what are server response codes and how do they relate to seo?

broken links detection with wget

HTTP status codes are three digits numbers that are returned by a web server in response to a web request by a client. This code provides some general information about the status of the request to the client. The response may (or may not) also contain a descriptive text regarding the status of the request. The IANA (Internet Assigned Numbers…

how to find out what keywords your competitors are using for marketing

Find keywords with keyword planner

One of the most important factors that determines the success (and cost) of your online marketing campaign is the competition. It determines how much or what share of the traffic you get and also how much money you need to spend for getting that. As you can imagine, the higher the competition the higher the cost of marketing. One part of…

url canonicalization: how it affects seo and how to fix it

Inlining css in html helps with SEO

URL Canonicalization is the process where by a resource that has multiple URL or URIs pointing to it is standardized to a single URL. The process does not involve removing or changing the other URLs, but just designating one of the URLs as the “normal” or “standard” URL. The process is also known as normalization or standardization. For example, your home…

seo: is your website getting indexed? if not, why and how to fix it

chrome developer tools

An important consideration when it comes to Search Engine Optimization (or SEO) is that your webpages and content are getting crawled and indexed by various search engines. Without getting indexed, you will not rank in any search query or search pages no matter what you do. The traffic on your website can be categorized into different types: direct traffic, paid…

what is a robots.txt file and how it affects search engine indexing

webmaster tools robots.txt console

The robots.txt is a text file that resides in the top level folder on your webserver. The purpose of the robots.txt file (or just robots file) is to provide some guidance to search engine crawlers as to what should be crawled and indexed, and what content should not be crawled. The robots.txt file uses an exclusion standard, which means that you…

seo: should you use outbound links in your pages and its effect in seo

content with external links

Having outbound or external links in your content is often a marker of good quality content. It can positively affect your brand reputation and your search engine ranking. Firstly, let’s first define what an outbound link is. A link or URL in a webpage is a piece of content that an user can click on and browse or be redirected to…

seo: start title tags and urls with your target keyword to improve ctr

keywords in title tags

When creating content for your website or writing posts for your blog, there are mainly three things that you need to focus on. The first and foremost is probably the quality of the content. The next is the title of the page itself and then the slug (or URL) of the page. The title of the page is important for…

how to use wget to find broken links on your website

broken links detection with wget

As websites get larger and larger with ever-growing content, it could easily get to be a nightmare to maintain. It is true for any website. But this is especially true of a blog, a forum or any site with a constant influx of new content. Over time, content on the website can get outdated and removed. This could lead to…

seo: how to find the total page size of a webpage

chrome developer tools

As you start to optimize your webpage, the first and foremost thing you probably want to know is the current total page size. This is the starting point of almost all web page optimization. The total page size is an indicator of many things, especially the rendering time of the webpage. In most cases, you want to render the webpage…

seo: what is a good ctr for organic search

google serp ctr

You wrote hundreds of blog posts, signed up and implemented a web analytics (eg. Google Analytics) service, and your posts are ranking somewhere in the google search result pages…and everything seems good. So, the next question is: Are you getting enough traffic from the search engines? Are you getting a good ctr (Click thru Rate) in search engines? There are several…

how to use google suggest to find long tail keywords

google search long tail keywords

If you are using Google Adwords to advertise your products or services, you already know that you need to come up keywords that best describe what you are selling. There are several way you can come up with the keywords that you want to bid for. The long tail keywords is arguably the set of keywords that can give you the…

why is inline CSS bad….and is it really that bad?

Inlining css in html helps with SEO

Many webpage analyzers and most website designers will actively discourage you from using inline CSS (cascading style sheets) in your web pages. There are usually very good reasons for it, and let’s see why it is generally frowned upon. One question that I generally gets asked is: I just want to use it in this one place. Is it that bad?…