Omar Kattan - search in a nutshell

Have you dealt with the canonical challenge on your site?  In other words, have you made sure that all of the urls below are redirected to a single page?

• http://yoursite.com

• http://www.yoursite.com

• http://www.yoursite.com/index.html

The Wikipedia definition of canonicalisation (spelt canonicalization in the US) is ”the process for converting data that has more than one possible representation into a “standard” canonical representation.”

In SEO, resolving any canonical issues you may have ensures that the popularity of your homepage is all attributed to one page.  addressing the canonicalisation challenge also ensures that search engines do not index more than one version of your homepage.

Below are the steps to follow in order to address canonicalisation on your site:

1. Use the tool available on this site to see which version of your homepage to keep.

2. Use your .htaccess file to permanently redirect (301) all other url versions of your homepage to the one you’ve selected.

3. Test to make sure that the redirect works.

Thats it.  You now have one less thing to worry about when it comes to ensuring that your website meets SEO best practices!

Do you monitor and manage  your company’s reputation online?  If you don’t then this post is a good place to start. 

Long are the days when companies were in control of their brands reputation by controling what messages their consumers are exposed  to.  The internet has changed all that, and today, with the internet penetrating more and more homes,  the tides have turned in favour of the consumer.

Today, internet users can  “virtually” go to a number of forums, blogs and social networks and speak freely about their experiences with your brand or service.  In an ideal world you’d like them to speak positively about your brand but are you really in control of that? Well no.  This is where reputation management plays a very important role.

So how do you go about managing your reputation?  Follow these three simple step:

1) Define Scope

Before you begin monitoring your brand’s online reputation, you will need to know what you’re monitoring.  I suggest you brainstorm the various areas of your business and categorise them.  Examples of reputation management categories can include:

• Brands/Services:

• Competitors

• Industry

• Employees (current and ex)

2) Resaerch

There are a number of free and commercial online tools and sites available to you as a brand owner, these include:

• technorati

• blogpulse

• Subscribe to the Google, Yahoo and MSN News RSS feeds for the keywords you want to monitor.

3) Manage & Engage

Once you’ve begun monitoring your brand, its time to create a strategy to counter the negative effects of bad publicity and to capitalise on the effects of positive publicity.   Below are examples of ways to fend off negative publicity:

• Create a company blog that allows users to interact with your brand as opposed to going elsewhere to do the same

• If you provide news, make sure you’re indexed in the news section of the search engines.  There is a detailed process of how to do this for Google can be found in this official guide for google news inclusion

Hopefully your brand only gets good publicity but if it doesn’t I hope the above tips are enough of an inspiration to set you off on the highly important task of manging your brands reputation. Good luck!

Here’s a good optimisation tip, did you know that you can add optimised title tags to your site’s internal links?  Here is what it looks like:

<a title=”Computer Monitors ” href=”your-link” mce_href=”your-link”>Home</a>

Home

I’ve bolded the title tag in the above example “Home” link, and as you can see, while the visitors can still see home as the link text, the title tag allows engines to understand that the home link is also the home page for a site about in this instance, “computer monitors”.

Users can also see the words “Computer Monitors” when they hover over the link so make sure you don’t stuff the tite tag with too many works otherwise it will lead to bad user experience and may be construed as spam!

By following the above simple example, you can insure that all your website’s internal links are optimised for the keywords you’re targeting and supporting your overall onsite optimisation efforts.

Using the link title tag will contribute to your overall efforts to rank higher in the search engines results pages.

There’s been much debate about whether ot not the strategy of creating subdomains to improve natural search ranking works or not. Well, I’m writing here to tell you that it does, but only if you do it right.

First of all, let me explain to you what a subdomain is.  Its basically what it says, a sub section of your domain (your site) and it usually looks like this:

subdomain.domain.com

A subdomain can usually be created through your server’s control panel.  With Apache C-panel you can login and go to manage subdomains and easily create one there.

Best practices for creating subdomains: 

1) Subdomains are considered as standalone sites by most search engines and therefore it is crucial to ensure that you have a reason for creating your subdomain (ie you have sufficient useful content to add to it)  I recommend at least ten pages of at least 450-500 words.

2) Make sure that your subdomain is keyword rich and does not cannibalise any content on your site.  So for example, if you have a site about computers, an idea for a subdomain would be suppliers.computers.com.

3) Don’t overdo it.  Too many subdomains and you will raise some red flags.  Also you don’t want to siphon off your main domain popularity unless you absolutely need to.

4) Make sure that your subdomain is well supported with keyword rich internal links from your main domain and also enough outbound links (links from other sites).

5) If your’ using subdomains to target various markets (ie. uk.yourdomain.com) try and host the UK subdomain on a UK server with a UK IP address.

Thats about it.  So to conclude, make sure to follow the above guidelines when deciding to go with a subdomain strategy. 

Good luck!

A very juicy water mellon

With the concept of “universal search“ gaining ground, it is becoming more and more crucial to optimise all content on your site for search including videos, pdf, podcasts and images.

This blog post will focus on optimising images on your site. 

As an example, if you wanted to optimise an image on your site for the keyword “juicy water mellon”,  implement the following three simple steps:

1) Image Filename:

Make sure your image file has an optimised name such as water-mellon.jpg and not image.jpg

<img src=”images/water-mellon.jpg” mce_src=”images/juicy-water-mellon.jpg” width=”257″ height=”329″>

2) Image Alt Tag:

Make sure all your images contain a keyword rich alt and title tags (the text you see when you hover over the image)  Example:

<img src=”images/water-melon.jpg” width=”257″ height=”329″ alt=”juicy water mellon title=”picture of a juicy water mellon”>

3) Image Caption and surrounding text:

Make sure your image has a descriptive caption under it and also make sure that the text surrounding the image is both thematic and semantic (ie is related to your image).

If you follow the above simple steps, you’ll have a good chance of your images being indexed and ranked in search engines’ image search algorithm.  This will drive more targeted traffic to your site.