We have run Edward Rayne Web Development solely by word-of-mouth advertising, and have been steadily growing. This year our plan is to expand our business and to do that we are enlisting your help. It’s pretty simple, if you refer someone to Edward Rayne and they hire us, we’ll pay you 10% of the total initial sale**, not including maintenance or ongoing contracts.

We value our customers and supporters and want to offer this incentive as a way to not only attract new business, but a way to reward you for sticking with us and recommending us to others. If you do refer someone to us make sure that they let us know about it or drop us a message about your potential referral so that we can track it accurately.

The services that we offer are Web Design and Development, SEO and Internet Marketing, Applications Development, Website Maintenance, and Consulting/Training on any of the above.

If you have any questions about this offer or any of our services please let us know.

Thank you!

**Disclaimer**

We reserve the right to change, cancel, or suspend this program at any time

• ERAYNE25OFF ~ 25% off the entire first order
• ERAYNE994OFF - Up to $9.94 off the first order ( minimum charge of 0.01 )

25% off coupon is perfect for large orders.

Right now HostGator is running it’s annual spring promotion where everyone gets 20% off their order. While this is a great savings we wanted to quickly put out this reminder that you can always save 25% when using the HostGator coupon code “ERAYNE25OFF“. So go ahead and take advantage of that extra 5% savings, just remember it is only on the initial order so go big to rack up the savings.

Want More? First Month for 1cent

We have another coupon code that is just perfect for smaller orders or if your looking to go month to month.  With the coupon code “ERAYNE994OFF“ you can get your first month for only 1cent.  If your going to be paying 6 months or more just consider that you will most likely save more money using our 25% off coupon.

Where to Change the Coupon Code

We have gotten a lot of questions about where to change or enter HostGator’s coupon code.  Most people look for it on the payment screen but it is actually on the screen right before that.  When you are asked to enter your domain name the field for coupon code is right below that.  Just change the coupon from SPRING to “ERAYNE25OFF” or “ERAYNE994OFF” and your set.

Don't forget to change the coupon code to save more.

Our Experience with HostGator

About 5 years ago we moved our first domains to HostGator.  We had been moving around a lot trying to find a web host that offered the environment we needed for application development but was still affordable and stable.  HostGator came recommended by a friend and after contacting support a few times and getting excellent customer service we were sold.  In 2009 we moved all of our domains under a single account and have never regretted the decision.  Since then we have recommended HostGator to all of our clients and have only received positive feedback from them as well.

Disclaimer

Edward Rayne is an affiliate for HostGator and we do get paid a commission whenever we refer new customers to them.  However we fully stand behind HostGator as an excellent web hosting provider.  We have been hosting all of our accounts with them for years and couldn’t be happier.  As a small business we understand what it’s like making the hard decisions between quality and price but with HostGator we are getting the best of both worlds.

Today, Ann Smarty posted this blog at Search Engine Journal asking When (Not) To Use Target=”_Blank”. In all fairness Ann Smarty is totally awesome and really knows her stuff. In fact, she never actually endorses using target=”_blank” for external links, she was simply asking the question and opening the floor to debate on the issue. My reply simply was too long to make there comfortably.

So Should you open external links in a new window

No! The design decision to open external links in a new window is the wrong one for your users 99% of the time. There are a couple of key points to make on this, and I would welcome any thoughts anyone has on them.

User Reaction: Many users, myself included, have very strong negative reactions when a link opens a new window (or tab) without warning. I hate it and I’m not using that word lightly. I have never met or heard of anyone who has this same negative reaction when a link opens in the same window.

User Ability: Users have the ability to open a link in a new window or new tab as they desire already. This functionality has been built into every browser and is a normal function that users are already trained to do. Even better, many users can middle click the mouse and directly open links in a new window. There is no simple common browser function that will force a link to open in the same window if that is their preference (I could be wrong here). The key here is “user preference” not the website’s preference.

User Workflow: The internet has been around long enough that people have established a workflow for using it that works for them. Opening a new window or tab forces the user to change their workflow to accommodate the website owners’ narcissistic fear of losing page impressions. Making the choice to open a new window forces the user to locate a window/tab before they can continue with what they wanted to do. Nothing is gained for the user by this decision that the user can’t achieve on their own.

User Experience: Finally the last and most important argument against opening external links in new windows is that it breaks the established and expected norms for link behavior. This creates a negative experience for a large number of your users, while in turn enriching the experience for no one. There is simply no positive results from the decision to take the control away from your users and a great many negatives.

Exceptions and Best Practices

Like everything there are going to be exceptions to my position on opening new windows. In fact, Ann Smarty lists most of them in her post (just go read it already). I tend to prefer if .PDF files and other non-html files open a new window or tab. The key factor should be what will provide the most familiar and comfortable experience to the user and if at all possible defer to the users to make the decision for themselves.

For those times when you feel you absolutely must open a new window or tab it is best practices to make it very clear what you’re going to do. Just like you would announce that a link opens a .PDF so that those who would prefer to avoid them can do so, announcing when a new window will be opened is just common courtesy. Even users like myself who hate new windows will forgive the occasional one if it’s not a surprise.

My Response to Common Arguments

“I want to keep visitors on my site as long as possible to get more page views”. I have never understood this argument. Page views have no value, you might as well be raking up wompom points for all the good page views will do you. Why anyone would risk potentially running off a future customer or loyal reader just to artificially inflate a valueless stat is beyond me. Seriously take off the target=”_blank” from your site and email me. I’ll gladly set up a bot to give you as many page views as you want.

“I can’t vouch for the availability of external sites and don’t want visitors to follow a broken link.” This is from a comment on the post by Michael Martinez who is a search engine genius and because of that I actually stopped and considered the merits of the argument. After thinking on it I can see the merit if you’re linking to a lot of unreliable resources (why?). Hopefully though this isn’t an issue so often that this is necessary. If it is then I would strongly recommend taking a hard look at where you choose to link to.

“I don’t want interrupt the user from reading my content to check out my references.” I hear this argument most from websites that provide inline links inside of their articles and I can understand their position. No one wants to write 1000 words only to have readers jump ship and miss the last 700. The truth is that if the content isn’t compelling enough to make them want to come back, they weren’t staying anyhow.

A lot of SEO companies will stress paid search engine placement for your keywords, while we don’t discount that as a part of some SEO campaigns it won’t mean a lot if all of the traffic driven to your site doesn’t find the content they were looking for. That’s where knowing how to develop and implement your content comes in.

Of course, content strategies will vary based on the kind of site that you have. One thing that all content strategies should contain; however, is in -depth search engine optimization research. Every piece of content on your site should be crafted with your key words, competition, and potential customers in mind. While it takes a lot of work up front, it pays off with big SEO returns after launch.

A big no-no is simply regurgitating what you have found elsewhere. Not only do search engines frown upon this, but if your “borrowing” isn’t done following copyright laws with proper citation, you may find yourself in legal trouble. Keep in mind that if you create content (whether it’s blog posts, articles, sales text, or even just meta tag descriptions) that is unique to your site, uses your identified keywords (in moderation) and is relevant to your site and your customer’s needs, you will reap great SEO rewards.

I’m not going to bother writing yet another of those articles. Personally I HATE this tag. Not because of the tag itself, its really nice and non-offensive. No I hate it because of all the inane questions, bad information, and scammy tactics that are the results of this tag. If your wanting some information on the current state of the tag here are 3 wonderful examples if your wondering.

Here is Matt Cutts from Google saying that “Google doesn’t use the keyword meta tag in web search”
What’s The Best Keyword Meta Tags Formula? by Shaun Anderson (hobo)
Even Yahoo, who supported the tag much longer than anyone else are dropping support (or are they?).

So with no search engines of note using the keyword meta tag to influence rankings anymore what should we do with it? The easy answer is to forget all about it. In large part that is what I have done on a lot of our sites and the sites we manage. So far we haven’t noticed any negative effects at all.

But, there is one use that I will highly recommend for the keyword meta tag. Misspellings.

Currently Yahoo and most likely the others as well are indexing the keyword meta tag as normal text with a really low ranking factor. Because of this I would recommend using the keywords tag for common misspellings of your business name, product name, or anything else that you would rank for normally. Since you wouldn’t want to use the misspellings on your page hiding them in the keyword tag allows the search engines to relate the misseplling to your page.

Either that or just forget about them. Thats what I do.

It should also be noted that it is optional for search engines to follow the directive of the /roots.txt file. Although all major search engines tend to comply with the /robots.txt file there are plenty of spammy spiders that won’t. For that reason the ony sure fire way to protect content is to place password protection on the sensitive areas.

If you have something that you want to disallow search engine spiders access to, but sill allow unrestricted surfer access the best practice is to create a /robots.txt file in your root directory. That means the url to it should look like this:

http://www.yourwebsite.com/robots.txt

The following are examples of what should be contained in a /robots.txt file:

If you want to exclude ALL robots from your ENTIRE site:

User-agent: *
Disallow: /
If you want to exclude ALL robots from some content on your site:

User-agent: *
Disallow: /cgi-bin/
Disallow: /tmp/
Disallow: /junk/
If you want to disallow a single robot:

User-agent: EvilRobot
Disallow: /
IF you want to let ONE robot in:

User-agent: GoogleBot
Disallow:
User-agent: *
Disallow: /
The user-agent field is used to identify the bot you would like to allow/deny access. The * character is a wild card character and stands for “any”. Please note that if there is a part of your site that is private it should be password protected even if you use /robots.txt to disallow crawling of the page. /robots.txt is NOT enforceable and although legitimate spiders of search engines will follow its directives, not all bots are benign.

It’s also important to know that just because you have excluded content from being crawled, search engine results can still contain the urls to that content. This is because the spiders may have spotted links to your content from other sites with anchor text suggesting your uncrawled url may be good for that term. Below is a great video from Matt Cutts showing how that works.

Uncrawled URLs in Search Results – Matt Cutts

We use WordPress for almost every website that we create and have also used Drupal and Joomla.  All three of these are free, open source, have huge support systems, and thousands of free themes.  Using a CMS like WordPress cuts down on our development time by at least half and saves our clients thousands of dollars.

General Tips

Human Readable URL’s

Human Readable: www.site.com/category-name/page-name
Not Human Readable: www.site.com/index.php?cat=1&page=356

Making your URL’s human readable has a couple of huge benefits.  First, it allows your customers to understand your site structure by looking at where they are. Secondly the URL will naturally contain keywords that search engines can read and use to rank your page.

Use Hyphens instead of Underscores

If possible use hyphens for spaces instead of underscores.  Not only are hyphens easier for your surfers to read but search engines generally understand that a hyphen breaks up two separate words.

Short and Sweet

The limit on URL length seems to be around 2,000 characters before browsers won’t display them.  For practical purposes though the shorter the better.  A good rule of thumb is to remove all non-essential words from the url that you can.  Common stop words like a, and, the, or, of and so forth can all be removed.  Creating a short and keyword rich URL is a major foundation in on page SEO.

WordPress Tips

WordPress comes standard with the ability to specifiy your url structure which WordPress calls Permalinks.  This page on the WordPress codex explains the basics.  The permalinks that I tend to use most are

/%category%/%postname%

I have found that this permalink code gives me nice clean URL’s.  I then edit the post slug when writing to eleminate extra words which allows me full control over my URL.

Drupal Tips

Drupal also comes standard with the ability to construct what they call Friendly URL’s.  There is also a popular module Pathauto that will handle this automatically and I highly recommend it.  The Pathauto module uses patterns much like WordPress to build the URL structure.  These patterns are detailed on this page in the Drupal documentation.

Other CMS’s, Shopping Carts, Forums, etc

Most other Content Management Systems have the ability to edit the URL structure or have add ons that do.  It is very important to good SEO to have a consistant and keyword rich URL so I highly recommend looking into the options you have on your CMS.

Best practice is to take those old URL’s, and all their traffic and inbound links, and redirect them to a new working URL. This results in a win/win for your users and your search engine rankings.

That is where the 301 server redirection comes in. Without getting technical a 301 redirect is a HTTP response from the server that means that the page has permanently moved to a new URL. Setting up 301 redirection is pretty straight forward and easy to manage.

301 Redirects and SEO

The permenant redirection indicated by a 301 error is honored by search engines. What this means is that when a search engine encounters a 301 redirect while crawling the web they will delist the old broken URL and update all the incomming links to the new URL.

Here is a short video by Mike Cutts from Google explaining how Google treats 301 redirects and anchor text.

301 Redirects Best Practices

Currently what we suggest to all our clients is that any page that gets search engine traffic or that has a significant number of inbound links get a 301 redirect to a working page with similar or the same content. This provides the best experience for surfers and maximizes the SEO value of their existing inbound links.

Any old pages that don’t get traffic or that have little to no inbound links should then be sent to a well designed and helpful 404 error page. Since there is little value in these pages to be lost the purpose of this method is to maximize the user experience for those who stumble upon one of these pages.

Another popular alternative is to redirect these lesser used pages to the home page. Doing this allows you to direct the inbound links and search engine rankings to a valuable page on the website.

The downside of this method is that potential customers may follow a link expecting to find something and instead find themselves on your home page. This isn’t the best user experience and may result in a lost customer.

Redirects on Apache Servers

The simplist and most common ways to set up 301 redirects is through the .htaccess file in the home directory of your web server. Unlike javascript redirects .htaccess redirects are invisible to the surfer because they are executed by the server when the page is delivered.

.htaccess Single Page Redirects

Single page redirects are best used when the content on the old page is still available at a new location. This way not only do you maintain all the inbound links and pagerank but visitors who arrive through external links find the information they were expecting.

When writing the redirect rule for a single page redirect you leave off the http://www and instead just include the path that would appear afterwords. For exampe to redirect from the old page of http://www.site.com/old/page.html to http://www.site.com/new/page.html you would use …

Redirect 301 old/page.html http://www.site.com/new/page.html

Other 301 Redirects

There are many other ways to set up 301 redirects besides using an .htaccess file. Steven Hargrove has a great resource that covers all of them here. If possible I highly recommend using .htaccess though because of how easy it is to set up and maintain.

Descriptions should be targeted at the surfer to entice them to your listing because most search engines give low ( if any ) weight to the description tag for ranking purposes. The primary value of the description tag is that it allows you to partially control how your listings display in results. If you provide compelling, unique, and accurate descriptions you will attract more search visitors.

An optimized description meta tag should follow these simple guideleines.

1. Unique description tag for every page
2. Use your primary keyword phrase once in the description
3. Accurately describe the page to reduce bounce rate

Unlike in the title tag there really are no “advanced SEO” tips for the meta description. Search engines, with the exception of Yahoo, place low to no ranking value on the description meta tag. Instead spend a few minutes creating a unique description that will appeal to searchers and then move on to something that will provide greater SEO returns.

The only time I would suggest revisiting the description tag is if you’re receiving significantly lower search engine traffic than your search position should be providing. In that case, some optimization of the description may result in a higher click through rate.

Again, I wouldn’t consider this unless I was in a top 5 position. Before that any time spent optimizing the description could be better spent building links or developing content to increase your rankings.

Those four links would normally be …

http://www.sample.com

http://sample.com

http://www.sample.com/index.php (or whatever)

http://sample.com/index.php

So what we have are in essence four different web pages, each gathering their own backlinks, but each one most likely having the exact same content. As a website owner or SEO this is obviuosly not something you want. The search engines also don’t want 4 versions of every single page cluttering up their databases.

This is where canonicalization comes in. Canonicalization gives you the power to choose which version you want to have the search engines use. It’s important that you make this choice for the search engines though because if you don’t, they will. While Google and other search engines are pretty good about deciding which version is best, its still better for us to retain as much control as possible.

To do this we will be using the canonical tag.

This tag is used inside of the tags and will indicate to search engines which of the versions you want them to link to. You are then free to begin building links to your preferred version without worrying that some site somewhere will add links to the wrong one that you won’t get credit for.

I know there are probibly a few more questions but instead of repeating information Google has provided here are the links.

Matt Cutts on “SEO advice: url canonicalization”
Google Webmaster Central Blog on “Specify Your Canonical“