Google See’s your domain. say www.bettermychance.org and www.bettermychance.org/index.php as two different pages with the same content on both. so a great way to solve this problem is by putting some code in your .htaccess file

Here is what you do:

Options +FollowSymLinks
RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{THE_REQUEST} ^[A-Z]{3,9}\ /index\.php\ HTTP/
RewriteRule ^index\.php$ http://www.bettermychance.org/ [R=301,L]

Replacing my domain above for yours.

Now when anyone goes to your domain.com/index.php they will be redirected to your main URL thus eliminating the chance of a duplicate content penalty.

To use a header tag simply put <h1> at the start of the heading and </h1> at the end of the heading.

Make sure you use the keyword you are trying to optimise your site for in the header and then directly after the header have a paragraph sentence using <p> paragraph goes in here </p> where you repeat the keyword twice within 200 words, prefrably once at the start and again nearer the end.

Example, based on trying to further optimize my site for “Blue Widgets”

<h1>Blue Widget are a must for all home users</h1>
<p> Blue Widgets where first introduced to out company back in 1966 since then ourcompany has over 1000% and we are now producing more than 250,000 Blue Widgets every day</P>

Apply this technique to your site and you will see an improvement in SERP’s

1. A standard backlink using your url. Example http://www.bettermychange.org

And

2. An anchor text backlink. Example Search Engine Blog

The second is a much better way to improve your SERP’s (Search engine results pages) as the site that is linking back to you is telling search engines what type of site it is, it need to be written in html code and looks like this:

<a href=”http://www.bettermychance.org”>Search Engine Blog</a>

Its not always easy to get sites to link to you using anchor text, but a good place to start experimenting is forums that allows footer links, such as Digital Point. There we go, that was another backlink using anchor text. cool huh!

Google considers a backlink as a vote for your site, so the more backlinks or votes you get to your site the more popular your site will become.

The above is a very basic description, you may also want to read, Types of backlinks and Too many backlinks.

In part 2 now will cover dynamic meta tags, The main point of this contribution is the give each page of your store and products some unique meta content. (Title, Description and Keywords)

The reason for this is to improve your search engine position, and increase the amount of pages indexed, by creating dynamic meta tag for each product page, Google will see that each page a unique and not place the pages in the supplemental index thus also improving you search engine placement.

There are several oscommerce contributions that will do this, but the one i found that does this best is cDynamic Meta Tags.

It a very easy contribution to install, make sure you fully read the installation instructions and ALWAYS backup your store before do any modifications.

Once installed you can tweak the settings in /includes/languages/english/meta_tags.php

What this osc contribution does is rewrites the standard dynamic URLs to more SE friendly and keyword rich URLs

in short it would turn a url from this:
www.domain.com/product_info.php?cPath=1&products_id=1
to something more descriptive like this:
www.domain.com/article-directory-turnkey-script-p-1.html

You can can clearly see how the second URL would be more descriptive and better picked up by search engines.

The installation is quite straight forward and well documented by Bobby AKA Chemo, but If you need help installing the contribution you can contact the store owner of this oscommerce hosting site. I highly recommend his work.

When you write a new blog post and publish it, wordpress automatically pings http://rpc.pingomatic.com/
thus notifying it of a new blog post. If you update your ping list to include the following services. more sites and people will be aware of your new blog post and now you potentially have a better chance of getting more people to visit your blog

http://rpc.pingomatic.com

http://ping.bitacoras.com

http://bulkfeeds.net/rpc

http://blogsearch.google.com/ping/RPC2

http://www.blogpeople.net/servlet/weblogUpdates

http://ping.myblog.jp

http://bblog.com/ping.php

http://ping.bloggers.jp/rpc/

To update the list go to your wordpress admin section and then go to options / writing
you will see update services at the bottom of the page, copy and paste the above list there.

For example, do you want your name to be displayed as

bettermychance.org

or

www.bettermychance.org

Personally i prefer the more traditional method including the www. at the front of the URL.

So what do i need to do once i have decided the format i want my URL to be displayed in?

The following bit of code needs to be placed in your sites root directory in a file called .htaccess

If you don’t have one, create one via ftp.

If you have decided to go for the www version you need to use the following code:

RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^example\.co\.uk
RewriteRule (.*) http://www.example.co.uk/$1 [R=301,L]

Remember to change example for your own domain.

If you want to use the non www version use this code
RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^www\.example\.com$ [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://example.com/$1 [R=301,L]

Again remember to change the example for your own domain.

This is designed to work on Linux servers and will not work on windows server based hosting

The best permalink structure i like to use is this:

/%postname%.html

This will rewrite the url as your post title and give the url the .html extention.

Reason i like this structure, Its a keyword rich URL that is SE’s friendly, Easy to index and good for SERP’s

There are several websites that specialise in automatic link exchange programs, the one i am going to discuss is called receive links.

The reason i prefer this one to other similar sites is because the links are permanent, link placement frequency is better and the paid upgrades are cheaper.

So how does the program work?

You have to go and sign up for a free receive links account, then add your site to your new account, then all you need to do is download 3 files that need to be added to your site and then add a piece of code to your sites footer or other similar file that is used sitewide. You can specify how many links you want to display up to a maximum of 5

You will then be given “points” based on a number of factors, PageRank, Number of pages cached by search engines, points are built up over time so don’t expect to see huge amounts of points straight away, but they do build up quickly.

Once you have your points you can then start to advertise your site/sites. you dont have to advertise the site you are placing ads on, so you can have one site for showing ads and another one or more than one site for promotion.

There are also other features like sending points to other accounts, so webmaster with large sites can rent points to other receive links users and make some $$

Once set up it runs on autopilot, just add new ad’s when needed and new site when you need more points.