Most webmasters are intimately familiar with the process of trading links with other websites.  Chances are, if you own or administer a site, you get requests to exchange links many times each week.  While annoying and usually automated, those requests represent one of the oldest methods of SEO there is:  Reciprocal linking.

Conventional wisdom on the subject says that getting a link on a site and linking back to them directly isn’t the best way to go about getting higher search engine rankings since you’re giving up authority to get some back.  Although this is true in many cases, it’s not an absolute rule.  As a matter of fact, some of the best possible links that many eCommerce sites can hope to get are by trading with other related sites in the same or similar industries.

 When doing reciprocal linking, the proof of quality really is in the pagerank (or your preferred value metric):  You’ll notice that sites with a focused link page that only links out to other quality sites relevant to their business will almost always have a good amount of PR, even on the link page itself, which means that an exchange would be valuable to pursue.  Conversely, sites that have full link directories about every topic and will link to anyone who links back are not worth the time it takes for the exchange and are best to pass up.  In those cases, you’ll see that their link directory doesn’t have much, if any, pagerank, and most of it will be on the directory index page, with the inner pages having almost zero authority and sometimes they won’t even be cached.  So, the rule with reciprocal exchanges is simply to be very selective and choose only the best sites to exchange with.

Beyond the value issue, there’s also the question of whether you want to actively engage in proposing link exchanges to other webmasters.  There are plenty of reasons to keep this tactic in reserve, including the fact that it’s an enormously time-consuming process, especially if done correctly.  Despite the time it takes, it’s still a very cost-effective option for getting good links to your site.  There are just a few rules to make sure are followed.  The cardinal rule goes something like “don’t automate” and while it sounds less than efficient, there’s pretty much nothing more annoying than automated emails, period (except maybe unwelcome audio on websites…).  Additionally: 

• Be as polite as possible, compliment the webmaster’s site and tell them what you like about it. 
• Make sure to offer something in return for linking to your site so that they know that you’re ready to make a mutually beneficial trade and aren’t simply trying to hijack their authority for yourself.

The most common exchange offer is, of course, a reciprocal link, but in certain cases something else might be more enticing to the webmaster…  Make sure to cruise their site and see if you can come up with something like that before sending out the requests.

In the end, the success rate of sending out emails requesting link trades is pretty low, even under the best of circumstances.  However, it’s one of the best ways to get high quality, related sites to link to you without indulging in paid linking.

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Marketing online for big or small websites can become daunting if you don’t randomize your approaches. A social marketing campaign, varied in its approaches, will give your client better results in achieving search engine domination. Using question and answer sites can prove to be beneficial if using them properly.

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Well we can hardly believe it.  WE PULLED IT OFF!  If this is your first time to our blog you may be asking did what?  For the last month we have documented the process of moving our web site to a new hosting company, redesigning and updating it and integrating our blog Link Building Best Practices in to our new web site blog location you are looking at now.  It was all done at the same time and you are now looking at the new site that went live effective December 7th 2008.

In our last post we shared some of the planning and specific action items we identified to make it happen.  One of our biggest concerns was making sure we don’t lose any of our excellent search engine position and it seems we achieved that goal as well as transferred our page rank.  

I think the best way to wrap up this series is to tell you about what DID go "wrong".   Although we felt like we planned it out carefully and we followed our plan there were things that happened that we just could not have anticipated and maybe sharing this information with you might help your next project as well.

What went wrong

Last Friday night we finished all the "Pre" items and the final step before taking the new site live was to use the excellent built in "export" feature WordPress has.  It exports all your posts, post categories and Authors.  The plan was to export that data and then import it to the new blog (you are on now) so everything is current.  I had already done this once before a few weeks ago just to populate the development version of the blog with some data etc. and I was very impressed with how easy and smooth it went so I wasn’t expecting what happened next.  Before I get in to that though here is where I made my first mistake…I hopped over to GoDaddy and updated the name servers for the site and blog to begin propagation.  Then here is where things got ugly.  I exported all the data just fine, then jumped in the admin panel for the new site and started the import.  It seemed like it was taking a long time but finally it finished.  The first thing I noticed was the post count was twice what it should be (oh oh) so I opened the site and took a look.  The entire site was all out of whack!  Things were not where they should be at all and the main navigation had extra items. HUH?

The next thing that went wrong was where it got REALLY ugly.  The entire site went down!  When I tried to view the site all I saw was "A CONNECTION CAN NOT BE MADE TO THE DATABASE" in big black letters.  YIKES!  This didn’t make sense because the site was just up and no changes were made that would impact the database connection.  I logged in to the database via PHP MyAdmin and everything seemed fine. By this time it was 2:30 am and after poking around a while I decided the best thing to do was change the name servers back to the old sites, get some rest and pick it up again in the "morning" when I was fresh.

All hail WordPress the self healing blogging platform!

At 5:30 am (yeah 3 hours later) I woke up and started thinking about the problem, came up with a few ideas and headed in to the office to attack it again.  Guess what, the site was up! (at the dev address of course) but still out of whack.  After inspecting the main navigation I noticed there were actually just a couple extra items I realized were the PAGES (not posts) from the old blog site.  (Well no kidding because pages are stored in the posts table so those were imported as well) Ok, fine I’ll just log in and delete them because we don’t need them any more.  I logged in and right away noticed the post count was back to normal!  NICE! I have no idea how…so I proceeded to delete the few extra pages.  I went back to the site and just like that the world was a happy place again!  The site looked perfect and the blog was completely populated.  All hail WordPress the self healing blogging platform!  Since everything looked ok I switched the name servers again to make the new site live and since I had no idea how long propagation was going to take I went back to bed for a while.

Oops, another big problem

I woke up checked my email and had a few from Arnie with the most glaring being all the images on the blog were dead!  Obviously I didn’t know  that before I retired for the evening.  All the paths to the images were wrong!  Normally this might seem like an easy problem to solve right?  Just add a copy of all the images to a directory found at the correct path and moving forward all images will be in a new correct location.  Nope, that isn’t going to happen.  The problem is that since we had a 301 redirect in place for linkbuildingbestpractices.com to verticalmeasures.com/blog there was no real physical path that could be used.  We decided the best thing to do (rather than manually change the path on all the images on the entire blog) was was to use mod_rewrite on the .htaccess file to point all the image paths to the correct location. This little beauty did the trick: RewriteRule [^/]+(/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/.+) $1 [R=301,L] It 301 redirects all the image paths to the standard directory in WordPress where all images reside.  Problem solved!

While we are on the topic of mod_rewrite there was another problem we needed to resolve and mod_rewrite came through once again.  On our old site we had a series of website marketing and link building articles and press releases that used an unusual query string path.  (They were dynamically generated from a content system developed)  We needed to make sure they redirected to the matching page on the new site to pass link juice and authority.  Here is an example of the mod_rewrite we used:

Articles:

RewriteCond %{QUERY_STRING} articles?Outsource-Link-Building-The-Right-Company-Is-Vital.html
RewriteRule articles http://www.verticalmeasures.com/outsource-link-building-the-right-company-is-vital/ [R=301,L

Press Releases:

RewriteCond %{QUERY_STRING} Link-Building-Company-Earns-TOP-SEO-Award.html
RewriteRule press http://www.verticalmeasures.com/link-building-company-earns-top-seo-award/? [R=301,L]

Unfortunately we had to write one for each article and press release but it had to be done.  Also for extra fun we had to change the case of the new path on each to lower case as well (since PHP is case sensitive)  and a "http://UrlLikeThis" is not the same as a "http://urllikethis".  They would be considered different pages and duplicate content!  Ouch…

Our video didn’t work either

There was one other small problem that required some fast thinking and innovation.  If you were familiar with our old site you may recall we had a video built using Camtasia studio explaining the importance of natural search ranking.  The video worked great (on the old site) but for some reason on the new site it would stop about 15 seconds in.  Well it was time for an upgrade so we just uploaded the .flv file to the Vertical Measures YouTube account and it worked perfectly there.  Thanks to YouTube we were able to embed it on a new page and the result is a more visually appealing and professional wrapper for the video.  If you haven’t seen it before you should take a few minutes and watch our very informative higher search rankings video.

So that wraps it up!  There were a few other little kinks along the way but we wont bore you with all the details.  We hope you found this post and the others informative and a little entertaining.  Please be sure to take a moment and tell us what you think about the new site. We would value and appreciate your feedback. 

 ArnieK.gooruze.com

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Welcome back!  This is the 3rd part of the 4 part series on moving our website to a new hosting company, redesigning the verticalmeasures.com website and integrating this blog linkbuildingbestpractices.com in to the new website so they are all one site.  

Last week we talked about why we chose Wordpress as the platform for the entire project and we showed you what the raw theme looks like that we are modifying to meet our design and functionality needs.  This week I will share some of the specific action items we indentified, problems we encountered and decisions we made to ensure we have a user friendly site and our excellent search engine rank is not negatively affected by all the change. Our hope is that with the new platform and the blog integration we will see better search engine results and PR when the dust clears.

Give your opinion and get some exposure!

First things first…with the exception of a few tweaks here and there we would like to get your feedback on the new design and colors we choose.  Although our team is busy updating and revising content we have settled on a color and design and invite you to take a look on the temporary development site.  Here is the link: [link removed] Again don’t pay too much attention to the content, just tell us what you think of the design, colors and layout in a comment below.  If you suggest something we love and implement we may mention you and/or your business in our 4th and final post next week after the site is live!

Road map to moving the site:

Here are most of the steps we identified so far to accomplish the goal:

1. Review current content and decide on what pages will be included on the new site and which ones wont as well as which pages need to be revised.
2. Identify the pages that will be considered the main pages available from the primary horizontal navigation
3. Patty Adams was given the responsibility of writing new content and updating the old content
4. Chose a WordPress "theme" and have the team vote on it
5. Set up the new hosting account and install the current version of WordPress
6. Add to the database the tables verticalmeasures.com uses so there will only be one database for the entire site
7. Install and configure any plug-ins needed for the blog or site
8. We used the awesome Xenu Link Sleuth to get a list of all the URL’s from the old site to make sure we dont miss anything. It also shows us any broken links.  We’ll be running it against the new site to check for broken links also.
9. Add any widgets and widget content to Wordpress
10. Update the 404 template page with custom content to make it more user friendly for our visitors.  We considered Google’s new 404 page helper script but I decided against it because it could take our visitors offsite and it allows Google to change the content of the page at will.  Instead I added our site search functionality to the 404 page, a link to our sitemap and a link suggesting they email us for help.
11. Forms: We have 2 primary forms on the site. The contact us page and the (now Orange) inquiry form on the right sidebar.  Although we could use the cFormsII plugin to quickly and easily add the forms we wanted complete control of everythng from the look and feel to the functionality and user experience so we developed our own forms and processing functionality.  In additon we implemented a new free captcha system by Simon Jarvis.
12. Design the header graphic for the new site, (we unanimously agreed the old one was outdated) and we didn’t like the color of the default clouds.
13. Decide on, purchase and customize the main feature images that fade in and out on the home page.  You’ll also notice we went with a straight arrow in the main black feature section versus the half circle that came with the template.  That was Arnie’s excellent idea.  We think that minor change made a huge improvement to drawing the eye to the messages.
14. ORANGE?  After much debate our Link Manager Eli (pronounced "L + E") suggested orange for the Inquiry form.  The fact is it’s all over the web lately and we think it works well with the blues.  I wont share how many different shades of Orange we tried before picking the current one but it was easily double digits.
15. 301 Redirects: This is a BIGGIE…Since many of our pages currently rank very well with the search engines we have to make sure to transfer that link juice to the new site. We have to create a 301 redirect for every page from both sites to the new corresponding page on the new site. All totaled there are about 200.  Tedious but critical.  We are about halfway done.  Once we make the switch we will be testing them also to be sure there are no 404 errors.
16. Meta Tags: cant forget the extremely important meta tags!  They all had to be transferred from the old pages to the new pages.  Kaila Strong handled that task.

There are more steps involved (and I know I am missing some we have done) but that is basically where we are right now so I will save the rest for out final post next week.

Once again I encourage you to click the link above or here: [link removed] to our dev site and give us some feedback via comments below on the new design, layout and colors. 

We will be taking the new site live some time in the next 48 hours so wish us luck!

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