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.

More and more users are turning to their cell phones for search while they are on the go, or even while sitting in front of the television. With some people, the cell phone might as well be attached surgically to their body. With mobile web advertising you can target your ads to these mobile searchers.

Searchers with a phone can do one thing that a desktop computer can not, which is to actually make phone calls. This creates an opportunity for mobile ads to have a button or link that actually places a phone call when tapped or clicked. This is known as Click-to-Call.

To educate myself about Click to Call I signed up for a course colorfully called MobileMoneyBandit. The course focuses on marketing a phone number both via paid advertising and using “free” organic methods. Justin also covers how to find companies with toll free numbers specifically set up for this type of advertising. He definitely knows his topic and his videos are well done. I definitely think he could charge more for the information he provides.

The approach of advertising a phone number in addition or instead of a website or link holds a lot of promise. Google launched Click-to-Call for it’s adwords advertising in January 2010 and a year later, hundreds of thousands of advertisers were using the ad format. Google found that “In recent studies we found that when compared to ads without phone numbers, Click-to-call ads drive a 6-8% average increase in click-through rates.” For advertisers it is a win as well as conversions on a phone call have always been higher than with visitors to a website.

FYI, the MobileMoneyBandit link is an affiliate link, but keep in mind that I recommend very few products on this blog. If you are serious about learning about Mobile Web Marketing, this is a great place to start.

Today many websites went “dark” to protest a pair of bills, SOPA and PIPA, that are currently in the US Congress. These broadly reaching bills are seen rightly by many as a vehicle for internet censorship.

Here is many screenshots of what greeted visitors on many popular websites today. The sad Koala to the left is courtesy of The Oatmeal, which posted a clever animation on its site in support of the blackout.

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.

SEO Translate – WordPress plugin that translates your content into many languages, including the double byte Asian languages. Built on Microsoft translation technology, it’s free.

Pagelines – This theme framework lets you rearrange your WordPress site on the fly with a nice drag and drop interface, you can also plugin your own css code without having to deal with ftp.

Livefyre – this plugin made for a cool demo by taking blog commenting to the next level with its real time interface. Livefyre also provides spam filtering and social network sign-in. With my comment luv plugin currently disabled, I’m tempted to check out their free version.

Richa Avasthi demo’ed how she implemented responsive web design into her blog using different stylesheets when particular browser widths were detected. If you haven’t heard the term “responsive web design” before, it means web design that looks good across an array of devices, such as mobile. If you haven’t started thinking about how your website looks on a mobile device, it’s time. I’ve been looking at the twenty eleven WordPress theme as an example as it has responsive elements built into its css.

Have you backed up your WordPress lately? Maintenance activities such as upgrading WordPress or backing up my site rank at the top of my list of my least favorite things to do. I’d much rather write a blog post or check out a new plug-in. But this week I bit the bullet and spent some time on site maintenance.

Do I really need you to tell why backups and upgrades are important? Here’s one reason, WordPress’s popularity has not gone unnoticed by hackers and they are hard at work exploiting security vulnerabilities in the software. By upgrading to the latest version of WordPress you are at least installing the latest security fixes. That goes for your plugins as well.

Backup before you Upgrade

That one click upgrade for your site and plugins is tempting, but before you click the button, there are a few things you need to do first.

• Backup your database: Everything you care about is in your WordPress database. Your posts, your categories, your tags. If you just backup one thing, your database should be it. Your WordPress can be reconstructed – but the content on all your posts and your pages likely can not. To backup your database you will want to make an SQL export of your database. This will contain the SQL commands to recreate the tables and import in your content. How you do the export is host dependent. I log into phpadmin through my cPanel and click on “Export”. Here is more information on backing up your database.
• Backup your files: This is less important but could be really useful if you ever need to restore your site. Also after my malware experience, I like to look over things periodically. Use a ftp client like Filezilla and copy down all the files in your WordPress installation onto your local computer.
• Disable plugins Your plugins may not play nicely with your new version of WordPress, so disable them.

After all of this you are now ready to upgrade WordPress. I just use the Automatic upgrade by clicking on the link that appears in the Dashboard. You can of course do a manual upgrade which is much more involved.

Cleaning house – do you really need all those plugins?

Since you have taken the time to do some site maintenance, why not focus a little more attention on it? Upgrade any plugins that need it, and critically look at your plugin list and decide whether you still want to use all of them. For example, I had been quite irritated how slow my social media plugins made my site, so they haven’t been turned back on, and sure enough, the site is much snappier, confirming my suspicion that the social media buttons are the culprit. So for now they remain deactivated while I develop a different solution.

Backups are good – multiple and distributed backups are better

Keep a couple of the database backups around, so that if there is a problem with one of them you have another to fall back on. Better yet, make a copy of the sql file and store in on a backup service such as Mozy or even Dropbox so there is a copy somewhere other than your computer.

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.