We're committed to making sure Gutensite is compatible with the latest recommendations for Search Engine Optimization (SEO) so that your website has every advantage possible to achieve the best rankings that your content can earn.

Below are a few of the most recent updates to our SEO features:

• Redirect to Remove Trailing Slashes. Search engines see the urls http://www.domain.com/blog/ and http://www.domain.com/blog as two different pages. This can trigger a warning for having duplicate content which dilutes your rankings. So we do a permanent 301 redirect to remove the trailing slash, in case someone ever accidentally links to a page in that way.
• Redirect to Correct Capitalization. For the same reason mentioned above, we also will redirect http://www.domain.com/blog to http://www.domain.com/Blog with the correct capitalization so that you don't get penalized for "duplicate content".
• Add Unique Page Titles to Calendars. We added month and year to the page title on calendar list and details pages so that your site doesn't get penalized for duplicate page titles.
• Prevent Duplicate Indexing of Pages. Whenever there is more than one URL structure to access a page, and the page content remains the same, we don't want search engines to index the same page twice. For example, /blog/archives?page=1 is the same as /blog/archives. So we add a meta tag that tells the search engine not to index and not to follow: <meta name="robots" content="noindex, nofollow" />. We've also told search engines to ignore a lot of other common URL variables that we don't need them to index.
• Add Relative Attributes to all Pagers. We added add rel="next" and rel="prev" to all pagers so that search engines know which page is previous and which is next.

As we become aware of other ways to improve default SEO, we'll be sure to update them as well. We use our own platform and we want our website to be as optimized as possible as well!

We're working on improving the native SEO performance of all websites that run on our platform. Search Engine Optimization recommendations change all the time as search engines improve their secret algorithms and we have to adapt to the new rules. But we are committed to making sure that we make SEO optimized websites.

Search engines do not like duplicate content. Unfortunately they aren't smart enough to know that it's just one page with different capitalization or with extra variables in the URL. Essentially if the URLs are different, it treats the webpage like two different pages. If search engines see two pages with nearly identical content they are going to think you are spamming, or if they see two pages with exactly the same content it will dilute the rank of that page.

So today we setup redirects to ensure that if a page is accessed with the same friendly url that has different capitalization, it will redirect to the correct friendly url (both still work, but it 301 redirects to the proper page so only one page gets indexed), e.g. /Latest-Products vs /latest-products will redirect to whichever you set as the real friendly URL.

We also made sure that if pages have extra variables on the end of the url, that do not cause the page to load different content, google will ignore those in it's index as well (we set a meta tag that tells robots not to index those "pages" since they are not distinct pages). So for example, if the URL is /Blog?leave_comment=1 that won't get indexed as a separate page. Or if the URL is /Blog/Archives?page=1 that also won't get indexed, since the /Blog/Archives defaults to page one already.

We've also improved some other system issues that used to allow pages to be accessed in several ways (for flexibility), but which are now considered bad for SEO. For example, previously you could access the blog via the ID (www.domain.com/1234), or Friendly URL (www.domain.com/My-Blog), or the generic content type (www.domain.com/blog/home). But now, all of these will redirect to the main blog page (www.domain.com/My-Blog).

And finally we also have the page display the blog tags as keywords, if you haven't set any custom keywords in the SEO Page Settings by default. You can still override the tags if you want, but for most people this will help immensely.

We've added a new setting (accessible on the Admin > Site Info) page, to allow you to disable the Search Engine Sitemap. By default all our sites are SEO optimized, but in some cases, a client may not want the search engines to index the site (until they are ready). So this option will turn off the sitemap.xml data, which search engines use to provide a map of what pages to index. It will also add a meta tag that tells the search engine to go away for now and not index the site.

We just redid the structure of our website and wanted to make sure that all the friendly URLs matched the new structure. But when you change your friendly URL, any hard coded links to that page (on your site or from another site or in a search engine) will stop working and your visitors won't find that page that used to be located there.

So we've implemented a great automatic system that archives the old friendly URL, so that people are automatically redirected to the new URL. Whenever you change a friendly URL on a page, Gutensite creates a record in your Shortcuts list for that old URL and points it to the same page. That way, visitors won't get "Page Not Found" errors.

This new feature makes managing your site much easier, and makes it possibly to update your site structure with little hassle.

Eventually you will want to go through and change any broken links on your site and point them to the proper URL, and search engines will automatically update their links. And then you may want to remove those old archive links at some point (Admin > Tools > Shortcuts). Also if you decide you want to use the shortcut for some other page, you'll first have to delete the shortcut before you can use it on another page.

Small businesses and non-profit organizations often overlook the importance of branding and marketing. Usually this is due to a few factors:

• Small Budget: revenue is too small to pay for quality Branding/Marketing.
• Small Staff: no one is qualified to lead the marketing effort.
• No Time: staff is too busy with development, management and customer service to have time to spend on promotion.
• No Expertise: no one knows where to find a trustworthy, affordable, quality company to hire for help.
• Ignorance: lack of value for the importance of branding, marketing and a good website that serves your clients and reduces administrative overhead in the process.

When a business is small, it can sometimes rely on referral business alone. But as it grows, it needs a larger stream of customers to support it's growing infrastructure and it can no longer support itself without proper promotion. Usually it takes some sort of crisis for a business to realize it needs help.

read more...

“SEO” is a buzz term that gets thrown around a lot these days... it stands for “Search Engine Optimization” and refers to steps you can take to increase your website’s rankings on prominent search engines such as Google and Yahoo!. Companies everywhere (some trustworthy, some not) are trying to sell their SEO expertise. In general, we don’t trust most of their promises, but we do believe basic SEO practices are essential, which is why all our sites are built with these principles in mind. Our CMS offers fantastic control over the most important SEO settings. We recently wrote an article outlining the steps you should take to improve your SEO status. See the article at www.gutensite.com/support/knowledgebase/seo. If you are too busy, ask us to help.

Did you know your URL's could be more friendly? Some people call them SEO friendly, because human readable URLs that utilize keywords are "supposed" give a boost to your page's ranking. We don't know if that's true, but at the very least they make the page's address much easier to remember and less intimidating to send to a friend.

So instead of this blog being accessed at: http://www.gutensite.com/3311098

We've given it the Friendly URL: http://www.gutensite.com/blog/main

Doesn't that make you happier?

Well recently we've added this new feature standard for everyone. Try it out. Whenever a new page is created, you'll have the option of specifying a Friendly URL. If you don't feel like it, you can just leave it blank and the page will remain accessible by the ID, which is often fine. But in cases where you want to add a little extra flourish, or perhaps you regularly send the link to clients, consider a friendly URL. You can also rename all the standard page URLs by going to: "Edit Site" > "Settings" > "Page Settings": Then finding the page you want to edit and adding a SEO Friendly, Human Readable, URL.

Enjoy.