Every SEO company on web apply lots of tools & techniques under the purview of SEO promotion such as link exchange, directory submission, PPC search engine marketing, article writing, etc… and one such popular technique is URL Redirection.

URL Redirection which is also known as the Domain Redirection, URL forwarding or Domain forwarding is a technique in which SEO experts make use of mod_rewrite module to clearly redirect one web address (URL) to another, hence take the visitor to a different URL than clicked upon without his / her explicit knowledge or permission. In other words, URL redirect is a technique wherein websites are made more visible by making them available under many URLs.

The technique is sometimes preferred for redirecting visitors when they type wrong spellings. It is also used as an effective solution in a SEO website that is a subject of poor publishing. URL redirecting is used for such a website to give much more reader friendly and search engine friendly URLs (web addresses).

With more and more websites using dynamic web page generation facilities, the URLs nowadays are generally less meaningful and ingrained with ampersands (&) and question marks (?).

Disadvantages of having such ragged URL’s:

• Easy information leakage about the technology under use for Hackers
• Scope for confusion for the readers/ visitors wishing to memorize or note down the URL for future use
• Difficulty in future changes in technology, as a shift from one programming language to another say ASP to PHP would render the old URLs obsolete and thus non-functional
• Difficulty in linking to your web pages for others, as the special characters in your dynamically generated web pages may meddle with the XHTML code of the websites trying to link with yours
• Discourage Search Engines from indexing your web pages, as search engine spiders do not index web pages with question mark within the URL

URL Redirection helps an SEO expert to eliminate all the above advantages and renders the URLs much more logical, manageable and readable for the end users as well as the search engine spiders.

Posted under Internet Marketing, Search Engine Marketing (SEM), Search Engine Optimization

The real benefit of hosting a blog and maintaining it has been a quick way to spread your business across the internet audiences. It has been proved by the search engine marketing specialists and bloggers in the past few years that a blog can benefits your website or business in very effective ways.

When you decide to host a blog on your website, the first question that comes up is where to setup a blog on your own website or separately. Each one has its own advantages that will help your website.

Where to Host Your Blog on Own Website or Separately?

There are two ways you can host your blog, either by creating an account on the blog platforms like Blogger or WordPress or simply installing your own blog software on your own website. Hosting a blog as a sub-domain of your own website looks like a professional approach and often preferred by those who want to boost their website ranking on search engines using blog as a tool.

Search engine ranking benefits

Setting up the blog in as a sub-domain on your existing website also benefits to your websites search engine ranking. Any new content that is added to your blog will be treated as new content part of your main website. Every new blog posts that you create are easily and quickly indexed than regular web pages. It thus helps promote better indexing and visibility of your main website, if the blog is hosted on the same domain name.

Backlinks benefits

If you spend some time and efforts on writing quality contents on your blog, you can easily attract the quality backlinks using those articles. If you host your blog on your main domain then all back-links will benefit your main domain. If your blog is on an external domain then back-links will not be directly passed on to your main website. However, you will still get the benefits if you are able to pull the PR and links from your separately hosted blog to your main website by cross linking. But, in order to get benefits via cross linking from your externally hosted blog it will need to be successful.

Brand targeting for business owners

Some business company’s or website owners can choose to start a blog on a completely new domain name. This can help if you wish to differentiate between the branding of your website and that of your blog. If the blog you are setting up is not directly related to the content on your main website, then you may not wish to combine the two on the same domain name.

If you wish to target on enforcing a collective brand for your company rather than creating a new brand for your blog, installing a blog as a part of your main website will help. If a blog is installed in a sub folder of your existing website, the blog URL will include your primary domain name in the address bar and appear as a cohesive entity.

Technical resources

If you are setting up a blog on your main website or domain name, you will require a certain level of technical skills in order to install the blog and add the database. If you are starting a blog using one of the free blog platforms then no software installation is required and a blog can be set up in a few easy steps.

Cost benefits

Another common reason for setting up an external blog outside of your main company website is the possibility for using one of the many available free online blog hosting services such as Blogger or Word Press. Most leading social networking websites such as Facebook also allow users to set up their own blog using their website platform. These services are usually free whereas setting up a blog on your main website or private domain name will require web hosting space and technical infrastructure.

So, decide your own where to host your blog, if it’s similar to your website and hosting it to boost your search engine rankings then definitely host it as a sub-domain of your own website.

Posted under Blogging, Search Engine Marketing (SEM), Search Engine Optimization