As a matter of SEO, avoiding duplicate content is crucial.  With our clients, many times what we find is that they have not purposely duplicated their content, but rather overlooked  problems with their site that cause their content to be accidentally duplicated.  This often occurs when pages or products are accessible via multiple URLs, due to categorization or poor organization.  This goes beyond a site that is accessible with and without the “www,” or with example.com AND example.com/index.html, it also affects many online businesses who have affiliates, link partners, and other people linking to their pages with affiliate-appended or mistyped URLs, as well as database-driven sites that have issues with differing versions of the same product or page showing up in multiple categories (each time with a different URL).   In these cases, the search engines can view the differing URLs as unique pages but with duplicate content, assigning a penalty or ignoring the pages altogether, but keeping the “juice” from incoming links separated among those pages.

Fortunately, a new link element announced last month and supported by all three major search engines could help to solve many of these issues, and give link builders, SEOs, and web masters a way to tell the search engines exactly what the “real” URL is.  This element, link rel=canonical, can be placed in the head section of any page to tell the search engines what the canonical URL for that page’s content is.  So if you have an article that appears in two or more places on your site, like example.com/article.html, and example.com/category/article.html, you can specify the former as the canonical URL, and avoid duplicate content and direct any link juice flowing to the latter to the real page for the article.

Originally announced at SMX West in early February and reported on various blogs, a follow-up post regarding the new element appeared on the Google Webmaster Blog on February 12, explaining its use and giving live examples, including Google’s “trusted tester” Wikia.com.  ClickZ’s Eric Dafforn also wrote a great article explaining the element and its uses in detail.

For those who want to implement the element themselves, simply place the following in the head section of the page you want to use it for:

<link rel=”canonical” href=”http://www.example.com/correct-url/” />

This will signal to the search engines that the original source of the page’s content on your site is whatever URL you place in the tag.  So if you have 3-4 versions of the URL whereby that page can be accessed, all links (both internal and external) that point to any version of the page will be credited to the specified canonical version of the page.

It will be interesting to see some of the changes that occur in the coming months for content management systems that have traditionally had problems with duplicating content, and whether or not they adopt the new element as a fix.  As for link builders like us, we will be doing our own tests to see how we can maximize its effect for focusing link juice on the best pages and driving rankings for the most competitive keywords.  For more on our link building services, contact us today.

One of the most overlooked aspects of link building, and SEO in general, is the process of choosing keywords. As with everything else in life, SEO is about opportunity costs.

- If I use this title, I can’t use that one.

- If I focus on ranking these keywords, these other keywords will be neglected.

- If I want to date this person, I can’t date that person… nevermind, bad example.

Well folks, that’s life, and you’ll just have to deal with it. Unless your name is Miley Cyrus, then you can take half-nude or Asian defaming pictures and rank for whatever you want. Generally you want to target 3-5 keywords per page. Anything more or less and your ratios might be a bit skewed. So what 3-5 keywords, and how do you find them? There are a ton of great tools out there that will give you an overwhelming list of keywords your propective buyers may or may not be interested in. The Google Keyword Tool is a great free resource, and although not as robust as other utilities, it is nonetheless free, and we like that. This is a great place to start. If you sell shoes, just type that in and grab yourself some good terms. Then type those in and see what you get. Once you have a good solid list of keywords that you think are relevant to your website and what you are trying to accomplish, it’s time to figure out which ones are the best.

If you have an older site with some existing sales data, then you already know some terms that give you more traffic, other terms that convert better, and some terms with amazingly high bounce rate. If you have this data it’s time to triage and get these narrowed down to the highest traffic and converting terms and focus on those. If you don’t have this data because you’re launching a new site or are just discovering the wonderful world of analytics then I recommend a magic 8ball and some Red Bull. Or you could try running a limited adwords PPC campaign and develop these numbers in a relatively short amount of time, whichever works best for you.

Ok, so now you have a good list of high traffic, high conversion keywords that you want to rank for. Make sure you prioritize these keywords based on your experience or inference as to which will bring in the most traffic, convert at the highest percentage, and have an adequate effort-to-reward ratio. In other words, you may assume that ranking for “running shoes” is going to bring you tons of traffic and convert great, and you’re probably right, but the amount of effort and time involved in getting to page 1 for that term is so high that you will likely not see a return on any investment you make toward that goal for some time. However, going for related but more specific keywords, which may bring in less traffic in direct comparison to the more general ones, is more likely to bring you business in the short term, while also helping to set up a run at the bigger keywords later. For more on this strategy, see this article from Searchengineland on SEOing the “long tail”.

Choosing what keywords you want to rank for is an essential, if not the most essential, phase in any SEO or link building effort.  Much like a military campaign, planning what to attack and when is just as important as executing the attack.