A for Architecture: part 2 of the HASCH the OnPage SEO framework

What means a SEO talking about architecture? What kind of architecture matters for SEO?

SEO must clearly distinguish two kinds of website architecture:

• site-wide architecture,
• page-wide architecture.

Both site-wide and page-wide architectures have own rules to obey. I will formulate these rules flexible and adaptable enough to be applied to any content or ecommerce project.
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How to SEO pdf files

If your task is to optimize a pdf file for search engines, you must ensure, that your pdf file will be text sourced and not image-sourced. To do so, create your pdf file with a text editor like Libre Office / Open Office or the like, and never with an image editor like Photoshop.

The SEO for pdf procedure isn't tricky, but the optimization quality depends vitally from your general HTML and SEO knowledge:
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How To Set Custom Redirects in Blogger

Over time, most blogs may go through many changes, like posts being added or deleted. In some occasions, you don't want people to get 404 messages when they navigate to posts or pages that don't exist on your blog and instead, make all requests to a specific link to be redirected to another page. One of the best way to avoid broken links and keep your traffic flowing in the right direction is setting custom redirects via the Blogger Custom Redirects tool.

This tutorial will show you how to set custom redirects for Blogger posts and redirect an old URL to a new URL. But before redirecting any URL, you must know that there are two types of redirects:

• A 302 redirect means that the page has moved temporarily. This redirect doesn't pass the URL value to the new location and instead, it will take the visitors to an appropriate location so that you aren't showing them a 404 page not found, or an error page. You can use a 302 redirect for coming soon pages or maintenance pages.
• A 301 redirect means that a page has moved permanently to a new location. Use the 301 redirect when you deleted or changed the URL of your post. In most instances, the 301 redirects are always recommended for SEO because they will pass link juice (ranking power) to the redirected page and visitors will also benefit from this. However, 301s aren't suitable when you change your custom-domain, because it only supports redirection within the same blog, not to an external URL.

Now that we've established which is which, let's see how to set custom redirects for Blogger posts.

How to redirect old URL to new URL in Blogger

Step 1. Login to you Blogger account with email and password.

Step 2. Click on your blog > go to Settings \ Search Preferences and click "Edit" next to "Custom Redirects."

Step 3. Enter the old URL in the "From" field, and the new URL in the "To" field including the forward slash "/" (see the screenshot below)

Note: Do not enter the full URL in these fields. Just omit the address of your blog and type only the rest of the link. Again, this works only if you wish to redirect within your blogger blog and not to any external links.

Step 4. Click the "Save" link (1) and the "Save changes" button (2), and you're done!

If you want to redirect more pages, just click the "New redirect" button. Also, you can check out this tutorial to learn how to create a static homepage in Blogger using custom redirects.

Winner of the Linux Game Awards PotM July 2014 announced!

See full announcement here.



Congrats to Unvanquished, they are doing a great job for sure!

While they won by a clear lead, the follow-up projects are also very much worth mentioning:

Introducing the "Free high-quality picture search" tool

This article introduces the Free High Quality Picture Search tool which has been added to this website.

Today I've added a new feature to Blogger-Hints-and-Tips.

The Free High Quality Image Search tool is available from the menu bar. It is a tool to help you locate free, high-quality pictures to use in your blog posts or other website projects.

It is based on a Google-custom-search engine, and a carefully selected set of websites that offer images you can use for free on your blog, even if it is "commercial" (ie you have advertising or any other way of making money from it).

The difference between this and the images that you can get from a general-purpose search using the Creative Commons image and multi-media search tool is the resolution of the images that are found and/or their photographic quality.

How to use the Free-image-search tool

• Choose it from the menu bar on this blog, or navigate directly to it at  http://blogger-hints-and-tips.blogspot.ie/p/free-image-search.html

• Type a description of the image you want to see into the search-bar.

• Press Enter

• When the results display, click the Image tab, to see what photos are available.
  (Hopefully this step is only temporary, and I can soon manage to have the search-results default to images and still use the tool in Blogger.)

• Use the numbers in the lower-left side to move to different pages in the image-search results.

• Choose an image that you would like to use.

Once you have chosen an image, you can either link directly to if (if the site allows), or download a copy, put it on your own image-service (eg Picasa-web-albums), and use it in your blog.   The latter approach is required if you want the image to be used as the thumbnail for your post.

Copyright

By definition, all images returned by the search-tool should be free-use and so not subject to any copyright rules.

However some do have attribution requirements, and you may need to use image-captions or similar to make sure that these are followed in your blog.

Related Articles:

Finding free photos for your blog, using Creative Commons

Introducing Google-custom-search engines

Summarise your blog-post with post.snippet and post.thumbnail

Copyright, Blogs and Blogging, an introduction