Canonicalization has been talked many times on forums, blogs, and conferences. Today also, I am trying to focus on Canonicalization & duplication content, its impact on SEO, how to fix Canonical issue, myths about duplicate content etc.

Definition of Canonical by Google-

“A canonical page is the preferred version of a set of pages with highly similar content.”

Does Canonical URLs create duplicity issue for my website?

Yes, canonical versions of URL will considered as different pages with identical content.

For example- if your site has 3 versions of home page:

www.yousite.com

www.yoursite.com/home.html

http://yoursite.com

These 3 will be considered as duplicate content. There might be several consequences of it. Some of them are as follows:

Dilution of link popularity: If you have backlinks for different versions of URL (like 10 links for www version & 10 links for non www version) then it will dilute your link popularity. It will always be a good idea to get all the backlinks on only preferred version of your page so that it can get the complete link juice & can get more PR.

User-unfriendly URL in search results: If you have different versions of URLs then Google will show only one version which it feels the most appropriate for users in each given search, which may or may not be the version you’d prefer. For example, it can show your Home Page URL with some dynamic parameters or session IDs which may decrease usability.

Inefficient crawling: Do you really want Google to spend all time on your site to find the different versions of the same URL? I guess NO. If we will define the canonical versions/ preferred to Google then it will spend more time in searching new pages (deep level pages) of your site. Isn’t it good?

How to fix canonical issue?

Google has suggested several ways by which we can tell Google about our preferred versions of URLs. Some of them are as follows:

301- Redirect: Add 301- redirect (A permanent redirect) from canonical URLs to preferred URLs.

This will notify Google to transfer your link popularity only to your preferred version of URL. 301-Redirect is very helpful in the situation when you are planning to transfer your site to a new domain or when you are planning to change your URLs structure to make them more search engine friendly.

Set preferred version by Google webmasters: You can easily specify non-www Vs www by Google webmasters tool. There is one “Setting” option in “Site Configuration” section of Dashboard where you can define your preferred domain.

Internal Linking: Try to use only your preferred URL for internal linking.

Robots.txt: Disallow the pages (which you considers duplicate or identical) by Robots.txt. This will help Google to crawl only the best version of your pages.

rel=”canonical” attribute: This new option lets site owners suggest the version of a page that Google should treat as canonical. We can specify the canonical version of page by creating a <link> element. For more info please visit this URL- http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=139394

Keep the URLs as clean as possible by removing unnecessary parameter.

Definition of Duplicate Content by Google-

“Duplicate content generally refers to substantive blocks of content within or across domains that either completely matches other content or is appreciably similar.”

Many webmasters have misconception that they can be penalized by Google for duplicate content on the website, however Google does not take any action on the ground of duplicity until unless content is deliberately duplicate across domains in an attempt to manipulate search engines rankings or win more traffic. Google might remove your site from search engines if they found your website engagement in deceptive practices.

Which type of content will not be considered as duplicate content?

• Discussion forums that can generate both regular and stripped-down pages targeted at mobile devices
• Store items shown or linked via multiple distinct URLs
• Printer-only versions of web pages

I have multiple domains for my website for different countries. Is it ok? Will it create the duplicity issue?

No, if you have different domains for different countries with targeted content then it will not create the duplicity issue. It will be good for you to define the geographic location for each website (by Google Webmasters tool). It will help Google to find the most relevant domain for a specific query for a specific country search.

For more information, you can watch video from Greg Grothaus.

It’s been real long I have written a post. This post of mine will answer many queries of yours which might be puzzling you since long.

Does Google crawl and treat Tiny URLs using a 301 redirect the same as other links?

Yes, Google consider the tiny URLs same as other links if they are 301-redirected. If links are 301 redirected then Google passes the page rank just as other links. So, basically it depends on the URL shortening services whether they are using a 301 redirect or not. If not, then Google will not consider them & will not pass any PageRank. These days many sites offering URL shortening services & number of service providers are increasing day by day, so make sure to pick only those that does provide what you actually want.

How can we make sure that Google reaches & indexes pages that are on a deeper or lower level of the website?

For this, one thing to make sure is that every important deep level page should link with your main or root page of the website. But this does not mean that you should link every deep level page with your Home Page rather it is advisable to focus on your money making or very important pages should be easily accessible to search engines & users. It is always good to link your money making pages with the pages which have good PR. So it is not a matter of concern to use deep directory folder.

Google seems to prioritize new domains in SERPs, will a Coming Soon page negatively impact the side?

No, this should not impact the website ranking. In fact, this is a pretty smart act to make your users aware with your upcoming services or information. This should not be a problem to search engines. You can optimize these page by putting quality content once the service/ section is ready for lunch.

How many pages can Google crawl or index from a single website?

Well, there is no limit as far as the page indexing is concern. Google always try to crawl as many pages as possible if pages are important for users & have quality information. In fact, you can find many websites with millions of indexed pages. But Google avoid indexing millions of pages from a website with auto generated junk stuff. So, always take care of the content quality & accessibility of the pages to make them crawlable.

Does position of keywords in URL have a signification impact on rankings?

Matt says that we should not be very possessed about these kind of details as these are very secondary kind of things. Keywords use in URL is definitely adds some value but the path or level should not impact much. Also, we not stuff the URLs with so many keywords which actually looks like a spam.

How much time does Google takes to index a new web page?

Google can find a new page very quickly like in seconds or minutes if the page is linked with an authority site, blog etc. For example, if your new webpage have quality info & is linked with CNN website then Google can crawl it very quickly.

Can I publish 100+ pages at once or in bulk? Would it count as spamming?

If you are publishing 100+ pages or 1000s pages with quality content which might be useful for your visitors then there is no problem but if you are planning to publish millions of pages at once then Google can find it strange. If Google found that the pages are auto generated junk stuff or does not have quality info for users then it will not crawl your website pages.

Should I tweak the Title & Description of the web pages to improve the CTR?

Many people think that their SEO work is over if they are ranking for their targeted keywords but it is not the case. If you are ranking on top 10 and visitors are still not clicking or if you are not getting conversions from your organic search then there is no mean of having a good rank.
We should optimize our Title & Description tags & try to make them compelling (not decisive) with correct info. Title & description tags are the part of ranking snippet in organic listing and are very helpful in increasing the organic CTR which will in turn helps in better ranking & conversions.

Do Google take into account quality factors from Nofollowed links when the links comes from authority websites like Wikipedia?

No, Google will add any value to the links which are nofollowed. Nofollowed links (even from authority websites) will not boost website’s ranking in Google. But yes, websites can get good no. of visits with the help of relevant links from the authority websites like Wikipedia.

In this post you will find the link building quality guidelines & some great ways of creating quality backlinks for your website.

Firstly, I want to discuss few general things about link building (this is specially for beginners)

Link building is the process of getting quality link to your web site from another web sites in order to improve search engine rankings. The quantity, quality, and relevance of links count towards your rating. The site that links to your site can provide context about the subject matter of your site, and can indicate its quality and popularity.

Now we will go through some Link Terms which we all should know before proceeding further:

• Link Popularity: the quantity of links pointing to your web page from other sites. It can also be determine as PageRank of your web page.
• Anchor text: The words in a hyperlink. The text usually gives visitors or search engines important information on what the page being linked to is about.
• Reciprocal / 2 – way link: The process where two webmasters agree to show each-other’s link on their website. Means, site A has link on site B and Site B has link on site A.
• 3-way links: It helps you build links while avoid reciprocal link building and other types of penalties resulting from it.
  A three-way link is where Site A links to Site B, and Site B links to Site C, and Site C links to Site A, like so: A -> B -> C -> A. In the end, 3 websites have links to each other, and yet none of them are reciprocal.
  Google will not penalize you for using this method, as long as all the sites are somewhat related.
• Link farm: Sites/pages with dozen of links. Built for the sole purpose of increasing search results. Often has opposite effect. Bad. Spam. Avoid.
• Link bait: Any content or feature within a website that somehow baits viewers to place links to it from other websites. A very good technique to get quality natural links.
• Deep Links: Links to internal pages (not your home page). Good stuff. One reason blogs tend to do better in search engines than static sites.

What is PageRank:

A feature on the Google toolbar which lets you know how important is your page in eyes of Google. When we install the Google Toolbar, it shows us the rank of every page we visit.

For successful link building strategy:

1) Get as many links from important pages as possible

2) Build relevance between the anchor text and targeted keywords/ phreases used in SEs.

Guidelines of Quality Links

• Links should come from related page/ category. This is probably the most important factor to determine the link quality & effectiveness in terms of the PR and traffic.

• Links should come from authanticated & quality sites. Also, take care of C-class IPs. Links should come from different C-class IP’s.

• Link pages must have been indexed & recently cached in (SE’s) Google. I think there is no point in getting links from pages which are not indexed by Search Engines.

• Links should not be listed on drug, porn, illegal and other offensive websites (spam, ban, or backlisted).

• Links should not be on web pages that are disallowed by robots.txt tag.
  
  
• Links should not be from framed pages as search engines usually don’t read these type of pages.

• Link should have varied anchor text with relevant/ targeted keywords.

• Link should be created with an optimum frequency. It is not advisiable to place hundreds or thousands of links to a new site the first few days. Search Engines like Google can easily catch these types of link building which are not natural and can ban the site. So we should move gradually with the consistancy in quality.

• If we are getting the links from relevant pages with Good PR then this is really great. But we should not ignore links from 0 PR pages which are very relvant with the theme.

• Links should not be temporary. The age of your backlinks is important.

Does high page rank Always guarantee top position in Search Results?

No, PageRank does not guarnatee any specific rank on SERPs. Google consider many factors while ranking any page for related search query- some of the factors are

No. of backlinks, anchor text, historical factors, on page factors, links from quality on-facus sites etc.

Now the question arises is- How to get quality Links? So, here is the answer…

There are many techniques to get the quality backlinks though it might take time as link building is a very time consuming activity. I am listing some of the tried & tested techniques to get the qualilty back links.

Link Baiting: You must have read about it many times. But trust me it is really a good way to get the natural links. Always focus on the quality content & try to write something which is very informative, helpful, easy to understand & interesting to read. But your job is not finished here….you have to make people know about this quality info. You will not get any advantage of having great content when people does not know about it and this your own duty to make them aware. So, promote your content by participating in social media & news sites. Once people will know about it & liked it then they will start link back to you.

Here are some link baiting techniques:

• Offer something useful for FREE: Give other website owners a useful or interesting tools for FREE. For example: if you are in to loan or mortgage sector & providing a free mortgage calculator or currency convertor etc. then if other webmasters will use that tool on ther website will automatically provide you a link back.
• Create Poll or Quize: Polls, quizzes, surveys, tests etc. are good ways to create the buzz.
• Contests: Organise something for people to participate in. It is again a good ways of link baiting. For example: seomoz SEO quiz, when people score a good percentage then they put their score banner on there website with a link to the main seomoz site.
• Humor: This is one of the best link baiting techniques I have ever seen. Most people generally act on and spread that content which is houmouous.
• Similarly, controversial posts usually get strong reactions. People post their perspective & publist the complete conversation on their on blog also.
• Research and Statistics - Research a topic which is very popular or in trend and then post your outlook on the same and invite a little controversy. Try to give some thing valuable to the visitors that people can use in some way is another effective way to generate incoming links.

Directory Submissions: Though currently directory submissions are not considered as benificial as before, however quality directories still have advantages, therefore we must submit the site to the quality web directories. There are 1000’s of websites available on the net with wide range of categories, regions and languages. Few of them are paid & fortunately maximum are free.

But you should take care of the relevancy & quality of the web directories before submissions. I am not in a favor of automated submissions as they might affect the quality of links. Always go for manual submissions though it will take time.

Take care of the following points before submitting the site:

• Always choose relevant directories
• Submit your site only once
• Choose the relevant/most appropriate sub category
• Always read the Directory Submission Guildlines
• Use the email address of the same domain because some dircetories reject the submissions from free email IDs.
• Don’t be just a seller while submitting the website, write accurate business title

Here is a list of some good directories:

www.dmoz.org/ Free

www.dir.yahoo.com/ Paid

www.lii.org/ Free

www.business.com/ Paid

www.jayde.com/ Free

www.botw.org/ Paid

www.directory.v7n.com/ Paid

www.businessseek.biz/ Paid

www.illumirate.com/ Free

www.turnpike.net/directory.html Free

www.littlewebdirectory.com/links.asp Free

www.wikidweb.com/ Free

www.linkcentre.com free

www.allthewebsites.org free

Here are some other resources where you can find list of web directories:

http://www.onewaytextlink.com/links.php?type=free&pagenum=1

http://www.web-directories.ws/General/Free/

http://www.directorycritic.com/free-directory-list.html

You can also search relevant directories by using these type of commands:

“add links” + Your Keywords

“add a link” + Your Keywords

“add your link” + Your Keywords

“add site” + Your Keywords

“add your site” + Your Keywords

“add a website” + Your Keywords

“add a URL” + Your Keywords

“add your URL” + Your Keywords

“submit URL”+ Your Keywords

“Submit a site” + Your Keywords

“submit links” + Your Keywords

“submit your URL” + Your Keywords

“suggest a website” + Your Keywords

“Suggest URL” + Your Keywords

intitle:add+url “keyword phrase”

intitle:submit+site “keyword phrase”

intitle:submit+url “keyword phrase”

intitle:add+site “keyword phrase”

intitle:add+your+site “keyword phrase”

intitle:directory “keyword phrase”

intitle:list “keyword phrase”

intitle:sites “keyword phrase” and many others.

Link exchange: Exchange links with a few better quality sites which deal with the same topics as your website. Though this is not a good way in the eyes of Google. But we can do the 3 way link building which is a better option.

Some webmasters engage in link exchange schemes and build partner pages exclusively for the sake of link exchanging, irrespective of the links quality, relevancy and the long-term impact it will have on their sites. This is in violation of Google’s webmaster guidelines and can negatively impact your site’s ranking in search results.

While exhanging the links then take care of the following things:

• Links should be from the relevant (theme based) websites
• No links to web spammers or bad neighborhoods on the web
• Excessive reciprocal links or excessive link exchanging (”Link to me and I’ll link to you.”)
• Link growth should be natural so maintain the frequency

PR submissions: New product line? Company going public? Acquired another company? Any newsworthy event you may have, do a press release and submit it through PRweb.com and many other quality Press release sites. Some PR sites allow backlinks to the main site and in this case we are getting links with marketing.

Here are some Press Release sites:
http://i-newswire.com

http://www.pr.com
http://www.pr9.net
http://www.press-base.com/

http://www.prfree.com

http://www.prleap.com

http://www.prweb.com/

http://www.webwire.com/

http://www.free-news-release.com/

http://www.myfreepr.com/

http://www.pr.com/

http://www.pr9.net/

http://www.prlog.org/

http://www.pressrelease.com.np/

You can find some more PR sites here: http://www.v7n.com/forums/seo-forum/95516-press-release-submission-websites.html

Also, keep track on those who picks up your articles or press releases. Offer them exclusive news or content to submit. You can also email your exclusive news & article content to some of your friends & relevant industry bloggers, when you have important relevant news asking them for their feedback, they will publish the info if find that useful.

Article submissions: Write some informative articles and share your unique expertise by including tips, strategies, techniques, case-studies, analysis, opinions and commentary in your articles. Syndicate articles on some great article directories like EzineArticles, GoArticles, iSnare, etc. You should optimize your author resource box to get the backlink to your website. The great thing about good article sites is that their article pages actually rank highly and send highly qualified traffic. (Get complete detail about how we can get the best from article marketing.)

Here are some good article directories:

http://www.ezinearticles.com/

http://www.goarticles.com

http://www.articlecity.com/

http://www.articleclick.com

http://www.articlebiz.com/

http://www.articledashboard.com/

http://www.articlealley.com/

http://www.free-articles-zone.com

http://www.articleworld.net

You can find some more resources here:

http://www.styopkin.com/article_submission_sites.html

http://www.beansoftware.com/article-sites-master-list.aspx

Blogging: Blogging is a good way to get traffic, populairity and backlinks. Blogs give you great presence on major search engines, like Google, Yahoo! & MSN. A well-written, routinely updated, keyword-oriented blog can enhance your chances of getting higher rankings on search engine result pages. Start a blog. Not just for the sake of having one. Post regularly and post great content. Good execution is what gets the links. Link to other blogs from your blog. Outbound links are one of the cheapest forms of marketing available. Many bloggers also track who is linking to them or where their traffic comes from, so linking to them is an easy way to get noticed by some of them.

There is absolutely nothing wrong with earning a link from a blog post you decide to comment on. In fact, if you comment often on blogs, it is a good way to increase the amount of inbound links pointing to your site’s pages. Comment on other blogs. Most of these comments will not provide much direct search engine value, but if your comments are useful, insightful, and relevant they can drive direct traffic. They also help make the other bloggers become aware of you, and they may start reading your blog and/or linking to it.

Here is a short list of things “not to do” when commenting on blogs.

• Don’t spam thru Blog commenting. Comments like “nice post” or “I agree” and then include a link is not a good way to create the link, you should try to give valuable comments to gain the authority. Spamming comments, spelling and grammar errors, or even unprofessional language will reflect badly on you, doing you more harm than good.
• Don’t try to stuff keyword rich anchor text in the “Name” field.
• Don’t mass comment all at once. When I see the same person commenting on a number of posts, all in a row, their intentions are clear.

Be a part of Technorati. Technorati tag pages rank well in Search Engines. Even if your blog is fairly new you can have your posts featured on the Technorati tag pages by tagging your posts with relevant tags.

There are 100’s of free blog directories available on the net where you can submit your blog for free. It will help you to get back links also. But take care of the relevancy. Always submit your blog in to relevant directories.

Here are some directories:

PR: 8 Technorati

PR: 8 Blogarama.com

PR: 7 blogcatalog.com

PR: 7 eatonweb.com

PR: 7 ping-o-matic.com

PR: 7 blogtoplist.com

PR: 6 WeBlogALot.com

PR: 6 BlogHop.com

PR: 6 blogdir.com

PR: 6 blog-directory.org

PR: 5 blogroll.net

PR: 5 biggerblogger.com

PR: 4 blogrankings.com

Link to other blogs from your blog. Outbound links are one of the cheapest forms of marketing available. Many bloggers also track who is linking to them or where their traffic comes from, so linking to them is an easy way to get noticed by some of them.

Links from using the “Blog and Ping” technique

This technique is mainly for getting your pages into the search engines as quickly as possible.

Links from social bookmarking sites using the “Tag and ping” technique

It will help put your site on the Internet map and if done right, Tag and Ping will deliver plenty of targeted traffic to your blog/website. It will boost your rankings as well. Just make sure you’re using some Ping and Tag marketing techniques to harvest all those links, traffic and sales for your site. If this is still confusing to you, one simple way to ping your tags/blogs is to use a site like: http://pingomatic.com/ and it will automatically ping your blog in many of the most popular blogging services.

Social Communities & Networking Sites: Start creating profile on social community sites and forums & build your network. Many forums allows signature links on every thread. Strong networking can bring lots of visitors to your site with quality back links.

Join The Bloggers Groups: You can join relevant bloggers groups. By writing some quality post you can get traffic to the blog and some back links also.

Offer something FREE: You can offer valuable information on something that an end-user finds useful, such as free tools, industry specific reports etc. This is the Natural Link Building process as an end-user finds something on a web site that they feel is useful and they create a link to it.

Affiliate Linking – Affiliate link building is one of the most prominent ways to increase you customer base and sales without actually making a lot of efforts when compared to other marketing techniques. These services are beneficial for increasing sales. These are usually especially strong, and easily obtained one-way backlinks because normally they don’t have a bunch of other links diminishing the value of your backlink.

Squidoo is a great way to support affiliate product reviews. Just create a new account & write an overview for each product review in its own lens. Tag the lens as much as possible & participate in as many groups as possible. Next interlink all the lenses together and link back to your affiliate website.

Similarly, Qassia is a good way to get the one way links. Post some intels and you will get one way links and some good traffic from other members.

Write about others: If you want links from some influencial sites then this tactic can be very useful. You just need to write a news article about the individual or company with some authenticity and request a quote from them. Once they know you’re writing about them, make sure to send them a copy of the press release or story once it hits.

Links from Classified Ads: This type of advertising is very useful to get backlinks, traffic & sales, including a short summary (text based) and telephone number for contact. There are other details presented with certain free classified ads, including the name of the company, service or product provided, website link and detailed descriptions. Sometimes the backlink marked no-follow so does not count for Google, but some search engines ignores the no-follow, so counts with them. You can submit several ads for different products/niches within different categories and some local directories as well.

Similarly, sites from Citysearch & Yellow Pages to Google Maps provides global, local links if you sign up with them. You can find local business dircetories & yellow pages where you can list your business for free.

Check competitors’ links: This may sound unscrupulous but it is one of the most effective ways to build relevant links. Firstly, you have to search pages that link to your competitors’ sites and get those sites to link to you as well. You can easily get the relevant links because the site is already linking out to people in your industry. This will consume less time as we need not to invest much time in searching the relevant websites/ directories for linking. The most effective ways to find your competitors’ links are listed below:

1. At Yahoo! type linkdomain:url.com -site:url.com
2. At MSN’s techpreview type link:url.com -site:url.com
3. At Yahoo! type link:http://www.url.com
4. At Google type “url.com” -site:url.com

These are typically the most reliable way to find the sites and pages that link to your competitors and, incidentally, those sites which link to you.

Keep track on updates in your industry: Have a quick trigger finger on popular news sites that allow comments and try to be one of, if not, the first comment and mention a URL on your site that better explains your point or offers more insight.

Link thru Wikipedia: . Create a page related to unexplored topics in the Wikipedia or in topic specific wikis. Don’t link directly your site but try to add links to other pages that link to your site. Try to add your link in the “discussion” section for the page. This way, you get a real, non-nofollow, indexable link from Wikipedia and you are at a much lower risk of pissing off the community of editors.

Links from partners: See if your manufacturers or retailers or other business partners might be willing to link to your site.

So these are some of the great ways to get the quality backlinks.
But don’t forget that the link growth should be as natural as possible. If you are running a link building campaign than even try to make it as natural as posibe with these ways:

1- Anchor text should varies

2- Link growth should not be too high & should be natural, so control the frequency

3- Limit the reciprocal no. or can go for 3 way linking

Path of learning does not have any cul-de-sac therefore this post cannot be treated as a complete guide; rather it will act as a briefing for beginners and catalyst for mid level enthusiasts.
After going through the post, I will encourage you to submerge yourself into the web and figure out what is relevant to you as new things come up almost daily.

The more you are intact with the updates, better you understanding would be on the subject. Happy learning……

Reference Resources:

http://seomoz.org/

http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=35769

I was watching a video of WebProNews’ Mike McDonald with Matt Cutts and here you go with some of the key points, which might be of some use to you.

Does PageRank have lost its significance?

Matt Cutts said that ranking is not as important as it used to be. He suggests that the main focus should be on traffic & conversions, not just the rankings. Webmasters should keep building good content and should not worry about keywords or keyphrases. The content should be very natural & original.

SEO in 2009?

Matt said that SEOs should need to work on broader perspective to get great response. They have to think about creating buzz, finding the ways of getting more loyal customers, maximization of ROI, videos creation & optimization, image & flash optimization and more.

According to Matt mobile marketer should think about the users’ experience not just about search engines.

View about Black Hat SEO?

Black Hat SEO is getting more malicious these days & people are doing illegal stuff. Google has been focusing on its different technologies to manage the black hat & spam issue.

Any advantages of using Sub-Domains?

There is no real advantage to using Sub-domains. Sub-domains can actually increase the work.

Every website owner is fighting to get back links from other websites to increase the PR & ranking on Google search results. But they are not concerned about the internal linking of the site which is also a very important factor in search engine ranking.

Let’s first understand the difference between internal & external linking……

Internal linking is the links on web pages or the website that point to other pages within the same website. External linking is when we put link on one website to another website.

Why Internal linking is important?

Internal linking is very important for any website as:

• It increases the accessibility of the website for users & search engines. Search Engines like Google rewards you for doing things that make the website user’s experience easier and better

• It helps search engines & user to navigate the site easily

• It is a perfect strategy for giving an extra boost to specific pages for specific keywords

• It helps search engines to crawl deep web pages which are away from main menu, navigation bar or home page of the website

• Anchor links helps search engines to co-relate the pages with the overall theme of the website

Internal Linking to get the top ranking on Google or Other Search Engines

As said above Internal linking is very important but I have seen many websites where every 5^th-6th word is linked with other page of the website which actually looks very irritating. We should not mistreat this opportunity as spamming.

I have consolidated some best practices of Internal Linking which is good from Search Engines & Users point of view.

1- Utilize every opportunity of effective internal linking like add links in your navigation, header or footer as text links to all your important pages and main sections of the website.

2- Internal page linking thru dynamic drop down menu in DHTML or JavaScript is not a good way of linking as search engines cannot follow links created in JavaScript; they can only follow simple text links. We should use simple text links to link all internal pages of the website.

3- Every page of the website should be maximum 2 clicks away from the home page of the website. E-commerce sites are usually very big in size so in that case search engine might face problem in crawling & indexing all deep level pages without appropriate internal linking.

4- In some times it is not possible to link every page of the website with the main menu or header or footer of the website; in that case internal contextual linking thru web content is a good idea to enhance the accessibility of the site.

5- Try to use relevant keywords as anchor text instead of using “Click here” etc.

6- Always use the same URL when you are linking a specific page. For example, if you want to link your service page (www.example.com/service.html) from other pages of the site then you should always use the same URL. Some people use different URL to link the same page like sometime example.com/service.html & some time www.example.com/service.html, this can create canonicalization issue.

7- Use breadcrumb navigation on sites that will link to other pages often

8- All internal links should work properly. Broken links are not good from both users & search engines perspective.

9- Use site map with all important pages links. It will help search engines & users to search all level web pages. Sitemap is not only effective for SEO, but also has usability benefits.

10- Some web pages may be more popular in the search rankings and receive more links than the rest of your website. You can strengthen these weaker pages by including some contextual links to them from the stronger pages.

11- Check your server logs for 404 errors. fix any broken links and redirect old linked to pages to their new locations

12- Try to use absolute URLs for internal linking as it can help you when you’re reusing content across multiple protocols (such as http and https). Absolute URLs provide you with indirect benefits in unforeseen situations, such as when someone steals your copy and forgets to change the internal links. Absolute URLs also show you exactly where your links lead, whereas links using “…/somewhere.html” structures are ambiguous and, especially in deep-content sites, often cause links to break when pages are moved around. Absolute URLs provides the better control over optimization.

13- Linking page & text should have connection which is actually beneficial for the users. Linking should not be from SE’s point of view.

14- Pages which are not very important from users & search engines point of view should have nofollow attribute while linking with navigational part of the site, because thru linking with those less important pages we are passing our link PRs to pages that aren’t as important. For example: private policy pages, legal terms, thank you pages, shopping carts, sitemap etc. are not very important so we can put a nofollow tag on these pages. You can understand in this way, like you should put nofollow tags on those pages which are not important for (search engine result pages) SERPs as people might not come to your site thru those pages. Basically, every link that you put it, ask yourself “does that page/section need more link weight?”, and if the answer is no, nofollow it. Don’t go overboard though, or else you won’t have any internal links as far as the engines are concerned.

15- Find out a list of pages which are most important for you- from SE’s & Users’ perspective. Try to optimize the internal linking of these pages with appropriate anchor text. If you have several pages for the same product range like in case of e-commerce sites then link the main page to all other pages but you can put nofollow tags on less important pages. Always put a link back from deeper pages to the main page of that specific category.

A well structured internal linking pattern will help SE’s to navigate your site in a better way & in longer way it will help you to get sitelinks in Google.

I am sure these internal linking techniques will be very helpful in your site optimization in a better manner.

Please don’t forget to digg or stumble this article if you really find it helpful for others.

Go SEO!!

Google has again become generous & reveal some secrets about the use of images & their optimization. I hear a lot of the concerns, questions, thoughts, etc about image optimization.

You might have read many articles on the same topic….It might not be new to you but I found it helpful so thought to share it with all of you.

Images are important component of a website and you will be happy to know that images can bring lots of traffic to your sites, but we have to optimize our images to get the desired results.

Here are image optimization tips from Googlers:

We should use Alt attribute to optimize them, this attribute allows us to specify alternative text for the image if it cannot be displayed for some reason. Alt text (alt tag) is basically a brief description of the image.

It is useful, if a user is viewing your site on a browser that doesn’t support images, or is using alternative technologies, such as a screen reader, the contents of the alt attribute provide information about the picture. Similarly, if you’re using an image as a link, the alt text for that image will be treated similarly to the anchor text of a text link. However, Google don’t recommend using too many images for links in your site’s navigation when text links could serve the same purpose. Also, image optimization makes it easier for image search projects like Google Image Search to better understand your images.

Always use descriptive file names & avoid using image.jpeg, picture1.jpeg etc. For example: if you are inserting image of IBM printer then use the file name ibm-printer.jpeg or ibm-printer.gif etc. Don’t write lengthy file names but try to make it accurate.

Store images in a directory of their own, instead of having image files spread out in numerous directories and subdirectories across your domain; consider consolidating your images into a single directory (e.g. yourdomain.com/images/). This simplifies the path to your images.

Also, use commonly supported file types. Most browsers support JPEG, GIF, PNG, and BMP image formats. It’s also a good idea to have the extension of your filename match with the
File type.

Also, don’t forget to optimize PDF. You can also use PDF adds-ons from Mozilla that enable you to complete the PDF-Object metadata, place links inside PDFs which did not previously have them.

It is really important to make the site structure as simple as possible to make it search engine & user friendly. Content should be organized logically with proper hierarchy. When we are talking of site structure & content management, we should not close our eyes to URLs of the web pages. URLs should be constructed with readable words without so many session IDs, so that human eyes & search engines can read them easily & can also get the idea of the hierarchy of the web pages. For example, if you’re searching for information about Pomeranian Dogs, a URL like http://example.com/dogs/pomeranian will help you decide whether to click that link. A URL like http://www.example.com/index.php?id_bread=360&sid=3a5ebc944f41daa6f849f730f1 is much less appealing to users. Also, search engines are not comfortable with long dynamic URLs with lots of session IDs.

Consider using punctuation in your URLs.

The URL http://www.example.com/general-science.html is much more useful to us than http://www.example.com/ generalscience.html. It is always advisable to use hyphens (-) instead of underscores (_) in URLs.

Excessively complex URLs, with multiple parameters or too many session IDs, can cause a problems for SE crawlers by creating unnecessarily high numbers of URLs that point to identical or similar content on your site. As a result, SE crawling software may consume much more bandwidth than necessary, or may be unable to completely index all the content on your site.

Also long dynamic and complex URLs are difficult to repeat or remember and did not provide any clues for average users as to what a particular resource actually contains. SE’s like Google indexes dynamically generated webpages, including .asp pages, .php pages, and pages with question marks in their URLs. However, these pages can cause problems for SE crawler and may be ignored.

Some best practices to make URLs Search Engine Friendly

• As said above, don not make the URLs too long & make them static with technologies like mod_rewrite for Apache and ISAPI_rewrite for Microsoft. (Note: If you do this, please be sure to include a robots.txt file that disallows the dynamic pages in order to ensure that these pages aren’t seen as having duplicate content.) SE friendly URL is really a important factor of crawling & ranking of the web page. This is also good from other SEO point of view like in case of link building process many directories does not allow very long & dynamic URLs. Also, when people naturally put links then they always give consideration to the URL structure.

• Wherever possible, try to avoid the use of session IDs in URLs. Consider using cookies instead. Try to shorten URLs by trimming unnecessary parameters.

• Try to use relevant keyword If your page is targeting a specific term or phrase (But please don’t try to do spamming with this).

• Consider using a robots.txt file to block SE’s access to problematic URLs. We should consider blocking dynamic URLs, such as URLs that generate search results, or URLs that can create infinite spaces etc.

• Don’t try to make URL’s case sensitive as they can accept both uppercase and lowercase characters.

• Last but not the least, you should create & submit a detailed Sitemap with all important URLs of the site. This is an easy way for you to submit all your URLs to the SE index and get detailed reports about the visibility of your pages.

Wondering how to promote a blog with DIY techniques? If yes, then you are at the right place…

Here are some techniques which can help you to increase the quality visits to your blog & the most important thing is that you can try it all by yourself.. no more need to invest money for promotion

11 effective ways to increase traffic to your blog

Content is the back bone of your blog

The most important thing is the Content Quality. Visitors wants unique & useful content which can help them so if you are helping others with your quality content then they will definitely appriciate it & will come again. To increse the new visit & to keep the current visitors, your content has to be very good. Quality content can help you in your link baiting activity also, to create the buzz in the industry. Content is the only way of viral marketing, people will automatically come to your blog. Alos it will increase your RSS feed subscribers ?

Update your blog frequently

In this dynamic environment all of us needs to be very active. Visitors will not like if they find that the blog is dead, means it is not updated for many weeks. Everyone need updated information to cope up with the competiton & stay ahead.

Try to update your blog twice in a week or atleast 1 post in week with new content. If you can update it on daily basis then nothing like it. Unfortunately, it is not possible for me because of the busy schedule however I always try to update my blog at least in a week on regular basis.

Be a part of Blogsphere- Submit your Blog in to Blog Directories & Search Engines

The collective community of all blogs is known as the blogosphere. To increase the back links, visits & rankings of your blog you should submit your blog into blog search engines, blogging communities & blog directories. Several blog search engines are used to search blog contents, such as Bloglines, BlogScope, and Technorati. Similarly, Several online communities exist that connect people to blogs and bloggers to other bloggers, including BlogCatalog and MyBlogLog.
There are 100’s of free blog directory available on the internet where you can easily submit your blog in a minute, but try to manual submissions in to most appropriate category only.

Don’t Forget to Ping (and Tag Appropriately)

Blog search engines & communities like Technorati, provides current information on both popular searches and tags used to categorize blog postings. Don’t forget to tag your blog.
Ping the major RSS feed and Blog search engines each time you post. This can be configured with blog software like WordPress to work automatically, or you can do this manually with services like Pingomatic or Pingoat.

Make Your Blog Search-Engine Friendly

Don’t forget to optimize your blog post by placing accurate & descriptive tags. Also take care of navigation, accessibility & internal linking of the pages. There are several plug-ins available which actually makes bloggers life easy. Also, create a sitemap for your blog & submit that in to major search engines like in Google thru webmaster tool. (In my next post I will deeply describe WordPress blog optimization techniques).

Promote Your RSS Feed

Create RSS feed for your blog & make it easily accessible to the visitors. Also, you should submit your feed URL in to various RSS submission sites.
There are many people who perfer to read blog posts via email & might want to subscribe your blog also. Offer them the option of email subscription so that they can get the mail in their inbox as soon as you update it.
There are several free services available for this including: Feedburner, FeedBlitz & more.

Encourage Comments, Trackbacks and Pingbacks

Always support comments on your blog to increase participation & involvement. If anyone is asking something from you thru comment box then always try to respond them.
Trackbacks and Pingbacks also helpful for your blog as readers of other blogs may follow pingback/trackback notifications back to your site & back links increase the number of external links to your site, which increases your search engine rankings.

Comment on Other Blogs

Start reading others blog in your niche & make useful comments. Name box phrase will be linked to the blog URL that you enter. It is advisable to use your blog name for anchor text. Don’t try spamming using comments that offer no value to the blog post. With this you can get the back links from Do Follow Blogs.

Participate in Forums & Discussion Boards

Join forums of your niche & actively participate. Always give genuine inputs which make sense & are helpful for others. Participation just because of marketing point of view can hurt your credibility. Do follow forums also helpful in getting link back from signature column.
In forums you also have an option to put RSS feed of your blog which will highlight your current post in every thread where you participate.

Promote Social Bookmarking and Networking

Give the option of easy bookmarking to all your visitors. Put social bookmarking buttons on each post of your site. These buttons are also helpful in viral marketing. Like if someone book mark your blog on del.icio.us or digg or stumble your post then your content will automatically get publicized without any effort.

Networking is the KEY

The ultimate trick to promote the blog is Networking, Networing & Networking. You can also do some offline marketing to promote your online blog like you can publish your blog url on your business card to catch the attantion. Also, you can participate the local network of bloggers in your area or can attend bloggers meets, conferences etc.

Conclusion

Be clear about your writing, style & your purpose.

Try to be as create as you can in every aspect including visual appeal, content & writing style.

Make your blog easy to navigate for both Search Engines & Visitors.

Engage your readers, establish a blogging schedule & maintain proper frequency.

No matter how much optimization you are doing for your blog but there is no alternate for quality content. Blog optimization is only as effective as the quality and usefulness of the content you’re optimizing.

In today’s competitive world of online industry, every one is looking for an efficient medium to get popularize. Advertisers are spending a huge amount on various activities just to get more & more traffic. But many advertisers are overlooking some great medium to get free publicity. “Article Marketing” is one of them. Yesterday, when I was suggesting this activity to one of my client for his web promotion then he simply said NO. He said that these kind of free promotions are of no use as they drive very less or no traffic. But I am not agreeing with this statement!!!!!

My past experience is totally defeating this statement. Article Marketing is an amazingly good way to get free advertising & publicity. It helps to get many free & targeted visitors to the websites, if done in right way.

Article Marketing is about writing quality original articles to promote you, your business, your products and your organization. It’s basically a pre-sales activity. It’s about exposure and pre-qualified traffic/visitor attraction back to your website.

To attain maximum benefit from Article Marketing, we have to take care of some factors which actually decide the success or failure of your marketing strategy.

Important Factors for Article Marketing:

• Original & Information Rich Content: Create original content with useful information for others. Don’t try to use selling pitch in your language. Now, your question can be- When we are here just for marketing then why we should not use selling pitch? That’s right, we all are here for marketing but there are so many advertisers in the same industry or niche so how users will find which one is the best for them. So, we have to prove our authenticity by our quality, original & information rich article content and it will market itself more successfully if written in a “non-sales” manner. Your quality & expertise will speak for you.

• Write effective & relevant Titles: Title plays a very important role in Advertising. There is no use of even a good article if people are not ready to open or read it. The Title decides almost 85-95% of the success of the article. Article title should be keyword rich, should be very appealing & should offer readers a glimpse of the content with their first glance. It should immediately capture the interest of your intended audience and motivate them to read further. I have seen many decent articles which are neglected because of bad title.

• Take care of Body content: The key concept is to use your article body to share your unique expertise. The Resource Box at the bottom of the article submission page is where you provide a link back to your website.”The Article Body Is Where You Give;
  The Resource Box Is Where You Take”

  -Christopher Knight
  CEO of EzineArticles.com

  Provide just enough information in the resource box to whet your readers’ appetite for more and they will be more inclined to visit your site. Make sure the information in your article body relates to the information in your resource box. Once at your site, you have the opportunity to deliver your pitch.

• Try to avoid using technical terms (Jargons): Try to use very simple & easy language so that every one can understand it. If you are writing on any industrial topic or technical thing then you can use Jargons but at that time take care of your tone & try to make the overall language easy to understand for all.

• Take care of information flow: Information should be in proper flow. It should not be randomly placed without any context. Every sentence should have sense & should complement the whole theme.

• Font Type/ Style: Use Bold and Italics Occasionally. It should be use only to draw readers attention to important information only.

• Submit your articles in to top article directories: Submit your article in many different article directories. You can find a good list of free article directories on the net. This will increases the chances of getting more back links & more visitors.

• Take care of Category: Always submit your content/ articles in to relevant category only. Also take care of the quality of article directories otherwise you will not be helpful to drive any traffic. Ezinearticles.com is the best article directory which can actually drive 1000’s of visitors to your site.

• Take care of Submission Guidelines: Many people don’t read the guidelines before submitting the articles in to article directories, which result in to rejection. We should carefully read all guidelines & take care of the quality standards.

• Author/ Resource Box: This is the part which you can use to market yourself & to get back links also. We should try to optimize our resource box to get maximum benefit out of it. Always use “call to action” phrase in your resource box as it is the selling/advertising portion for you. Try to differentiate you & your services from others. Highlight your USP & don’t forget to mention the exact URL of your website.

These are some of the most important factors which we all should take care of to get publicity from Article Marketing.

Try these tips & it will change your traffic status.

Please leave your comments or feedback about these tips.

Thanks for your time!

Which browser do you use? Which is the best browser? These are some of the common question which many people asked me.

Well as a SEO specialist my answer is very obvious…”FIREFOX” , though all browsers are important for graphic & web designers as they have to check their design, work & functionality on each & every browser. They have to check the compatibility of the site on each.

Anyways..I really like FireFox because it has many great Plugings that makes my work easy & helps in quick SEO analysis.
If you are an expert or just starting to learn SEO, these Firefox plugins are great. I use the majority of these SEO Firefox plugins on a daily basis, if not more often.
Here’s a listing of the best plugins available for SEO work:

Mahalo Share: Share and recommend Web pages across many different services; recommend a link once and have it automatically posted to any of Twitter, del.icio.us, MySpace, Ma.gnolia, Jaiku, your Tumblr blog, Facebook, Pownce, StumbleUpon, Mahalo, Faves, or Google Bookmarks.

Clipmarks: Your clips are saved on clipmarks.com and can easily be syndicated to FriendFeed, Twitter, Facebook or other sites. You can also post anything you clip directly to your blog (supports Wordpress, Blogger, Typepad and more) or send it directly to friends or co-workers via email. Your clip collection is accessible from any computer with an internet connection, including your iPhone, Blackberry, or other mobile device.

SeoQuake: Seoquake is a Mozilla Firefox extension aimed primarily at helping web masters who deal with search engine optimization and internet promotion of web sites. General set of parameters consists of such parameters as:

Google PR (Google PageRank of current page)

Google Index (Number of indexed pages. Google version)

Google link (Number of links, pointed to the current page. Google version (Except links from concerned domain))

And similar parameters for many other search engines (Yahoo, MNS, Yandex, Rambler, Baidu) and some other miscellaneous parameters.

LinkChecker: Check the validity of links on any webpage.

SEOpen 0.8: Provides some basic tools to help with search engine optimization, including Google backlinks, yahoo backlinks, PageRank check, http header viewer, and more. All features are available by right-clicking on an open area of a web page, or by using the included toolbar.

Search Synchronizer 1.3.0.3: Synchronizes the firefox searchbox 16 default search engines, and the ability for you to add more!
So when you search for something from the google website, for example, the firefox searchbox shall automatically show that search. Works with:
-Google
-Yahoo
-MSN
-Ask.com
-and 12 others!

SearchStatus 1.25: Display the Google PageRank, Alexa rank and Compete ranking anywhere in your browser, along with fast keyword density analyser, keyword/nofollow highlighting, backward/related links, Alexa info and more.

RankQuest SEO Toolbar 3.9.2: RankQuest SEO(Search Engine Optimization) Toolbar provides you quick access to more than 30 intuitive SEO tools. Alexa Rank and Page Rank provided by Alexa and Google respectively ensure the popularity of the site. Once you download and install the SEO Toolbar you are only one or two clicks away from carrying out most of your day to day SEO operations.

FireFTP 0.99.1: FireFTP is a free, secure, cross-platform FTP client for Mozilla Firefox which provides easy and intuitive access to FTP servers.

About This Site 1.1: One-click access to web site metadata – traffic, related and linked pages, and more – added to the Tools menu and context menu.

Page validator 0.3.3: Validates a page using the W3C Markup Validation Service. This is a simple extension that will work only for online pages.

SEO Link Analysis 1.0.3: Adds display of PageRank, linktext and nofollow links to external links in Google Webmaster Tools, Yahoo! Site Explorer and Microsoft Webmaster Portal

Google Global 2.0.1: Google Global allows users to see organic and paid Google search results as they appear in different countries, cities, regions, ZIP codes and IP addresses.

Google Pagerank Status 0.9.3: Display the google pagerank in your browser’s status bar.

Web Developer 1.1.6: Adds a menu and a toolbar with various web developer tools.

StumbleUpon 3.23: With StumbleUpon you can also connect with friends and share your discoveries, meet people that have similar interests, and check out what other people are discovering.

Bookmark Duplicate Detector 0.6.4: Detects Duplicate Bookmarks when bookmarks are added and specify where the previous URL is. You can also search and delete duplicates URL already in your Bookmarks.

del.icio.us Complete 1.3: del.icio.us is a social bookmarks manager. It allows you to easily add sites you like to your personal collection of links, to categorize those sites with keywords, and to share your collection not only between your own browsers and machines, but also with others.

This extension is not only a sidebar it provides an excellent post dialog as well.
Social Media for Firefox : A submission on Digg, Reddit, StumbleUpon, or Delicious is sometimes a good candidate for submission to the others. This add-on makes saves you the time of checking if an item has already been submitted by showing vote counts right on the home pages of these social bookmarking sites.

In addition, vote counts are shown in the Firefox status bar as you move from page to page again saving you the trouble of going through the bookmarking process if someone has beat you to it.

Compete.com: The Compete Toolbar automatically creates three alerts for every web site you visit:

Trust Scores: help you experience a safer web by warning you of potentially malicious (spyware, phishing) web sites

Site Profiles: tell you how popular the web site is, its rank, and how fast it is growing

Deal Light: automatically lights up if there are any special promotions or coupons that can save you money on the web site.

I am sure these plugins will increase your SEO efficiency.