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Stick men indicating link building for SEO

Bot accessibility & how it affects search engines seeing your website

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Smart business tips

Small programs called spiders, or bots, crawl your site every day and the millions of other sites across the web. The bots, programs created by search engines like Google and Yahoo, analyse your website and send back reports with valuable data. This information is usually stored in the indexes of the search engines which can be used as a counter measure to rank your site based on specific criteria, mostly the keywords.

Making each page of your website easily consumable for search engine bots is a part of the process. Many contractors and builders are familiar with accessibility building codes.

So, an essential part of the Search Engine Optimisation process is about making your website ready as ‘bots accessible’ by placing the required code that allows bots to get full access to your site and all of its contents including its homepage, archives, pages and subpages.  Just as an example, bots can’t see images in the same way that people can see. They can just ‘see’ certain website descriptive codes, so by knowing this fact, you would need to create certain formats for easiest bots accessibility.

Although this may sound very easy like many people are saying, “Well, this is a very easy task, let us make my site easy for the bots to crawl for indexing and then be done with it!” Really, it is not that simple process while we have made the site ‘searchable’ for bots, we would still have to tell them about what they are looking at through codes and carefully selected keywords.

Smart Cow Marketing is a sales and marketing company based in South London.

We hope that this article is of use, feel free to forward it to whoever may find it useful.

Digital marketing agency Surrey

If you need a helping hand with your digital marketing strategy, get in touch with us at Smart Cow Digital Marketing for expert advice on how to conduct an effective digital marketing campaign!

Services we offer include web design and development, SEO, Pay Per Click (PPC), social media management through to CRM and marketing automation.

Website letters

Why URL name and structure is important to website success

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Smart Cow top tips

There are many tactics in search engine optimisation. Some people read posts in hundreds of blogs about building optimised URL and they keep tweaking until getting it just correct. After a few months, they find that they are sitting on many layers of 301- type redirects; you didn’t make any link building for your website, neither created any content.

I know that it is not what the motivational search engine optimisation speakers want you to hear, but in reality, these changes carry a big risk. Even if you made a perfect change for executing site-wide URLs with 301-redirects – is going to take long time for search engines to process. During this long time, your rankings will bounce up and down. And you may get some kind of errors. If the scheme of your new URL is not better than your old one, some pages may lose their rankings permanently.

From a search engine optimisation point of view, the URL structure of website should be:-

• Straight forward: URLs with copied contents should have canonical URLs set for them because there shouldn’t be any confusing redirects on the website

• Meaningful: URL names should have correct keywords in them, not gibbering punctuation marks or numbers.

With emphasis on the right URLs: URLs in any website don’t have equal importance in general. Actually, it is very important to check that all the pages that you need to submit to search engines are tested for being 100% working hence search engines can crawl your website and index your pages fast.

We hope that this article is of use, feel free to forward it to whoever may find it useful.

Digital marketing agency Surrey

If you need a helping hand with your digital marketing strategy, get in touch with us at Smart Cow Digital Marketing for expert advice on how to conduct an effective digital marketing campaign!

Services we offer include web design and development, SEO, Pay Per Click (PPC), social media management through to CRM and marketing automation.

Website letters

What are server response codes and why are they important

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Website tips from Smart Cow Marketing

Over the life of a website you will be (if you manage it that is) presented with Server Response Codes or ‘HTTP Status Codes’ in regard to different elements of your site’s maintenance needs and functionality. There are many response codes that you may be presented with when you work on a site but the most common ones are 404 errors and 301 errors.

Every time a HTTP request is made to a web server, the server can respond with many different responses.

Some of these are completely internal to the server and client or are out of date so you are very unlikely to see them.

Key server codes

Server response codes are classified as follows:
• 100s – Informational: process is continuing after request has been received.
• 200s – Success: process finished successfully after request was received.
• 300s – Redirection: Request has been received, but needs to perform an additional step to complete the request.
• 400s – Client Error: The Request made by client is for a not valid page.
• 500s – Server Error: Server failed to complete the request although valid request was made by the client.

While there are many different HTTP status codes, most are not directly important to SEO.

It is important to use server response codes for improved search engine optimisation such as using 301 Redirects which are recommended when you are redirecting pages or sites because other redirects such as the 302 redirect codes do not inform crawlers of search engines that a site or a page has permanently moved.

Also deploying a custom-made 404 (page not found) page can prevent people from leaving your site if one of your pages has moved or been renamed and can just point your visitor back to the homepage or referring page and so not losing them.

We hope that this article is of use, feel free to forward it to whoever may find it useful.

Digital marketing agency Surrey

If you need a helping hand with your digital marketing strategy, get in touch with us at Smart Cow Digital Marketing for expert advice on how to conduct an effective digital marketing campaign!

Services we offer include web design and development, SEO, Pay Per Click (PPC), social media management through to CRM and marketing automation.

Business ruler

5 Key points for your business website

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Business Tips from Smart Cow

You should look at your online business in the same way you look at a physical presence for a business.

Just as a physical shop needs a good foundation and architectural designs, a website also needs to be built with a good foundation and structure.

You can create a website quickly these days, and it will probably look nice and appear to do the job you want. But as with almost everything in this world, you get what you pay for. If a website or a stall is sold at a bargain price, there is probably a reason for it. The real store may be in the wrong location, may not be set up properly, have never been marketed, and therefore has poor trading. Similarly, if you do not invest in the initial infrastructure of your website, although it may look nice, it will not be found by potential customers searching for your services.

Here are five key points that a business owner must be aware of when reviewing their business website. The list could go on and on, but these are some of the key points you should be aware of.

If you’re unsure about any of these, contact your current web developer or give us a call at Smart Cow Marketing on 020 3137 1826 or email us at saymoo@smart-cow.com.

Below are our top five tips with links to the associated articles that provide more detail to help you and your business.

  1. Sitemaps: Why your website needs a Sitemap – Sitemaps give search engines an understanding of the layout of your site, making it easy for them to help web browsers find your content.

  2. URL Structure: Why the URL name and structure is important to the success of your site – Properly naming pages and structuring the site gives search engines the best chance to help your business.

  3. Bot Accessibility: What is bot accessibility and how it affects how your site is seen by search engines – Ensure that none of your hard work goes to waste and that search engines can find the content within your site.

  4. Unique Content: Why you need unique website content and what happens if you don’t – Always make sure your content is unique and relevant to your target audience. Using other people’s content is not true to the values of your business and will be marked harshly by search engines.

  5. Server Response Codes: What are server response codes and why are they important – Make sure that errors are managed appropriately so that even if a visitor has a bad experience, it can be recovered easily.

Don’t forget to visit the full articles for each of these top tips, and we would love to hear your comments on the top tips needed when building a website.

Happy online marketing from all of Smart Cow.

Digital Marketing Agency Surrey

If you need a helping hand with your digital marketing strategy, get in touch with us at Smart Cow Digital Marketing. We are a Croydon Web Design Agency providing expert advice on how to conduct an effective digital marketing campaign!

Services we offer include web design and development, SEO, Pay Per Click (PPC), social media management, and CRM and marketing automation.

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