In this case, I had a client that had a number of very similar pages that did not fully have the rel canonical tag fully applied as a solution. Based on Eric Enge’s interview with Duane Forrester, where Duane stated “If we are finding your pages, but not keeping them in the index, there is a reason for that.” I decided to see what Bing Webmaster’s Index Explorer had indexed as “quality content” as a data point.

Bing Webmaster Indexation Stats, the spike in the middle was due to some crawl errors.

Google introduced the URL parameters settings in Webmasters Tools so you could help Google decide whether to crawl pages with a parameter. With Google this is working fairly well. Bing has recently introduced a similar feature, called “URL Normalization”. The feature is confusing, you have two choices: “Enabled” and “Disabled”. Non intuitively “Disabled” means that Bing doesn’t do any “URL normalization”, so if you want the search engine to do the normalization you enable it. What that means is not entirely clear, but the instructions on the page say “use this page to specify the parameter “abc” be ignored …” So apparently “enabled” means “ignored”. Clear? Maybe to you. It hurts my head.

So far the tools at my disposal have proven ineffectual in addressing the duplicate content in Bing’s index. Of course the search engines have the position that rel canonical is a hint, a 301 is the preference, but a 301 is not an option here.

And even more sadly, I didn’t even get to a strategy for the similar pages.

The opponents say that SOPA would give the US government the ability to completely block a website from US viewing even if just one link on that site violates copyright. It wouldn’t matter if the link was created by a user and not the site owner, blockage would still be possible. If that doesn’t bother you, this FAQ on SOPA may. No wonder sites such as reddit – which are driven by user generated content – are up in arms over this legislation and plan to go dark on January 18th as a protest.

While there is some fearmongering going on here, it is clear that the legislation is dangerous and not really in the spirit of a free and open internet that many of us expect. SOPA opponents have many valid points. While there are signs that the White House is beginning to waver in its support of the bill, we are not out of the woods yet.

Joining the SOPA blackout protest? Read this first

Many are urging webmasters to protest by posting a statement on their site or altering their site to redirect to this effective AmericanCensorship.org infographic. There are already WordPress plugins created that you can use. However before you run off and implement any of these, consider that your actions may have a negative impact on your site’s SEO. Have a read of this post: How to participate in the outage without hurting your site with Google search. Google recommends that you have your site return a 503 HTTP status code so that it knows not to spider your content that day.

It occurs to me that maybe Google should just not crawl that day?

Picture by aussiegold and published under the Flickr Creative Commons License

I used to get frustrated after carefully explaining to new bloggers and site owners how to write SEO friendly permalinks, page titles and meta descriptions — and then watching them forget everything I told them by creating poorly optimized posts and pages. Now I can lead the horse to water, and he (or she) actually drinks it! Another great bonus about this plugin is that is it so comprehensive is that it does the job of several plugins. For example there is no need to install a sitemap plugin – Yoast’s plugin will take care of that too for you.

There is so many features in this plugin, that I am not going to cover them all, but I would like to show how it helps you optimize your pages and posts to be SEO friendly. When installed, the plugin adds an additional form to your page/post edit screen that has three tabs. The key to the first tab is to first choose your focus keyword (a drop list appears to help you refine the keyword even further – and there is a related keyword button). Once you’ve decided on your keyworde, you can then customize the page title and meta description (here I have customized the title but not the meta description tag). Then you can use the initial page analysis results as a guide to optimize further. Perhaps you need to weave in your keyword into your content? You’ll be reminded to do so here:

First Tab has the Snippet Preview and is where you choose your focus keyword and customize your page title and meta description.

The second tab takes the page analysis a level deeper. You’ll get reminders on placing your keyword in the first paragraph of your copy (as I am reminded here) and a reading level score.

Taking the SEO analysis of your page to a deeper level

The third tab has a lot of power. Here you can noindex your page if you need to, setup a 301 redirect, also define your canonical URL, and even tweak your sitemap priority settings.

Don't overlook the third tab, there is a lot of power here.

The plugin has many more features available in a separate menu on the sidebar. Yoast has taken the trouble to add commentary to help you use the settings correctly. Just taking the time to read through his comments could help many learn SEO. The plugin is available in the WordPress plugin repository (search on “WordPress SEO Yoast”) and by download from his site.]]> http://webenso.com/wordpress-seo-plugin-yoast/feed/ 0 http://webenso.com/to-seo-or-to-ppc-useful-info/ http://webenso.com/to-seo-or-to-ppc-useful-info/#comments Fri, 30 Dec 2011 12:07:22 +0000 Guest Author http://webenso.com/to-seo-or-to-ppc-useful-info/ Once you have a website launched, the next question you need to answer is how you are going to get traffic to it.

Today you have a lot of options you can choose from. One way to get traffic is to pay for advertising with the search engines and other networks (such as Facebook). Or instead of paying for advertising, you can focus on getting your website found when people search for a solution that your business provides. You can also attract interest with social media. In this article we are going to look at advertising using PPC and ranking using SEO.

What is PPC?

A popular way to advertise is by using PPC. PPC means Pay Per Click. Often when you search on Google or Bing – you will see “sponsored” listings at the top of the page and/or to the right. If you click on one of these sponsored links, the advertiser will pay the search engine for that click.

It isn’t a simple flat rate. The advertisers bid for placement in the listings. You would think the highest bidder would always get the first spot, but this is not always true. Google and Bing take many factors into consideration, including the quality of the ad and the site and how well it matches the searcher’s query.

What is SEO?

SEO – search engine optimization – is the art and science of getting your website to appear in the coveted top organic listings (those that appear under the sponsored listings. SEO activities include optimizing your website pages to match the keywords that searchers enter into Google and the other search engines, and also promoting your site to get other websites to link to yours.

Which is better?

It depends on the answers to the questions below:

1. What’s the competition like? The effort it takes to rank for a set of keywords can vary widely based on the market and how “niche” your keywords are. If you are a local business, using local SEO to rank for search terms that have your city name in them can be successful without a lot of effort and time. However if you want to rank for “car insurance” you will have to have a big SEO budget and time.
2. What will be your PPC spend? Competition matters in the PPC world too. Some terms (legal issues are an example) are quite expensive to bid on.
3. What’s your timeframe? To get traffic quickly, PPC will be much faster than SEO. New sites can take 3 months or more to rank consistently. You may want to consider using PPC to kick things off for your business until your SEO efforts start to pay off.
4. Are you testing? Maybe you are creating a new landing page for a product you are offering. A focused PPC test can give you a lot of information on how well your page converts. This information can help guide both SEO and PPC efforts in influencing the headline you write and the keywords you use in both your PPC campaigns and SEO efforts.
5. How do you want to target your audience? With advertising, particularly on Facebook, you can get fairly precise on who to advertise to. Google gives you the ability to select the geographic locations to advertise to. If you advertise on the display network (adsense ads) you can even choose the websites to advertise on. Facebook additionally lets you target certain demographics and interests. While you can target your SEO efforts as well, by its nature, SEO traffic will be less targeted – focusing only on the keywords used in the search query.
6. What do your competitors do? If your competitors are heavy users of advertising and their sites are not well optimized, you should ask yourself why. It might be an opportunity for you to capitalize on their oversight, but then again there might be a good reason why they are focusing their efforts in one area over the other. Keep in mind, that certain types of sites (think a lot of content) lend themselves more naturally to SEO, and others more to PPC.

Many online businesses will employ both SEO and PPC campaigns to get traffic. To answer the question, which is better? the answer is neither, it all depends on what you want to accomplish and the market you want to compete in.

One annoying thing, and many people miss this, is that you should verify both the ‘www’ and non ‘www’ versions of your site with Google Webmasters Tools, even if you have a 301 redirect (as you should) setup from one to the another.

Why verify both the ‘www’ and non ‘www’ versions of your site?

• Google is pretty smart about the ‘www’ subdomain, but telling it you own both your domain and the ‘www’ subdomain just is another signal that helps your site. Google doesn’t automatically transfer the trust and authority it’s given to a domain to a subdomain. This is because it is possible for someone different to own a subdomain.
• Verifying both versions allows you to set the “preferred domain” (Site Configuration -> Settings) in GWMT, again another signal that can only help.
• If you ever have to move your site to another domain, you will want to submit a “Change of Address” in GWMT. You will not be able to do this unless both the ‘www’ and non ‘www’ versions of your site have been verified.

More on Google Webmasters Tools Verification

To verify your site in Google Webmasters Tools there are three methods (the third method is newer):

1. Add a meta tag in the of your home page
2. Upload a file to the root directory that GWMT provides to you
3. Add a DNS record for your site and telling Google about it.

DNS Text Verification was released in mid 2011 by Google.

There are many step by step articles and videos on how to do the verification, including in this blog. Also as one might expect, there is a WordPress plugin that makes it easy to do the verification if you don’t want to deal with FTP, editing your site or DNS records. Here are some links to resources:

• I cover both the Yahoo and Google verification process and submitting a sitemap.
• One of many videos on GWMT verification (covers the HTML file upload option and doesn’t mention DNS Text Verification). Most of these videos assume you are using particular hosting provider.
• Article that covers all three verification methods
• Why submitting a change of address is beneficial when you move domains even if you also use 301 redirects.

So what about setting up your own domain and pointing it to your marketing system? Not a problem, for $10 or so, you buy a domain and then forward it to your marketing system URL.

This won’t cause any SEO problems for my new domain, right? Well, “it depends”.

Domain Forwarding – 301 and 302 Redirects

The simplest way to forward your domain is with a redirect. This means that when a user visits your domain, say www.mynewdomain.com, the server sends back a code to the browser that tells it to go to a new location, such as iuser.marketingsystem.com. There are two types of my website has moved codes. One is HTTP code 301 which says the new location is permanent, the other is HTTP code 302 which says the move is temporary.

If you browse SEO articles on the web you’ll see advice to always use 301 redirects to make sure that the SEO benefit passes through to the target domain. But is that really what you want here? If you are interested in building up the SEO power of your new domain, a 301 redirect will defeat that goal as it just passes all that link juice to the marketing system, which may not be what you want. A 302 might be better, although with 302s, Google will decide which URL to index, which may or may not be in your favor.

Domain Forwarding – with masking

With the redirect described above, the user will see the iuser.marketingsystem.com URL in the browser after the redirect completes. Masking, also called URL Frame, will hide the target domain from the user, keeping www.mynewdomain.com visible in the URL box in the browser. Sounds perfect, yes? Well, let’s look at what spider sees when it visits the domain. Here’s an example <frameset rows='100%, *' frameborder=no framespacing=0 border=0><frame src="http://iuser.marketingsystem.com" name=mainwindow frameborder=no framespacing=0 marginheight=0 marginwidth=0></frame>

This code tells the visitor that the content is all coming from the marketingsystem.com domain. The general consensus is this masking using frames are bad for SEO and most tests agree with this. Your mileage may vary. In any case, savvy users visiting with Chrome or Firefox might notice that the browser is getting a response from marketingsystem.com, specially if it is slow (Waiting on ….). So, although you can insert meta tags in the frameset code to try and optimize the “page”, this approach is not ideal either.

Name Server solution

So what’s left? Instead of forwarding the domain, you can use DNS to map the domain to the target system’s nameservers. DNS is how the internet determines where your website is actually hosted, it translates the domain name to an IP address. By pointing to the marketing system nameservers you are transferring that translation process to the marketing system which will figure out what files to show your web visitor. Since in this we are trying to build the SEO value of our domain rather than the marketing system URL, this is a better approach than redirecting or forwarding with masking.

There are a couple of drawbacks however. One is that if both domains get indexed, Google may consider this duplicate content. You want to avoid having any links go directly to your marketing system URL. Also, as much as you can, customize the marketing system website. If your website looks like a hundred others, it will be harder to get it to rank highly.

Danny's article with SEO advice to Bill Gates

Google’s desire to tie content to “real” people perhaps sheds some light on the recent mass removal of non user Google+ accounts.

I had initially tried to set it up on my blog but it didn’t work. After seeing tweets from several people that it didn’t work for them either, I put it aside and forgot about it. However this week, I was determined to get it working.  The concept to get here is that you have to establish a bi-directional link between your blog and your Google profile, as a way to validate that it is really you that wrote the article.  So far, sounds easy right? Well, unfortunately there are a lot of little details.

Set up your Google profile

If you have a Gmail or Google+ account, you already have a Google profile.  You might have even filled it in back in the Buzz days.  Sign into your Google account and select Profile from the right hand dropdown on Googles black bar that appears on Gmail and other Google properties.

• Add a decent, recognizable picture to your profile.  Picture of your cat won’t work.
• Set up the +1 tab on your Google profile as Google’s authorship instructions tells you to.
• Add a link in “Other Profiles” to the site that you are publishing on.  Ideally the link should point to a bio page of you and the “This page is specifically about me” checkbox should be checked. However in my Google profile this checkbox has disappeared so your mileage may vary.

Add tags to your articles and bio page

Now you have a choice.  You can established the bi-directional link as I described above, or you can establish the link between a bio page and your Google profile and then mark up your web pages with rel="author" to reference your bio page.  Adding a bit to the confusion, is Google recently introduced an alternative to the markup on the articles using ?rel=author which is explained on the Google webmasters help page, ostensively to help out people who have a limited ability to edit their site. I haven’t tried this approach yet.

If you are sticking to the original approach (whether you are using the rel="me" links in an author bio page or not), watch this Matt Cutt’s video below:

If you have a bio page on your blog (and you really should), adding the rel="me" is easy. What’s harder is figuring out how to turn your author’s name into a hyperlink with the rel="author" pointing to your bio page. Joost highlights a nice alternative approach to this with an About link in your WordPress menu using XFN.

A couple of other things you need to worry about:

• Many WordPress themes are stripping out the “rel” tags, do a view source to see if this is happening to you too. If so, Joost’s article addresses this, and there is a also a WordPress Plugin that you can install
• As Joost highlights, you need to submit a form to Google once you have set it up.  Another little but important detail!

To check whether you have done everything right you can use the Rich Snippets Testing Tool Google provides.  You want it to look something like the below:

Now you sit back and wait for your smiling face starts to showing up in snippets in the search results

Before you even upload the image to WordPress consider renaming the image filename from the SEO unfriendly (for example) DCN0019.jpg to a filename that describes the image (such as “wordpress-image-uploader.jpg”). Given how organizationally challenged I am, I don’t understand why people don’t do this, how do you search through images if you leave them with unrecognizable names? When I name an image I avoid spaces as well.

Now you are ready to upload the image into your post. Click on the little box to the right of “Upload/Insert” above your post. When the uploader dialog pop ups, take the few seconds and fill in the tag fields before inserting the image into your post. Here are the tags to fill in.

• alt This tag is the most important. Add a keyword rich description of your image here.
• title Ever notice how a little yellow tag appears on some images when you mouse over them? You can get this effect by setting the title tag. Note that some browsers may not support this well. Is it important for SEO? It depends on who you ask, but I always set it, usually to the same as my alt tag.
• caption Some SEOs feel that captions help the SEO of your images, it’s a nice way to describe the image to your audience as well.

Make sure to fill in the alt and title tags

Don't use %name if you use unfriendly image filenames

Like everything, it’s more powerful if you know how to use it well. The default options assume you have a nice friendly filename that is descriptive of the image. If you are not going to bother with that, then don’t use %name. %title is the post title, which is often a great choice, but keep in mind that if you have multiple images in your post they are going to have the same tags. Still anything reasonably descriptive is better than having blank tags.