Technical SEO Ryan Smith, SEO Programmer on search engine friendly web development – HackingSearch.com

There comes a time in the course of every SEO’s life where they find themselves wishing to scrape their own search rankings data rather than use one of the fine commercial tools available for the task.  Fortunately for me, not every SEO is also a hacker, so I do a lot of work with professional online marketing consultants in need of a web programmer who speaks fluent SEO to turn their geeky daydreams into working apps.  But what if you can’t afford me?

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Here’s a PDF of my presentation for TechMaine’s Web Designers User Group on common Apache .htaccess tricks ranging from password-protecting directories and Wordpress permalinks to how to do 301 redirects for a variety of situations and useful PHP runtime configuration directives you can do from .htaccess.

The game sure is changing.  Though it often feels like a captor-hostage situation, and for some accompanied by a kind of Stockholm Syndrome, Google and its nearly pathetic (if precedent) runners-up in the search market have opened up new ways of tweaking your site’s presentation in their search results.  It used to be that all you could customize was the title and the description snippet, simply by writing a smart title tag and an even more enticing meta description tag, but that was it.

If you haven’t heard of Yahoo’s Searchmonkey project, well now you never will because the great behemoth of underpaid, overworked and perpetually-pampered Python programmers of Mountain View have done roughly the same thing Yahoo started a year ago , just for 80% more users than Yahoo’s ever going to have.  They call it Rich Snippets.

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What do you do when you’re trying to put Google Analytics on a dumb-ass checkout process which uses the same identical URL like /stupidcommerce.cgi for every step?

Naturally any web analytics package is going to see every step every user performs as views of the same page and count them all together as the same page, which is basically as ridiculous and impossible as attempting to determine the ratio of red M&M’s to green M&Ms in a jar full of black M&M’s (see diagram at left).

Though far from obvious to most, fortunately Google Analytics is flexible enough to let you solve this dumb problem and add some color back to your candy jar, but not before wading knee-deep through the help file to decipher the steps required. Until now…

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Amit Singhal, a Google Fellow in charge of their Search Quality Group, just posted a killer entry on the official Google Blog describing their IR philosophy. The first thing that jumps out at the casual SEO reading this is emphasized in bold below:

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I recently encountered an issue where a client with a web server cluster was having difficulty keeping every node’s copy of their sitemap up-to-date, and wanted to know if all the search engines’ sitemap bots would follow a 301 redirect on the sitemap itself to a master server with a different domain than the site for which the sitemap is authored.

I doubted that we could trust that redirects on sitemaps would necessarily be followed by every service which supports them. I asked Google’s Matt Cutts about it, and he offered the following suggestions:

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Here are the links from my presentation on Automated Keyword Research in the Organic Keyword Research panel at 2007 WebmasterWorld conference in Las Vegas.

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Properly translating your search-unfriendly URL’s into search-lovable ones, or just scrambling up your information architecture (or “IA”, which is essentially a site’s navigational structure, with respect to the way content is organized) into something more delicious to bots and humans alike should be a straightforward process. Many of us had to learn this process from trial-and-error (trial by fire more like it) or, if you were lucky, from popular SEO folklore.
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As a compliment to Alex’s presentation on site search optimization at the 2005 Vegas PubCon, I developed a free site search tool called BeyondSiteSearch which allows a webmaster to customize site search results which can help optimize a site’s usability and conversion rate. Considering we’ve had over 800 downloads since the PubCon release, I’d say it’s been filling the niche rather brilliantly so far. Here’s a link to the custom site search tool’s instructions and download page.

Happy hacking!