Bonehead SEO » Website

Getting a Handle on Your Canonicals

Kristine — Wed, 26 Aug 2009 16:05:52 +0000

Have you ever worried about duplicate content? If you haven’t, you’re definitely in the minority.

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.

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.
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).
Within your Google webmaster tools area you can TELL Google what you’re preferred way of linking is.
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:

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.
A lot of free web hosts don’t let you create a 301 redirect.
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:

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

Does Link Age Matter?

Kristine — Thu, 12 Mar 2009 14:16:35 +0000

In a previous post I talked about how the age of a domain name factors into where your website ranks in the search engines.

But what about the age of a link? Does how long a link has been pointing to your site matter? In my opinion, yes.

I believe (and some may disagree with me) that whenever you get a brand new link from a site, that link is in a “probation period” of sorts. It might stick around for a while, or it might disappear after a month or two. Chances are if the link disappears after a few months, it is likely that the link was purchased since most websites that sell links require you to purchase a link for at least a month if not longer.

Sites that link to you of their own accord, that is, like your content and the information you provide, will generally place a link to you from their site and typically it stays there for a good long time.

Like a domain name that gets better with time, so do links. So if you haven’t already, start working on getting good quality links back to your website that can start to age. And whatever you do, don’t purchase links.

Does Domain Age Matter?

Kristine — Tue, 10 Mar 2009 14:15:57 +0000

While there are many factors that determine how well you rank in Google, there is one in particular that will give you an advantage over your competition and that’s the age of your domain.

All things being equal, how old your domain name is will generally put you at a higher advantage than your competitors.

The reason for this is that the age of a domain cannot be faked. That is, unlike links which can be gathered from everywhere online and even purchased (and which also have an age factor assigned to them), the age of a domain is not something that can be manipulated.

So how does someone establish credibility with the age of a domain if they’re just starting out and need a new domain name?

One way is to purchase an older domain. (The older the better). However, just because a domain has been established for some time does not mean that you should rush right out and get it. There are a few factors to take into account first.

Does the domain you’re considering have any current links pointing to it? How long have those links been pointing to the site? (The age of your links also plays a factor and we’ll talk about that in our next blog post).
Just because a domain name has been around and registered for a long time does not mean that it has been indexed for that same amount of time. It’s important that the domain you’re thinking about purchasing has been indexed in the search engines and established itself already.
If a domain has been indexed, you’ll next want to determine if that domain has been penalized in the search engines for any reason. One simple way to determine this is using the Wayback machine at http://www.archive.org/index.php (this will also help you determine how long pages have been indexed in the search engines as mentioned in #2 above). Enter in the domain name you’re considering and take a look at the different pages you receive.
Here’s an example. In a well-publicized event in early 2006, Google penalized the site http://bmw.de. If you visit http://web.archive.org/web/*/http://bmw.de and click on the pages for this time frame, you’ll see that some pages are no longer available (as of the time that the Wayback machine viewed them) and that they didn’t show back up for months. This is in stark comparison to previous years when they were indexed nearly every day and at least once a month. If you happen to notice something like this for a website you’re considering, it’s best to move on to another domain name opportunity.

The bottom line is, if you want to get a head-start on your website efforts, you might want to consider looking into buying an existing domain especially if you don’t want to have to wait to establish credibility in the search engines. Just be sure that the domain you’re considering is, and always has been on the up-and-up.

SEO Tips – 25 of Them…

Kristine — Mon, 23 Feb 2009 10:16:39 +0000

What follows are some of the most important SEO Tips that you need to follow in order for your website to get seen in the search engines for the keywords you’re targeting.

Choose a keyword related to your content for your web page. Remember that your web page and your website are not ranked as one. Your web page will be ranked of its own accord.
Write unique and relevant content related to that keyword.
Use that keyword in your title tag.
Use that keyword in a header tag. Preferably an
tag.
Use words and phrases related to the keyword you chose and use them throughout the content of your web page.
Write a description for the web page that contains the keyword you have chosen.
Do not keyword stuff your web pages. (Keyword stuffing means that you use the same keywords multiple times throughout the content of your page).
Do not use underhanded techniques in order to get better rankings in the search engines. This is oftentimes referred to as “black hat SEO” or even “gray hat SEO”.
Within the content, link to another page on your site using keyword-focused anchor text.
Do not submit your web page to link farms. Link farms are website set up specifically for the purpose of allowing anyone to post links.
Do not purchase links to point to your website.
Do not link out to bad neighborhoods. Bad neighborhoods are: link farms, known spam sites, gambling sites, porn sites, phishing sites or hacker/cracker sites.
Do not engage in linking schemes. Linking schemes are those schemes created specifically for the purpose of gaining more links to your site.
If you must use reciprocal linking, keep it to a minimum. Reciprocal linking is the act of trading links with another website.
Don’t use hidden text on your web pages.
Don’t use hidden links on your web pages.
Link to well-known high-quality web sites.
Always create a sitemap for your website.
Submit your sitemap to the search engines.
Use an RSS feed for your website. This will allow people to get notified whenever you update your website.
Do use a blog on your site and update it as necessary.
Use content from article directories only when absolutely necessary.
Do continually add unique and updated content on your site.
Do use a robots.txt file for your site.
Lastly, remember that your website is for your site visitors first and foremost and the search engines second.

For more information on proper SEO techniques including generating traffic to your website, visit the Bonehead SEO Course.

Another Secret SEO Tool

Kristine — Wed, 18 Feb 2009 16:13:36 +0000

There are tons of great free resources online to use for your SEO efforts and one of them is by far one of the less known tools available online.

It’s the Wordtracker Keyword Questions lab and it just might be one of the best tools you can use for your industry.

What the Wordtracker Keyword Questions lab does is let you enter in a very generic search term and once you submit that term, Wordtracker will return to you a list of questions that people are asking right now within your industry.

Take for example the keyword “Twitter”. If we head on over to this tool (which is free by the way), and enter in this generic phrase, we’ll see that people are asking all kinds of questions about “Twitter”.

Or, let’s take a look at the generic term of “jewelry”:

Whatever term you enter in, Wordtracker will give you back a list of questions that your market is currently asking about.

By taking a look at the questions above regarding “jewelry”, if we had a website about jewelry, these would be questions that I could answer regarding jewelry.

I could dedicate a page to “how to make jewelry” and create yet another page on my jewelry site about “how to make beaded jewelry”.

Since I already know that people are asking these questions, I can then answer these questions and use website optimization on a web page to do so.

This resource is just another way to make use of phrases that people are searching on right now. By incorporating these questions (and answering them on my site), I can then add this to my ever-growing arsenal of keyword phrases surrounding the main topic of my site.

Website Optimization – What it is & How to Use it

Kristine — Tue, 17 Feb 2009 16:37:39 +0000

Website Optimization, website seo, or just simply “SEO” is the process of writing and designing your web pages so that the search engines as well as your target audience understands what your web page as well as your entire website is all about.

While this sounds like a simple process, it’s actually a culmination of lots of little things that you do right in order to get your website optimized. The bottom line of website optimization is nothing more than getting your site listed within the first pages of a SERP or Search Engine Results Page.

Regardless of what industry you’re in, chances are you’re up against hundreds of thousands if not millions of competitors and at first glance it can seem rather daunting when you’re trying to compete against these other websites.

However, there are some fairly easy processes that you can follow in order to get your web pages properly optimized. While this is only a fraction of what you can learn in the Bonehead SEO Course, it will help your web pages get moving in the right direction.

Here are just a few tips to help you along the way:

Keywords

By far, the most important first step you need to take is to use those keywords and phrases that people are searching on right now within a search engine. While you might be tempted to just “guess” at what people are searching on in your industry, don’t. You want the actual phrases that lots of people are using to find your product or service.

One way to go about this is to use a service such as Wordtracker. Wordtracker offers a free version as well as a full-fledged paid version (with a 7-day-free-trial). While you will get more results as well as more details on the keywords you’re researching with the paid version, the free version works just fine if you’re on a tight budget.

Simply visit Wordtracker and enter in a word or phrase that describes the kind of business that you’re in. What Wordtracker will return to you is a list of those phrases that people are using right now online that include your topic.

It’s these phrases that you want to focus on within your website.

The Title

Once you’ve decided upon a phrase that you’ll be targeting on a web page, you’ll next want to use that phrase in your page’s title. The title of the page is an extremely important factor in how search engines rank that web page.

If for instance you were targeting the keyword phrase of “website optimization” then you’d want to use “website optimization” in your title tag.

The Heading

Next, you’ll want to use this same phrase in a heading on your web page. The heading will be one of the first things that a site visitor (and the search engines) will see so you want to be sure it’s contained within a header tag at the top of the page. Again, use the keywords you chose for the web page within the header.

The Body Text

As you might imagine, the body text of the web page should incorporate the keyword phrase you have chosen for that page. Use the phrase where necessary but whatever you do, do not “keyword stuff” your web page.

Keyword stuffing means that you use the same phrase you’re optimizing that page for multiple amounts of times. This often makes the content sound unnatural and the search engines will pick up the fact that you are attempting to trick them by using your keyword multiple times throughout the text.

Instead, just write naturally and incorporate words and phrases related to but not identical to the main keyword phrase you’re working with.

In our example of the keyword phrase “website optimization”, I might use related words such as “website seo”, “seo”, “search engine optimization”, “ranking”, and “conversion.”

Just remember that when you do start optimizing your web pages that you make use of your main keyword phrase you’ve chosen in the appropriate spots on your web page and have also included related words and phrases throughout the content.

This will help get your web pages moving in the right direction.

How To Get Listed in Google In Less Than An Hour

Kristine — Fri, 13 Feb 2009 20:07:22 +0000

I’ve got a nice surprise for you today.

It’s a brand new free report that I’ve just released entitled Bonehead SEO’s Quick Traffic Guide and it will show you (with proof included) how you can get your website, your product, your blog, whatever it is, listed in Google in under an hour!

Now, even though there’s plenty of proof included in the report I obviously can’t *guarantee* that the same will happen to you but on the tests that I’ve run so far, it’s never failed.

You can get this free 18-page report at http://BoneheadSEO.com/freeSEO/

Enjoy it, use it, and if you’ve had the kind of success using this same method yourself, let me know about it by posting your success stories here!

Who said Friday the 13th was bad luck?

- Kristine

How do you get those extra links in Google?

Kristine — Tue, 03 Feb 2009 14:27:01 +0000

A question was submitted to me just today about those extra links that tend to show up in a Google Search Results page.

The Question:
Hello,
I have a burning question and I can’t find an answer in SEO course available.
If you do this search: http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=kurir&btnG=Search

You’ll notice the first result has 8 other links besides the main one (Crna hronika, sport etc.). That must increase the CTR a lot.

The question is: what makes Google do that for one site and not for another one?
What should you do with your site to get such extra links in the results?

Best Regards,
Eko

Here’s an example of what they look like:

These are called “Site Links” and the bottom line is that Google does not tell you exactly how to get these sitelinks for your own site.

However, each website that contains these sitelinks has a few common denominators:

They’re typically an authority site.
They have an easy-to-navigate hierarchical structure. In the case above, there is a section for “Sports”, a section for “Stars” and a section for “Politics” as Eko pointed out.
They have lots of incoming one-way links from a variety of sources.
The sites are easy to navigate.
The age of the site tends to be a defining factor.

If we pick apart the site above, there’s a few things to note about it:

The site has a PageRank of 6.
It has over over 100,000 links pointing to the site itself including internal pages.
Sites such as these generally have been around for years.
The site has lots of useful information that readers enjoy by clicking through to various pages.

You’ll generally find these sitelinks on major news sites like CNN and highly visited sites such as Oprah’s site at Oprah.com.

So while these sitelinks can be a huge boost for your search engine traffic, they aren’t easy to come by. Google must deem your site “worthy” enough to receive these sitelinks.

If you use Google Webmaster tools, at http://www.Google.com/webmasters/tools/ and you’ve added your site, you’ll be able to navigate to the section where Google tells you whether or not any sitelinks have been identified on your site as candidates for the Google Search Results page.

The bottom line is that there is no hard and fast rule to getting sitelinks placed on your site aside from some of the factors that are believed to be important as mentioned above.

If you’d like more information about sitelinks, visit:

http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=47334&topic=8523

Kristine

The Definition of SEO

Kristine — Mon, 12 Jan 2009 08:00:25 +0000

Most people know what SEO is yet they don’t understand exactly how SEO is important to their website. I probably notice this the most with businesses who don’t immerse themselves online.

The nuts and bolts of SEO is the process of getting your website to the top of a search engine results page for your keywords of choice that can drive targeted traffic to your website. Targeted traffic being website visitors who are actually interested in your stuff and aren’t just out “browsing”.

Your keywords of choice are those words and phrases that people are typing into a search engine to find information on your website’s topic.

While that sounds pretty cut-and-dried, there are a hundred tiny details that go into getting a website in that prime location. So let’s talk about what some of these tiny little details are exactly.

First, there’s two parts to SEO; on-page optimization and off-page optimization.

On-page optimization is the process of using your keywords that you have chosen for one of your web pages in strategic places throughout that page. Note that I said “one of your web pages” not your “web site”. Each web page within your entire website is ranked differently. Each web page should be optimized for one or two keywords specifically related to the website topic.

So for instance if you were a store that sold tools, you would have a page optimized for hammers, another page optimized for saws, another page optimized for nails, and so on. All of the pages being part of the same “Tools” website.

Off-Page Optimization is the process of getting links pointing to your web pages. A lot of people don’t consider off-page optimization part of SEO. I completely disagree. The point of optimizing your website for the search engines encompasses all factors. What you do on your own site as well as what you do to promote that site since the promotion of that site will help you get better search engine rankings.

This off-page optimization is the most time-consuming task of SEO. It’s the process of getting links to your site, yes, but they have to be the right kind of links; in the right neighborhoods not to mention those links have to have the ability to be seen by thousands of eyeballs that are interested in the information you’re providing. They must be located on pages related to your niche, they must have the right keyword anchor text and so, so much more.

So for those who were interested in what SEO was exactly, there you have it, in the most condensed form I could come up with. SEO continues to change on a regular basis. There’s always new strategies, new ideas, new search engine shakeups. That’s why SEO is so important to the average website. It’s an ever-evolving process that continues to change as the Internet grows.

Google Search – SEO Style

Kristine — Wed, 07 Jan 2009 14:56:31 +0000

There are a wide variety of ways to use Google to search that will help you when you’re optimizing a page. Here are a few of my favorites.

intitle – intitle:keyword – If you want to know what web pages are optimizing for a keyword phrase you’re considering, type intitle:yourkeyword in the Google search box. This will return to you a list of web pages that are using that keyword in their title – an important on-page SEO technique. If you’re looking for a particular keyword phrase in the title use quotes like this: intitle:”Keyword Phrase Goes Here”. And finally if you want to see who isn’t optimizing their pages at all, just for fun, try intitle:”Untitled Document”. You can also use this for a specific command we talk about below called site. To see the web pages that are optimizing their title for a certain keyword or keyword phrase within their site then use: intitle:”Keyword phrase” site:nameofsite.com.
inurl – inurl:keyword – If you want to know what URLs contain a specific keyword phrase in their URL (web address) then simply type inurl:keyword. If you’re looking for a phrase in their URL then type inurl:”keyword phrase”. Note that this will pull back the pages on a website that contain this phrase in their entire URL including any web pages within their site.
inanchor – inanchor:keyword – If you want to know what web pages contain a specific keyword within their anchor text on their page, then simply type in inanchor:keyword. If you’re looking for a specific keyword phrase, use quotes: inanchor:”keyword phrase”. Alternatively if you want to find a link on a specific web page that contains certain keywords, you’d then type in: inanchor:”keyword phrase” site:nameofsite.com.
site – site:nameofsite.com – If you want to see how many pages of a website are indexed in the search engines then type in site:nameofsite.com.
link – link:nameofsite.com – If you want to know how many links are pointing to a site you can enter in link:nameofsite.com. Note that Google is notorious for not giving you all of this information to take it with a grain of salt.
filetype -filetype:file_extension. If you want to know how many web pages have a certain filetype extension you can type in filetype:fla for example. This will show you all of the pages indexed with the .fla extension. A great way to see how well Google is indexing flash. Also try filetype:pdf. This also works well with the site search. If for example you wanted to locate a pdf file on a certain website you’d then enter filetype:pdf site:nameofsite.com.
intext – intext:Keyword – the intext command allows you to find all web pages that contain a certain keyword within their text. intext:keyword. You can also use this with the site command as well to search for a specific word or phrase within a websites text: intext:keyword site:nameofsite.com. Use quotes to search for a phrase intext:”keyword phrase”.
cache – cache:nameofsite.com. If you want to see the last cached version of a web page or site type in cache:nameofsite.com.