Ok.  Everyone knows of the popularity of real estate and house flipping.  This is very popular for the “handy” person that can do most of the fix up work themselves.  They take a home that may be on the market for a great value, see the potential, remodel, fix it up, and sell it off for a profit!  This has been a popular and successful business strategy for the real estate savvy.  There’s even a reality show devoted to this for the high-end market.

So, let’s apply the same principles to the Internet.  I know SEO, I can do some web editing.  Can “site flipping” be a profitable business?  How long would it take to flip a site?  How much work would be involved?  How much of a profit (when you consider your time put into it) would be made?

I’m sure that it probably wouldn’t make for a good reality TV show… But, has anyone out there played with this in practice alone? How did it go?

Shanee

What is the best way to name a URL on a site?

The current best practice for naming a URL is to separate the words by hyphens. This helps the crawlers to read each word separately, and will help to increase the SEO for your targeted keywords. When Google offers guidelines it’s best to pay attention!

How NOT to name a URL:

• Don’t separate your URL keywords with spaces
• Don’t separate your URL keywords with plus “+” signs
• Don’t separate your URL keywords with underscores “_”

Best Practices to naming URLs:

• Do separate most important keywords with hyphens “-”
• Use no more than 3 hyphens, so you don’t appear to be spamming the SE’s
• Use the most important keywords only, skip the articles (and, the, but, with)

These simple guidelines should help to give a slight boost to some of your pages! Have fun SEO’ing

Shanee
Get SEO help for your site.

What to do with all of those old pages? Whatever you do, don’t delete them. In most cases there is a better solution — 301 Redirect, otherwise known as a “Google-Friendly” redirect.

Do a Google search and you’ll find tons of information on this topic. But, clients still ask “Why?” Here’s my explanation (and this analogy is a bit of a stretch). We all work very hard to have our current content and pages ranked and indexed. Picture climbing a very, very tall mountain — Let’s say Everest. Each new page starts at Base Camp 0 - no associated page rank. Older pages, depending on many ranking factors, could be located anywhere between base camp and the summit. When you redirect the old page to the new page, you give the new page a leg up, based on the elder’s position. So, if you can get a head start, why wouldn’t you??

A second analogy (again, a stretch): Think of heading on a long journey — Maybe driving cross-country, starting in California. You reach Texas and realized that you missed the exit to the Alamo. Do you A, return to California and begin your trip again? Or, B, make a U-turn and quickly get back on track? That’s what I thought!

There are many other reasons for creating redirects, especially if you have a large or popular site — Links! All cross-links and backlinks will become broken if you delete the old page. All of the “link” power will be transferred to the new URL if you use the proper redirect practice.

Finally, if you can possibly make an update to an existing page, without changing the URL, this is the best practice! No need to go creating new pages and re-directs when simple updates to existing pages can be made.

So, what are your common client questions? What analogies do you use to explain the concepts?

Shanee K.