Posts Tagged ‘search engine optimization’

Importance Of Area SEO Strategies For Business

Thursday, July 2nd, 2009

Localized searches on search engines are becoming more and more widespread within the Area SEO community. Customers are choosing to use Search engines such as Google, Yahoo, MSN, AOL, and the rest over their traditional paper Yellow Pages. It takes too much time and effort these days to open the Paper directory and search and search alphabetically for the business you would like to find.
Some users stick to online yellow pages and search for a topic of interest. Most searchers may not be seeking a business but information. When they search online they may end up finding area seo content within a page full of information that they are searching for and end up using or contacting the business because it is where they located their pertinent area seo information.
Out comes the search engine philosophy of Localized Area SEO. A potential customer opens his or her favorite search engine and types in their city, state county or zip and the business type or information they are searching for. Based on this it is important to see how a company must be optimized for their local seo area. If they are not listed in the search engines on the first page and are not marketed for their Neighborhood, Area, City, or state there is little or no chance of them being found by a searcher online. Regardless of the business type model it has become required to be found online when someone is searching.
There are also at least two types of possible searches and results being found online these days. The customer is either looking for a localized search based on location or a general search based on web search. In an area seo perspective both of these are equally important. For customers searching for businesses online Localized search becomes important to be listed with directories for local businesses. When a customer searches for information based on a local area seo search web search localization becomes the key target. When customers for instance in Palm Coast Florida seek to find a local Seo professional so they can meet and communicate their desires in person, they would type in Palm Coast SEO. The same obviously applies to all locals in the nearby area such as Daytona SEO. Since geographically these areas Palm Coast and Daytona are fairly close, a marketing professional would chose to target both of them equally. A localized customer in search of an seo company would not type Florida SEO and the market is too general and would include results they would not be interested in.
For an SEO professional although it may be a national market that they strive to achieve it is equally important to be listed in their localized search so that potential local customers will be able to locate their products and know they are locally listed.
In part two of Local Area SEO we will discuss the importance of understanding the customers target market to achieve best results for Area SEO.

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Search Engine Optimization Isn’t Rocket Science

Wednesday, July 1st, 2009

Introduction
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So you have completed your website, great! Now how are you going to attract visitors? If you do not let them know you’re there, your visitors will never find find you. How are you going to sell products when users don’t know that you exist? SEO will make your website noticeable on the internet, and this small guide will help you bring targeted visitors to your website.

Optimize your website
The most important part of your website is quality content. Search engines (such as google) will crawl your content and index it into a database. If your content does not match the product you are selling, you will not attract targeted visitors. It is therefore very important that you choose your (key)words very carefully. For instance, if you sell calculators on the internet, make sure you mention the words calculator, calc, math and more calculator related words on your website. However, be careful not to mention the words too often, or search engines might think your website is spam, which will result in a very low rank (search engine position) within the search results.

Linkbuilding
When more websites link to your site, the more attention you will get from search engines, which results in higher ranking. When you create and receive links from other websites to your website, make sure important keywords are used as anchor keywords in the hyperlink. If you sell calculators online, use a link such as; “buy calculator” instead of “click here”.

Target your audience
Leave your link on website where your potential customers meet, for instance forums or discussion boards related to your website. Do not spam your website as this will be noticed by crawlers and will eventually result in a blacklist entry.

Offline targeting
Be sure to market your website offline as well. Advertise in local newspapers, tell everyone about your website, etc.

Add a sitemap to your website When you want search engines to crawl your entire website, the best thing to do is adding a sitemap to your website.

Make sure searchbots can read your website
Searchbots can only read plain text.websites. No matter how beautiful your flash animation is, searchbots cannot read the content inside that animation. Therefore, try to avoid Flash animations on your website when there is content involved. Same story goes for JavaScript.

Do NOT use frames
Never use frames to design your website! Lots of search engines simply skip webpages with frames since they are a difficult to be seen apart from each other by visitors. For instance, if your framepage would consist of menu.html and content.html and your visitor would land on content.html, he would not have a menu to navigate through your website.

Stay away from bad neighbourhoods and don’t spam!
Do not be tempted into leaving your link on abandonned guestbooks, forums or spam your link on every website you can find. Do not exchange links with spammy websites (such as pharmacy websites) either. The risk exists that google will classify your website as a spamsite and will block your website from any search results.

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PPC Vs Natural Search – A Cost Comparison Case Study

Monday, June 29th, 2009

The attraction of Pay Per Click (PPC) online advertising is undeniable. Each click costs virtually nothing, you only pay for the clicks you get, and you set your own daily budget so you know exactly how much you’re going to spend. Most importantly, your listing appears instantly.

On the other hand, a high ranking in the natural search results seems unobtainable. There’s a perception that hundreds of thousands of other businesses are competing for your keywords, and that makes it seem like a real rat-race. And it also seems like such a big mountain to climb; it’s true that it can take months to reach the first page for your target keywords. To make matters worse, thousands of opportunistic (and some very dodgy) ‘SEO companies’ have emerged, looking to make a quick and big buck out of market naivety. So to CEOs, BDMs, marketing managers, webmasters, and business owners, the road to natural search ranking seems expensive, risky, and beset with traffic.

But does this mean you should forget natural search?

Definitely not!

Firstly, most user studies to date have found that people pay more attention to natural search results because they’re more relevant. That’s the foundation of the success of companies like Google and Yahoo (and the reason they keep their indexing rules a secret).

What’s more, it’s important to put things in perspective. Hundreds of thousands of other businesses may be competing for your keywords, but in most cases, they’re at least as confused and disheartened as you. So the sooner you figure out the real story, the sooner you’ll have the jump on them.

And yes, it can take a while to reach the top, but because your competition is – for the most part – traveling blind, your early progress will normally be quite quick. In fact, for most businesses, it’s not until you reach the top few pages that your progress will slow.

And again yes, there ARE some dodgy SEO companies out there. But there are also some very good ones. (Go to WebProNews.com and sign up to a forum if you want to find out who they are.) So long as you know the basics of SEO you won’t be taken for a ride. (See SEO for CEOs for a rundown of SEO basics in layperson’s terms.)

But let’s talk bottom line…

Is it more expensive to obtain a high ranking?

Certainly not! In comparison with other forms of advertising – even PPC in the long run – reaching the top of the rankings is NOT expensive. The following case study explains why.

CASE STUDY

For the past year, I’ve been working hard on the natural search results for my copywriting business, Divine Write. For my primary keyword, I’m now on page 1 of Google.com (out of approximately 900,000 search results). I’ve done this simply by writing helpful articles and submitting them for publication on the Internet. Luckily for me, I’m an SEO copywriter, so writing articles is all in a day’s work. But had I paid an SEO copywriter to write my articles for me, I’d have spent approximately USD$5,000.

Over the same period, I spent approximately USD$3,000 on Google AdWords (my ads appeared towards the top of the paid listings).

Now I hear what you’re saying; my natural search campaign definitely cost more in the first year than my AdWords campaign. But now that I’ve reached the top of Google.com, I’ve paused all my AdWords ads, so I’m not paying anything. If I hadn’t chased the natural search results, I’d have continued paying for AdWords, spending at least another USD$3,000 next year on AdWords, and another USD$3,000 the year after that, and so on.

Of course, I have to retain my high ranking. If I was paying someone to write my articles, that would involve an investment of approximately USD$1,000 per year (a saving of 67% each year).

So it breaks down like this:

Google AdWords investment: 2 yrs = $6,000, 3 yrs = $9,000, 4 yrs = $12,000, 5 yrs = $15,000

Natural search investment: 2 yrs = $6,000, 3 yrs = $7,000, 4 yrs = $8,000, 5 yrs = $9,000

Conclusion

Obviously the competition for keywords in the copywriting field isn’t as fierce as in a lot of other industries, so the actual dollar investment discussed in this case study may not apply directly to your business. The important thing to understand is that – over time – a high ranking in the natural search results can actually cost less than a high position in the (arguably less effective) paid listings.

Also, these figures are based on me submitting articles to various article banks on the Internet myself. (This is a routine task requiring little skill. You should be able to purchase a list of 50 or more article submit sites from your SEO copywriter or consultant for as little as USD$99.)

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Impact Of Press Release In SEO

Monday, June 29th, 2009

All companies want to brag something about their products or services. Owners always want to let the whole world know about their companies to get more customers and to increase their sales. This is where online marketing takes place.

You must have a good online marketing strategy to have a successful online business. There are lots of ways to capture the attention of your potential customers. You can have all the available advertising tools online such as advertising on the search engines, online advertisements, affiliate programs, newsletter distribution through email and a lot more.

One of the best ways for cost effective marketing is creating a press release for your site. There are many press release services available on the Internet, you can choose whether you like it to be free or paid. Of course there were lots of differences between those two services. On free press release services, the features are limited. Like on some press release distribution sites, you cannot insert HTML tags, and you cannot upload your images. On the other hand, paid press release services can have your release featured on their site. In short, your release can be more visible. But keep in mind that money alone will not guarantee that your press release is read by your targeted visitors. You must also have an appealing announcement to attract visitors and readers.

Creating a press release for your site is not enough, you have to take another step, which is publishing your release and getting it read by your targeted readers. Publishing a press release can help your search engine optimization work. By having your link on your release pointing to your site, you can acquire more backlinks and you can also boost your web site promotion.

Acquiring backlinks is very important in search engine optimization. The more backlinks you have, the greater the possibilities to have a higher page rank in Google. The higher your page rank, the greater the possibilities to have a higher search position for your particular keyword. The higher your search engine position, the more traffic you get for your site. Remember that most of the researches only click those links on the top pages. They wouldn’t waste their time searching on the 100th page. Search engines also rely on backlinks to determine how popular a website is. The more websites linking to your site is a good indication that your site is reliable and offers something useful to your visitors.

The main purpose of a press release is to let your products, services, or companies be known. In short, it’s about promotion. Create an interesting and attractive press release and choose a good press release distribution site for better promotion and for successful search engine optimization.

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I, Robot: How Do Search Engine Spiders And Robots Work?

Monday, June 29th, 2009

Some internet surfers still hold on to the mistaken belief that actual people visit each and every website and then input it for inclusion in the search engine’s database. Imagine, if these were true! With billions of websites available on the internet and with a majority of these sites offering fresh content it will take thousands of people to achieve the tasks made by search engine spiders and robots – and even then they won’t be as efficient or as thorough.

Search engine spiders and robots are pieces of code or software that have only one aim – seek content on the internet and within each and every individual web page out there. These tools have a very important role in how effectively search engines operate.

Search engine spiders and robots visit websites and get the necessary information that it needs to determine the nature and content of the website and then adds the data to the search engine’s index. Search engine spiders and robots follow links from one website to another so that it can consistently and infinitely gather the necessary information. The ultimate goal of search engine spiders and robots is to compile a comprehensive and valuable database that can deliver the most relevant results to the search queries of visitors.

But how exactly do search engine spiders and robots work?

The whole process begins when a web page is sent to a search engine for submission. The submitted URL is added to the queue of websites that will be visited by the search engine spider. Submissions can be optional though because most spiders will be able to find the content in a web page if other websites link to the page. This is the reason why it is a good idea to build reciprocal links with other website. By enhancing the link popularity of your website and getting links from other sites that have the same topic as your website.

When the search engine spider robot visits the website, it checks if there is an existing robots.txt file. The file tells the robot which areas of the site are off limits to its probe – like certain directories that have no use for search engines. All search engine bots look for this text file so it is a good idea to put one even if it is blank.

The robots list and store all of the links found on a page and they follow each link to its destination website or page.

The robots then submit all of this information to the search engine, which in turn compiles the data received from all the bots and builds the search engine database. This part of the process already has the intervention of search engine engineers who write the algorithms employed in evaluating and scoring the information that the search engine bots compiled. The moment all of the information is added to the search engine database this information is already made available to search engine visitors who are making search queries in the search engine.

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How Broken Links Can Hurt Your Website

Saturday, June 20th, 2009

If your business has a website, most likely it’s constantly changing and evolving. This can be a good thing but how you handle these changes can make a dramatic difference in how effective your website becomes.

Some of your content may be time sensitive, such as information on special promotions, contests and things of that nature. Some content may no longer be relevant to your business, such as discontinued products or services. Most people’s first course of action in these cases would be to simply remove these pages and all internal links (links from your own website pointing to your own pages) so that there is no path to them. This is not the best approach and can result in less website traffic and also potentially affect your search engine rankings.

There is a strong possibility that other people have placed links on their website pointing to the removed pages. Some people may have even previously book marked the removed pages for future use. Once you’ve removed the pages you have eliminated these sources of prospects.

Search engines follow links to find websites and web pages. By removing these pages, you are removing the content that they have come to expect (once they’ve found and indexed it). If they are unable to find a number of pages that you have improperly removed from your server then they very often will leave your website. This can make getting your new pages indexed difficult and slow.

Fortunately, the solution is relatively simple. If you plan to remove a page from your website you would first set up a 301 redirect to another related page. For example if you had a page named “july-sale.htm” and it is now August, you would set your 301 redirect to automatically send all requests for that page directly to “august-sales.htm” instead. Once that is in place you can safely delete the page. If you’ve already deleted pages from your website without setting up 301 redirects you can still fix the problem. If you view your error logs on your web server you can find all of the 404 errors which are caused by requests for files that do not exist and then set up a 301 redirect for each missing file.

This ensures that when someone comes to a page that no longer exists, rather than getting an error message and leaving, they are instantly whisked away to the next most relevant page and you get the chance to turn them into a client or customer. It also ensures that when the search engines come looking for a page that no longer exists they are redirected to the next most relevant page causing them to spend more time crawling your website. It’s important to point out that some hosts do not offer the ability to set up these type of redirects and will recommend adding a java script to the page. This will not work for the search engines because they do not execute any scripts, and it will only work for a portion of visitors.

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Best Tips For Web Directory Submission Link Building Campaigns

Saturday, June 20th, 2009

The buzzword of the hour is ‘SEO’. It has transformed the architecture of sites, brought about many new jobs, and is now considered vitally important for those that want to take their online operations to the next level. In its simplest form, search engine optimization (or “SEO”) is about doing everything you can to boost your natural ranking in the major search engines. The algorithm that ranks your site (despite variations across engines) is a compilation of many different variables. There is no one magic secret or special key you can turn. The goal is really to check off as many variables as possible from that algorithm. The kicker is that, for the most part, we don’t actually know what is contained in these algorithms that are so important to us. We can, however, make educated guesses. And there are several aspects of SEO that most, if not all, industry professionals agree on. One of those factors is the importance of link-building.

The Internet was built upon links. Sites link to one another to guide users through relevant information. Since these links basically mean, “there’s relevant information on this site,” each link pointing towards your site counts as a “vote” towards it. These votes help improve your natural ranking, especially when coupled with a well-built SEO friendly site. The big question is, of course, how do I go about getting other sites to link mine? Fortunately, the answer is an easy one, because there are many well run search engine friendly directories that would be more than happy to link to your site as part of their directory.

But the most popular directories receive thousands of applications to review. As such, they develop rules and guidelines for your submission. These rules are put in place to ensure that the submission and approval process can flow as smoothly as possible, as well as to help the directory select only the sites that are, in fact, relevant. And so the question returns: how do I ensure that my site gets accepted into the high-quality, top web directories?

It is very easy to adhere to the rules of a web directory with very little effort. In addition, because the editors of any directory are really looking for the same things, the rules from web directory to web directory tend to be very similar.

Count Those Characters:
One of the big rules imposed by directories has to do with the length of your title, description and keywords. If there were no limit, some people would write an essay for descriptions and cram in every possible keyword. Let me assure you that no directory editor wants to review a site application that could be broken up into chapters! Directories impose restrictions that essentially force you to be straight to the point. You might not be able to say everything about your site, so pick the most important points and go with that. Before you start submitting anywhere, sit back and write a few well-formulated descriptions that span 100, 150, 200, and 250 characters. One of those four levels will generally work in any web directory you come across. Once that’s done, most of the hard work is out of the way. Now all you have to do is look for the character requirements, copy and paste your blurb of that length, and you’re all set. The same thing holds true for keywords, so prepare a few different options so that, come submission time, it’s just a matter of picking the right one.

Would You Approve A Spam Filled Site Application?
Do not spam your directory listings. That can’t be more clearly stated, yet for some reason, people still do it. You are never going to get listed in any human reviewed directory when you try this tactic. An example of this would be that if you sell widgets, when you submit your information you repeat the word ‘widgets’ in your title, description, and keywords as many times as possible. Typically comprehension takes a back seat as the focus becomes cramming the word in as many times as possible. Directory editors hate this and it’s a very easy rejection. If you think that even attempting to spam like this is helpful, you might want to think again. If you spend time submitting to web directories with poorly articulated, spam-filled information, you are going to get rejected. You’ve then wasted a lot of your time and gotten absolutely nothing in return.

Choose The Right Category:
Web directories are sorted by topic and editors typically take great pride in ensuring that everything stays well organized. A tiny little bit of effort on your part to choose the right category can vastly improve your chances of being listed without any delay. The reason is simply that if you are an editor and you want to approve a site, you probably only have to click one button. But, if that site chose the wrong category, then you need to edit the application to modify the category (and now the editor has to find the correct category in the hierarchy!), which takes more time. If you are the editor sitting there with thousands of applications to process, it’s much easier to click the ‘reject’ button than it is to start fumbling through categories. So, put yourself in their shoes and do them a favor, because ultimately it’s you and your site that stand to benefit when you are approved.

A successful web directory submission campaign is when you maximize your time so that you get listed in the most directories possible. By following the above tips, you can help ensure you get approved, which goes a long way towards achieving your goal. With everything pre-written and good intentions to play by the rules, you’ll be flying through your submission campaign in no time.

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Backlinks, Anyone?

Saturday, June 20th, 2009

In order to increase your search engine rankings, getting backlinks is important. But getting links from other sites can be tough. Here are 2 creative ways you can try to get more backlinks.

Start a Community of Websites
One of the easiest ways to gain backlinks is to start other websites and have them linked to yours. Blogs are a great way to get traffic because there’s no cost, they provide free traffic, and are easily searchable throughout the blogging community. I’ve seen other various websites that target a younger audience even using myspace as a source of traffic and backlinks. And the list goes on and on for other quick sites you can start with a good amount of traffic.

Email Campaigns
Some people are hesitant to do this because they think no one would ever go to their site if the email even gets opened, or they have no idea who to email a promotion letter to. While the person who doesn’t have an idea of his audience can easily fix this problem, I’d say for every website that has updated content that isn’t gibberish, somebody has to like it and for every email sent out, there is probably at least 10% that the email gets opened if you target your audience precisely. Give yourself some confidence, and keep in mind that none of these techniques would get your website blacklisted or has any risk to it, except for wasting your time. But if you have the time to waste, research on who your audience is, get a list of emails of your audience and compile it in an excel sheet, and start your email campaigns. One person that I work with has a job site, which gets employers and job seekers together. Well all job sites needed jobs, so he started emailing to a number of colleges and got links for Rutgers, Harvard, and other colleges across the nation. Doing this boosted his Google rankings from 2/10 to 6/10. Just keep in mind that 1 email will not do the trick. You need to keep emailing the people in your excel sheet, but change the content of the email each time you do so.

Unless you don’t a good amount of time to spend on getting backlinks, I wouldn’t worry about how well your methods are working. Most of the techniques listed above as well as others you might think of should give you some increase in traffic that would last a very long time, as well as boosting your search engine rankings. These things suck up a lot of time, but the rewards can be high.

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Off-Page Factors Affecting Your Position On Google Searches

Wednesday, June 17th, 2009

Different search engines use different algorithms to calculate where you appear on their search results. This article will focus on the factors that we believe affect your results on Google searches. One word of warning, Google does not publish its algorithms and is constantly changing and updating the way it views sites - so these are the guidelines for you to follow, rather than a definitive statement of the processes involved.

We will divide the major factors into two main types, namely, on-page and off-page factors. Basically, on-page factors are those things that you can do to improve your ranking by adapting the actual coding of your site. Off-page factors are those factors mainly relating to incoming links to your site. This article, the second of two will focus on off-page factors.

In terms, of off-page factors the areas we will cover are:

IBLs – inbound links to your site
Directory Listings – which directories feature your site
User Statistics – who visits your site and for how long

Inbound Links (IBLs)
Many of you may not be aware that many sites may be linking to your own site and sending new users and traffic to you. You can check who links to your site using an IBL checker, like the backlink checker that can be found on the free SEO Tools site www.datacoms.co.uk.

These checkers allow you to see which sites have linked to you as identified by Google, Yahoo and MSN. Interesting, the Google list is always smaller and more quirky than the other two. This is because Google has decided that pure volume of links is not a good measure of a site’s attractiveness since this metric can be spammed by the use of links farms, where unscrupulous webmasters can buy loads of links for free.

So Google uses other factors to check your site’s IBLs, and one of these is certainly pagerank. The concept of pagerank was developed by Google to rank sites across the web on a number of factors that overall aim to show how attractive a site is to potential viewers. Your site will have a pagerank, even if you don’t know about it. Again you can check your pagerank for free at www.datacoms.co.uk.

Sites with a pagerank or PR of 4 or more are considered worthy sites by Google and so a link from a site with PR 4 or above is more important to your site’s overall ranking. PR starts at 0 and goes to 10, with only sites like Microsoft, Apple, Google or NASA getting a perfect 10.

It is also very useful to get sites to link to you with consistent anchor text; this is the text description of your sites URL. So we try and use SEO Gurus for all out links, but some sites seem to take pleasure in changing this for us. The point is the more consistent the anchor text is the better you will be found. The old example of keying “miserable failure” into Google is a good one to demonstrate the power of consistent anchor text. This search gives George Bush’s biography on the Whitehouse site – no mention of “miserable failure” on the site, but it has many sites linking to it using those words as anchor text.

So try and get lots of sites of PR 4 or above linking to you, especially if the site has a similar theme to your own site. However, don’t grow your links too fast as Google sees this as spammy, and try and avoid reciprocal links where possible (these are links where each site agrees to link to each other). The best way to get links is with consistently good, well-written content that interests people.

Directory Listings
There are many directory listings sites on the internet, but some are much more important than others, because they are big and powerful with a high PR. Top of the list must be DMOZ, with a PR of 9. Also known as the Open Directory Project, DMOZ, is the largest, most comprehensive human-edited directory of the Web. It is constructed and maintained by a vast, global community of volunteer editors. It gets the name DMOZ from the acronym for Directory Mozilla, as it is administered by Netscape Communication Corporation. It costs you nothing to get your site onto DMOZ, except blood, sweat and tears – see www.datacoms.co.uk for more details. DMOZ is important because it is one of the places Google looks when deciding the importance of your site. Hence, a listing on DMOZ almost guarantees better search results performance.

Yahoo is probably the second most important listing, but costs $299 a year to list your site, again a PR of 9. There are many other sites, far too many to mention, that may be useful to you. Some are free, others ask for reciprocal links or a payment. It pays to be selective on your links and we have as yet not paid for any links. Interestingly, even without paying Yahoo you can get high on their searches if you have a listing on DMOZ, so worth persevering.

User Statistics
Google has developed a number of measures to record the amount of visitors your site and individual pages visited. How did they get there (keyword searches), what pages did they visit, how much time did they spend on each page, did they bookmark the site, etc.

After all, a true measure of where you should appear on the search results is how popular and interestingly your site is. The only real way you can have this is by having interesting, or in marketing jargon, “sticky” content. Many sites are trying to add news feeds, puzzles or quotes of the day to try and achieve a greater degree of stickiness. But, in our opinion the reason people come back to your site has to be the quality and quantity of information that you have presented and organised for easy access by them.

Content is king, long live content!

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How To Manage Duplicate Content In Your SEO

Friday, June 12th, 2009

This article will guide you through the main reasons why duplicate content is a bad thing for your site, how to avoid it, and most importantly, how to fix it. What it is important to understand initially, is that the duplicate content that counts against you is your own. What other sites do with your content is often out of your control, just like who links to you for the most part… Keeping that in mind.

How to determine if you have duplicate content.
When your content is duplicated you risk fragmentation of your rank, anchor text dilution, and lots of other negative effects. But how do you tell initially? Use the “value” factor. Ask yourself: Is there additional value to this content? Don’t just reproduce content for no reason. Is this version of the page basically a new one, or just a slight rewrite of the previous? Make sure you are adding unique value. Am I sending the engines a bad signal? They can identify our duplicate content candidates from numerous signals. Similar to ranking, the most popular are identified, and marked.

How to manage duplicate content versions.
Every site could have potential versions of duplicate content. This is fine. The key here is how to manage these. There are legitimate reasons to duplicate content, including: 1) Alternate document formats. When having content that is hosted as HTML, Word, PDF, etc. 2) Legitimate content syndication. The use of RSS feeds and others. 3) The use of common code. CSS, JavaScript, or any boilerplate elements.
In the first case, we may have alternative ways to deliver our content. We need to be able to choose a default format, and disallow the engines from the others, but still allowing the users access. We can do this by adding the proper code to the robots.txt file, and making sure we exclude any urls to these versions on our sitemaps as well. Talking about urls, you should use the nofollow attribute on your site also to get rid of duplicate pages, because other people can still link to them.
As far as the second case, if you have a page that consists of a rendering of an rss feed from another site – and 10 other sites also have pages based on that feed - then this could look like duplicate content to the search engines. So, the bottom line is that you probably are not at risk for duplication, unless a large portion of your site is based on them. And lastly, you should disallow any common code from getting indexed. With your CSS as an external file, make sure that you place it in a separate folder and exclude that folder from being crawled in your robots.txt and do the same for your JavaScript or any other common external code.

Additional notes on duplicate content.
Any URL has the potential to be counted by search engines. Two URLs referring to the same content will look like duplicated, unless you manage them properly. This includes again choosing the default one, and 301 redirecting the other ones to it.

By Utah SEO Jose Nunez

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