According to Google.com, the Changefreq XML tag may be set to one of seven frequencies: “never”, “yearly”, “monthly”, “weekly”, “daily”, “hourly”, or “always”. This tells the search engines approximately how often each page is updated. An update refers to actual changes to the HTML code or text of the page, not updated Flash content or modified images. Changefreq examples…

NEVER: Old news stories, press releases, etc.
YEARLY: Contact, “About Us”, login, registration pages.
MONTHLY: FAQs, instructions, occasionally updated articles.
WEEKLY: Product info pages, website directories.
DAILY: Blog entry index, classifieds, small message board.
HOURLY: Major news site, weather information, forum.
ALWAYS: Stock market data, social bookmarking categories.

The Priority XML sitemap tag is useful, although not quite as important. It is set to a number ranging from zero to one; if no number is assigned, a page’s priority is 0.5. A high priority page may be indexed more often and/or appear above other pages from the same site in search results. Here are some examples of different types of pages and how their Priority sitemap XML tag value might be set, depending upon how important they are…

0.8-1.0: Homepage, subdomains, product info, major features.
0.4-0.7: Articles and blog entries, category pages, FAQs.
0.0-0.3: Outdated news, info that has become irrelevant.

How strictly they want to follow the Priority and Changefreq sitemap specifications is up to the search engines; these XML tags are considered preferences, not orders. This doesn’t mean search engines don’t consider Priority and Changefreq important, just that they won’t put sitemap instructions before their own interests (like making sure a site hasn’t changed its subject or become pornographic).

But why is it important when or how frequently search engine “spiders” index your pages? When a “spider” visits a web page, it records information about the page’s content, title, META tags, links, and other characteristics. This ensures that search results reflect its latest content and take into account any recent improvements (such as new META tags or repaired links).

However, it is unnecessary for “spiders” to regularly scan pages that are seldom or never updated. Spider indexing consumes bandwidth (which can increase the cost of operating your website), and may briefly slow access to your site if it is run on a low-capacity server. Thus it is important to set the Changefreq sitemap tag to accurately reflect how often individual pages are updated.

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1. Optimize The PDF File Name. When you create the pdfs, be sure to include your SEO targeted keywords in the file name.  Make sure that Google can identify what the PDF is about.  Don’t overdo it, but try to work in a few keywords into the file name like target-keyword.pdf

2. Complete Document Properties. Most PDFs are indexed without specified document properties, the most important of which is the Title. This document property is the equivalent of the html title tag.  If you don’t complete the Title property, the search engine is going to creat a title from the PDF’s content, and it may not be optimized for your targeted SEO keywords.  There are other PDF meta data properties that can be completed, the only other one of importance is the Subject property which is the equivalent of a meta description for .html pages.

3. Optimize your text in the PDF. For your PDF’s optmize the copy just like you would web page copy.  Don’t overdo it, but use target keywords in the first hundred words.  Try to use some variations to support long-tail while focusing on a main keyword for optimization.

4. Build links into PDFs. Include links in your PDFs, and pay attention to the anchor text used as Search engines recognize these links. In addition to including links in PDFs for search-related purposes, there’s also a good business reason as PDFs are often passed along to others via email.

For B2B websites with PDFs and White Papers, this optimization of PDFs can be incredibly important for your overall SEO strategy.  Qualified B2B visitors can be hard to find, make sure you give yourself every opportunity by leveraging your PDFs for top rankings.

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3. Search Engine Optimization and Flash

1. Since the introduction of support for SWFObject in July, Google hasn’t associated text content in Flash with the correct parent URL or as a single entity.
2. Flash files can accrue PageRank independent of their own parent URLs.
3. Google doesn’t index URLs containing #anchors (fragment identifiers) in Flash per W3C Guidelines.
4. Currently, Google doesn’t seem to support translations of text content in Flash.

These case studies continue to show that SEO for Flash can be achieved but only if done properly and then it will have limited value when compared to a site without Flash.  SEO can be done for Flash, but it is not optimal.  The Adobe announcement has not changed the recommendations for the immediate future because:

• Google can see text and links inside the Flash file which is good but it will not split them up a Flash file into multiple pages and index them separately. That means that your Flash file will be the equivalent of one, massive HTML page, unless you break it up into multiple HTML landing pages.  Remember that this can’t use the #anchor because Google will not treat that as a separate URL.
• Google will not run all types of Javascript and this makes it uncertain in the fact that Googlebot will index a Flash file that is embedded using the SWFObject script.
• If you have content dynamically loading into your Flash movies from an 3rd party XML file, this content may not be indexed by Google.

Until this is settled, one of the best alternatives is to make  an HTML alternative that is not only helpful to the search engines, it’s also great for people without the Flash plugin and for disabled site visitors.

Sources for Blog Post:

http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2008/06/improved-flash-indexing.html

http://www.beussery.com/blog/index.php/2008/10/google-flash-seo/

http://www.yourseoplan.com/seo-for-flash.html

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The reason so much importance is placed on the page title is that it helps search engines understand what a web page is all about, thereby increasing the relevance of search results. However, recently there has been some question as to whether longer page titles rank better or not. Here are some thoughts on that topic:

Many experts wonder if there is a downside to having title tags that match a popular search query exactly. The reasoning behind this train of thought is that these types of title tags will be seen as an advertising attempt to trick the user into clicking rather than true content to help searchers.

So, this may be one reason a longer page title could rank better than one that includes only the searched term or phrase.  We have found that a 5-6 phrases followed by the company seems to work best.  Here is one example of a page title we have done:

Another thought is that the end user experience is better with a longer page title. This would be because it’s generally easier to understand a page’s content with a longer title.

If you do decide to go with a longer title, though you don’t want to make it overly long. Keep in mind that Google only displays the first 63 characters in search results so the searcher won’t see more than that.

While Yahoo and MSN show more characters it’s best to go with a title that can be displayed fully on all 3 major search engines. You also only want to use your best, or most important, keywords. Typically pages rank better when there is more than one keyword in the tag.

So, it seems as though the answer may be that medium page titles work best. You don’t want a title that seems spammy to the search engines or the end user on one hand. But, on the other hand you don’t want a title that will be cut off so that your topic isn’t clearly shown to the search engines and end users.

We see many sites that go over-board and place 100 – 125 characters in the title tag.   While not confirmed, Google is always looking for ’signs’ of a spammy site and a long, keyword rich TITLE.   Our recommendation is to use the full 63 characters for the page TITLE without going over and place your most important keywords first.   In addition, if you are going to put your company or website name into the title, we recommend doing that at the end of the page title.

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Watch Video Here

You can get more information at Google Webmaster Blog Post.   We are glad to see the constant improvements by Google on the webmaster tools and we avidly monitor and manage the information in the Google Webmaster Tool interface.

If you want to take advantage of this new feature to not only reduce 404’s but increase links, here is a sample email you could send to those sites with 404 links to your site to increase both your link count and your anchor text relevance:

(Person),

This is (clients name) from (client) and we noticed through our Google Webmaster Tools that you have a link to our site. First off, I would like to say thank you for linking to (client website) as we believe it is a valuable resources for your website visitors. However, we did find that there is an issue with the link that is pointing to our site. The issue is that the page you linking to no longer exists on our site and we would really appreciate it if you could update this link to an active page. To help you find the page that is linking to our site we have included a screen shot below that contains this information. Right below this information is the link to the new page we would like you to point this link to with the anchor text. We would like you to replace the broken link with this new information.

Broken Link:
(Put bad link here)

New Link:
(Put new link here with optional description if page allows it)

Please let me know if you have any questions and I can help you work through those.

Thank you ,
(Clients Name)

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URL styles affect SEO (Search Engine Optimization) in two significant ways. First, the words contained in the URL – its subdomain, domain, subdirectory, and filename – help the corresponding webpage to gain a higher ranking in search results for these keywords. If there is more than one word in the domain name, filename, or other part of the structure, it is important for the words to be separated (when possible). They can be separated using hyphens or underscores, although hyphens are typically preferred. This allows the search engine’s computer software to distinguish between each of the separate keywords. It is best if these keywords are also used in the text of the webpage in question.

Second, URL structure is also important to SEO because people see URLs when looking at search result listings (on most search engines). They are more likely to visit a site if its address is short and/or contains words related to the subject of interest. A webpage with a relevant domain or subdomain name seems more likely to provide useful information than a page without this advantage. Most major search engines make any search keywords in the URL appear bold, helping to attract the attention of searchers. Yahoo shows the domain name in bold as well. This factor probably isn’t as important to SEO as the impact URL structure has upon search result positioning, but it is worth keeping in mind.

Both of these factors encourage website operators to use a long URL structure with numerous separated keywords. However, very long URLs do have some non-SEO drawbacks. People are reluctant to write them down or use them in print, they take longer to copy & paste, and they use more storage space and bandwidth (because of the long URLs appearing in HTML link codes). A domain name with many words may be forgotten if it is not immediately added to a user’s bookmark/favorites list. It is best to balance these concerns by avoiding the use of multiple subdirectories, leaving out unnecessary connecting words, and curtailing any excessive insertion of keywords in URLs.

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This change comes from Google due to the fact that they can better understand the purpose of a page based on its URL structure now. John Mu of the Google team had this to say: “One of the reasons for that is that we can use the information provided through the parameters to better understand what your site is doing with those parameters. For instance,the URL http://www.mysite.com/search.php?q=keyword can give us information about what is happening, it could even allow us to recognize that this is a search form and perhaps let us attempt other keywords that might lead us to content that we haven’t seen for your site. On the other hand, a URL like http://www.mysite.com/search/keyword does not give us any information at all about what the “file name” is used for.”

The question now is do you need to undo all of the dynamic URL rewrites you already have. While there is not a punishment for switching your URL formats it may take a bit of time. So, essentially changing your URL rewrites really depends on how many rewrites you have and how well those pages currently rank. One suggestion is to start with your lower performing URLs and see the effects of switching them.

Otherwise you may find that you lose ranking popularity and lots of time making a switch. And what’s most important is making sure your site doesn’t suffer in search engine optimization.

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404 redirects send the user to a single “catch-all” page which tells them that the webpage they are looking for does not exist. It can then link to the home page, allow visitors to search the web site, or provide a list of links for each section. It is not specific to the URL the user entered, and will show the same information regardless of whether the URL was incorrect or outdated. According to wikipedia.org, a 404 redirect page should be at least 513 bytes for compatibility with some versions of MSIE. Example:

ErrorDocument 404 /notfound.html

On the other hand, a 301 redirect forwards visitors going to a specific (former) webpage to a new page. If the user is sending form data to a PHP file, such as a search query, this data will be redirected to the new page as well. This can give users a more specific replacement for the invalid address they are trying to reach, increasing the chance that they will stay on the web site. Example, for a site where the search feature has been moved to a new subdomain:

Redirect 301 /find.php http://search.example.com/results.php

So which type of redirect is better for web sites to use? This depends upon the situation. If a webpage has been moved or combined with other pages, a 301 redirect is probably best. However, if pages have been deleted and there is no similar content on the web site, or users are just typing in the wrong URLs, a 404 redirect is better. Many sites can effectively make use of both 301 and 404 redirects.

When a page’s location is changed, both types of redirect are better than leaving duplicate pages in place. Search engines do not react favorably to multiple pages with identical content, and the web site operator receives the added burden of having to update both pages every time a change needs to be made.

Webpage redirection can be set up through cPanel (or a similar interface), or by adding/editing .htaccess files (via FTP or File Manager). Other types of automatic redirects exist as well, such as 302 and 307 (like 301, but “temporary”) and META refresh – which usually isn’t recommended, but is better than nothing if a hosting provider doesn’t allow other types.

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Putting related search keywords in the URL will help improve a page’s ranking. However, it is best to separate these words so that search engine “spiders” (a.k.a. “robots”) can distinguish between them; otherwise, it just looks like one long word. Some people use underscore (_) symbols in between the keywords, but using a hyphen (-) is generally considered preferable for SEO. If the page has content people are likely to revisit regularly – such as updated news or weather – consider creating a page with a short, easy to remember URL (perhaps a subdomain) which redirects to the long URL. Make sure the longer address is linked to from the “Site Map”.

Using a long URL structure generally isn’t a problem with regard to SEO; search engines will still index very long (over 100 letters) URLs, and most web browsers can handle addresses which are thousands of characters long. Nonetheless, excessively long URLs are less appealing for people to use in print or email. There is no need to repeat words already used in the URL; don’t use a word in the filename that repeats the domain, directory, or subdomain name. The same applies to the page’s title and “keywords” META tag, but not the body/text of the page, where SEO keywords should be used several times.

As an example of applying these best practices to the structure of a specific URL, the file name for a page selling portable computers might be cheap-laptop-notebook-computer. The entire address would be something like www.example.com/shopping/cheap-laptop-notebook-computer.htm. Changing the directory name “shopping” to “buy” would best target keywords people are likely to search for. On some search engines, text files (.TXT format) are listed with the URLs as their titles; others use the first line of text for this purpose. The same goes for documents in PDF format.

Basically, the best practices for creating an SEO oriented URL structure include using keywords (or phrases) people search for, separating each word with a hyphen, and avoiding repetitive URLs. Applying these practices isn’t difficult, and has the potential to substantially increase traffic.

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Now all of that has changed. Recently Adobe has announced that they’ve invented a way for search engines to read the Flash files so that all of the information in them can be indexed. Adobe’s Vice-President of Marketing Michael Turner said this about the release, “We are releasing technology to Google and Yahoo that enables them to crawl and index SWF files. They are now searchable. This will open up millions of Flash files to search.”

For anyone that works in Flash, this is a giant step forward. The way the new program works is that a special Flash player created by Adobe for the search engines acts like a virtual user for each application. These “virtual users” completes the entire runtime of the Flash applications and then translates what happened for the search engines to understand.

Google has begun putting out the Flash indexing tool, but Yahoo reportedly still has some work to do before they can do the same. Turner warns that even with this technology there will still be some problems with the Flash content and search engines. Mainly the idea that it will still be tough for an average webmaster to link deeply into Flash files. Without that ability high rankings are still unlikely for Flash files.

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