hasn’t been crawled or indexed or has no results, then you will get an error message. This will in turn give you the opportunity to submit your site for free to Yahoo. You have to have a Yahoo ID to do this it is kind of a pain.
This will then put you in the cue to be crawled by Yahoo. I am sure if you wait long enough it will happen anyway, but if your site is new this will help speed things up. Even still they say to expect a delay of several weeks before your URL is crawled, unless you pay them 299 in which case they will do it in 7 days.
Checking your links on Bing.com (was MSN.com) is again the same thing.
link: your domain
example: link:ibcscorp.com on bing
Like Yahoo, if the page isn’t found, it can be entered at this point, again it may take some time for it to be indexed.
Determining where you are at for web marketing
Nov 13th
Before you start any program or set a goal; it doesn’t matter if it is an exercise program, weight loss program, or marketing program; you have to take baseline measurement of where you are.
You also have to take measurements along the way in order to determine if what you are doing is working or not.
Over the next several posts I will be reviewing tools which help determine your effectiveness on the web, and then how to put together a program to improve that.
Web Marketing!
Nov 9th
Ibcscorp.com cares about the success of its customers. We provide web marketing consulting and services to help maximize the benefity that our clients can get from the Internet. Some of our leading consultants have been using the Internet since as early as 1992, and have created and worked in many successful on line businesses.
Our goal is to work with our clients to help them determine an appropriate marketing budget for web marketing and then to maximize the effectiveness of that budget. We can’t do it all for you, but we can do it with you to help improve your success.