Customer Street SEO Articles & Help

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.

Some people here at Customer Street have very small websites but want to be found on the SERP’s (search engine results pages). Many people do not understand that Google and the other search engines work of content to make a decision on how to rank a page - (in fact Google has over 100 parts to its ranking criteria).

What can you do to get good results?

Well let me first start with the basics, Google loads weight on the meta title so this needs to be written well in order for Google to take it into consideration in its ranking algorithm. Here is an example of a very bad example of a title tag:

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: