Last week I posted some simple htaccess rewrites. This week I want to take it a step further and look at the RewriteCond property, along with three neat rewrites you can use.

As its name suggests, RewriteCond allows you to set conditions for a rewrite, including filtering by referer, saved information (in cookies), server information, and more. Each condition is applied to each rewrite rule, from the conditions line downwards, until it hits a rule marked as the "last rule" with an [L] tag. (For more tags see: Regex Character Definitions for htaccess) Following rules will be executed as well, but not with the condition applied.

The available conditions are:

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Last month, while we were moving our site from our old coldfusion/flat HTML based website to our new Drupal hotness I took it upon myself to learn how to do some htaccess work. In the past we had written about htaccess, redirects, and rewrites, but in playing around a little more I realized that I really didn't understand a lot of it (hell, I still don't). So today I'm going to walk through some more intermediary htaccess rules you can use.

You can do a lot with htaccess, from error codes to banning IP's to password protection to setting MIME types. It's an incredibly versatile tool. What I am interested in, however, is rewrites.

301's redirect/rewrite seamlessly send users from one page to another, while sending information to the browser telling it that this page has been permanently redirected. For SEO's a 301 sends linkjuice from that page to the target. It won't always send 100% of it, but often it's nice and simple and clean.

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There's a lot more activity on the server where your site is hosted than you can imagine. Most of the time we only worry if the site is up and running but you should take a look to what is happening behind the stage too.

There is a nice and clean way to track 404 errors with Google Analytics but error logs are the mother of it all when it comes to this kind of information.

Every web server has an error log, though Microsoft IIS and Apache the most typical ones for sure. Good news for those having an open source server to host their site, they usually come with AwStats installed; a free logfile analyzer that makes more easy for non-techies to read that information.

From an SEO perspective there are 3 basic reasons why you should listen carefully to what your web server is shouting to your deaf ears.

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While at the 2010 Internet Retailer Conference & Exhibition (IRCE) in Chicago this year, we were introduced to a new Software As A Service (SAAS) called LotusJump, a tool for helping with your site's search engine rankings. The idea is that you put in your site's URL, Lotus Jump scans the site and the internet, then reports back ideas and suggestions on how you can improve your site's rankings, whether it be metatag suggestions or a forum topic thread relevant to your product that you should reply to.

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this isn't what people searching for you should look like

Yes, link building is a tedious task that must be done regularly and it requires a certain amount of imagination to get nice results. There are no advanced link building techniques in my opinion, there are only advanced strategies.

No more excuses, the fact that you have not spent some time thinking about it does not mean you cannot start taking some basic steps and the first one is to make sure that your reputation turns up as much as possible in certain search results.

Are we talking about online reputation and link building? Yes, keep on reading.

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At some point everyone realizes that it's time for a website migration. Moving to a new platform can open up opportunities for further development, and help fix the perilous mish mash of old and new technologies that a website develops over the years.

We recently relaunched our website, moving the entire thing over to Drupal. Half expecting the kind of horror stories that econsultancy reported, we nervously checked and double checked all of our SEO factors. With enough planning and care we managed to achieve very little drop in organic traffic.

Here's the steps we went through to maintain rankings while migrating our site to Drupal:

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reuse your adwords

Google continues to improve Adwords by giving advertisers more options to better target customers. One of these options is the Remarketing feature available through the Content Network. If you're unfamiliar with this relatively new feature, it allows you to reach out to users who have previously visited your website. As an advertiser, this gives you the ability to show specialized ads which better speaks to what your visitor has previously been researching.

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Aggregate data is a sin, they say. Segmentation is crucial to finding useful information about your users, and ao this week I hit up our SEO team for advice on what custom segments they use. Alex T., Ani L. and myself provided the following 6 metrics that you can use to take a closer look at what your visitors are doing on your site.

Starting from the top:

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Last week I went over how to develop a fairly huge SEO report in Google Analytics. Today we're going to look at how to apply this report to your website, and use it to draw some conclusions about your website.

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Usually you won't get a lot of traffic from Images Search - close to nothing in fact - but for certain web sites with a high volume of organic traffic, around 85%, and good quantity of search engine optimized images it can be close to 13% of the total visits. 

This added traffic sure will help you get some extra conversions and who doesn't want that?

Optimizing images is not that difficult, but it is a task you have to do every time you upload a picture. And unfortunately there is no easy way to know the yield of this work.

Web analytics tools are not going to tell you (at least not right out the box) the quantity of Image Search traffic, the keywords user searched at Google Images, the exact image that is appearing on the search engine results pages, nor the exact page in your site where the image is allocated.

PHP script to the rescue

It would be fantastic to have all these details to help your image optimization work and here is where I come in, with a piece of PHP code. 

This script is doing three basic tasks:

• Getting the referrer
• Guess which of the major search engines is, Google, Yahoo or Bing
• Analyze the query string and extract as many relevant details as possible

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