Umbrella Web Studio

htaccess 301 Redirect Duplicate Inner Page URLs

Amir Farid — Fri, 09 Jan 2015 17:16:48 +0000

Its very easy and common to get htaccess code to 301 redirect the duplicate home page URLs that may exist for your website home page. We looked at how to achieve that in an earlier post titled non-www to www. Googles Matt Cutts also has a good article here about that issue.

However trawling though the net or fiddling about with htacces codes to resolve the duplicate inner page URLs you may have is a much different matter. WordPress and many other CMS’s handle this easily without any intervention required from the user.

If however you have a static HTML site and/or a PHP based site then this may not be so easy. You may have fixed your duplicate home page URL’s but you will still have inner page duplicate URL’s like so:

www.example.com/innerpage/
www.example.com/innerpage/index.php
www.example.com/innerpage/index.html

To htaccess 301 redirect duplicate inner page URLs you have to be careful. Inadvertently adding the wrong code to your htaccess may give you a 404 page not found error for that page or worse for the whole of your site.

Luckily, its fairly simple to add code to the htaccess file. To htaccess 301 redirect duplicate inner page URLs you simply need to pop this code into your htaccess file. We would recommend adding this below the non-www to www code as per our earlier post:


RewriteCond %{THE_REQUEST} ^[A-Z]+\ /([^/]+/)*index\.(php|html?)[#?]?
RewriteRule ^(([^/]+/)*)index\.(php|html?)$ http://example.com/$1 [R=301,L]

The first line of that code gives the parameters that need to be looked for. So in this case we are looking for index.html and index.php. You could of-course replicate this for inner-pages that are called innerpage.html and/or innerpage.php or any other variation that you could think of. To keep it simple we have used the index example.

Now all you would need to do is pop that into your htaccess file with the code referenced in the earlier non-www to www post and hey presto all you duplicate inner page URL’s will disappear. This will now leave you with one simple url that looks like:

www.example.com/innerpage/

Notice the / the URL’s will be appended with that and you will no longer have the index.html/php referenced. this is good for static HTML and PHP based websites.

Author information

Amir Farid

Creative SEO Director at Umbrella Interactive Ltd

Amir Farid is the Creative SEO Director of Umbrella Interactive Ltd. Based in Rochdale, Greater Manchester, Umbrella Interactive provides online and digital media solutions to SME's and start-up businesses. Umbrella Brands include Umbrella Host, SEO Umbrella and Umbrella Web Studio. You Can find him on Google+

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The Importance of Choosing a Good Web Host for your Internet Business

Ahmed Bhula — Tue, 09 Oct 2012 15:07:05 +0000

Finding a good web host company/package is one of the most important tasks for your internet business and can literally lead to the success/failure for your business.

What is a Good Web Host?

A website host is an internet service that allows you to make your website accessible to users on the internet. Without a host, you have no website. Basically, your website will be stored on a computer at a data centre and ‘hosted’ to the work on the internet.

Why is a Good Web Host Important?

How would a taxi driver fare if they were given a 15 year old Nissan Micro to do their job? They would only go so far before the car can’t take any more (except in extremely rare cases!!). The more people the driver takes on board, the sooner the car will become unworkable.

However, a taxi driver who is given a new Merc will last years without facing the slightest issue (no matter the number jobs completed)

A host is similar to this. A bad, low spec hosting package will only go so far before breaking down (something that must be avoided at all costs for an internet business). A host going offline means your site will become inaccessible, thus users will not be able to purchase from your site.

Now, there are millions of different hosting packages available across at all levels and you need to ensure you choose the best for your business. Yes, the best for your business, not the best out there. If you’re looking to purchase a car, do you go and purchase an R8? No, you would first look at your budget and then your requirements and whatever fits within the two, you choose.

The same goes for hosting. You don’t need the greatest but be sure to go above your minimum requirements (as traffic on the web can change in an instant).

Traffic and users are one thing, the platform your website is built on is another. Some platforms require high resources and trying to host them on a low spec hosting package will inadvertently take the site down.

So, estimate the traffic to your site and look at the requirements for your cms platform. Research this well and you’ll inevitably choose the ideal host for your internet business.

Author information

Ahmed Bhula

This article was written by Ahmed who works at Toner Giant, an internet business supplying Canon toner cartridges to businesses and consumers in the UK.

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Remove WLW and RSD WordPress Links

Amir Farid — Mon, 12 Dec 2011 17:04:39 +0000

Remove WLW and RSD WordPress Links from your wordpress website. WordPress by default adds the following code to the head section of your WordPress site:

These links are used if you plan on using Windows Live Writer to write to your wordpress blog/site.

Many of you simply dont need this or dont plan to use Windows Live Writer. This post will show you how to remove WLW and RSD wordpress links from you head section and reduce the size of the page and potentially make your pages load much faster.

Now to remove these links, simply login to your WordPress admin area and follow the instructions below:

1. Navigate to Design -> Theme Editor and click Theme Functions (functions.php) from the list of theme files

2. Just before the closing ?> tag, add the following:

remove_action ('wp_head', 'rsd_link');
remove_action ('wp_head', 'wlwmanifest_link');

3. Now click on update and the file will be saved.

For those of you that dont have a functions file, simply create a new file and call it functions.php and add the following code to that file:

The WLW and RSD links should now be removed from your site. To check this simply visit your website and hit ctrl + u, which shows you the source code. If all has gone well the generator code is no longer there. That’s how easy it is to remove WLW and RSD WordPress links!

Author information

Amir Farid

Creative SEO Director at Umbrella Interactive Ltd

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Remove meta name=”generator” content=”WordPress 3.2.1″

Amir Farid — Fri, 16 Sep 2011 16:50:21 +0000

From the 2.5 version of WordPress the meta tag generator that displayed the version of WordPress you were using was removed from the template file to become a core function. This meant that you could not simply remove the tag from the template file anymore.

To remove meta name=”generator” content=”WordPress 3.2.1″ or for any other version number, this now needs to be implemented via the functions file.

There are many reasons to remove this tag but i think the most important is for security reasons. Showing your WordPress version could allow hackers to exploit vulnerabilities for specific WordPress versions. Most Web Hosting companies have auto install up-daters which update your WordPress installs and removes vulnerabilities that are found, however many do not.

Now to remove this tag, simply login to your WordPress admin area and follow the instructions below:

1. Navigate to Design -> Theme Editor and click Theme Functions (functions.php) from the list of theme files

2. Just before the closing ?> tag, add the following:

remove_action('wp_head', 'wp_generator');

3. Now click on update and the file will be saved.

For those of you that don’t have a functions file, simply create a new file and call it functions.php and add the following code to that file:

Your WordPress version tag should now be removed from your site. To check this simply visit your website and hit ctrl + u, which shows you the source code. If all has gone well the generator code is no longer there.

Author information

Amir Farid

Creative SEO Director at Umbrella Interactive Ltd

The post Remove meta name=”generator” content=”WordPress 3.2.1″ appeared first on Umbrella Web Studio.

Write great PPC Adverts for AdWords

Amir Farid — Thu, 08 Sep 2011 13:51:29 +0000

Successful search engine marketing (SEM) requires an understanding of what potential customers are trying to achieve. PPC adverts that are relevant to their queries will drive higher click-through rates (CTRs), better quality scores on Google, lower costs per click (CPC) and ultimately more sales.

To be successful in your SEM approach you must understand where prospects are in the buying process.Generic searches signal ‘research phase’ and an opportunity to promote specific products. Detailed searches indicate a ‘buying mode’ where customers will respond to highly relevant ads. Here’s how to create copy that will pull them in.

1. Create clear, compelling messages to drive up your clickthrough rates (CTR). Poor CTRs will establish a low quality score and increase click prices.

2. Find the traffic by initially using a few broad keywords, then use “search query reports” to add more relevant keywords to the mix.

3. Add non-related negative keywords to avoid unwanted traffic.

4. Once you have traffic streams, break out your keywords into separate ad groups with super-relevant ad copy that relates to your customers’ queries.

5. If you have the budget, use tracking technology to understand your traffic and which keywords and ads are converting to sales -alternatively you can use Google Analytics for this analysis.

6. Always run at least three ad copy variations to see which messages work best, then delete the two low performers and make two new variations of the best one.

7. For keywords that do not convert, do some analysis to learn whether there is a mismatch between your ad copy and the offering or if you’re simply not competitive.

Author information

Amir Farid

Creative SEO Director at Umbrella Interactive Ltd

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Get more from your user-generated content

Amir Farid — Tue, 06 Sep 2011 17:05:43 +0000

Most brand and retailer sites have some function for collecting user-generated content, but many of them miss out on business benefits by not using that content fully. This is a huge lost opportunity, as user-generated content can put you in touch directly with consumers of your products and services and help you learn about their attitudes towards it. Here are some ways you can get additional value out of your content.

1. Improve your digital marketing

Customer voices have impact far beyond your web page. Use UGC in email campaigns to increase open rates and click-through rates. Include it in banner ads and Google AdWords to create more effective advertising.

2. Turn positive feedback into campaigns

Listen to what your customers are saying that they like and use their words to create acquisition campaigns focusing on those benefits.

3. Use negatives to improve

Negative reviews can be a powerful tool. Smart retailers use them to drive their merchandising and manage catalogue content. Manufacturers use them to improve their product features and quality.

4. Take reviews in-store

User-generated content can influence purchase decisions in stores as well as online. Add ratings and review snippets to shelf tags to boost in-store conversion. Or provide access to reviews on mobile devices using barcodes on the products.

5. Take it social

Make it easy to share user-generated content on social networks and integrate it into your FaceBook page. Use the social ground to facilitate product discovery by preempt users to find products that are highly targeted to their friends.

Author information

Amir Farid

Creative SEO Director at Umbrella Interactive Ltd

The post Get more from your user-generated content appeared first on Umbrella Web Studio.

3 New resources for Web Designers

Amir Farid — Sun, 04 Sep 2011 18:40:47 +0000

Color Rotate
Web www.colorotate.org
Price Free/$9 for Photoshop plug-in

Coming up with a colour scheme for sites that’s both coherent and individual can be lot harder than it might first appear. Color Rotate gives you a chance to look at the problem in three dimensions (“The same way as your brain”, apparently).Whether that claim can be justified or not, Color Rotate is a nice thing to play around with. Producing palettes of up to 16 hues in pretty much any colour format is simple. The 3D viewer quickly makes sense, giving you an intuitive grasp of how your choices relate to one another. A great resources for Web Designers.

CSS 3.0 Maker
Web www.css3maker.com
Price Free

The visual goodness that CSS3 represents has patchy coverage. Some of it works on iPhones, some only on the latest browsers, and occasionally everyone pulls together to give some decent cross-platform support. CSS 3.0 Maker gives you a resource for trying out these new effects and getting reliable code to use, but also discovering where your visual concoction is going to work. The controls are all straightforward slider-based affairs and code is just copy and paste. Another great resources for Web Designers.

Font Spring
Web www.fontspring.com
Price Per font

Using custom typography on the web is a tantalising prospect, but not everyone wants to pay a subscription and have their typefaces hosted on third-party servers. Font Spring charges a one-off fee for unlimited use and enables you to download and host the fonts yourself.
It’s a web-focused clearing house for type designers, and has listings for a huge number of foundries. If you don’t want to limit the number of domains or page views your (§font-face installations can serve, then this is your solution. Another great resources for Web Designers.

Author information

Amir Farid

Creative SEO Director at Umbrella Interactive Ltd

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non-www to www

Amir Farid — Sun, 14 Aug 2011 20:32:25 +0000

When it comes to optimising your website, duplicate content is always an issue but much overlooked. Many webmasters do not even realise that Google may be inadvertently looking at 2 versions of there home page. The non-www to www versions, and inadvertently be hit by the duplicate content penalty!

That’s because if you haven’t redirected your non-www to www version (or visa versa) then Google sees 2 versions of your site and slaps a duplicate content penalty on to your site.

The code below will help get rid of this. It will redirect the non-www to www version of your website via a friendly 301 redirect telling Google that the site permanently exists at the www version. Of Course this also applies for the rest of your site for which this code also helps.

Simply replace the example.com with your site reference (highlighted in green) and the save code to your .htaccess file and upload it to the root. If you don’t have a .htaccess file then simply paste the code to a text file and save it as .htaccess then upload to the root of your folder. Of course your UK Web Hosting account needs to be an based on an Apache server for this to work correctly or a server of the similar type..


Options +FollowSymLinks
RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^example.co.uk [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.example.co.uk/$1 [L,R=301]

RewriteCond %{THE_REQUEST} ^[A-Z]{3,9}\ /index\.html
RewriteRule ^index\.html$ http://www.example.co.uk/ [R=301,L]

The last 2 lines of code above simply redirect your index file to the root and apply’s a / so that Google doesn’t cache 2 copy’s of your home page i.e. www.example.co.uk and www.example.co.uk/index.html.

You can replace the html part of the code for php or htm if that’s what your using on you site.

Author information

Amir Farid

Creative SEO Director at Umbrella Interactive Ltd

The post non-www to www appeared first on Umbrella Web Studio.

Search Engine Optimisation (SEO)

Amir Farid — Sun, 17 Jul 2011 15:16:37 +0000

Umbrella web Studio offers Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) based on years of continuing research by our in-house experts. We use an ethical approach to optimizing your web pages ensuring that you don’t get penalized by Google or worse blocked completely..

The key is to understand that SEO is useless unless your site has a good online reputation with Google. Umbrella web studio will devise strategies for listing your web site in appropriate directories, link your offline promotion to your online and help you develop strategies to do to get yourself noticed more.

After initially analyzing your keyword positioning in the search engines, we use methods and file analysis to determine a clear keyword strategy so that Search Engine Optimisation happens naturally and organically.

Here are some great tips to help you get the most visitors possible.

We build websites to be SEO ready

If we build your website, we integrate the Search Engine Optimisation steps into the normal process of designing and building your website. we make sure that standard features such as your URLs, navigation and link text all match the terms in your keyword strategy as per Google guidelines. Using this approach automatically makes your website search engine frreindly and ready.

The proof is in the pie

We have helped many businesses improve their Search Engine Ranking positions and have also optimised our own website for a wide range of keyword terms. In fact, most of our own business is generated directly by search engine traffic. Contact us and let us show you what we can do for your business.

Author information

Amir Farid

Creative SEO Director at Umbrella Interactive Ltd

The post Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) appeared first on Umbrella Web Studio.

Increase traffic to your website

Amir Farid — Wed, 16 Mar 2011 15:22:15 +0000

Nominet has written this great guide with tips to increase traffic to your website. We thought we’d pass it on to you for inspiration.

So you’ve got your new web site up and running. How do you get maximum exposure for it and ensure that you get a constant flow of traffic to it? There are a number of fairly simple things you can do that will make a big difference to the amount of visitors you will get.

Here are some great tips to help you get the most visitors possible and increase traffic to your website.

1. Make your launch public

If you are launching a new web site or some significant new content for your site, write an introduction about it and submit it to share web sites such as Digg, Reddit.

2. Make sure that the domain name you have chosen is suitable

Pick a name that will grab the interest of your target audience and enable them to instantly understand the aim of your web site.

Try and keep your domain name short – two to three words maximum. Avoid complex or hard to spell words, as people will struggle to type them correctly and remember them. Try to avoid a hyphenated domain name, as it will make the name hard to pass on verbally (e.g. on the telephone).

3. Be flexible about your choice of domain name

However, as there are approximately 120-130 million domain names registered worldwide, it may be useful to have a shortlist of alternatives in case the name you ideally want is already registered. You can check the availability of any domain names ending in .uk using the WHOIS search facility on our web site sister http://umbrella-host.com/domain-names/.

4. Think about sources of traffic to your web site

The type of traffic you want to attract to your web site will also have a bearing on your choice of domain name, as well as influencing how you decide to publicise the site, and the features and content you include.

Traffic to a personal web site usually comes from three main sources:

Search engines
Referral traffic (from other sites)
Loyal readers

Each of these audiences will benefit from a different approach. The key to building a group of regular readers is to keep the content on the site fresh and update it regularly. Adding features such as a forum, or comments section will enable your audience to interact with you and others who share your interests, which can help keep the impetus
going.

You can attract readers from search engines by using keywords. Search engines use keywords within domain names to rank web sites. If you choose a domain name that contains generic keywords (like mobile, music blog, gamer) you could achieve a high ranking. If your web site contains advertising this kind of traffic can be valuable, as visitors who come via search engines are more likely to click on ads than regular readers.

You can also attract readers who follow links from other sites. If your site is a blog you could benefit from links from one of the larger blogs such as Slashdot. This can result in large amounts of traffic and although these visitors are less likely to click on ads if they decide to post links to your site on their own blogs this can help with your search engine optimisation.

5. Marketing your web site through search engines

If you are not able to use keywords in your domain name you can still use search engines to promote your web site to a larger audience. Most of the search engines and directories allow you to register your web site for free. You can also take advantage of free banner advertising on various link exchange networks.

6. Marketing your web site through social networking sites

If you belong to a social networking site such as MySpace or Facebook, or you are a member of a network such as a Yahoo Group, make sure that you post a link to your web site on your page, and post messages every time you update the web site or add a new feature. It’s free advertising that could reach a much larger audience than you think.

7. Making money from your web site

You can make money from your web site by placing adverts on your home page that generate revenue when visitors click on them. Google Adsense adverts are pay per click and can generate decent revenue. You could also sign up for an account with Text Link ads, who will sell small text ads on your site and split the revenue with you 50-50. You can also take advantage of free access to various affiliate networks such as Amazon and LinkShare. You can also make extra revenue by adding a donation button – if your site is giving people genuine value they may well be prepared to give a donation.

8. Keep developing your web site

The key to any successful personal web site is to generate traffic. In order to keep attracting visitors to your site, you must spend time developing it and updating it regularly. Add new content as often as possible, and carry out regular reviews of your layout and design. Keep your eye out for new features you can add to improve usability and if you are monetizing your web site, experiment with different revenue streams.

9. Use your domain name for your emails

In addition to your web site you can use your domain name for your email address. If you have an existing personal email account (e.g. hotmail) you can keep this, but use the domain name to forward your email.

We hope that you’ve found this guide, how to increase traffic to your website, as useful as we have and that it inspires you to build on your new and existing website. For low cost domain name solutions and to see wheather your domain name is avalible go to Umbrella Host and do a search!

Author information

Amir Farid

Creative SEO Director at Umbrella Interactive Ltd

The post Increase traffic to your website appeared first on Umbrella Web Studio.

Umbrella Web Studio

htaccess 301 Redirect Duplicate Inner Page URLs

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Related posts:

The Importance of Choosing a Good Web Host for your Internet Business

What is a Good Web Host?

Why is a Good Web Host Important?

Author information

Ahmed Bhula

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Remove WLW and RSD WordPress Links

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Remove meta name=”generator” content=”WordPress 3.2.1″

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Write great PPC Adverts for AdWords

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Get more from your user-generated content

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3 New resources for Web Designers

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non-www to www

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Search Engine Optimisation (SEO)

We build websites to be SEO ready

The proof is in the pie

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Related posts:

Increase traffic to your website

1. Make your launch public

2. Make sure that the domain name you have chosen is suitable

3. Be flexible about your choice of domain name

4. Think about sources of traffic to your web site

5. Marketing your web site through search engines

6. Marketing your web site through social networking sites

7. Making money from your web site

8. Keep developing your web site

9. Use your domain name for your emails

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