Posts Tagged ‘search engine optimization’

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The truth about duplicate content and Google

Wednesday, April 8th, 2009

by Brad Callen

So a concern of many webmasters out there is the idea of duplicate content. With all you read out there today I am sure this has crossed your mind from time to time as it has mine.

The idea of Google being the 800-lb gorilla is a long standing one and thinking that maybe some how and some way they have the ability to screen the internet for duplicate content on the fly sounds CRAZY but we always perpetuate the idea as paranoia is much easier to believe than fact in many cases.

I mean think about this for a second just in terms of computing power:

1. Google shows a cached version of your website and not the actual site listing in its results. This means that Google ACTUALLY STORES information about your sites pages and updates them on the fly.

2. Google’s index likely contains BILLIONS of webpages.

So what this means is that for Google to determine if your site is an exact copy of another persons website than it has to store your pages content and screen that content against its ENTIRE active index…sounds nearly impossible as far as I am concerned. To boot you have to consider this is happening simultaneous to the active crawling and indexing and re-indexing of new pages in Google.

I hope this is putting a little bit of perspective to the situation for you. Let’s further the concept. I will take an article from Ezinearticles.com:

http://ezinearticles.com/?Cocoa-Beans-and-the-Fierce-Competition-in-the-Chocolate-Industry&id=1674880

Now let’s make the assumption that there is a duplicate content filter. If that is the case Google will eliminate all duplications of this article from its index and a phrase match for this article title will only return 1 result, the one it considers to be the best right?

http://www.google.com/search?rlz=1C1GGLS_enUS291US304&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8&q=”Cocoa+Beans+and+the+Fierce+Competition+in+the+Chocolate+Industry”

Yet somehow there are 162 results for that title. You can do this for every article title you test. Try it for yourself…it works and it is still the basis for article marketing and why article marketing still works.

Now this comes on the heels of an interesting article from Google which should further dispel any remaining myths you may have:

http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2008/09/demystifying-duplicate-content-penalty.html

As SEO experts have been telling us for years there is NO DUPLICATE CONTENT PENALTY!

Ok….that is a little bit of a lie.

There are 2 types of duplicate content: external and internal duplicate content. Let’s take the first of the two.

1. External duplicate content.

External duplicate content is very similar to the example I just posted above where you see multiple copies of the same content on DIFFERENT WEBSITES. That last part is very important there as it seperates what could be considered as a penalty but in reality it is just competition.

So how is it that 162 sites can list the exact same article in Google and they allow it?

The quick answer is that they really don’t care. Yeah it may be mudding up the index but if a site or page is still showing in the index it is because they have enough authority or link clout to be there. Pages will be removed from the index if they get stale or have no links pointing to them for example but not for duplicating content.

The real issue becomes how can you soar to the top with a site that has repurposed content? I am inclined to say its not easy and more importantly its just not a good idea. If you are using content to build your website AND to promote it be sure to do this:

1. Your sites content is unique to your website

2. Your promotional content (PR’s, articles, etc…) belong outside of your website

This makes your life a lot easier. IT IS NOT FOR DUPLICATE CONTENT THOUGH. It’s to avoid competition with those with the same content. If you must republish content from another website make sure you add some commentary or additional content around it. This can include images or other variations of media and your doing this for your visitors sake. You need to stand out, not repeat what others are doing.

Bottom line, with external content the site with the most links and authority in Google will always win. Same as with keyword competition.

2. Internal Duplicate Content.

Ok this is as real as it gets but for the same reason. Its a web filter to keep you from competing for yourself but its a lot simpler to handle than you think.

This is important for the following individuals:

a. If your running a CMS out of the box

b. If you are running an eCommerce platform

c. If you are pulling pages and having them autogenerated

These are just a few examples of people who have had issues with internal duplication.

When Google does index your pages it will look at your title tags and meta descriptions and one of the evaluating factors it uses to determine to actually list your pages are the uniqueness of those tags. If my shopping cart system has 10 products which are all “shoes” and that is what I use as my page title for all of them and the meta description for all of them is “tennis shoes” Google will look at all 10 and simply choose the best 1 to list.

This is a big and easy fix and something I would advise for both usability and for regular old good SEO.

Every page NEEDS a unique title tag

Every page SHOULD HAVE a unique description
(or at the vesy least enough unique content to differentiate it from the others pages on your site)

So rest easy. There is NOT a duplicate content penalty from Google. If you site is not ranking I can assure you its because of the lack of links targeting your core keywords so go out and start link building!

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Posted in Google SEO & PageRank, SEO, Site Promotion, Website Design, Website Development | No Comments »

Planning to hire an SEO pro – What results should you expect?

Thursday, April 2nd, 2009

Every business owner is on a look out for cost effective way to market their business. Especially with the recent recession where survival depends on tightening the belt and getting lean, online marketing is an option nobody can afford to ignore. The benefit from search engine marketing (SEM) has taken the marketing world by storm as the results are more accountable and also more cost effective compared to traditional marketing strategies.

But the conflict begins when as a business owner there is confusion regarding what you expected out of a search engine optimization campaign and what is actually being delivered by the SEO pro. When expectations get unreasonable, it is difficult to manage the SEO campaign and it’s doomed to fail.

On the other side of the fence, SEO pro might be desperate to close more number of deals and thus misses to explain their clients the “results” that should be expected out of the campaign. This could lead disillusionment and a false notion that SEO is not working for their business. Do remember that “SEO is effective and beneficial for any business searching to promote their presence online” but there is no way to guarantee sales lead. SEO targets to drive highly targeted web traffic that are on a look out for your services or products, but again a lot of things need to be taken care of, before a visitor gets converted into a final lead, namely, the site itself which should not be a turn-off for visitors, display of proper information, easy navigation to contact information or inquiry form, service/product pricing, your company credibility in market, industry competition, etc.

What can you expect from your SEO pro?
Well to answer this in simple terms, you need to closely look into your SEO contract. Study, analyze and understand what the dotted lines tell you. Does the contract merely list down the services that will be provided by the SEO pro during fixed time frame or does it also includes what results will be delivered by the SEO campaign.
SEO provides the following 4 deliverables which can be numerically measured:

Search Engine Rankings
Web Traffic
Conversions
Return on Investment (ROI)

You can expect any one or combination of any of the above results, depending on your ultimate business requirements and what you are trying to promote online.
Let’s take each of the above deliverables in more detail to clear doubts:

Search Engine Rankings:
This tops the list of results expected by clients undertaking SEO campaign. Please understand that rankings on search engine crawlers like Google, Yahoo, Ask, AOL etc can never be guaranteed or controlled. This is dependent on the particular search engines own search algorithm and calculations for crawling. But generally clients still demand top rankings. But do they know what particular rankings in particular?

What’s the use if you do get top rankings in certain keywords, but they do not generate traffic? At the same time you should not expect instant top rankings for highly competitive phrases and keywords. The truth is even moderate competitive keywords can be a real challenge, if your site is brand new. Always remember rankings take time and constant efforts to build up. The only way to measure results is to constantly check the progress. A gradual positive pattern on chosen keywords shows that the SEO campaign is working.

As a client you can NEVER expect a specific keyword to always rank well. Rankings fluctuate unexpectedly and even dip to extreme extent. An experienced SEO pro will keep a constant eye over those movements and try to find the cause and immediately undertake damage control to rectify the situation. It is important to place your trust and give the SEO pro time to do their job.

Web Traffic:
Web Traffic is the number of visitors that are driven either to your website, an e-commerce portal, blog or a reference site.

Once the SEO campaign kicks off, one of the desirable results clients expects is an increase in traffic which is reasonable, but should not be heavily relied upon since it is possible to manipulate traffic to a site with unethical short cuts. The question is not whether the traffic is increasing but whether SEO manages to bring the right kind of traffic to your site. Planned SEO can only begin only after you define who the target audience is to your SEO vendor, so that the SEO pro does not wastes time shooting in the dark aiming anyone and everyone.

The role of traffic should be downplayed, if you belong to a niche industry where the keyword search volume is naturally low. You should expect some improvement but make sure your expectation of traffic coincides with search volume of your main keywords.

Also if you already enjoy significantly heavy traffic, then the focus should shift from traffic to conversion rates and that means driving the right traffic that are ready to buy what you are selling.

Conversions:
People have a tendency to get mesmerized with number crunching and web analytic statistics regarding what exactly is conversion rate. A generally accepted formula to calculate your conversion rate is as follows:

Conversion Rate = [(Total Web Sales / Unique Web Traffic) / Average Sales Price] x 100

It simply means you need to understand the trick is not where you appear on a search engine or even how many unique visitors you attract to your site, but rather how many of these visitors you convert into customers. Visitors turning into customers are conversion rate. But an SEO pro can only do so much; the actual closing of deal depends entirely on you.
An SEO pro can help by making recommendations, suggesting specific improvements to the site’s architectural structure, etc, but when it comes right down to it, they are not the ones running the business. They can help put everything into alignment, but the client is still responsible for their side of things. This is the reason why no legitimate SEO company can guarantee conversion rate and will not include conversion rate in their SEO contract, since the control to convert traffic to customer depends on you.

ROI:
Last but not the least, every SEO campaign begins with the objective to improve your bottom line. It not just about getting the top 5 or 10 ranks or if you can get ‘X’ amount of visitors to your site. What ultimately matters is whether the amount you invest in SEO campaign is giving you more than you spend. It needs to be profitable. Just like when you make financial investments with hope of earning better returns, the same is the case with SEO. The key here is to remember that instant return on investment is not possible. As a client you need to wait for the fruits to ripe. If you get too impatient and pull out; you might drain all the benefits that might have been in the pipeline. This is the reason that SEO is not a one day job or one week or even one month activity. At the very minimum it is advisable to wait for at least 90 days before expecting improvements. Sometimes it can take 6 months or even a year depending on keywords, competition and industry etc.
The above 4 are the main deliverables expected from search engine optimization program. Focus on which deliverables are important for your marketing goals based on your budget and time availability. Ensure to always keep your feet firmly rooted to ground and your expectations realistic. Hire a SEO pro and actively participate in drafting a formal SEO contract which clearly outlines and defines expectations and services to avoid misunderstandings later on. Build a positive rapport with your SEO pro and ensure you do not ignore the recommendations provided by vendor to improve your site. Remember it’s your site and SEO pro is dependent on your complete support to succeed with the SEO campaign.

This does not mean SEO pro can shirk their responsibilities. If the work that goes into the campaign isn’t performing as per your expectations then move on and find another SEO pro who can produce reasonable results you expect (contract permitting and right amount of time frame being given to produce results).

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Posted in SEO | No Comments »

Discover the Secrets of SEO

Tuesday, March 31st, 2009

There is so much information floating around out there about Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and how to get some rankings. So much of it is contradictory and confusing. I wanted to spend a little bit of time talking about the secrets of top rankings.

So, let’s jump right in with the secrets to SEO success….

Search Engine Secret # 1: There are no secrets! The search engines make it all very public and clear what you need to do to get top rankings. The success lies in the details and proper implementation. But there is no top secret, proprietary technique for getting top rankings.

OK, so now we all know there are no secrets, but that doesn’t mean there isn’t information you need to know, such as:

If you don’t optimize your site, you won’t get top rankings. It really is that plain and simple. If the engines can’t spider your site and you don’t have links and strong content, you don’t stand a chance against the sites that do have all that in place. So many people don’t want to spend money on SEO, or are afraid to take the plunge but then they can’t understand why they don’t have rankings. So maybe there is a secret – maybe the secret is take action and get your site optimized!

Your site structure matters! I can’t tell you how often people have said to me “I know my site is a mess, but I don’t want to spend the money fixing it, so can’t you just throw up some keywords and Meta tags and get me some rankings?” Ummmm, no, I can’t. Your site structure is your foundation. You would never build a house without a solid foundation, why would you build an SEO campaign without a solid foundation?

Don’t just focus on small keyword list that is made up of the most popular and competitive keywords. You will be missing out on opportunities for great keyword phrases that convert really well. Expand your list. Include long tail phrases. They may have less traffic but they will convert at a higher rate and if you get enough of these phrases they will likely add up to be better than your original list.

SEO is changing and evolving so staying current on what the engines are looking for is important. Either hire a firm to get you top rankings or find a way to make sure you stay current with information you can trust.
Social media and SEO go hand in hand, so get out there and be social. You can optimize your site without doing social media, and you can do social media without an optimized site. But why would you? The two enhance and compliment each other. The truth is there is a lot of competition out there for website traffic so why not use all the tools at your disposal?

Focusing on SEO without focusing on conversions is a mistake. You are going to work so hard, or pay someone your hard earned money to get you top rankings. You can’t afford to ignore marketing issues. Make sure your site is going to convert all that great new traffic you are going to send to your site.

Google Webmaster Tools and your web stats are a goldmine of information. Make sure you take time to see what words people are actually using to find your site and see what people do once they get to your site. See how many people link to you and which of those sources are driving traffic. Find out if there are errors on your site. There is so much information to be analyzed; you just need to make the time to check it out.

Successful SEO requires time, patience, skill, knowledge, persistence, attention to detail, knowledge of HTML, current information and an understanding of marketing helps too – then you can write the best possible text while using the keywords well, and it will also help you write compelling Title and Description tags….OR – the willingness to invest in a professional firm to get those top rankings for you.

By Jennifer Horowitz

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Posted in SEO | No Comments »

How search engine marketing can boost your business

Sunday, March 29th, 2009

SEM or Search engine marketing is one of the methods adopted in Internet marketing that helps websites to increase hits by visitors and thereby increasing the chances to sell the offered products. Search engine optimization (SEO), Paid Placement, Contextual Advertising and Paid Inclusion are the techniques used for the purpose.

Search Engine Marketing strategies are necessarily aimed at bringing the business more visitors, more consumers and more buyers by generating leads.

The internet is the fastest growing medium for advertising. The brand recognition can be increased manifold by an appropriate use of the strategic internet tools available.

A good understanding of the business being promoted is all needed to formulate strategies for the internet marketing. Choice of proper key words that needed to be picked up the search engines like, Google, Yahoo or Microsoft Live form the foremost part of making a strategy. The more easy and popular keywords it be, the easier it will be to find the website by the search engines. And a position in the front page of the search engines would increase the assurance of a visitor much more than that of in the next pages.

Search engine marketing boosts the Business by not only short term sales, but a good strategy also aim at expanding the market reach and creating a customer base. The rise in number of business outlets also gives rise to the B2B opportunity. New buyers, consumers and information are logging in Internet every second. It is up to the businesses that how effectively they can use this information to their benefit. Being found in the front page of the search engine is the key to succeed in this marketing strategy

Online advertising as in Pay per click (PPC) or in Price per thousand Impressions (PPM) play a very significant role in increasing sales. The advertisement either pops up or positioned in a fixed place when a prospective buyer enters the keywords. By directing to proper pages a visitor can easily be converted to a sale as the prospective customer does get an idea of the product being offered before he decides to click on the link.

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Posted in Google SEO & PageRank, Search Engine Marketing | 3 Comments »

10 Ways To More Website Traffic

Friday, March 27th, 2009

Every website needs more traffic. This traffic needs to be as targeted as possible to the site you are promoting, whether it is your own web site or an affiliate program. This is the lifeblood of the business. No traffic – No business, More traffic – More sales

The question is – How do you get this highly targeted web site traffic.

I will list some of the most popular methods.

Pay-Per-Click (PPC)

Of all the pay per click search engines, Google Adwords is the largest and most popular.

This method, when done correctly, will increase your exposure, and give fast results. You must keep up to date with Google’s rules, so be sure to read them. You pay a one off fee when you register and set up your campaign. You can have your campaign up and running in minutes. There is a minimum bid, but of course you will have to pay more than this. But the beauty of Adwords is you can set a daily budget of how much you are willing to spend.

You can create as many campaigns as you want, and then test your ads (changing the headline for example).

Google provide tools to help you with your campaigns, and have exellent tutorials that walk you through everything from signing up to creating your Adwords campaigns.

Link popularity

This is achieved when other sites have links to your site. If a high traffic site has links, the search engines perceive both sites must be popular. The important thing is to have quality web sites linking back to your site.

Why should anyone want to link to your site? If you have quality content, this adds perceived value and makes your site popular, so others will want to link to you.The type of content could be:

Free downloads
Free reports, articles, ezine or newsletter
Video
Links to other good sites

Reciprocal Links

This is where you exchange links with other quality sites. You can create a links page on your site. This create a resource that visitors will want to return to. Find quality (there’s that word again) web sites related to your subject and contact the webmaster about exchanging links.

Ezine advertising

Most ezines accept advertising. Ezines are online or email newsletters. They are used to build a relationship between a webmaster and a web site visitor, with news, updates, special offers etc. But as always they should have quality content. You place an ad in ezines that are highly targeted towards your niche. Prices depend on the ezine, and also the position of the ad. The most expensive is the solo ad, where yours is the only ad.

Article Submissions

Submitting articles is a great way to build back links and web site visitors. Your articles can become ‘viral’ when others want to re-publish them on their sites, or use them in their newsletters and ezines. You include links to your site in the author resource box offering more free information. The resource box is your chance to convince the reader to visit your web site.

Two of the most popular places to post your articles are http://www.goarticles.com/ and http://www.EzineArticles.com.

Forum Posting

In order to be successful using forums there are some things that are required. Do Your Homework: Prior to joining any forum, you must do some research. Join relevant forums that are in some way related to the promotion’s primary sales market. Choose popular forums. There is no point in wasting your time and energy on forums that few members and few posts. Page raking and the amount of active members are two good ways to check for this. Choose forums that allow sig tags. Read the rules before joining and pay attention to them.

You’ve Joined: now what?

Keep your sig tag short and update it regularly. The ideal thing is to limit yourself to one link, preferably to your main website. Never create posts that are nothing more than an advertisement. This is a universal rule. At best this kind of post will be deleted by the monitors, at worst, you will be banned. Be an active member on the forum. Plan to spend at least an hour each day there. Get to know the users. Iintroduce yourself with intelligent questions depending upon the forum’s topic.

Use Your Sig file to the best advantage and within the rules. Some Forums have places where you can advertise and give special deals to members.

Social Bookmarking

In a social bookmarking system, users store lists of Internet resources that they find useful. These lists are both accessible to the public or a specific network, and other people with similar interests can view the links by category, tags, or even randomly. Some allow for privacy on a per-bookmark basis.

Social Bookmarking can bring immediate traffic to your website, as web 2.0 community websites such as Technorati, Digg, Reddit and Tailrank provide almost immediate information on various topics. These type of Bookmarking sites index and categorize content usually faster than the major search engines. People looking for the latest information on certain topics usually refer to these types of services.

Bookmarking Accounts to check out:

http://digg.com/

http://technorati.com/

You can increase your Bookmarking using the free submission site http://www.OnlyWire.com to bookmark many accounts at once. When you signup to OnlyWire.com you can use many bookmark accounts and with one simple procedure bookmark your blog post to all your accounts at once.

OnlyWire.com interfaces with:

Backflip
Bibsonomy
Blinklist
Blogmemes
Blue Dot
de.lirio.us
del.icio.us
Diigo
Furl
Jots
Linkroll
Looklater
ma.gnolia
Markaboo
Rawsugar
Shadows
Simpy
Spurl
Wink

If you don’t have a Bookmark Account for the ones listed go and sign up.

Viral Traffic using free reports – ebooks etc.

Directory Submissions

Submit your website url’s to the search engines Google, Yahoo, MSN.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

Search Engine Optimization, (SEO), is making web pages attractive to the search engines. The better optimized your web page is, the higher a ranking it will achieve in the search engines. Most people searching the internet only look at the first couple of search results.

So optimizing for the search engines focuses on techniques such as making sure that each web page is using the appropriate title tags and meta tags, and that the keyword or key phrases for the particular pages are distributed throughout the content. Search engines find and catalog web pages using spidering software.

These are just a few ways to get more web site traffic.

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Posted in Site Promotion | No Comments »

All You Need To Know About Long Tail Keywords

Friday, March 20th, 2009

Have you heard of the 80-20 rule? Well, an Italian economist called Pareto noticed that 80% of land in Italy was owned by 20% of the population. His work was taken up by others until it entered mainstream thinking. You’ve probably heard variations of what’s now become known as the 80-20 rule, or the Pareto principle. They go like this: we spend 80% of our time with 20% of our friends, or we wear 20% of our favorite clothes 80% of the time.

More generally, of course, it is a common rule of thumb in business: e.g., “80% of your sales come from 20% of your clients.” In business, for example, Microsoft noted that by fixing the top 20% of the most reported bugs, 80% percent of the errors and crashes would be eliminated.

So far, so good. But what if you found out that – let’s take your website, for instance – the Pareto principle was not so robust? That 80% of your major keywords only account for 20% of your sales? In other words, by focusing on a handful of major keywords you may be missing out on the ‘real’ keywords that prospective customers are actually using to find your product or service.

Most webmasters apply the 80-20 rule: that the top keyword provide 80% of the business, but in practice, this has proved to be the opposite. In other words, the keywords that are most sought after are actually rarely those that provide the most business.

Let me put it another way: your web pages are much more likely to gain more of their search engine referrals via a mixture of low-volume search queries instead of a tight bunch of keywords. And this means that by focusing on identifying the keywords which receive a lower volume of search queries you will increase in the overall amount of prospective customers from, say, Google, to your website.

What are these keywords? And will they actually increase my visitor numbers?

Well, keywords such as this are generally recognised as Long Tail Keywords. “Long Tail” because they are phrases that are usually made up of more than three words. For instance: “Paint” is not long tail, but “Outdoor paint for wooden shed” is long tail. Or, take “shoes”: “Adidas running shoes” is almost there. But “Adidas running shoes for women” is a long tail keyword.

Can you see the difference between “horse training” and “quarter horse training products”? Here is another example: ‘Credit Cards’ is the general keyword but effective long tail keywords within this niche could include: ‘good low cost credit cards for nurses’, ‘credit cards for people with bad credit’, ‘credit cards with low interest’, ‘benefits of corporate credit cards’, and so on.

The fundamental thinking about long tail keywords is that because there is less competition for them, it is far easier to achieve an optimal ranking with the search engines. Moreover, it’s much more likely that people who enter particular long tail keywords are highly likely to be actual customers, rather than web surfers. If you can optimise your web pages while delivering high value, informative content that matches those particular search queries you are highly likely to attract visitors who are actively seeking actual information about products using your long tail keywords and other, similar, phrases.

And there’s no doubt that long tail keywords are a highly effective at attracting traffic. What’s more important, there are thousands and thousands of long tail keywords which no one or very few people are pinpointing so can easily be utilised.

Here, then, are four major reasons why you need to consider the use of long tail keywords to make your web pages user search engine friendly:

First, focusing on long tail keywords will slowly but surely lead to more search engine traffic because you will have many, many web pages indexed and ranked for specific phrases related to your products or services. This means higher visibility and so a greater volume amount of search engine traffic.

Next, long tail keywords lead to higher purchase ratios. Visitors who visit your web site because they have entered long tail search phrases are highly likely to buy your product or service or follow through on affiliate programs. By focusing on these long tail phrases, you are actually zeroing in on a vast market of potential buyers.

Third, long tail keywords lead to higher page ranking because of there is generally far less competition. There is so much more scope for variation when you start digging for the phrases that people actually use when they enter search terms.

Finally, using long tail keywords means that your sites have the potential for greater monetization. People who find your site because they used a search engine such as Google or Yahoo are high value for this reason: they are people who are looking for explicit information. So they are highly likely to follow relevant advertisements or subscribe to your blog feed or ezine.

So here’s the nutshell: more long tail keywords equals more potential customers equals more likely sales. Good luck!

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Posted in SEO, Website Development | No Comments »

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