Customer Street SEO Articles & Help

Site Construction – The Problem

When building a site there are certain SEO fundamentals that web designers often miss. This is understandable as search engines aren’t their specialist area; although many web designers now have a basic knowledge of SEO and know how to build a site that is search engine friendly.

One of the key SEO mistakes which designers miss is the creation of several home pages due to site navigation. The problem occurs due to the way search engines view sites, or more appropriately the way search engines view URLs. You see, although there is only one index (home) page on a server when that page is delivered to the end user it can appear in the address bar in a variety of different ways:

The First Sitemaps

One of the newer additions to the Webmasters artillery, and a staple of Customer Street domains, is the XML sitemap.

The standard visitor sitemap has been around since websites began but only as a tool for site visitors to find the product or page that they are looking for. This is great for the user and it turned out to be great for the search engine spiders too as it gave them a central page from which they could access every URL of a site.

In my last post I covered some of the most common applications of .htaccess files that we use at Customer Street. In this post I will be looking at some of the lesser known .htaccess applications: IP address blocking, blocking unwanted bots and blocking site scrapers.

Blocking IP Addresses From Your Site

From time to time you may want to block certain users from your site. There are many reasons why this would be useful. Maybe you want to block all IP addresses external to your target country or maybe you have a visitor to your site that keeps stealing content. The possibilities are vast.

The .htaccess file has a variety of purposes and all SEOs should have a basic knowledge of these. In this post I’m going to tell you how to create an .htaccess file and how to setup two of the most frequently used .htaccess features – 301 redirects and custom 404 error pages.

Creating an .htaccess file

Firstly, a few points about the .htaccess file: