Free SEO Advice

It seems that everyone is looking for free SEO advice as websites are becoming more advanced in SEO terms. The key to SEO success is hard to put your finger on. It is apparant that the harder you try the worse the results are that are achieved. It seems that Google are changing the goal posts slightly to keep ahead of the Search Engine Optimisation companys. So what free SEO advice can Chameleon Web Services offer?

SEO Basics

You have a website and you want to drive more traffic to the site so you need to start with SEO basics. One of the first things to understand is that Google record traffic visiting the site relating to keyword terms. Most websites have a fundemental problem when it comes to this as Google will basically be recording 4 results for sites traffic. This is known as canonicalisation and is one of the first SEO basics tasks that should be fixed to prevent Google recording information as below:-

• https://www.chameleonwebservices.co.uk
• https://www.chameleonwebservices.co.uk/index.html
• http://chameleonwebservices.co.uk
• http://chameleonwebservices.co.uk/index.html

This means in Googles eyes that there are 4 home pages that visitors hit depending on how it is that they have stumbled accross the site. Each home page will have information relating to visitors and this is being watered down. Fixing the canonicalisation errors on a site is simple if you understand coding. This is the first step in SEO basics that most sites lack.

.htaccess file

To setup a .htaccess file to avoid duplication issues edit the existing .htaccess file or create one and use the following code. The .htaccess file will be located at the websites root folder. If it doesnt exist already then this is the place to create it.

The code should be as follows:-

Options +FollowSymlinks

RewriteEngine On

RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^website.com [NC]

RewriteRule ^(.*) http://www.website.com/$1 [R=301,L]

Note that this is only on Apache server.

Now you need to test the .htaccess file is working.

Look at the link http://chameleonwebservices.co.uk and see if it puts the www. back at the front of the URL.

Now try the index link http://chameleonwebservices.co.uk/index.html and see if the index gets dropped.