Using “html” as your cloak word

I can’t stress enough how important it is to use “html” as your cloak word. Using “html” as your cloak word allows you to use optimized cloaked URLs that will rank better in the search engines. Using “html” as your cloak word is considered an advanced technique and it is required that you have the Templates
Add-on to properly implement this method, but the benefits greatly exceed the few extra steps required to implement “html” as your cloak word.

To setup SEC to use “html” as your cloak word follow the following steps…

1.) Go to the “Advanced” tab inside your SEC Management Console
2.) Go to the “Enable .htaccess and setup Cloak Word” section
3.) Enable .htaccess
4.) Set your Cloak Word to “html” (without the quotes)
5.) Scroll down to the bottom of the page and click “Submit Now” to save your settings

Now that you have the settings set in your SEC Management Console you need to configure your .htaccess file. To get the code to add to your .htaccess file follow the following steps…

1.) Click on the “Manual” tab of the SEC Management Console
2.) Scroll down to the “Advanced Techniques: .htaccess cloaking” section
3.) Copy the code that is generated for you. It should look something like the following…

options all
RewriteEngine on
RewriteBase /
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule html /cgi-bin/index.pl [L]

4.) Now that you have the .htaccess code add it to the root or home directory on your website.

You now have .htaccess cloaking setup with “html” as your cloak word. This means that any cloaked URL with “html” in it will be redirected to your landing page. For example, you can now create clean URLs that look like “http://www.domain.com/a-keyword-phrase.html” and of course this cloaked URL will be optimized for “a keyword phrase”.

Using this strategy will greatly improve your search engine rankings as the search engines add more weight if your page has the keyword in the URL. You can now also use the [linkwords] command in your templates to put “a keyword phrase” anywhere in your website. So this means that if you put <title>[linkwords]</title> in your template you can now have the keyword phrase you want to rank for in your title, which will help your search engine rankings even further. Elaborating on this search engine optimization example you can put [linkwords] in your meta tags, h1 tags, alt tags, and then sprinkle it throughout your text. Hopefully you can see the power of using “html” as your cloak word…

EDIT:  I almost forgot to mention…all the work listed above to set “html” as your cloak word is automatically done when you use EWI saving you a lot of time in manual labor.

Enjoy!