I’ve had fun and a fair amount of success in tracking down the answers to my questions about how a total overhaul of my site will affect my search engine rankings. In some cases, the answers are straightforward; in other cases, an answer has lead to another question. Here’s what I have so far:

Q: I’ve been wanting to transfer my site to a different hosting company but I haven’t known how (or if) that will affect my site’s search engine ratings.

A: The answer to this seems to be “No”. That answer told me an important piece of information I hadn’t had, namely that search engines search by domain name, not IP address.

Q: When I first created the site, the domain name I chose was bend-in-the-river.com. I published the site with that domain and then a bit later, decided to also use susanlitton.com. Since the site was already up, I ended up putting susanlitton.com as an alias. I’d like to switch that out — have susanlitton.com as the main domain name and bend-in-the-river as the alias. Will that change affect my ratings?

A: A tentative answer to this seems to be “Yes” with the added bit of info that an older domain will fare better than a newer domain. However, there seemed to be some disagreement and/or lack of clarity about how an alias actually works. I solved this dilemma by writing to my hosting company. Here’s their response:

The alias works via redirection from the zone records.
Zone records are basically a table that resolves domain names to i.p. addresses.
Thus, susanlitton.com has a zone record that tells servers looking for susanlitton.com to go to bend-in-the-river.com. The advantage of having an alias is that all e-mails going to susanlitton.com get forwarded to bend-in-the-river.com.

To show it visually…

bend-in-the-river.com has 66.113.130.214 as it’s i.p. address.

susanlitton.com also has 66.113.130.214 as it’s i.p. address.

I don’t know if all hosting companies do an alias this way, but I was happy to at least see how one company handles it. A solution to this concern seems to be to use a 301 redirect. More about this in another post.

Q: I also thought that at some point, I’d like to convert the site from HTML to PHP, but again, I haven’t known if that would mess things up.

A: Again, this question got a bit of a mixed review. However, people seem to agree that to a search engine, index.php is seen as the same as index.html. If you have any doubts, though, it seems that adding the trailing slash at the end of the URL will clear it up as well as possibly speed up your site a bit. (See waferbaby’s Slash Forward (Some URLs are Better Than Others))

Q: If I decide to include the site in my portfolio, it’s going to need major overhaul. In fact, although the content and the overall site architecture are still OK and I’d keep most of the images, I’d probably have to do pretty much everything else from scratch. How will that affect the ratings?

A: Short answer is that there will be a dip. Again, a 301 redirect will help here and I’ll explore that in my second post tonight.

Q: I’d like to use some of the tips and tools we’ve been studying in class to find out all I can about what is and what isn’t working to help people find my site.

A: The only thing I’ve done on this so far is sign up for Mint. I think it will be way cool to log some of these early stats and compare them throughout the process of my redesign. But see . . . even this brings up a question for me. I signed up for Mint using the main domain (www.bend-in-the-river.com). Since I now know that my alias has the same IP address, will Mint automatically give me stats for both or do I need to buy a separate package for www.susanlitton.com? I haven’t had a chance to look at Mint yet or figure out how to use it so hopefully when I crack it open, that answer will be obvious.

The first step in applying what we’re learning about findability to my psychotherapy site seems to be to compare my site to the nuts and bolts findability techniques. No tools or analytics or cool stuff yet, just the basics:

The Good

• The site has a lot of content and the content tends to be fairly keyword rich. This is largely due to a 17-page Questions & Answers section.
• The titles of each page start with “Psychotherapy in Atlanta, GA: Susan C. Litton, Ph.D. — ” and then have the name of that section, e.g., Philosophy of Therapy, Articles, Questions & Answers: Attachment Disorders, Questions & Answers: Personality Disorders, etc.
• The URLs contain some form of the main word for each page, e.g., the URL for the Philosophy of Therapy page is http://www.susanlitton.com/philosophy.html.
• I built another psychotherapy site for all the therapists in our practice and my personal page on that site includes a back link to my main site.
• I have links to my site in a signature I use for a mental health message board I monitor for iVillage.com.
• There are meta tags for both keywords and descriptions for each page on the site.
• There are a fair number of internal links on the site and the text of the links tend to be keywords. Again, the best example of this tends to be on questions pages, e.g., Abuse Questions.

The Bad

• With a couple of minor exceptions, the only changes I’ve made in content to the site are the yearly updates to the copyright date. There have been years that I haven’t even gotten around to doing that.
• The URLs could be done a lot better. For example, in the Questions & Answers area, although the main keyword for the page does appear in the URL, the keyword for each question page is prefaced with “qa” and the keyword for each answer page is prefaced with “ans”. For example, the URL for the page of questions pertaining to abuse is:

• Headers for each page are graphics and although they do have ALT tags, the anchor tags don’t have title attributes.
• The layout was done with tables and the tags have none of the attributes that would help search engines locate content.
• There’s no sitemap.

The Downright Ugly

• The home page is in Flash. There is a link on the home page to a non-Flash version but I don’t know how effective it is.
• The site doesn’t validate. There’s some real scary stuff in there.
• The site doesn’t even give a nod toward accessibility standards.

As you can see, the site needs some serious help. Stay tuned next week for the upcoming installment in this findability project.

Been mulling things over and have come up with a way to learn that excites me: I’m going to try to apply the things we’re learning in our Findability class to a real world project I need to do. The project is my psychotherapy site. I built it before I ever started taking classes at the Art Institute so the coding is a mess. No. A MESS. A peek under the hood would be an embarrassment. However, it generally ranks fairly high in Google and my referrals have increased exponentially as a result of the site.

There are several objectives I’d like to accomplish with this. Some of the tasks I have in mind will give me some answers I’ve been wanting for my site; some will help me learn the findability class material better; most will do both. One of the problems with my site is that I’ve been afraid to change anything because I haven’t wanted to mess up my search engine ratings. However, there are some changes I’ve really been wanting to make on the site so using this class as an opportunity to learn seems like a great idea. Here are the objectives:

• I’ve been wanting to transfer my site to a different hosting company but I haven’t known how (or if) that will affect my site’s search engine ratings.
• When I first created the site, the domain name I chose was bend-in-the-river.com. I published the site with that domain and then a bit later, decided to also use susanlitton.com. Since the site was already up, I ended up putting susanlitton.com as an alias. I’d like to switch that out — have susanlitton.com as the main domain name and bend-in-the-river as the alias. Will that change affect my ratings?
• I also thought that at some point, I’d like to convert the site from HTML to PHP, but again, I haven’t known if that would mess things up.
• If I decide to include the site in my portfolio, it’s going to need major overhaul. In fact, although the content and the overall site architecture are still OK and I’d keep most of the images, I’d probably have to do pretty much everything else from scratch. How will that affect the ratings?
• I’d like to use some of the tips and tools we’ve been studying in class to find out all I can about what is and what isn’t working to help people find my site.

So . . . several questions to research and then some activities to do.

I need another personal post – helps me clear out my brain and focus. Life is very intense right now. The septic tank at my office decided to die and since the owners of the building are planning to sell, they opted not to fix it. This meant that the 8 of us who have called the place home (me, for over 20 years) are suddenly in the position of having to scurry around and find a new place to practice. Moving to commercial office space is a lengthy process. Once you find a space you like, you give the owner the specs you want and it typically takes around 2 months for them to get the necessary permits and build the place out. Two months in the old office with the possibility of no water or plumbing isn’t a viable option; two months of not seeing clients isn’t a viable option. So, Anne and I decided to move our offices to our home temporarily.

As a result, this week has been a week of rapidly changing hats. We go look at commercial office space to try to find a new permanent home. Then we swap that hat for our Home Depot hat as we go into fix-it mode to try to convert our home into temporary office space. Then we don our therapist hats as we go see clients. And the interior designer/architect hats as we make tentative drawings of how we want our new space to look. In a few hours, we’re going to go hire a couple of guys off the street to come help us move furniture. I’m not even sure WHAT that hat is. And of course, there’s my student hat that I just pulled down over my ears as I began to write this post. And the beat goes on . . .

A couple of times this week, I thought of writing Aarron a whine email telling him all of this and asking him not to expect great things from me this quarter. I still pretty much just want to whine about it all. However, in my nobler moments (which are few and far between right now), I’m trying to see this as an opportunity to learn something I’ve never been good at: how to work smarter, faster, with less “fat”. Get more (and perhaps better) work done in a smaller amount of time. I’ve never, ever worked quickly. I meander around a lot to get from A to B. For example . . . well, ok, writing this personal post. It doesn’t have to be done. It’s not part of any assignment. I’ll still write my two non-personal posts for this week. But it helps me. Gets me in the right track. So . . . is that fat or something essential? Hmm. Maybe I need to remember that fat – for all the bad press it gets – is an essential nutrient. At least it seems to be for me.

I have been having horrible writer’s block on these posts. Being an “I wanna understand it” person at heart, I’ve spent some time trying to figure out why. Here’s the deal:

1. I feel totally out of my element in this class. I feel like I’m back in 33 RPM-land while everyone else in class is spinning CDs and DVDs.
2. The assignment specifically says we’re not to write personal posts and that’s what I do best.
3. The whole point of this course is to learn about findability and we’re supposed to use the techniques we’re learning to make our blogs more findable. To be honest, with the state of my learning at this point, I’d really rather hide my posts so no one CAN find them. (It’s probably not a coincidence that I titled my blog ‘To Find or Not To Find’.)
4. In short, I feel dumb, not up to the task, and that there’s no way in heck I can play catch up quickly enough to come up with anything important to say that wouldn’t be old hat to everyone else in the class.

So that’s what’s tying me in knots.

Now. I also know what DOES work for me. What works is for me to find something that sincerely interests me. It may well be kindergarten level compared to where everyone else in the class is but if I don’t worry about that and just write about what I learned, I’ll be fine. And I’ll learn stuff. The stuff I most want/need to learn. AND . . . I do want to learn about findability. I have a web application I’m hoping to market some day and heck YEAH I want people to be able to find it. So to be honest, I pity the person who finds this blog but maybe I can think of just using it as a vehicle to learn things I’m sincerely interested in learning.

There. 343 words of sheer personal indulgence to help me break through my writer’s block.