p2w2 blog » SEO

A Useful Fix for Duplicate Content Issues

Iswarya — Wed, 07 Jul 2010 13:16:57 +0000

I recently came across the concept of canonical URLs. It’s a useful fix for duplicate content issues within your site.

Say you have two different versions of the same web page, with very similar content. Maybe you use one of them is actually present in the navigation links in your website and the other is a landing page for your PPC ads. But obviously you wouldn’t want your page rankings and other metrics to be split between those two. An easy solution for this is to mark the “more important” page as a “canonical page” . According to the definition in Google Webmaster Tools Help , “a canonical page is the preferred version of a set of pages with highly similar content.”

So how do you mark a page as canonical?

It’s very simple, very similar to the concept of nofollow blogs. Lets consider the example I gave before. You have two similar pages in your website, one is an actual page in the website and another is a duplicate you use for PPC ads.

http://sample.com/website_page.php

http://sample.com/landing_ads.php

In this case, the more important page of the two is obviously “website_page.php”. So within the HTML code of “landing_ads.php”, all you have to do is add the following code in the section:

When the search engine spider is crawling “landing_ads.php”, the canonical tag will instruct the spider that this page is simply a copy of “website_page.php”and that whatever backlinks or traffic metrics this page has should point back to the “preferred page”, or in our case, “website_page.php”.

Technically, this seems similar to a 301 redirect, though there are subtle differences in the way both work. A canonical tag is mainly for the benefit of a search engine, as opposed to a redirect which is intended for end users. There’s a good SEOmoz article in that explains this concept very well.

Are there some more useful other on-page optimization practices that you follow for your site? Do let us know in the comments section!

How to Improve Google AdWords Quality Score

Iswarya — Mon, 21 Jun 2010 14:15:14 +0000

A couple of weeks back, I attended a webinar on improving Quality Score of Google AdWords, hosted by WordStream, a search engine marketing software company. Quality Score is a numerical measure of how well your Google ads are performing, and is thereby used to determine your ad position as well as your cost per click. Quality Score could be broadly thought as a sum component of all these factors:

Click Through Rate (Number of Clicks/Number of Impressions)
Relevance of Ad to keywords
Landing Page
Other Factors

The next part of the webinar focused on ways to achieve a better Quality Score. Some of the things you can do:

1. Showing ads only to targeted audience will bring down the number of times your ad is shown (impressions), and therefore improve your CTR. Some of the things you could do is filter out showing your ads by geography, day/night time (based on previous performance), making use of phrase/broad/exact search filters and implementing negative keywords for your campaign.

2. Write good quality ad text so that more people will click on your ads. For more information, check out this post on how to write good copywriting text.

3. Use targeted, long tail keywords and bind the keywords tightly to the ad text.

4. Maintain a good keyword density within your landing page.

The slides of the presentation are available here. Do you think there are more ways to optimize your AdWords performance? Do let us know in the comments section!

P.S: For more information on link building, social media and SEO/SEM check out our link building and SEO services.

SEO for Business Owners Webinar: Recap

Iswarya — Fri, 21 May 2010 10:49:58 +0000

We hosted our webinar on SEO for Business Owners this Wednesday. We’re glad to inform that a lot of the attendees found it useful and informative.

Here’s some of the feedback we got:

“Listening to great webinar SEO for Business Owners #p2w2″

“Chaitanya, thanks for your webinar. Very informative.”

“Everyone should buy Chaitanya Sagar’s ebook due out June 1. GET IT!”

“Attending a great webinar on SEO on #p2w2″

On popular demand, we have also put up the presentation slides for your information. You can check it out here. We had also recorded our webcast and I will be uploading the video soon! Look out for it!

For those of you who missed out on the webinar, don’t worry. Here’s a great chance for you to get to pre-order our SEO ebook that will be released on June 1, 2010. All the information presented in the webinar, will be available to you in a convenient, readable format complete with all the links and tools presented in the webinar!
http://www.p2w2.com/seo-for-business-owners.php#pre-order

Don’t miss our next SEO webinar on June 16th. Do send us your suggestions and questions in comments to this post. We would love to hear from you!

Free Webinar: SEO for Business Owners, May 19th

Iswarya — Wed, 12 May 2010 12:25:02 +0000

On popular demand, we are re-hosting our SEO webinar!

Want to cut down PPC marketing costs? Improve conversion? Or just learn what is SEO? Here’s a great opportunity for all that and more! We are hosting our webinar on SEO for business owners on 19th May. Learn more about the webinar at this link:

http://www.p2w2.com/SEO-for-business-owners.php

Did you just ask how much the cost of each ticket is? Wait for it – the webinar is all for free! It can’t get any better, can it?

All you need to click Register on this/SEO-for-business-owners.php page or just drop in a mail to iswarya[AT]p2w2[DOT]com with the subject “RSVP to SEO Webinar”.

Looking forward to seeing you at the webinar!

5 Easy Ways to Avoid Backlinking Spam

Iswarya — Wed, 05 May 2010 13:52:11 +0000

SEO – love it or hate it, you can’t just ignore it. Whether you are doing SEO for your website yourself, or getting it outsourced, you would definitely be aware of link building. Speaking of which, one of the most frequent issues that you have to deal with is avoid getting marked as spam, especially when you are trying to get links from blog comments. Writing good comments is not rocket science, all it requires is some additional effort from you. Read on to know what kind of quality standards you should maintain to get some good quality links.

1. Thou shalt not spam
The blogger is giving you a valuable link. So, the least you can do is not spam. I have seen instances where people just visit our blog just in order to get a link from the comment. They write promotional stuff about their website without even bothering to read through the post! There is no way such a comment is going to get approved.

2. Don’t be greedy
Just because a blog is dofollow doesn’t mean you can try to get as many links as possible. Don’t stuff up your comment with links. In fact unless you are pointing out to some resource that might be relevant, don’t use links in the comment at all. After all, you are already getting a link from the URL field.

3. The blogger is human too!
Spare some effort to actually read the post. Doing this will actually create a favorable impression about you, and you might even end up establishing a good relationship with the blogger.

4. Say something of substance
Try to leave some insightful comment rather than a generic “Nice!”, “Good blog!”,etc. As I mentioned earlier, read the post and contribute something of essence. If you don’t have anything useful to say, do not to comment at all.

5. Be a nice person
You don’t necessarily have to agree to whatever the blogger says. Even if you are contradicting him/her, there is no need to criticize the post overly. Put down your arguments politely, in a concise and clear fashion.

Follow these steps for quality link building, and you will see that you will observe the difference yourself!

Want quality link builders? Check out our services:
www.p2w2.com/link-building.php