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.

SEO for Business Owners Webinar: Video

Finally the much awaited webinar video is here! For all those of you who couldn’t make it to our webinar on May 19th, here’s the recorded version of the webcast:

You can also download the slides of the presentation from here. Here’s also a great opportunity for you 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

Hope you enjoy the video. Do let us know your thoughts and feedback!

Relevant Links to this post:

Webinar: SEO for Business Owners

Increase Page Rank using p2w2’s link building services

SEO for Business Owners Webinar: Recap

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!

SEO: A Quick Primer on the Difference Between Ecommerce and Content Sites – On Amex Open Forum

Did you know that on the Web, 4 seconds is all the time you get to capture a visitor’s attention? Find that fact astonishing? Well, read

more to know how you can get the best out of those critical 4 seconds.

Gone are the times when an ice-breaker topic was “Does your company do SEO?” Now the question has become downright simple – “Which SEO are you?” This in some sense, reflects the inevitability of SEO as a part of

any company’s overall marketing strategy. We as a company, realize the importance of SEO. Learning how to optimize for search engines is a long-term process, just like SEO itself. Based on our learnings,  Chaitanya recently wrote an article on AMEX Open Forum titled SEO: A Quick Primer on the Difference Between Ecommerce and Content Sites.
The article talks about the following:

1. Difference in SEO strategies for Ecommerce sites and content sites

2. Importance of good, targeted landing pages. (To know more about landing page optimization, check out this post)

3. Importance of backlinking

You can read the entire article here. Do let us know your thoughts and feedback!

P.S: Check out our Link Building page to know more about p2w2’s link building services!