A Useful Fix for Duplicate Content Issues

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 viagra for sale 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 <head> section:

<link rel="canonical" href="http://www.sample.com/website_page.php" />

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

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.

How to Use Google Alerts for Small Business

Google Alerts is a free service by Google where you receive email updates about keywords of your choice as and when they appear online – in news, blogs, websites etc. Google Alerts help you keep track

of your industry, your competition and most importantly the websites that talk about your company. BusinessInfoguide.com has a comprehensive article that suggests 10 ways of getting the best out of Google Alerts for your business.

#1. Personal name, Business name, Domain name – Set alerts for these to know about who is talking about you, your business where.

#2. Blogs – If you blog or submit articles to other blogs, you can keep track about where your articles are appearing.

#3. Industry & Competitive Research – You can know about the current happenings in your industry and know what your competition is upto.

#4. Client Research – You can create alerts to find who is looking for the services you provide. You can also keep up with the activities of your existing or potential client