Website letters

Having unique content on your website and what happens if you don’t

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Smart Cow top tips

Unique website content is a key to ranking success. The over-simplification of that statement – despite of the fact behind that statement – is responsible for a big number of wrong complaints, and abuses by some of the search engine optimisers, world’s professional web designers and online marketers.

You are technically saying the same thing but in a different way when you are just paraphrasing someone, so therefore you are not actually being all that original, and chances are that other plagiarists on the Web will wind up saying the exactly same thing as you with very minor differences.

These days, Google is really good at distinguishing between different kinds of content. It’s also getting really good at working out who the original author of any given piece is then Google can easily decide on which site to get the higher rank!

Google is more actively punishing sites that tend to copy site contents from other sites. It is known that the copied usually hurt the site’s performance in search engines for the time being. It is now going to hurt it even more and this is likely a good thing overall for original writers and website owners.

Google rewards

At the end of the day, writing unique website content isn’t about substituting the big words; it is about making your own research and writing an informative, interesting and original piece that gives your guests what they are searching for. This really needs more work than the normal plagiarism, but in return, Google offers rewards for that extra work.

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

Content marketing agency

Talk to us about your content marketing needs and we’ll guide you towards the best combination of channels and tactics to utilise to make you stand out from the crowd. A reliable digital marketing agency in Croydon, Smart Cow will be glad to answer any further questions.

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.

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