Ideally, their hope is that if they link all of the smaller niche websites to the main website, that this will give that main website more credibility in the search engines.

This is what’s called a “Mini-Net”.  A set of websites that one person owns and that are all inter-linked together.

Let’s take an example shall we?

Let’s say Webmaster Joe likes the topic of hair removal.  So he builds a website that focuses on laser hair removal.  But, Webmaster Joe has also learned that if you build other, smaller websites that talk about a nichier (is that a word?) topic yet one still related to the main overall topic, and then link them together that this will help where his main website is listed in the search engines.

So Webmaster Joe creates 5 more websites all on similar but less competitive terms:

• cosmetic hair removal
• skin hair removal
• upper lip hair removal
• affordable hair removal
• hair removal surgery

These smaller, nichier sites aren’t high-quality by any means but they all have an article or two on them about the main keyword phrase they’re focused on.

The point of these additional sites is not to have them rank well but to have the main website that talks about Laser Hair Removal rank well which is his money phrase.

So Webmaster Joe visits a hosting company (HostGator is a good one that I personally recommend) and purchases a shared hosting package that allows him to have multiple websites on the same IP address.

What this means is that Webmaster Joe can add as many websites as he wants to his hosting account; doesn’t sound like much of an issue until you realize that they’re all on the same IP address.

This is important because when search engines like Google come to pay a visit to all of these websites, they’ll see that they’re all linked together but they also all reside on the same IP address which diminishes their importance.

Think of it like this:

Let’s say that someone recommends a movie to you.  Later, five other people recommend that same exact movie to you so you start to think “Wow!  This must be a really great movie!”.  You find out later that all of these five people live in the same house, maybe they’re related to one another maybe not.  The point is, the only time you’ve gotten a recommendation to see the movie was from someone who lived in that house.

All of a sudden, that recommendation doesn’t seem so great does it?

The search engines feel the same way with websites.  Obviously if there are multiple websites all linking to one place, but all of those links reside at the same address (the IP address) of the site they’re linking to, then all of a sudden, it doesn’t look so great to the search engines.

And will eventually get you penalized.  Can I say that for certain?  Can I guarantee that?  Obviously, no, since I don’t run the search engines but I can tell you this.  It’s not something that I would recommend you trying during your online career…unless you’re into that kind of thing.

The bottom line is, a mini-net is nothing more than a group of websites usually all owned by the same website owner that link to one another in the hopes of getting better rankings for those websites.

Do these mini-nets always reside on the same IP addresses?  Obviously, no.  The savvy website owners have come to realize that this will get them penalized in the search engines, and so they’ve scoped out ways of getting around this IP issue.

Does that always work?  No.  As a matter of fact, it borders on “black hat seo” techniques.  Or in other words those techniques that the search engines frown upon.

But, that’s not the purpose of this post.  This post is to explain to you what a mini-net is and why people use it.

As always, leave your comments if you feel up to it

Bing recently released their SEO Toolkit (currently still in beta) and I took some time to run through the toolkit to see what kinds of information it gave me.

The first thing you should know is installing it is less than a breeze.

First, you need to be using a PC – no surprise there.

In order to install the toolkit, you need to jump through a bunch of hoops first.

1. You need a PC running Vista, Windows Server, Windows 7 or Windows Server 2008 R2. It won’t work on XP (which is a shame).  Most of you reading this (if you’re not using a Mac) will have Windows Vista on your computer.
2. If you do have Windows Vista, you need to be sure that youalso have installed Windows Vista SP1 (service pack 1) or higher. Most of you will also already have this if your computer updates itself regularly.
3. You also need IIS 7 running on your computer. Unless you’ve worked on a server team, the typical webmaster probably won’t understand what this means (huge problem!). Click here to view the Microsoft installation guide and get IIS 7.
   UPDATE: Note that on the Microsoft site – this link points to a topic that is “No Longer Available”.  After checking Microsoft’s own post about this installation guide, I receive the same message.  Hopefully they’ll have it fixed soon.
4. Next, you need to enable IIS 7 before you can install the SEO Toolkit. To do this…
   1. Click Start.
   2. Click Control Panel.
   3. Click Programs.
   4. Select “Turn Windows features on or off”.
   5. When the window opens, select the “Internet Information Services” check box.
   6. Click the plus sign (+) to expand the directory (they call them nodes), expand “world wide web services” and then expand “Application Development Features”.  Finally, check the box next to .net Extensibility.
   7. Click “OK” and then wait…a long time…while your computer updates.

Now, you next have to determine if you’re running a 32-bit or 64-bit version of Windows.

(By now, I’ll bet that a vast majority of people have already said “This is WAY too much trouble – forget it!).  And I wouldn’t blame you.  As much as Microsoft search has evolved, it seems that the rest of the company has not.

To do this…

1. Click Start
2. Right click “Computer” and then choose “Properties”
3. In the “system group” the System Type will tell you what kind you’re running; 32-bit or 64-bit.
4. FINALLY, install the right version.  (Note that these links will download the SEO Toolkit to your computer – they’re directly from Microsoft. If you’d rather view the Microsoft page itself, click here.):
   1. IIS SEO Toolkit for 32-bit Windows
   2. IIS SEO Toolkit for 64-bit Windows
5. NOW, you’re ready to install and use the SEO Toolkit (and it’s probably time for a quick break).  I don’t know about you but my head hurts!

Once you have the SEO Toolkit installed, you’ll need to open the program.  But like most programs that you install, where you expect to see them in your Start menu, this one’s a little tricky.

1. Click the Start icon on your Windows Vista computer.
2. In the Start Search box, type “IIS”.
3. IIS manager should pop up in the window. I suggest that you move this to your desktop in an easier-to-find location.
4. Double click the program.
5. Once it loads in the main menu section scroll down to “Search Engine Optimization” and double click on “Site Analysis”.
6. Next, on the right, click “New Analysis”.
7. Give it a name.
8. Enter in the URL of your website and make your additional choices from here (which aren’t many).
9. Finally click “OK”.

Now the program will traverse your website and find issues (if any) that relate to SEO (as Bing sees it).

There’s various categories that Bing looks at such as SEO, Content, Standards and Performance.

Now, while this was a hassle to install it does give you a great deal of on-page SEO information.

For instance it found multiple spots where I had missed giving an image an alt tag attribute.

It also found a few spots where my description was too long and where I had a few broken hyperlinks – many of these attributed to a bookmarking service that I had included on my web pages.

If you double-click on any of the pages that had issues within the SEO Toolkit, you’ll get a very detailed analysis of that web page (this is definitely a plus).  Things like:

• A Word Analysis which shows you…
  • The counts for any specific word or phrase up to three word phrases.
  • The character count on the page.
  • The links referenced on the page along with their anchor text.
  • The links pointing TO the page.
  • The links coming FROM the page.
    • As well as what the linking status is, is it OK or not found, the linking title, the linked URL the type of link and the anchor text.  All invaluable information to have.

Now, all this being said, I will tell you of one very large (and frustrating) issue that I had.  After I ran through the steps and set up everything exactly as explained, I could NOT get to any of my websites that I had set up in the SEO Toolkit.

I could get anywhere else (so I knew it wasn’t my internet connection) but just not to my own sites.  Obviously very frustrating.

Now, my husband who is a VoIP engineer and who works with this kind of thing on a daily basis couldn’t even figure out what the issue was.  And we together tried multiple things…all to no avail.

Until…for the heck of it, I unplugged my DSL modem, plugged it back in and all was fine (Occam’s Razor).  So in the event you follow through this process, and have the same issues, just try rebooting your modem.  I can’t guarantee it will work for you, but it worked for me.  (You’ve just received a 5-hour-time-saving tip).

All in all, I think that the SEO Toolkit provides great information, so long as you’re willing to put up with the installation of it.  And best of all it’s free!

View this walkthrough at Bing (complete with screenshots) by clicking here.

Everyone who runs a website has at one point or another worried about whether or not their site is being silently penalized in the search engines for having duplicate content.

Just to be sure everyone’s on the same page let’s first define what duplicate content REALLY is.

When you have two pages that are identical to one another on your own website, this is considered duplicate content.  And chances are you likely have duplicate content but you just don’t know it.

Here’s why that would happen…

Let’s say that you have a website located at http://www.Example.com.

You create a new web page on your site and have a few people link to that page.

• Person #1 links to you using http://www.Example.com.
• Person #2 links to you using http://Example.com (notice the lack of the “www”).
• Person #3 links to you using http://www.Example.com/ (notice the trailing slash).
• And Person #4 links to you using http://www.Example.com/index.html (notice the “index.html).

To YOU and to the people visiting your site, this is all the same page.

To the SEARCH ENGINES however, these are all different URLs. Surprised?

So as far as the search engines are concerned you have 4 pages on your site that all contain the same exact content – hence, the duplicate content issue.

You see, search engines can’t tell that these are the same URLs (I’m shaking my head as I say that because it’s still beyond me), but, the fact remains, that this is in fact, very true.

So how do you fix this issue?  Well, thankfully, there’s a few ways to fix this issue.

1. When you link internally, that is, link to other pages within your own website, consistently use the same URL.  ALWAYS use http://www.Example.com or http://Example.com -whichever one is your preferred way of linking, choose one and stick with it.
2. Additionally you can also use a 301 redirect to point to your preferred way of linking to your URL.  For example, if you prefer http://www.Example.com then set up a 301 redirect on http://Example.com, http://www.Example.com/, http://www.Example.com/index.html, etc.  (I’ve listed below the most common ways people would link to your site).
3. Within your Google webmaster tools area you can TELL Google what you’re preferred way of linking is.
4. Be sure that when you submit a sitemap for your website that within that sitemap, all of the URLs are using your preferred way of linking.

Some potential issues are:

1. If you don’t have direct control over the webhost that administers your files, you’ll have to have someone else place that 301 redirect on the URLs you want.
2. A lot of free web hosts don’t let you create a 301 redirect.
3. Session IDs on a website can create a huge duplicate content issue.  Since each page may be accessed with a different session ID in the URL, that page may be indexed multiple times; even though it’s the same page.

Now if all else fails and you simply can’t implement a 301 redirect to your preferred way of linking, then consider placing the canonical link element on the individual page.

In the head of the individual web page you’d place the following:

<head>
<link rel=”canonical” href=”http://www.Example.com/page.html” />
</head>

Note the trailing slash after “page.html”.  This is very important to include.

The bottom line is, using the canonical link element on your website is EXTREMELY beneficial to you.  But first and foremost, use the methods listed in the first four items at the top and if those fail, then use the canonical link element.

This information has summarized what Matt Cutts said in his 20-minute presentation; but if you want more information, here’s a few more places you can check out:

• The Matt Cutts video.
• The blog post at Google webmaster central.
• Yahoo’s blog post.
• Microsoft

And, as promised, here’s a list of URLs that are all different in the search engines eyes and that might cause duplicate content issues:

• www.Example.com
• Example.com
• www.Example.com/
• example.com/
• www.example.com/index.html
• example.com/index.html
• www.example.com/Home.aspx
• example.com/Home.aspx

So the business owner asks around and eventually finds a website designer (usually a friend or a friend of a friend) that can make their site “look like that awesomely cool site”.  It gets done, the designer gets paid, and quicker than you can say “awesomely cool” their site rankings start a free fall in the search engines that seems to have no end in sight.

Unfortunately, this is a scenario that is repeated over and over again online multiple times a day.

Typically these “awesomely cool” sites are created in Flash or have dynamically generated scripts that run the entire website without an ounce of text to be found.  While it might look great, there’s no doubt about that, the search engines have no idea what to do with it.

The bottom line is, if there isn’t text to be found, the search engines will pass you over.

This does not mean that you should nuke every last one of your images, videos, JavaScript or Flash items on your website…it just means that you need to separate the important stuff; the stuff you want the search engines to find, from the stuff that looks “neat”.

An easy way to do this is to ask yourself  ”Do I want the search engines to find X?” with “X” being a web page, a description, a price, a product, etc.

If the answer is yes, and X is located within an image, within a video, Flash or JavaScript, then you need to be sure it’s also in text somewhere on your page.

Now, this is not to say that you can’t use things like images, videos, or even Flash – as a matter of fact, they do make your web page more appealing; but it should not be the sole item on the page.  Even if you have details about your business for example within an image and “real” people can read it, the search engines cannot…which means that you’re web site will struggle.

Here’s some tips to follow:

• Whenever you use an image on your page, give it a description using the images <alt> attribute.
• Don’t use script to generate navigational links.  Stick to basic text-based navigation and you’ll be just fine.

If you’re concerned that your site might not be friendly to the search engines, you can use a free online tool called a Lynx emulator.

Just visit http://www.yellowpipe.com/yis/tools/lynx/lynx_viewer.php and enter in the URL of the web page you want to check.  Ideally you want to see keywords, lots of text, relevant topical information, etc.

You DO NOT want to see something like “This page requires the use of Flash…get the latest version at…” or something along those lines.  You want to be able to look at the results of the Lynx viewer and know, without a doubt, what that web page is talking about as well as see important keywords for that page.

So the bottom line is, as “awesomely cool” that website is that you stumbled across, you can rest assured that they’re probably not getting the rankings they want in the search engines.  You can keep things pretty and play it smart at the same time.

Ever since Microsoft came out with their new search engine Bing, there have been lots of buzzing about it.  And good buzz at that…not what people expected to see which was just a name change from “Live.com” to “Bing.com” and nothing more.

But Bing has taken a lot of people by surprise and now that Yahoo! has agreed to use Bing’s search results as their own search engine (thus taking the number of major search engines down to 2), it’s a very big deal and has great potential to be a big competitor for Google.

Just for the record, the use of Bing’s search results at Yahoo.com probably won’t come to light until sometime in 2010 or beyond, but it is something to start taking notice of right now.

Because we know that this change is coming, we can be fully prepared for it.  And that means doing a few things to be sure that our websites are on top of these changes starting today.

I’ll be covering Bing in sections during the upcoming newsletters but for now, I want to focus on one of the more crucial elements of getting listed well in Bing and this is where your linking strategy comes into play.

Unlike Google who tends to keep information on ranking well in their search engine pretty close to the hip, only divulging just enough information, Bing seems to be moving in the opposite direction.  While not full-disclosure by any means, Bing does give you a lot of tips and ideas when it comes to ranking well with them.

So let’s take a look at what Bing considers to be important where linking strategies are concerned.

The do’s and the don’ts.

While some of the do’s and don’ts of link building will seem familiar to you if you’ve engaged in link building where Google is concerned, some of the advice through Bing is easier to understand… and truly gives a “no bones about it” kind of approach.

So, let’s cover what these do’s and don’ts are.

DO – Link TO (that is from your own site) other websites that your site visitors would find helpful and useful. When you link to another site you are telling your site visitor that you “endorse” that site, so be sure that you actually do.  Don’t link to a website just because it’s your Mom’s or you promised a friend you would link to them.  If it isn’t helpful and complimentary to your own, skip it.

Do – Link to other sites that are relevant to your own. A wedding cake website linking to a tuxedo rental website would be relevant.  A local coffee shop linking to a PPC marketing product would not be relevant.  The same holds true for those links that point to you – granted you can’t control who links to you, you can influence this to an extent.  IF you are engaging in a link-building campaign where you ask other site owners to link to you, be sure that those sites are relevant to your own.

Do attempt to get high-quality links pointing to you. Quantity is NOT the same thing as quality.  This also holds true for Google.  Just because you have thousands of incoming links to your site does not mean that you’ll rank well.  What matters is the quality of those links.  A thousand poor low-quality links cannot equal the ranking power of one high-quality link.

Do not participate in site-wide linking strategies from “bad neighborhoods”. Search engines know what a bad neighborhood is because the bad neighborhoods give off certain signals.  Bad neighborhoods often consist of families of websites that all link to one another, have little to no content in and of themselves and often cover every kind of topic under the sun.

You want links from authority sites – those sites that are older (and thus “more reliable” as stated by Bing), have had consistent content on them over time and have high quality links pointing to their site as well as away from their site.

You can use this tool – http://www.bad-neighborhood.com/text-link-tool.htm to help you determine if a neighborhood is “bad” or not.

Do use proper canonicalization. This means that you use one style of URL for every link within your site.  If you remember in a past blog post I had talked about how the search engines view different variations of your URL as different domains all-together.

This means that http://YourSite.com and http://www.YourSite.com are viewed as two separate URLs.  Why this is detrimental to you as the site owner, is because the importance of your websites are then spread across two domains instead of one – thus reducing the importance of your website in the search engines eyes.

Now, as you’ve probably guessed, you can’t control how others link to you and they will use a vast number of ways to point to your URL which the search engines will all consider different UNLESS you set up a 301 redirect on each of the subsequent domain names.

So for instance if you wanted http://YourSite.com to be your primary URL that you referred people to and that you used consistently as absolute links on your own site, then…

• www.YourSite.com
• YourSite.com/
• www.YourSite.com/
• YourSite.com/index.html
• www.YourSite.com/index.html
• etc.

All need to have a 301 redirect set up on them that point to the URL you want to be your “main” URL.  In this case, YourSite.com.  Whenever you link within your own site, always, ALWAYS use the YourSite.com or whatever URL you have determined to be your primary URL.

Additionally use absolute links everywhere on your site.  An absolute link means that you actually place the “http://www…whatever your site is.

For example, if you had a page on your site named “espresso-beans.html” and you linked to this page from any other page on your site, it should look like this:  <a href=”http://www.YourSite.com/espresso-beans.html“> Espresso beans</a> and NOT <a href=”espresso-beans.html”> Espresso Beans </a>.

This is referred to as an “absolute URL” and as Bing states “The use of absolute links reinforces the use of your full URL and, like canonicalization, focuses the link juice to that URL.”

When linking to your home page within your own site, use the trailing slash and omit the “index.html” or “default.html” whatever the name of your default home page is.  For example:

http://www.YourSite.com/ and not http://www.YourSite.com (notice the lack of the trailing slash.)

Bing also suggests that you use the title attribute within your internal links. For example:

<a href=”http://YourSite.com/espresso-beans.html” title=”keyword or key phrase describing the page you’re linking to“>Anchor text link (also the keyword or keyword phrase) </a>.

For sites that use dynamic linking (in other words pull descriptions and item numbers from a database), you know that the URL to those pages can get quite long.  Do a search on Amazon.com for any book title and then take a look at the URL in your address bar.  As you can imagine, these kinds of links can make a search engines job quite difficult.

In order to help the search engines use a more user-friendly version of that URL so that they don’t have to do a lot of hard work understanding the link, add some special code into the head section of your web page that will tell the search engines which canonical URL to use.

Ex:  <link rel=”canonical” href=”http://YourSite.com/products.php?item=espressobeans” />  And be absolutely certain that this link actually points to the page you want it to go to and that it WORKS.

Bing suggests to use the nofollow tag on your links if you don’t want them to follow that link.  However, if you want to block an entire page of links from being crawled, instead use the meta robots tag to block access to that content or use a robots.txt file.

What a nofollow tag looks like:

<a href=”http://YourSite.com/espresso-beans.html” rel=”nofollow”> Espresso beans </a>.

What a meta robots tag looks like:

<meta content=”noindex, nofollow”>  (this tells the search engines to NOT index nor follow all of the links on the page this is located on.

You can also use:

<meta content=”index, nofollow”>  which means that the search engines will still index your web page but they won’t follow any links on the page itself.

In summary, we know that the merger of search results between Bing and Yahoo! will be a significant step in the right direction where the search engines are concerned.  And we’re also aware that Bing is starting to get lots of great feedback.

Since Bing is new, relatively speaking, they are handing you outright information that can help you rank better with them.  Use these suggestions for your own site’s benefits.  All of these suggestions will work well with Google as well…rarely do we see a big change of what’s allowed and what’s not where the search engines are concerned.  But, Bing is a little more forthright with their information … which is something we haven’t seen in a long time with Google.

The purpose of SEO is to get your site listed in the top ten search results without having to pay to be there and without it being a local listing (although this is important) for keywords that will get you targeted visitors who are likely to spend money at your store or sign up for your newsletter, whatever you want the goal of your website to be.

But, the average website owner usually doesn’t know the difference between all of these different listings.  So let’s talk about them so that YOU are an educated consumer.

First, the Paid Listings (PPC)

In case you’re not familiar, when you do a search at Google and get a page of results, oftentimes you’ll see listings at the very top of the page which are highlighted in yellow (at Google) and you’ll see listings down the right hand side of the page.

These listings (outlined in red above) while technically on the first page of Google, pay to be listed here.  Each time someone clicks on any one of these ads, the owner of the ad has to pay a certain amount of money.  The more competitive the term, the more money you’ll have to spend per click.  Now to be fair, there are lots of little nuances that go into a PPC listing such as (as previously mentioned) how competitive a term is but other factors are how much you’re willing to pay for each click as well as how much you’re willing to budget each month for those ads to run.  So while you could split hairs and say “Well, this is a top-ten listing.” you would be right.  But, in SEO it’s our goal to get you listed in top spots without having to pay to be listed there.

SEM which stands for “search engine marketing” is a way to not only get your site listed in the top ten results at Google but also helps you place ads in the Pay Per Click marketplace so that you can get traffic to your site while you wait for the search engines to pick up and start ranking your web pages.  Now I can’t speak for all SEMs but typically across the board you’ll find that no legitimate SEO company will count this as a “top ten listing” at Google; again, because you have to pay to be listed there.

Second, the Local Listings

I’ll be the first to admit that if you have a local business whether that be in your home or an actual walk-in brick-and-mortar business, a local listing is an absolute MUST.  Google has made quite a few updates to their local listings so that you now can show up for highly competitive terms whereas before you had to state a location in your search query.  These are what local listings look like in the search results:

However, again, when we talk about a top ten listing in a search results page, we’re talking about the listings that A) you don’t have to pay for and B) the listings that aren’t local.  One flaw to a local listing is that if you’re in an area that doesn’t have a lot of competing local businesses listed in the local business area, you’re listing will not show up as a local business.  Plus, a local business listing doesn’t take into account all of the different keywords you’d want to rank well for in a search results page.

Here’s a great example I did on a search for “bicycle tires”.  Now, in my local area there are tons of bicycle shops and most if not all of them sell bicycle tires.  However notice from the screenshot below that there are no local listings like the image above shown:

Now this means that even though you have a local business that does sell bicycle tires, the local business listing doesn’t show for that topic.  To be fair, this could be due to a variety of reasons; either local business shops in my area have not created a local business listing, or if they have they have not listed bicycle tires as one of their items, or, likely, there’s just not enough local businesses to warrant a Google local listing.

This is why actual top 10 natural listings are so important…

Third, Top Ten Natural or Organic Listings

This is the cream of the crop.  This is what SEO actually does for you is get you listed in the top ten positions of a SERP (search engine results page) without having to pay for it and without worrying whether or not your local listing is going to show up at all.  If you look at the image above, and you sold bicycle tires, it is the goal of SEO to get your site listed right there in the top positions where those other sites currently reside.

Can you guarantee those listings?  Absolutely not!  How come?  Because we, as SEOs don’t control the search engines.  We aren’t privvy to all of the factors that go into a top listing at Google or any other major search engine for that matter.  We do however, understand quite a few of the factors that can make that happen.

Things such as what keywords you’re using on the page, how your website is set up (is it easy for the search engines to move through or does it stop them in their tracks?), who is linking to you, how important those links are, and tons of other little details.

So the bottom line is, the next time someone promises you “Guaranteed Top Ten Listings at Google!” read carefully because you might be in for more than you bargained for.

• An easier to use interface.  Before you had drop-down lists where you had to hunt for specific information but now, the navigation on the left is much easier to understand and use.
• For each site that you have verified, you’ll get a dashboard that allows you to view your data easier than before.

Perhaps one of the biggest benefits is that you can now see more search queries for your sites than you have been able to in the past.  Here’s a quick video of the new changes.