Getting to Page 1 on Google

"Content is King" they say. So, in the spirit of content, I decided to add our entire help-page system (Which is already made up of *.htm pages) to our website.

We would increase our relevant content quite significantly, and allow customer to browser our help pages online. A win-win proposition.

In reality though, this proved to be more work than what I initially estimated. Our help pages are built using the HTML Help Workshop, and my first task was to clean each individual page of all header and body tags. Each page would simply have to start with a h1 tag.

• This format still works in the HELP file, which is great !
  
• This allows us to embed the help files directly into ASPX pages with a simple wrapper and include statement:

Now, any change to a help file can be updated on our web page by just adding the file directly to our web directory.

Now, the problem was that IIS was configured to open *.htm as web pages. So, a quick reconfigure later, and the include works (and we have no other htm pages anyway).

My last problem is that each *.htm file includes links to other *.htm files. But each htm file is embedded in an ASPX page, so the links don't work.

Using a URL rewriter, I simply setup a rule to re-direct any requests for *.htm files to the corresponding *.aspx page. Nice!! I love URL re-writing!!

Google even managed to index the pages, which is great, BUT google fails miserably when reading the title tag. For some reason each title becomes an "unknown page", most likely due to the redirect.

While finding the ultimate destination correctly, google seems to 'use' the 'missing page' it get's from the URL redirect header (Or something to that effect), so now I have to find and resolve that issue.

Getting to Page 1 on Google

After many month of optimizing our website (Best damn project collaboration tool around), I have finally gotten a good solid idea of how to optimize for google. Let me say, it's surprisingly easy, and bound to get harder. As sites starts competing, the keyword-shuffle can begin.

So, Lesson 1 in my own story of getting to page 1 on google (and altavista, live, ask.com, etc)

1. Use the same keyword on the title, header 1, bold in body text, and lightly strewn around the pages. Don't overdo it (Like I have on some pages). If you can, make sure the keyword is part of your domain name. If that's impossible, then make it part of your page name (Like Great Cookies):

BEST: www.greatcookies.com/Fantastic.html
GOOD: www.bambionice.com/GreatCookies.html

Remember to use image ALT and TITLE tags, they are great for keywords, as are the TITLE tag of your links.

URL Rewriting and Google Website Optimizer

I've begun discovering the power of URL rewriting. As our KaDonk website is growing furiously, URL rewriting is the only good method of fixing old pages that have been removed.

This becomes particularly true after having run several Google Website Optimizer tests. The Google website optimizer are great, but when using A/B pages, let's say on registration.aspx, you inevitably end up with registration1.aspx, registration2.aspx, etc... These pages are just temporary for using while the experiments are running.

Once the experiment ends though, users may have links to these pages, and search engines may have indexed them.

So I installed a freeware URL rewriter, and now all I have to do is redirect the temporary pages to the main one after each experiment. Simple, and clean.

Another benefit I recently discovered was when we added our entire library of help files to our website. These are the same pages that are included in our F1 Help inside LiveProject. Internally, they all reference eacher using *.htm links. But our pages are in ASP.NET, so references would basicallyshow the raw files instead of my encapsulator .aspx files.

URL rewriting to the rescue. Each reference to a .htm file is automatically redirected to an .aspx file of the correct name. Literally with one line of configuration all the links in our embedded help files works.

It looks something like this:



May I add this is insanely cool !!