301 redirects are used to tell the browser that the page they are requesting has been moved permanently to another location. However, this is often used in SEO as well to give a domain ALL the credit from incoming links.

Search engines see your domain as 2 domains.

http://www.mydomain.com

and

http://mydomain.com

If 50 sites link to www. and 50 link to mydomain.com, you are losing half the 'votes' for your website (a link to your site is essentially a vote that your website has good content). The best way to get FULL credit for your links is to setup a 301 redirect.

Log into your hosts control panel and look for a Redirects option.
Type of Redirect: 301 (Moved Permanently)
Select the domain from the dropdown list.
WWW Redirection: Look for an option that says Only redirect with www.
Redirect to: Type http://mydomain.com

Click add.
If you visit http://www.mydomain.com, you should now be redirected to http://mydomain.com. Alternatively you can set this up so that any request to http://mydomain.com redirect to http://www.mydomain.com, this is up to you.

One last thing use this: SEO Friendly Redirect Checker to make sure your redirect is setup properly! For Example, i can check this site for a redirect by typing http://www.theinfiniteblog.com, it will tell you there is a search engine friendly redirect setup!

If you do not have a host or they do not support configuring redirects, you may have a little more trouble setting up the redirect, BUT, there is a great resource for setting up 301 redirects with: IIS, HTAccess, PHP, ASP, etc etc.
How to Redirect a Web Page

Happy Redirecting!
Comment if this helped!

Rank Checker - Great SEO Tool

A great SEO Tool I bumped into while learning about SEO is Rank Checker.
If you ever wanted to know what your rank is in the Google index, but were just to lazy to sift through the
many many pages of results (admit it you've done this...how many pages did you get through before giving up ? 10? 15?...ive done this too lol)..you really should check it out.

Rank checker is available from SEOBook as a free Firefox extension.
It won't work in IE, but you should have firefox anyways!

You can download Rank Checker by clicking: http://tools.seobook.com/firefox/rank-checker/

After you install, you will see the Rank Checker icon on the bottom right corner of your browser.

Clicking on this will open the main Rank Checker Interface.

Interface

This is the starting interface, basically there is a box for your domain and then a keyword box. If we type www.msn.com as the domain name, and messenger as the keyword and click Add. We see it in the window below, you can repeat this step for multiple keywords, making a list
of keywords to search for that domain. When we hit start, Rank checker will go through Google Index, Yahoo Index, and Live Index to find the position of your domain for each particular keyword.

Results(Click to enlarge)

This is the interface after a search. It may take some time, but eventually you will see what your position is for each specified keyword. Here we see that www.msn.com is rated 9th for the keyword "messenger" (Msn Messenger) if you havent figured that out already.

Rank Checker Presets
If this search is going to be used often, you can save it as a preset. Click the Save button, and type a name for this preset. The next time you load, you can load the preset using the OPEN button on the interface. Please save a preset, we'll need it later on!

Rank Checker Export Ability
One nice feature of the rank checker extension is its ability to export your results to a csv file (comma seperated value). This file can be opened in a number of applications including wordpad and excel. This allows you to track your results. You can save a copy of the csv file, and next time you run your check, you can compare the two to see how effective your SEO techniques have been.

Rank Checker Extra Features
By clicking Tools>Rank Checker in your Firefox Menu bar, you have access to some neat features which aren't that visible on the interface.
Hell, im not even sure they exist on it. Tools>Rank Checker>Options, allows you to customize rank checker for your locale (ie Google.ca instead of Google.com). It also allows you to put a delay on the time between requests. This is to keep your IP from being banned if you're querying a LARGE number of keywords - dont worry about this for a low number of keywords.

SCHEDULING!...YES...SCHEDULING.

This ones pretty exciting. By clicking Tools>Rank Checker>Scheduling, you can schedule rank checker to run at a certain time, and certain frequency. On the scheduling interface, choose a time and click the Save button. At the drop down in the bottom, pick the preset we saved earlier, choose your frequency, then click Add. This will run your preset on a schedule. If you would like to view data gathered by these scheduled runs, click Tools>Presets. Select your preset and click Export History to CSV. This will allow you to see all the data gathered by this tool.

Anyways, headin to bed, so thats it for today, but enjoy.
This tool will DEFINITELY help you improve your SEO rankings. Often times with SEO I felt that I had no clue if it was working or not.
This tool gives you a definite way to measure whether or not the SEO techniques you're applying are working effectively or not.

Feel free to leave comments or contact me with suggestions, questions, or requests.

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I am a beginner at SEO, however, after couple months of research I feel I've learned enough to maybe help some beginners at least get started with some basic SEO.Watching videos, reading e-books, reading websites, and looking at googlebots content analysis of my site and how it changed depending on some of my changes has helped me rank a little higher in the search engines. I may not be page 1 for some of the queries I would like, but optimizing for search engines has increased my traffic substantially. (I think about 85% of my visits are from search engines). SEO is practically a whole different discipline, but there are some things that are extremely easy to implement. These tips and tricks use my Death Note Anime Site (www.alldeathnote.com if you're interested) as an example.

SEO Tools:
As a webmaster, Google is your friend! Google has so many services that are free to use, its unbelievable. These tools will help you with everything from picking keywords to tracking your website's statistics. I just wanna make you aware of some of these tools so that you can install them before you do your SEO so you understand what's out there, and how you can make it work for you.

Adwords Keyword Tool (free): https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal
This tool allows you to input a website, or submit a list of keywords. Google will suggest keywords for you
as well as show you information on Competition, Approx Search Volume for the month, Approx Avg Search volume.
Based on this tool you can pick good keywords that will more than likely get you traffic.

Webmaster Tools (free): http://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/
Setup: 5mins
This tool does an analysis of your site, shows you potential problems, crawl errors, allows you to submit sitemaps, tracks statistics (top search queries, content analysis, view external/internal links) and others. This tool is amazing...USE IT.

Analytics (free): http://www.google.com/analytics/
Setup: 5mins
A ton of analysis data and by a ton, i mean A TON. Some of the data available: Visits, PageViews, New vs Returning Visitors, Location of Visitors(maps), Top Content Pages, Traffic Sources(Direct, Referring, Search Engine), Visitor Trending (Time spent on site, avg page views, bounce rate). With this tool, you can actually see how much of an impact your SEO is making. This is an AMAZING tool....use it!

Now the good stuff ...Actual SEO:

Keywords:
Keywords are important! When you optimize your site, you want to have a list of keywords that you would like to optimize for.
When picking keywords, don't just pick the obvious ones. For example in my death note website, "death note" is not a keyword I optimize for.
Why? Because the amount of competition on that keyword is ridiculous and the chances of me being 1st page are slim to none. Instead I choose to optimize for keywords which are searched for less frequently, but will bring me more traffic. Use the keyword tool from google to pick
good keywords with low competition (if you export the file to excel, you will be given a number from 0 to 1 for competition, lower being less competition...this is a lot easier to analyze then their little blue bars).

Header Tags <h1>-<h3>
USE THEM PROPERLY and then use css to style them in the manner you like.
You should try to include keywords in your headings.
<h1>Death Note</h1>
<h2>Episodes</h2>
<h3>Dubbed</h3>
stuff stuff stuff stuff
<h3>Subbed</h3>
stuff stuff stuff stuff
<h2>Anime</h2>
<h3>Chapter 1</h3>
stuff stuff stuff stuff

Meta tags:
are they as important as they used to be? NO.
Will having meta tags make you #1 on google? NO.
does including meta tags harm SEO? NO

Meta tags are not hurtful, so include them!
"Better to have and not need, then need and not have"
Some meta tags you can include.
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html;charset=utf-8" />
<meta name="author" content="alldeathnote.com"/>
<meta name="designer" content="alldeathnote.com"/>
<meta name="copyright" content="Copyright 2008-2009"/>
<meta name="rating" content="General" />
<meta name="description" content="All Death Note Online, Manga Series, Wallpapers, Death Note Episodes Dubbed/Subbed,
Videos, Anime" />
<meta name="keywords" content=" "/> Make this descriptive, 160 characters or less, and these keywords should be more specific to this PAGE, not your entire site.

IMPORTANT - a good title tag
Death Note Episodes, Manga, and Wallpapers Online
as opposed to
Death Note

Important, bold some of your key words
e.g This is a site for the anime Death Note

Build your one way links:
http://www.dmoz.org/add.html (Open Directory - google, yahoo, msn use this directory)
http://www.google.com/submityourcontent/index.html (Google)
http://search.yahoo.com/info/submit.html (Yahoo)
http://search.msn.com.sg/docs/submit.aspx (MSN)

Read this article on getting highly regarded one way links:

http://www.yourblogismoney.com/2009/...one-way-links/

The alt attribute
The img tag has the alt attribute as a required attribute.
Bots cannot crawl your images, so provide them the alt text so they can
index your images etc.
<img src="deathnotewallpaper.jpg" alt="Death Note Kira Wallpaper" />

The title attribute
The anchor tag (<a>) has the title attribute.
Sometimes it may not be feasible to put your keywords in your link text.
Example:
Your links may wanna read
Home Episodes Manga Chat Contact
This isnt describing your link to bots, however the following will

<a title="Death Note Episodes Dubbed and Subbed" href="deathnoteepisodes.php">Episodes</a>

External Links
One way: A site links to you, and your domain does not link back to that site
Highly regarded, proves your content is worthy.

Two way: A site links to you, and your domain links back to the site.
Still good to have, but one way links in a search engines eyes are better.

Think about it
one way = endorsement with no return for the endorser
two way = endorsement because you're endorsing

Theyre both still good to have, but opt for good quality one way links.
If a site links to you like this <a href="http://www.alldeathnote.com">Click here</a>
This is not considered a good one way link, however the following is:

<a title="Death Note Anime Manga Wallpapers" href="http://www.alldeathnote.com">Death Note Anime Manga and Wallpapers</a>

Beware of keyword stuffing and/or css tricks
Using the same keyword to many times on a page or using css to hide keywords will harm your page rank and the way the bot sees your site.
SEO is very delicate and a recommended keyword density is 3-7%. Meaning for every 100 words, you should pop a keyword in 3-7 times.
Stuffing keywords in your page will result in your site being penalized by search engines.

<strong>Example:</strong>
<h1><strong>death note, death note anime, death note episodes, death note dubbed, death note subbed</strong></h1>
<h1 style="font-size: 1px;"><strong>death note, death note anime, death note episodes, death note dubbed, death note subbed</strong></h1>
<h1>This is a site for death note. The Death Note anime was the best anime I've ever seen. If anyone doesn't like Death Note, they have got to be out of their mind. I love anime and I love Death Note.</h1>......you get the point

Privacy Policy/TOS/Contact Page:
try to include a privacy policy, terms of use, and contact page
I read somewhere that google respects sites that include links to a privacy policy,
terms of use, and contact page. so it would be a good idea to include these somewhere on your site.

Sitemaps:
A sitemap is basically a txt file (or XML) where you list all the url's of your site.

Text File
--------------------
www.mysite.com
www.mysite.com/pictures
www.mysite.com/holiday_pictures
www.mysite.com/programmingtips

This file can be submitted to Google WebMaster Tools to help Google crawl your site.

SEO Analyzers:
SEO for Firefox(free): http://tools.seobook.com/firefox/seo-for-firefox.html
This is a Firefox plugin that allows you to view certain SEO related statistics such as Page Rank, Alexa Rank, Keyword density.

Website Grade(free): http://website.grader.com/
Provides an analysis of your site, and alerts to potential problems.

Traffic Tricks:
Include your site EVERYWHEREEEEE.
Your email signature, forum signatures, relevant forum posts etc etc.

Im not sure if actual traffic directly effects SEO, but the more traffic you have, the more chances for external one way links you have and this will inadvertently affect SEO.

These are not a surefire way to get a page 1 google ranking, however, it's a start. Research, read, and watch videos on SEO. Constantly, constantly learn!

Feel free to comment, or asks questions