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One of the most frequently asked questions I receive is “How do I get my site into Google?” And the process is a very easy and simple one.

There’s actually one of two ways to get your site found by Google.  The first way is to have another website that is already listed in Google link to you.  This can be done in various ways:

• If you’re a regular on a forum in the same industry that your website is about, you can add your new website in your signature.  Forums, especially active forums, tend to get indexed quite regularly.
• You can write an article on the same topic as your website and submit that article to places like EzineArticles.com or GoArticles.com.  Both of these places get visited very often by Google.
• You can leave a real (not spammy) comment on a regularly visited blog.  Typically when you leave blog comments, the blog owner allows you to add your website URL.  Be sure however that the blog is a “do follow” blog.  That is, they allow the search engines to follow the links off of their site back to the site source.  Click here for a list of do follow blogs.

The second way to get your site indexed by Google is to submit your sitemap to them.  A sitemap file is a list of all the links contained on your website and is Google’s preferred way of finding and indexing your website.

Sitemaps are XML web pages that are created for the purpose of letting the search engines know about all of the pages on your website and they’re essential for getting all of your web pages indexed in a search engine.

Although XML format of a web page might sound a little intimidating, you’ll be happy to know that there are plenty of services online that will create one for you.  http://www.xml-sitemaps.com is one of them.

Once you have a good set of pages created for your website, you can simply tell xml-sitemaps to create a sitemap file for you which you can then move to your web host.  Once there, you’ll want to create a Google Webmaster Tools account at http://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/ and then submit the sitemap URL to Google.  This way, Google will be notified that you have submitted a sitemap and will generally visit that page within 24 hours; oftentimes less.  Aside from a search engine robot finding one of your pages through a link, this is one of the best ways to notify Google that you have a new website with content.

While Google doesn’t always guarantee that they’ll crawl your sitemap, you’ll generally find that they do so within 24 hours of you submitting the sitemap to them.

In our Premium BoneheadSEO membership, I discuss Google’s Webmaster Tools in depth.  Visit http://BoneheadSEO.com for more information.

Using either or both of these ways will get your site indexed in Google.

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

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.

If you’re trying to establish yourself online, you might have found that locating content to use on your own website is difficult. There are PLR (Private Label Rights) products that you can buy and even full PLR memberships that you can purchase that will give you access to content to use at your discretion, but in many cases, not all mind you, they’re not typically of the best quality.

Aside from PLR products, you can always write the content for yourself which is very time-consuming or you can hire someone to do it for you; the higher the cost of the writer, generally, the better kind of content that you’ll get.

Now, while I will always advocate doing most of the work yourself, or at least having people who are trained by you do the work, even with PLR content, I also understand that writing day after day can suck away a lot of your time, when you can be using that time to create your own products or advertise your business or products your affiliated with.

That’s where a new Google Advanced search feature can work well for you in finding content to use as well as pull double-duty by generating links back to your site.

Here’s how it works.

First, visit Google.com. But before you search on anything click the link to the right of the search box entitled “Advanced Search”.

Next, enter in a keyword or keyword phrase at the top of the list just under the heading “Find web pages that have…”  I suggest that if you’re locating content for use on your own site that you only enter in one keyword or keyword phrase related to the content you want to locate.  When you use this search feature and you have multiple keywords in this area, the search will only pull back sites that contain ALL of these keywords.

Additionally you can also use the second option of “this exact wording or phrase” which will find the entire phrase in any web page or you can also use the third option of “one or more of these words:” where you can specify a variety of keywords and keyword phrases.

To make the job simpler for you, I would just use the first suggestion, and only search for one keyword or keyword phrase.  If you’re using a keyword phrase, just place that phrase in quotes in the first search box.

Next, click the plus sign next to “Date, usage rights, numeric range and more.”  And then narrow down your choices from what’s listed.  The most important point here is the “usage rights” link.  This allows you to filter content that allows you to do a variety of things with the content (and where all of the magic happens).

You have 5 options from this list.  Here’s what they are and what they mean:

1. Not Filtered – Exactly what it means.  The content you get using this search is not filtered in any way.  Not recommended if you’re attempting to locate content to use on your own site.
2. Free to use or share – These pages are labeled “public domain” or carry a license that allows you to copy or redistribute its content, as long as the content remains unchanged.
3. Free to use or share, even commercially – The same as “free to use or share” but for commercial sites.  So if you have a website that sells products, information or services, this is the option you want.  Note that this does NOT allow you to modify the content.
4. Free to use, share or modify – This search will only pull back those web pages that are labeled with a license that allows you to copy, modify or redistribute in ways specified in the license.
5. Free to use, share or modify, even commercially.  The same as “free to use, share or modify” but for commercial sites.  When you’re looking to reuse content on your own site that you can re-word as you wish, this is the option you want.

Once you’ve entered in the terms you’re interested in and chosen a license, click search and Google will return to you a list of websites that have these criteria.

The one thing I recommend is to double-check the license itself.   The way that Google is able to determine this kind of content is by using the “Creative Commons” filters. So once you’re at a web page that seems to have some content you’d like to use yourself, check for the “creative commons” license on the page.  When you click on the license link, you’ll get more details about the license.  The site may require you to link back to them in exchange for you using their content which can help boost their incoming links.

At this point you have to consider at least one thing – whether or not you want to link back to the site that has the content you want to use.

What this means to you in this instance, is to consider if it’s worthwhile to link out to the site whose content you want to use.  If you don’t feel comfortable having the link on your web page then keep on looking through the search results that Google gave you to see if there’s a site that doesn’t require a link back to them.  While few and far between, this little bit of extra work can mean a great deal of fantastically free content for you.

If you believe that the site will be a good resource for your site visitors, then by all means, link back to them.  If you question it in the least bit, it’s best to refine your keywords and find a better resource.

On the flip side of this coin…you might be wondering “Well, if this is how THESE sites are getting incoming links, how can I get one way links to my OWN site?”

Glad you asked!  Here’s how to do that:

Visit http://creativecommons.org/choose/ and license your own work.  You can also visit a website that is also using the license, click on the Creative Commons link or icon, and then scroll down the page that you’re taken to on the Creative commons site which lists the details of that sites license.  If you’d like to use the same kind of license that the site owner is using, click the link that says “Use this license for your own work”.

My suggestion to you when making use of the Creative Commons license is to be careful what you’re licensing. If you only want to license a single blog post that you made (and it’s entirely your own work), then only place the license on that blog post and choose “text” from your list of choices at http://creativecommons.org/choose/ .

If you license your entire blog, then this allows all of the content on your blog to be used by anyone depending upon the license you chose to use.

The reason that choosing text, audio, video, image, or interactive when specifying your license at Creative Commons is because this allows your license to only be used on your text, or your audio, or your video, etc., not the entire blog as a whole.

Secondly, be absolutely 100% certain that it is your OWN work you’re granting a license for.

Using a Creative Commons license will help you generate links for your site because others will find that they can use your work as content for their own sites and, if you’ve specified in the license that they have to link back to you, can generate lots of relevant links back to your own web pages.

So the bottom line is, when you’re looking to find content to use on your own site, use the advanced search feature in Google to find those sites that allow you to use and modify their work.  Ideally you’d like to find that content that doesn’t require a link back to their site, but, as I said, these are few and far between.  Just keep in mind that if you do want to use someone else’s content, and they require a link back, be sure it’s a site you do in fact want to link back to.

A new year is almost like starting fresh – having a new slate that you can start writing on and getting those goals that you’ve always dreamed of accomplished. So I sincerely hope that your plate is full of items that you wish to accomplish this year and that you achieve all of them!

That said, I’ve got a few things up my sleeve to help you accomplish those goals. The first of which is the Bonehead SEO Training course. Currently it spans 181 pages long and is nearly complete.

I’ve taken nearly everyone into account in this course. Those who are brand new to site building and SEO as well as those who have been around for some time and just aren’t getting the rankings they want.

I run you through everything from selecting a niche that will actually help you make money, to registering your domain name, getting hosting, getting your on-page SEO ducks in a row, doing some very detailed competitive analysis, black hat SEO techniques to avoid as well as even how to get your site optimized so that you remain at the top of the very latest trends.

The face of SEO is changing and it’s changing rapidly. I’ve incorporated all of the areas of SEO that I believe you need to be aware of and even teach you how to work those areas to your advantage before your competition gets there.

I’m looking to get this course out to you by mid-January so be on the lookout for that.

I’ll even be running some “beginning of the year” specials on it as well.

So until then, get your goals in order, and keep an eye out for this massive SEO course coming to you shortly.

The first is RavenSEO – This program is for those of you who are looking for a way to keep track of all of your own campaigns or even your clients SEO campaigns, or even if you’re a business that needs to keep tabs on its rankings in-house through your IT department.

Within our Bonehead SEO courses we’ll be teaching you how to do a variety of these same tasks manually, however, if your intention is to use the SEO information you learn here to open up your own SEO business, use the SEO information here to add to your current business or if you keep track of multiple websites, then RavenSEO will save you time and money.

The next tool we’ve added is RankSense.  RankSense is a revolutionary new Search Engine Optimization Software suite that will help your site rank well in the major search engines easier than you ever thought possible.  Plus, you can try it out for free for 90 days.

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