January 30, 2008 at 6:54 am
· Filed under SEO, SEO Best Practices
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?
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:
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Use the tool available on this site to see which version of your homepage to keep.
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Use your .htaccess file to permanently redirect (301) all other url versions of your homepage to the one you’ve selected.
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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!
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January 18, 2008 at 5:07 pm
· Filed under SEO, SEO Tips
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!
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January 16, 2008 at 4:43 am
· Filed under SEO, Code
 |
| 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.
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January 8, 2008 at 11:04 pm
· Filed under SEO, SEO Tips
Keyword Cannibalisation is the term used for the common SEO mistake of having several of your website’s pages targeting the same keyword. This confuses the search engines as to which page to serve back to users. This also confuses other sites owners that want to link to your site thereby leading different sites to link to different pages leading to a dilution of your link popularity.
So what are the most common causes of keyword cannibalisation?
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Duplicate Title and Meta Tags
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Duplicate Content
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Similar internal links pointing to different pages.
How do you solve Keyword Cannibalisation? Easy, make sure each of your pages are targeting different keywords by optimising the meta tags and ensuring unique content on each page. Also ensure that all internal links on your website support the landing pages’ keyword target.
There are various tools available to help you solve Keyword Cannibalisation including:
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Conducting a site colon search ie type site:yoursite.com in Google; You can tell by browsing the results if you’re suffering from Keyword Cannibalization.
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Performing permanent redirects (301) to ensure that many pages with similar content are all merged into one.
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Using content similarity tools to check duplicate content, a good tool of this sort can be found here: http://www.webconfs.com/similar-page-checker.php
To sum up, make sure that your website’s pages are not cannibalised by following the simple steps mentioned above. Good luck!
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January 3, 2008 at 1:17 pm
· Filed under SEO, SEO Tips
A good article was published by Brett Borders on his Copy Brighter blog listing 7 SEO techniques that no longer work. here’s the summary with links to related posts on this blog:
Thanks for your article Brett, very thorough!
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