In our previous post, we discussed the engagement between aknowledge it solutions and Little Wildrose (www.littlewildrose.com). In this article, we hope to get into the nitty gritty, and discuss some of the basics of SEO, and some of the first steps we will take in determining what work is required, and what results we could expect to see.

Some background points:

• The Little Wildrose website has been operating for almost 2 months, and has just recently had a new website developed
• Little Wildrose produces custom hand made clutches (men: it’s a fashion item)
• Little Wildrose currently runs OS Commerce for the main website
• A Blogspot blog is already being used (http://mylittlewildrose.blogspot.com/)
• Facebook is heavily utilised (http://www.facebook.com/LittleWildroseBNE)

We started off by looking at the index page of the Little Wildrose, and noticed firstly, that there was no visitor tracking scripts, such as Google Analytics. This was our first priority, so as we can start collecting visitor metrics. Usually, webhosts provide tools like AWStats or Webalyzer, to analyse traffic to a website, however, we find this to be quite limited. Google being Google, have spent lots of time, money and effort, on developing Google Analytics, and as such, it is regarded as one of the industry standards for analysis of web traffic.

Little Wildrose Google Analytics Code

Implementing Google Analytics could not be simpler. For Janine’s website, we simply edit the page template file and add the Google Analytics tracking code to the end of the file, before the </body> tag. This code simply loads Google’s tracking script when the page has finished loading, and tracks the visitors activity on the website. It’s very unobtrusive, and only tracks non-personal details such as time on the page, browser version, referrer URL, page title, etc.

Having a web statistics package straight up, reduces the turn around on an SEO package. There are numerous things that can be done without utilising the statistics, however. Statistics are utilised later on down the track, to not only track progress, but to also aide in what is known as SEO copywriting. Statistics also show where the bulk of your visitors come from, such as Facebook, Google, and even so much as detailing what keywords are entered when using Google or other search engines.

While we await the statistics, we next move on to analysing the existing page. A few of the things we pick up immediately with Janine’s website:

• The official URL is littlewildrose.com – however, the website redirects to littlewildrose.net
• The blog RSS feed is not linked to the main website

Normalising the URL

First things first, some basic systems administration. Janine mentioned straight away that the website redirects to the .net URL, and needs to be fixed. We agree. A website that redirects like this, will lose valuable ranking points with Google. Saying you are littlewildrose.com, but the website redirecting to littlewildrose.net, is a massive no no, and you need to stick by your branding.

A 3rd party web host provider was required to modify the hosting account in this instance. The domain account had been created as littlewildrose.net, which is fine, but a separate account on the webhost for littlewildrose.com had also been created, and as such, they needed to remove this, to allow littlewildrose.com to be added to the littlewildrose.net account.

Next, we implemented what is called a 301 redirect. This ensures that the domain name being used, is the same, all the time. This is implemented by editing or placing a “.htaccess” file in the root of the web folder, as follows:

<IfModule mod_rewrite.c>
RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !^www\.littlewildrose\.com [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.littlewildrose.com$1 [L,R=301]
</IfModule>

What this does, is matches any URL not beginning with www.littlewildrose.com, and redirects it to a littlewildrose.com URL – that is, if a user goes to http://www.littlewildrose.net/contactus, it will rewrite the URL to http://www.littlewildrose.com/contactus

Linking the Blog

As well as using conventional methods of linking directly to another page, many browsers now have built in functionality to pick up an Atom or RSS feed from a website, and allow you to “subscribe” to that feed. Publishing your feed URL on your index page, allows Google and other search engines to validate that you are updating content on a regular basis. Frequently updated content, scores higher rankings on Google.

To implement this, we simply add the RSS and Atom feed URL’s to the head of the website’s HTML code, by pasting the following code:

<link rel="alternate" type="application/atom+xml" title="LittleWildrose - Atom"
href="http://mylittlewildrose.blogspot.com/feeds/posts/default"/>
<link rel="alternate" type="application/rss+xml" title="LittleWildrose - RSS"
href="http://mylittlewildrose.blogspot.com/feeds/posts/default?alt=rss" />

Once the change is made, a feed icon will be displayed in the address bar of most browsers (the little orange icon), which allows the visitor to subscribe to the feed.

It should be noted, that we encourage all of our clients to maintain a blog, and keep it regularly updated. We’re not talking about daily updates here, but a simple article once a fortnight is all it takes. Not only will you be keeping your customers in touch, but you will be encouraging Google to index your content more frequently, so new additions to your site (i.e. new products), will get indexed faster.

The Next Post

In the next post we will be looking at the Google Analytics reports, as well as some of the basic changes we will start to implement.