Specialising in Wordpress Content Management Systems – Robert Fyffe

Correct use of Technology on Your Website – Part 1

Having the correct technical set up is essential for any website to maximise its ranking potential. The first things that search engines request about your website are technological responses from your server. Having incorrect server side technology can make it difficult for search engines to effectively crawl, index and rank your website. Leading to a reduction in the position you achieve.

The first stage of any SEO  is to ensure that the server and website are returning appropriate information to the search engines in the best ways possible. This will allow us to have a strong technological foundation upon which to develop an effective SEO campaign.

On the whole having a sound and search engine friendly technological set up will not positively affect your search engine performance. Rather, having a technological set up that is not developed with search engines as a primary concern can significantly reduce your ranking potential.

HTTP Headers
HTTP headers are sent by your server to anything that requests the page before the page of HTML code is returned. Google looks specifically at two main groups or HTTP header; those that describe the status of the page and those that give information on when the page/site was last updated.

Having an incorrect response returned for web pages can lead to devaluing of your website and may lead to ineffective indexing by the major search engines.

200 OK
This header is sent out by web pages that have been requested and will be returned by the server effectively to the user. All pages, except error pages, should deliver this header. It lets the search engines, and browsers, know that the content will be delivered as requested without any problems.

404 Not Found
When a server cannot find a webpage, such as when a user has typed in a URL incorrectly, it will return a 404 error header response. This will tell the browser to display the correct error code to say that the page could not be found. Google will inspect your website to ensure that error pages return this code. If your error pages do not return this header response for missing pages Google will not allow access to information within Webmaster Tools.

302 Temporarily Redirected
This header lets browsers, and search engines know that a page has moved from the requested location. This HTTP header indicates that the page will be returning to the original location shortly. The browsers and search engine are then moved to the temporary location of the page.

Search Engines do not effectively spider these redirects. Unfortunately, the default setting for page redirects on Microsoft Servers is for 302 redirects to be used. This can lead to your website losing pages in the search engine indices following redevelopment.

301 Permanently Redirected
301 header redirects indicate that the requested page has been moved permanently to a new location. Search engines will transfer all the attributes from the previous page location, such as links, to the new location. The redirect sends a web user from the old location of the page to the new location.

Robots.txt
This file is used to inform search engines which parts of the website we do not want them to index. This file is requested by default by all the major search engines. It should be located at http://yourwebsiteurl/robots.txt.

Favicon.ico
This image appears within Mozilla-based browsers in the address bar and is an image for the website that will also appear when the page is bookmarked. Google currently uses a web spider based on the Mozilla browser and requests this file from every page it visits. The Favicon.ico will also appear on user’s web browser if they bookmark your website.

Stay tuned for part 2.