Online Marketing Blog from metrocafe311

Many a website has launched or is about to be launched without proper attention being paid to a number of KEY factors that effect SEO, mainly the location of hosting and the platform hosting your website.

Working as a web developer I have worked with and re-developed many websites that target a small cross section of the Irish populace. Some of these websites are selling what could be considered niche products to a niche market, but host their website through a third party hosting reseller based in Roanoke, Maryland in the U.S?!?

Having investigated why this was the case, it came down to a rock bottom price offering? When is price ever a factor when hosting a small website, given the serious implications for search engine optimisation!?!

It’s well known that search engines pay attention to the IP address your domain name resolves to, and without the benefit of a regional domain name (such as .ie, .co.uk), can rank your website in an incorrect regional version of their search engine. As a result your website will have absolutely no visibility for your target audience, giving a good example of how investigating hosting is of paramount importance.

“My website is hosted on a server in Ireland”. Another factor effecting SEO are search engine friendly urls. This factor can be directly related to the word bolded in the previous sentence…read on…

Firstly, I have a bit of a problem with the term SEO URL’s as search engines are not stupid! Despite common misconceptions that Google cannot index long “unfriendly” urls, I have seen many examples where Google has indexed some of the most complicated urls on the planet! Google can index almost any url, as it’s what they strive to do (gather information), so I would use the term: Search Engine “Friendlier” URL’s.

When people create documents they generally tend to give them an easily identifiable name (e.g RTE Fear Mongering Recession In Ireland.doc). Likewise on the internet, search engine spiders are going to see URLs with names like: http://mydomain.com/RTE-Fear-Mongering-Resession-In-Ireland.htm as more likely to be about recession in Ireland that the link: http://mydomain.com/?display=true$sectionid=4&sidenav=false

The name helps define the content, simple. A good name helps!

The process of turning THIS:
http://mydomain.com/?display=true$sectionid=4&sidenav=false
INTO THIS:
http://mydomain.com/RTE-Fear-Mongering-Resession-In-Ireland.htm
Is known as URL re-writing. To rank higher for your keywords it makes obvious sense to ensure your documents have names relating to their content…..easy!

Question - “OK, so how do we go about re-writing our urls?”
Answer – “I’m sorry you’re on a shared hosting platform running IIS, we don’t support url rewriting on our shared Windows Machines.”
Solution – Read the title of this blog post.