Hi, I'm Mike Essex, the Online Marketing Manager at Koozai. Today's video
comes from David Sottimano from Distilled. David asks, "What are the best
ways to do SEO for Apache servers?" So I'm going to run you through three
simple ideas. Now, Apache is a very complicated beast so there's certainly
a lot more than these or some more high end technical solutions, but for a
basic introduction on the things that anyone with a little bit of
development time can do, these are essential things that you should be
doing.
So the first one we've got is .htaccess, this is the most powerful part of
Apache in my opinion. What you can do is a lot of the basic kind of 404
errors can be fixed within here. For example, you can state your 404 page
URL within here and design your own custom page. I tend to do that with
links to other pages on the client site so people can find their way back
to the content they want, rather than just a general 404 page, which is
just, 'Page not found, figure it out yourself.'
So first of all we've got 404. Then you've got your 301 redirect, so
ideally we don't want people to see a 404 page. We want them to be
redirected to the right content. So you can build 301 redirects into
Apache. It's really simple. You just write, '301 redirect' then you put
the old URL without the domain name. Then after that, you write the new URL
with the domain name, simple. The way that I tend to do this is to build in
Excel, so that I have one column that just says, "301 redirect," another
one with the old URL, and another one with the new URL, and that's good
because sometimes there tends to be a pattern in the way the old URLs were
and the new URLs are. So you can create some macros in Excel to do that
quickly. It's not essential. You don't have to do it that way. You can just
write on the .htaccess file. It's just a basic text file that you add in
there, but for me it's a real time saving solution to do it that way.
Next, you've got your canonical homepage issue. So if the client's site
homepage exists at domain/ and also at index.htm, index2, index.php, all
sorts of annoying variations that clients like to use, you can just set in
this file what the index should be and tell it to point these other
variations to it. So it's like a 301 redirect, but it's just written in a
slightly different way.
Another duplicate issue that you can have is duplicate domains. So, for
example, we've got Koozai.com, but we've also got Koozai.co.uk. We don't
want two separate websites to exist on those two different domain names or
the same website to exist on both. So we always want the URL bar at the top
to say Koozai.com. We set that in here, so canonical, homepage, and domain.
So not only can you resolve the duplicate homepage in here, you can also
specify what it is with this tag as well.
So that's the .htaccess file. One last thing that you can do as well is to
change file extensions from one to the other. So, if you change your entire
site from HTM to PHP, you can set that in here to automatically point one
to the other.
In the .http config file, this is the place that I tend to use to redirect
URLs that have different case variations. So if your client URLs can exist
as uppercase and lowercase URLs, but ultimately it's the same webpage, then
you set that in here and say actually I only want them as lowercase all the
time and just redirect everything else.
Last of all we've got Gzip compression, which technically you do put in an
.htaccess file, but I've included it as a separate component here because
it's kind of different logic to redirects. With this, you can tend to save
up to 70% of the site load time just by the way this zips files on
the fly. The user doesn't see any difference, apart from the speed, but it
makes things faster for them and for the search engines. It literally is
just one piece of code. You can find it easily just by searching for Gzip
compression. You just plug it into the .htaccess file, upload it to the
server, and you're done.
So those are the main components. All I would suggest with any of these is
to do them step-by-step. So to do your 404 page, add it, test it. If it
doesn't work, upload the same version again. If you do get any of these
files wrong, it will bring down an entire client website, but it's simply
just a case of uploading the old file again. So just bear that in mind, be
really careful. Make sure you check all your redirects afterwards, because
the last thing you want to do is redirect a client's store page to their
homepage or something daft like that.
So follow these steps and you'll really be able to harness the SEO
potential of Apache. If there's anything we've missed in this video, then
let me know by visiting Koozai.com or subscribe to our videos to get more
updates like this.