1. Google recommends using a 301 (or 302) redirect rule to enforce HTTPS – so don’t try to get away with a canonical. Check if you or your client is using a canonical tag, which is a much weaker signal.Also, from a user perspective it does not protect users who may land on the non-secure version of a page. Using a redirect rule ensures that users are always pushed to the secure version of your pages and unable to access non-secure pages.Cybersecurity awareness is becoming more widespread and your users may actually look for the HTTPS. If it’s not there, do you think they are more likely to try to edit the URL and add the S? Or just play it safe and hit the back button? Don’t take your chances. Enforce with 301 redirect.
2. Be sure to consider WWW and non-WWW versions of the website in the redirect rule used to enforce HTTPS. Check for older redirect rules used to enforce WWW. If those are left in place, a users who lands on any secure HTTPS non-www page could be redirected to the non-secure version with WWW inserted. Any old rules should be replaced with a set of rules to look for every variation of the website: HTTPS vs HTTP in combination with WWW vs non-WWW.
3. Your rule should attempt to enforce HTTPS and WWW in as few redirect hops as possible. The thinking here is that individual pages may already have more than one hop now — or in the future. Redirect rules usually get implemented before individual page redirect rules. So if Google stops following long chain redirects after the 4th or 5th hop, that last hop is probably the target page.  You can use Screaming Frog, DeepCrawl or Moz Crawl Test to find and address long redirect chains. But over the next year, a valuable page could be moved 3 times and get 3 redirect hops added to whatever rules are in place.It is better to have more rules and fewer hops. For example, use separate rules to look for HTTP WWW, HTTP non-WWW and HTTPS non-WWW so that each variation only uses one redirect hop to enforce HTTPS with WWW. Sometimes developers want to minimize what is in the htaccess file (or whatever file houses redirects) to keep the site speed up. However, the bulk is generally caused by having a lot of individual page redirects for old pages. Redirect rules are by nature efficient because one line of code is used for multiple URLs. You can make everyone happy by doing an exercise to look for long chains and loops as well as eliminate older blogs, press releases, etc. that do not perform well. Trimming the fat and killing these off is essentially the same thing as PageRank sculpting.

The post Top 3 SEO Mistakes When Migrating to Secure HTTPS appeared first on Blend SEO.

As more and more businesses jump on the SEO bandwagon, the competition for search visibility continues to increase. Search marketers must not only acknowledge the latest trends, but adapt their practices accordingly.

There are four trends that continue to go underutilized by sites engaged in SEO and internet marketing. For this reason, leveraging these tactics in strategic fashion can lend to a competitive edge for increased search visibility.

1. Accelerated Mobile Pages

Today, more searches are made on mobile devices over desktop computers. And in a mobile-first world, speed matters. Nearly half of all visitors will abandon a site if it takes over three seconds to load.

As such, Google’s search algorithm favors responsive sites that are mobile-friendly. In fact, Google has emphasized the importance of mobile usability so much that it developed a new project called Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP).

AMPs are minimalist versions of web pages designed specifically for mobile users. AMPs strip any “extra” information on web pages, dramatically improving load speed, and in some cases, how the content is absorbed. With mobile usability of paramount focus, Google gives more value to AMPs, and often ranks these pages higher in the organic search results on mobile devices.

If you have experimented with AMPs, now is the time. This relatively new trend is a big deal for SEO, and yet many search marketers are slow to adopt. Visit AMPproject.org for the latest news and support on Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP).

2. Engaging Content

Back when content marketing emerged onto the SEO scene as all the rave, the common theme was to create easily-digestible, bite-sized pieces of content, and in high volumes. The outcome today is that the search results are overly saturated with fluff content, most of which is the same ideas redundantly spun into different words.

Search engine users are fed up with weak content that proliferates the web. This is probably why engagement metrics like time on site and bounce rate have become a part of Google’s search algorithm. Now, favor is given to engaging content that speaks volumes, but still in digestible formats.

When it comes to SEO and creating content that’s prone to high rankings, comprehensive articles, educational videos, and other forms of high-quality content win. Further supporting success is content that speaks to a specific audience, covers a precise topic, or relates to a very niche market.

So instead of banging-out run-of-the-mill blog posts every week, try investing in something a bit more purposeful. Such content marketing efforts can strike higher levels of engagement while serving as powerful assets for SEO.

3. “Schema” or Structured Data Markup

Using structured data markup, or Schema, is nothing new. In fact, it’s been over three years since it was considered SEO best practices. And yet, most sites on the web still fail to use it.

Essentially, Schema markup helps Google and other search engines interpret the content on a website. Schema uses special HTML tags to define specific pieces of content, such as an image, link, description, etc.

While there are WordPress plugins and other tools to help implement Schema, it can often require technical knowledge and effort. Nonetheless, it remains on the forefront of SEO trends, and offers an incredible opportunity for those not using it.

4. Reputation Means Everything

More and more Internet users are privy to using customer reviews to help base their decisions. Beyond make a purchase or calling a local store, a company’s reputation can dramatically impact SEO.

In both organic and local search (or Google My Business pages,) more 5-star reviews can significantly help increase click-through rates. And with reviews often a direct correlate of reputation, favorable businesses can also experience greater post-click conversions.

Social media platforms, as well as popular local directory sites like Yelp.com, have heightened the importance of online reputation. As such, implementing a review generation strategy is one of the most progressive SEO strategies.

Forward-thinking SEO companies and brick-and-mortars alike are putting the systems in place to motivate happy customers to leave a review. From creative, incentive-based programs to straight-up solicitation, there’s a reason why savvy marketers are getting reviews any way that they can. Online reputation means everything, especially in SEO.

Final Takeaways

While these are just a few SEO trends among many, they lend to some of the most prevalent missed opportunities. And unlike strategies like acquiring links, growing your social media following, and building authority, these strategies that can be executed almost immediately.

This article was contributed by Tyler Tafelsky, Senior SEO Specialist of Captivate Search Marketing, a search-first Internet marketing company based in Atlanta, Georgia.

Image by Christopher Dallarosa  

The post 4 New SEO Trends to Influence Search Visibility appeared first on Blend SEO.

These 4 easy tips will give you a mindset and attitude that will change how your supervisors thinks about you…regardless of your skill level and experience. If you are an entry-level SEO, you aren’t expected to have experience yet.

Here’s what your supervisor wants to see – Potential! But what does that look like? As an SEO Director, here are the things I look for…

1. Come in like you own the place.

Take the mindset that you run the accounts. This may sound like a run of the mill visualization technique. But they work, and especially if you take the right approach. An active approach.

Because when you start to think like an SEO manager or SEO director, your results will follow. And this type of stuff gets noticed by your supervisor – mainly because it removes some of their burden. It naturally puts you in their mind into the next higher role.

2. Take an SEO Management Overview

If your organization is using Basecamp or another task management software, you can often see all the projects, what phase or step they are at, who it is assigned to, and what the due date is.

Every morning, assess where we are with each client. Is anything missing from task lists? Is anything running behind? What is coming up next? If you own or run something, you’ll take this point of view. If you run the show, it will bother you if you haven’t checked in on each SEO account’s progress.

Here’s what to do if you see a project falling behind. You might be thinking, “I don’t want to overstep my bounds” and act as if I’m the boss. But the best bosses try to help their staff, not boss them around. Don’t go over to the person who is behind and tell them, “Hey you’re late on this task.” Rather go to your supervisor and say, “Hey, I noticed this task is behind. Is there anything I can do to help?” Even better, be specific and offer to help whoever is late on the task, “Is there anything I can do to help Joe with task XYZ?”

3. Q.A. Your Own Work…Please!

Checking your own work is a must, just to maintain your current position.

Some work looks like it was finished in a rush to get out the door. This is not the impression you want to make on your boss. This may not always be the case. Sometimes you may not understand the assignment, or get confused in getting code to work, or simply have a different point of view on something.

But sometimes there are typos, data from the previous month, or partially unfinished assignments in a deliverable. These are the kind errors that say, “I don’t care”. This may not be true, you may totally care, but simply overlooked something. Unfortunately, it looks like you didn’t read your own work. Your supervisor is ready to make some conclusions and send it out to the client – not proofread or redo the work for you, then send it out.

Again, approach each assignment like you are in charge. Once done, take a step back and look it over. Make sure it is ready for the client to read it. Does it all make sense? Even better, does it make a point? What will the client think about it?

4. Do Your Own SEO Training

Learning SEO on your own turns you into a more valuable asset. SEO directors love it when you take initiative. Not everyone does, and it flags you as someone to promote. With self training you can practically qualify yourself for the next pay level or position. This will drastically shorten the time you spend at your current level.

If you want to be an SEO expert, nothing is stopping you. Start reading through the learning center on Moz, and keep up with SEO news updates from Search Engine Land and/or Search Engine Watch. Take it a step further and buy a domain name, hosting and set up a personal website to practice what you learn. This gives you some real experience to go along with the education.

In combination these tips will keep you pointed in the right direction to a growing SEO career.

The post 4 Career Tips for Entry Level SEO: Think Like a Director appeared first on Blend SEO.

If you want to optimize your landing page, you already know the first thing Google Adwords Help tells us is to optimize the Landing Page Experience.  So, start with the easiest tactic that takes no resources other than a smart strategy and the SEO tool on this page.  Before you engage your creative team of writers, graphic designers and web developers, take 20 minutes to create a strategy to address this little known factor in landing page experience that anyone can do with no special skills.

Google Adwords Help has a sneaky way of telling us that duplicate content, something very familiar for SEO, is also a factor in your Adwords landing page quality score.  What we can determine from Google’s help is that Google first reads the content, using the Ads-Bot to crawl your landing page.  Next Google decides if your content is original, specifically original compared to other websites.

The opposite of original content is duplicate content.

Duplicate content has been in the forefront of SEO consulting from the beginning.  Now, Google has multiple bots like the mobile bot, smartphone bot and Ads-bot that crawl your content and your competitors content to allow Google to decipher and make decisions about your content.  SEO considers duplicate content within your website as well as between separate websites.  These are two separate issues with two levels of importance.  Duplicate content between pages of your website makes it hard for Google to crawl and rank your site, but it won’t make Google hate you.  Duplicate content between your site and another, will incur penalization.  This has been the crux of the Google Panda algorithm filter as well as manual penalties and past algorithms. And now it is a factor of Adwords Quality Score.

Check for Duplicate Content with Competitive Landing Pages

If you run simultaneous campaigns across multiple websites, duplicate content across these landing pages could be killing your quality score and forcing you to bid higher.  Check your pages for duplicate content.  Use this tool to compare content and see the degree of similarity a bot sees when crawling each page.

How much text similarity can you get away with?  Let’s find out together. Check your similarity and between two pages and check the score for each.  Leave a comment below for your overall text similarity and your scores for the pages.  Next, change up your copy and make a comment on your new similarity and how it affected your score.

The post Landing Page Duplicate Content Optimization Boosts Your Adwords Quality Score appeared first on Blend SEO.

Google, Bing and Yahoo cracked down hard on duplicate content starting December 2010.  Penalties hit hardest on February 24, 2011 in the Google Panda algorithm update.  Bing and Yahoo rankings followed suite.

How To: The SEO Tools and Process to Address Duplicate Content

Comparison SEO Tool

An SEO services client with which we work has developed multiple websites for different brands, but the client recycled the content.  Instead of writing 100% unique text for each website, paragraphs and sometimes whole pages were used universally across multiple websites.  They were getting away without noticeable revenue loss, so despite existing duplicate content penalties (though not actual penalties – more accurately wasting crawl budget and possibly dividing link juice) on interior entry pages, the client decided it was not a big enough priority to rewrite all the content … until now.

February search engine algorithm updates penalized entire websites that have pages similar to any other site that the search engine credits as the originator. Even if words are rearranged and the brand name is switched out, the Google algorithm is not fooled.  Google chooses one website as the originator and penalizes the others.

In late 2010, various rankings started to slip.  On February 24th, clients with duplicate or similar content across different websites saw a total drop off for #1 ranked keyword phrases.   Google guidelines for duplicate content indicate that the algorithm perceives these similar pages as  “deliberately duplicated across domains in an attempt to manipulate search engine rankings or win more traffic“.

By the way, these guidelines were [initially] updated March 20, 2011, less than a month after the [first] Panda algorithm update.

Systematic Process of Identifying and Addressing Duplicate Pages

If you are intimately familiar with your websites, like this search engine optimization consultant is, you already know which pages are similar and possibly causing duplicate content penalties. If you are an SEO agency taking on a new client with duplicate content issues, leaving it up to you to figure out where the duplicates are within their online properties, then you may need a few SEO tools to help identify possible duplicate pages.

UPDATES: Google Panda Filter Dates

• Panda Update 1.0: Feb. 24, 2011
• Panda Update 2.0: April 11, 2011 (about 7 weeks later)
• Panda Update 2.1: May 10, 2011 (about  4 weeks later)
• Panda Update 2.2: June 16, 2011 (about 5 weeks later)
• Panda Update 2.3: July 23, 2011 (about 5 weeks later)
• Panda Update 2.4: August 12, 2011 (about 3 weeks later)
• Panda Update 2.5: September 28, 2011 (about 7 weeks later)
• Panda Update 2.51: October 9, 2011 (minor filter update about 2 weeks later)
• Panda Update 2.52: October 13, 2011 (minor filter update)
• Panda Update 3.0: October 19, 2011 (3 weeks later)
• Panda Update 3.1: November 18, 2011 (3 weeks later)
• Panda Update 3.2: January 18, 2012 (8 weeks later)
• Panda Update 3.3: February 28, 2012 (refresh to update index 6 weeks later)
• Panda Update 3.4: March 23, 2012 (refresh to update index 3.5 weeks later)
• Panda Update 3.5: April 19, 2012 (refresh to update index 4 weeks later)
• Panda Update 3.6: April 27, 2012 (refresh to update index 8 days later)
• This has become crazy to update.  Just check the SEOMoz Google Algorithm Change History.

To determine if your website fell victim to a Panda filter, check your traffic.  Panda “penalizes” your website by dropping your rankings, not just on pages with duplicate or thin content, but universally across your website – including your homepage.  If you were hit by the Panda Filter, you will see a significant traffic drop on one of the dates above.  Subsequently, if you address the issue, your traffic should be adjusted the next time the Panda filter runs.  Each time the filter runs, it updates the Google index.

Update: February and March 2012 updates were merely when the Panda Filter was run again in order to refresh the Google index, so that changes made to websites will be reflected in Google.  In other words, if you implemented fixes to get out of the Panda Filter before February 28 or March 23, you can check traffic at those dates to see if your fixes did the trick.

Identify Duplicate Content

This paid tool makes your process simple, but costs money. Copyscape is a tool for finding copyright and plagiarism offenders.  Since Google generally penalizes the copier and not the original author, plagiarism is not an SEO issue.  For this reason CopyScape is not a regular part of the SEO arsenal of tools.  Don’t ask me why as an SEO I even know about it, but I’ve known about it for years (guess that’s part of the multidisciplinary Blend SEO approach).

The process to identifying duplicate pages is, using the paid version called CopySentry, you can feed it your non-penalized website and let it find the duplicate content out there amidst your penalized websites.

Using free tools takes a little more time and effort.  Download and install A1 Sitemap Generator, a great sitemap generator program with a fully functional free 30 day trial.

1. Run a scan of your penalized website.  It will generate a list of pages of the website, ignoring those blocked by robots.txt, following any redirects or canonical tags – meaning you have a list of webpages that spiders crawl.
2. Among the sitemap output choices, you can create a text file list of page URLs with each URL on a separate line.
3. Paste this list into excel and start your search for duplicate content.  Use your intuition and Google to check blocks of text.  If a different website ranks number one for any block of text, that website is credited as the originator.  Mark this URL and the originator URL.

Test or Check Duplicate Content

Once you have a list of pages from your penalized website and their counterpart on the originator website, you will want to check their similarity.  Are they similar enough to require a rewrite?  Run the URLs through a webpage comparison or duplicate content checker tool.  After you go through several pages between two sites, you will eventually get a feel for where the cut-off is for rewrite verses no rewrite.  Any pages with similarity higher than your cut-off require a writer to take a look for the duplicate or similar language.  Similar content on the penalized website must be completely rewritten.

Update: Unfortunately, my favorite duplicate content diagnostic tool has been abandoned.

This first similarity tool is my favorite.  Some only give a single percentage, letting you wonder how much of that similarity is due to non-visible code.  This tool tells you, without inundating you with too much information.  There’s no captcha, so checking through your list is quick.  I embedded the form below, so you can try it here.

Duplicate Content Check

This next tool, embedded below simply gives you a single percentage.  Depending on the template between your penalized and originator websites, the number you get will seem pretty low.  My cut-off with this tool was about 10%.  Anything over 10%, required a copywriter to rewrite the page or at least a section of the page.

This comparison SEO tool by SEO Book compares the page titles, meta information, and common phrases occurring on different pages.

Here are several more alternatives you can try.

• http://www.webseoanalytics.com/free/seo-tools/duplicate-content-checker.php?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss
• http://utext.rikuz.com/en/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss
• http://www.seomastering.com/duplicate-page-finder.php?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss
• http://www.seomastering.com/site-comparison.php?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss
• http://www.seomastering.com/similar-text-checker.php?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss

The post SEO Tools & Process to Fix Google Panda Penalty appeared first on Blend SEO.

How you setup your blog is crucial for SEO.

1. Where To Install a Blog:
   – Subfolders?
   – Subdomains?
   – Separate Domains?
2. How to Integrate the Blog into the Main Website Architecture
3. Optimize Website Navigation Anchor Text
4. Optimize Blog Categories
5. What to Remove from the Blog

Steps 1 and 2 (concerning blog location and navigation) were discussed in a previous article on the 5 step process to setup your blog for SEO.  As a quick review of these two steps, the strategy for blog SEO is to integrate your blog within your main company website.  Typical blog architecture creates a strong web of interlinking.  Blogs also attract links from other blogs and directories.  The inbound links hit the web-like framework of interlinking and spread authority throughout the blog.  Search engines naturally view a blog as a tightly interlinked section of your website.  That is why, if you want your blog to benefit your main website, it must be actively interlinked.  That means, install it in a sub-folder of your main website, so link authority will count toward the domain, not toward a sub-domain or separate domain.

Step 3 is your first act of optimizing your blog using keywords.  Imagine if you were a s search engine starting at the top level of your website.  The first thing you read is the domain name.  Optimize it.  You might take a quick scan of the text near the top of the homepage, and then go right through the main navigation.  What do each of the links say in the navigation?  What is the file name of each page where they link?  The internet is too big to read every inch of every website, so you pull what information you can from a quick preview.  Using meaningful keywords in the main navigation anchor text and file names is only logical.  And its something every SEO consultant can agree upon.

This concept carries right into the next topic, optimizing blog categories.

Optimize Blog Categories

Approach SEO for your blog categories the same as you would for your main website categories.  Each category of your main website is located in your main navigation and is leg of themed content.  Your blog now stands as one of those legs.  Within it are its own legs.  Pick a theme for each category.  If you are writing for the reader, than you choose subjects that you know your readers are searching for.  Carefully choose relevant keyword rich categories as the legs for your blog.  These category names will appear in the category URLs and provide keyword rich anchor text in the blog-wide menu as well as other links throughout the template.  You will naturally gain a high percentage of anchor text keyword density on and pointing to URLs with those keywords.

What to Remove from the Blog

Typical items you find on the side of blogs include

• categories
• recent articles
• blog roll links
• calendars
• date archives
• author archives
• tags

… and I’m sure you can find more.  These devices provide blogs with their biggest strengths and biggest weaknesses.  For every article you post, your blog creates multiple views of it, each with a unique URL.  This is great for building up a large body of content, however, take it too far, and search engine bots get lost in duplicate content.

SEO for Categories and Recent Articles

The strategy here is to become aware of the URLs created by each device and trim down the duplicate content, leaving each URL looking as unique as possible, even though most content is reused.  We already talked about optimizing categories, so those can stay.  Recent articles links can also stay, since they simply link to the individual article URL – the same URL you get from the read-more link or article title link to read the individual article.  However, you need to consider limitation or removal for each of the other items.

Blog Roll SEO

Your blog roll links give a LOT of link juice away.  This might be a good place to link to your main website or other online properties where you have a vested interest.  Some bloggers fill this area with endless links out to other bloggers.  In doing so, you just have to consider how much link juice you want to hoard or trade.  And in the trade, though there may be a reciprocal link sending authority back to you, the visitors that click off to another website may never come back.  Therefore, my strategy in the blog roll is to keep it in the family (unless you have a really, really good resource you want to list).

Calendars and Date Archives

I like to completely eliminate calendars and date archives.  Calendars are a long known source of duplicate content.  If a client insists on having a calendar, its best to use a rel=nofollow in every link of the calendar and disallow it in the robots.txt.  The Robots Meta WordPress SEO plugin even gives you the option to disable calendars and date based archives.

Blog Author Archives

Author archives can go either way, depending on your situation.  For example, if you only have one author, that author archive will be an exact duplicate of the blog home page.  But if you have several authors contributing evenly, your blog content will be split between them.  A nice long description from each author will further contribute to making these pages unique.  Category pages can be treated similarly.  Create a reasonable number of categories and assign each post to just one category.  Give each category a unique description of 100 words or more to appear on the category view and every category page will appear unique from the others, with just a fraction duplicate content on the homepage.  For example, if you have 7 categories and you set your blog homepage to show the most recent 7 posts, 1/7th of your homepage will be pulled from each category (assuming you write posts in a rotation of categories).

Blog SEO Tags

Tags are nice to keep in the template because they create on-page keyword anchor text.  They in a way have replaced meta keywords.  Create a tag for every keyword relevant to the article.  Spam should be no temptation here since these appear visibly on the blog.  However, I don’t like robots indexing those tag pages, since blog themes are pretty tight and after a while, the same keywords are reused over and over.  This means the tag archives pretty much look the same from one tag to another (duplicate content).  For this reason, it’s a good idea to disallow tag pages using robots.txt.  The bot will still crawl the anchor text link on the page, follow the link, crawl the tag page, but won’t include it the tag page in the search index.

The post SEO for a Blog Accompanying a Company Website appeared first on Blend SEO.

The usual answer is… 301 redirect the old website to the new website.

But How Exactly?

Here’s the problem that always happens.  They end up redirecting the homepage from the old website to the homepage of the new website.  But what about all the interior pages?  There may be hundreds of back links to interior pages that get completely wasted as soon as the old website is deleted.  If you are hosting on a Microsoft IIs server, you may be limited without installing ISAPI or some other rewrite module. However, if you are hosting on an Apache server, the .htaccess file gives you an extremely flexible means of handling redirects.

There are a few options to address redirects, depending on your situation for the old domain to new domain transition:

1. If the two sites are different, ideally, you would redirect each interior page of the old site to a relevant interior page of the new site.  In the .htaccess file of the old site, you would specify the old page (using a relative path) and the new page (using an absolute path).  Here is the code to redirect one page to another individual page.Redirect 301 /old-page http://new-domain.com/new-page?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss
2. If you are just changing the domain name and keeping the same folder structure, you can just redirect every page of the old domain to the same path on the new domain.  Here’s the.htaccess code for that.Redirect 301 / http://newdomain.com/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss
3. If  the sites are different and there is no way to identify relevant pages for a one to one page comparison or if comparing every page of each site is simply not feasible or cost effective, you can use a wildcard in the .htaccess to simply redirect all the interior pages of the old site to the homepage of the new domain and a separate line to 301 redirect the old website to the new domain.  Here is the code for that.

RewritEngine On
RewriteRule . http://www.newdomain.com?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss [R=301,L,NC]
Redirect 301 / http://www.newdomain.com/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss

.htaccess Redirect Best Practices

301 Redirect non-www to www

Generally any page of a website is accessible by typing the URL into your browser without “www” and with “www”.  For example http://website.com?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss and http://www.website.com?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss will serve the same page.  Any link to a non-www URL that a spider finds, will lead that spider to crawl the entire website using non-www for every page.  This assumes you are using relative paths in your navigation, which most CMS and web developers do.  The search engine is thus crawling your site twice, doubling the task for the crawler.  Now understand that search engine spiders have a limited crawl budget for each website.  Google uses PageRank to determine how deep to crawl your website.  If you look at crawl stats, you will see that your entire site does not get crawled each time the bot visits.  If the bot must crawl through two versions of your website, you basically doubled its work.  Later, the search engine algorithm will analyze the content, identify duplicate pages and determine which ones take priority over the others.

But why make extra work for the search engine?

If you want to optimize your website for search engines, than cut out this extra work for the crawler and algorithm.  Don’t let the crawler find the non-www version of your website.  The server URL rewrite that returns a 301 code will not allow the search engine crawler bot (or humans) to access any non-www URL pages of your website. This is an old standard SEO best practice for reducing duplicate content issues.

RewriteEngine On
 RewriteBase /
 RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^yourdomain.com [NC]
 RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.yourdomain.com/$1?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss [L,R=301]

.htaccess Language – Apache Server Configuration Directives

There is a lot more you can do with .htaccess code that will affect SEO.  The below SEO .htaccess tips and more in depth background for creating your own Apache server directives can be found at http://www.corz.org?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss.  Many  of these use regular expressions, or regexes that are explained very well at http://www.seomoz.org/learn-seo/redirection?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss.

Escaping:

\      char escape that particular char

For instance to specify special characters.. [].()\ etc.

Text:

.                 Any single character  (on its own = the entire URI)
[chars]       Character class: One of following chars
[^chars]      Character class: None of following chars
text1|text2    Alternative: text1 or text2 (i.e. “or”)

e.g. [^/] matches any character except /
(foo|bar)\.html matches foo.html and bar.html

Quantifiers:

?      0 or 1 of the preceding text
*      0 or N of the preceding text  (hungry)
+      1 or N of the preceding text

e.g. (.+)\.html? matches foo.htm and foo.html
(foo)?bar\.html matches bar.html and foobar.html

Grouping:

(text)     Grouping of text

Either to set the borders of an alternative or for making back references where the nthe group can be used on the target of a RewriteRule with $n

e.g.  ^(.*)\.html foo.php?bar=$1

Anchors:

^      Start of line anchor
$      End   of line anchor

An anchor explicitly states that the character right next to it MUST be either the very first character (“^”), or the very last character (“$”) of the URI string to match against the pattern, e.g..

^foo(.*)   matches foo and foobar but not eggfoo
(.*)l$   matches fool and cool, but not foo

The post Using .htaccess file for 301 redirects and URL rewrites appeared first on Blend SEO.

Do You want to maximize their SEO benefit?

Being raised with a thrifty mindset and borderline hoarding tendencies, I am compelled to use every website asset to further SEO success.  This article will reveal to you:

1. How to know if your landing pages are causing duplicate content for organic search engines
2. How to eliminate duplicate content penalties
3. How to reclaim unused back links
4. Long term strategy to build organic traffic using your paid search landing pages

Are Your Paid Search Landing Pages Causing Duplicate Content Penalties?

A lot of clients don’t realize that their PPC landing pages end up in the search engine index.  If your landing pages have nearly identical content as each other or other pages of your website, they will potentially cause duplicate content penalties without you realizing.  Your website will not completely drop out of the search results, but those individual pages will waste resources (link authority, PageRank, crawl budget) that should go into other areas.  And, Google will remember that your website has useless duplicate pages, which affects your website’s overall profile.  Over the years Google has told us to disallow, redirect and apply canonical links to those pages.  Depending on how you address duplicate pages can hold back your potential for Google PageRank and high search engine rankings.

Check Google for your landing pages by searching…

site:yourwebsite.com/landingpage.php

A lot of times I find duplicate versions of the same landing page in Google or Bing, the only difference being different strings in the URL.  The URL may have some random looking string at the end such as ?src=W4THMJHWWZRP. Because these have different URLs, the search engines assume they are supposed to be different pages. They may have identical content with only slight differences. Unfortunately, search engines are penalizing you for duplicate content in the organic results.  You can turn this around to your advantage!

So the first thing you’re probably wondering is how do these pages find their way into the Google or Bing index?  You don’t have any links to them, they are complete islands, pages hosted on your server with no links from any part of your website.  So how does Google find them?

Easy… someone else landed on the page from your PPC ad and created a link to the page.

Here’s the proof.  Once you find a page in a search index using the “site” search above, check that page for backlinks. Go to Yahoo Site Explorer and enter the URL for the page. Make sure you click “Inlinks” and chose the drop down “Except from this domain”.  Here you will see other websites that link to that landing page.

How to Eliminate Duplicate Content Penalties

Some people would say to use your robots.txt file to disallow search engines from listing those pages in their results.  For a long time, this has been the standard way of addressing duplicate content.  However, there is always the potential for other websites to link to your landing pages.  Even if you don’t see back links in Yahoo Site Explorer, there may still be back links not shown (search engines just refuse to show you everything they know and there’s nothing we can do about it), you need to plan on the possibility of people creating links in the future.  Using the robots.txt to disallow a page with potential back links does not let you take advantage of potential back links.

How to Regain Unused Back Links

Every back link you have is one more that your competitor may not.  With organic search engine optimization, there are so many factors not under your control.  With all the competing websites each with their individual approach to outrank you, the only way to maximize your success is to make the best use of everything under your control.  You can’t force other websites to link to you.  If they do link to you, take credit for them all.

Instead of using robots.txt to disallow pages with potential back links, use the canonical tag.  The canonical tag can point the back link PageRank to a page intended for organic search engine ranking.

Implementing the canonical tag is something you can do right away with very little effort.

1. First figure out which landing pages would be considered duplicate content.  If you use the same content and only change out a keyword or two, those should be considered duplicates.
2. Next choose a page to represent the duplicates.  This will be your organic landing page.  It may be a page already on your website that your PPC landing pages are patterned after.  Or if your paid landing pages are written differently from any of your organic website, it may be one of your paid landing pages.  You may end up with several groups of duplicate pages where each group has its own representative organic page.
3. Place the canonical tag in the head section of each duplicate landing page.  The canonical tag on each landing page will point to its organic representative. Code for the canonical tag looks like this:

With the canonical tags in place, all your actual and potential back link authority is transferring to preferred organic landing pages.

Strategy to Build Organic Traffic Using Paid Search Landing Pages

As you have time, page by page, you can build out these duplicate pages into powerful organic search landing pages.  We will assume duplicate landing pages are targeting different paid search campaigns.  Content for these pages are slightly different in that they aim to convert a different audience, whether it be based on keyword search, geographic area, time of day, etc.  Let’s assume you did a great landing web page design which may follow this example from John Saddington at Church Create.

Your headlines and content above the fold should be customized for the specific audience.  Since this is slightly different from an existing organic landing page, we will optimize this page to target a variation of that existing page.  We will turn this marginally different page into a completely different page without affecting is as a paid landing page.  The areas we have to work with include:

1. Title tag
2. Meta description tag
3. Content below the fold

Define the theme of this page and choose your targeted keyword phrase(s).  Create an optimized title tag and description.  Make your keyword phrase(s) prominent in the title.  Gear your description to convert your target audience, but be sure to include your keyword phrases here too.

Below your current content, write out 200 or more words of optimized content.  Keep the code for this text simple.  200-400 words of text should not add noticeable load time to the page.  Human visitors may or may not scroll down to read the text, but search engines will definitely read it.  This should be highly optimized with excellent information geared toward or even about the target audience.  This text can be used to further qualify the audience. Talk about their interests and problems.  Break the text apart into paragraphs with H2 coded sub-headings.

Once your content is complete, remove the canonical tag and add this page to your sitemap.  Create links to this page from other pages of the site.  If appropriate, link to this page from your navigation.

Enjoy free traffic on this paid search landing page.  By tackling these pages one by one, you can make transforming your paid landing pages into organic landing pages a long term strategy.

The post Landing Pages, Not Just For PPC. Hello SEO. appeared first on Blend SEO.

1. Common sense says to optimize everything you can. Title (company/organization), description, categories, additional details, and coupons, etc.  Anywhere you can enter data – optimize it (but don’t spam).
2. Reviews – this is another easy one.  The hard part is making it happen. Come up with a way to get customers to write reviews.  This could be a contest, discount, freebie, etc rewarding people who write reviews (good or bad – just keep it honest).OK, but where?You can check the topped rank sites to see where they have reviews that get pulled into their Google Place page. Provide a list for your customers of places where they can write reviews.  Obviously, they can do it right in Google on your Place page.  That’s always a good option.
3. Citations – this is anywhere your business location is mentioned.  There does not have to be a link.  Google reads content and remembers.  If you business is listed on websites for your local chamber of commerce, your local newspaper, your local  phone directory, these are all good spots where Google can find you.

The post Local SEO: 3 Ways to Boost Your Local Business Rankings appeared first on Blend SEO.

SEO copy software – The Death of Search Engine Optimization

Reciprocal link building became widespread by webmasters and SEOs in the 90’s and continues today.  Some people do it manually one link at a time, while others use automated programs to search prospects, contact them, check for the back link and publish the reciprocal link.  Some internet marketers sell reciprocal link building software while others sell against it. In some cases it will get you penalized by Google.  But in other cases, you can find websites that dominate their targeted keywords whose backlinks are filled with insestual reciprocal links. You may wonder…

• “If I trade links with someone who emailed me with a reciprocal link offer, will it hurt or help me?”
• “Can I use a reciprocal link building program without penalizing my website?”
• “I think its OK if they link to me, but should I link to them?”

To find out the answer to your questions, forget everything you ever heard or think you know about SEO.  Think about your own website visitors.  Why do your visitors go to your website?  Would someone on your website be interested in reading what is published on another website?  Remember the term “Surf the web”? For those of us who do, we would go to an interesting website, read a bit, see an enticing link and follow it.  Read some more there, until we either get bored with it and hit the back button, or come across another enticing link and read some more there.  Those were the days before link building…before the knowledge of link affects on search engines polluted the activities of webmasters.

Go back to the ideals of these pre-link building days.

Create links for your visitors and you will be rewarded for quality outbound and inbound links.

That is one of the goals of Google.  “No follow” code for links addressed some of the spam link building activities.  Google algorithm updates over the years have aimed at rewarding or penalizing visitor benefiting links and spammy links made just for the purpose of having one more link.

Reciprocal Link Directory: Good or Bad Idea?

Sometimes webmasters would publish a list of related references that they respected. However, unless the sole purpose of your website is to be directory, it makes no sense to create an index of outbound references about every subject thinkable.  DMOZ and Yahoo Directory already covered this.  If however your website directory is full of online resources that are pertinent to your website and valuable to your visitors, such as a list of local vendors for something you provide expertise, then that makes sense.

If a resource on your website is indeed valuable to your visitors, it is likely valuable to visitors of other similar websites… and it would make sense for those websites to link to your resource.  It would also make sense for you to link to it from prominent pages of your own website.  Search engines can read relevance in the language.  Search engines like Google know what words are related to others because they read content from all over the web and remember which words appear together (this is called a semantic relationship between keywords).  Search engines like Google determine the value of a directory (or any other web page) based on inbound links.  By linking out to other excellent resources, you can create a valuable resource.  This is the original idea behind a directory, and it still holds true, as long as you make it a good one for your particular visitors.

The post The Truth About Reciprocal Link Building for SEO appeared first on Blend SEO.

Using embed code from right click while video playing on Youtube.

Using embed code from Youtube with box checked for USE OLD EMBED CODE.

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If you already know what keywords and phrases for which you want to rank, then the task is to reverse engineer those sites that rank at the top of the SERPs for your chosen keyword phrase.

This keyword density tool allows you to compare your keyword density of a phrase on your webpage against your competitor’s page who ranks above you.

However, beware of keyword stuffing…

Keyword stuffing can trigger an over-optimization penalty.  The text should read naturally.  There is no rule for what percent of density is ideal.  Compare your density to that of the webpages that rank at the top for your target keyword phrase.  This will give you an acceptable range.

You can also use this keyword density cloud SEO tool to get a feel for unnatural keyword density.

Once you have competitive on-page SEO factors, you can switch your focus to off-page to link building.

The post How to Out Rank Your Competitors Using Keyword Density appeared first on Blend SEO.

This video tutorial shows the basics for using Yelp business tools.  However, leveraging yelp for local search optimization can be simplified to 3 steps.

Yelp can work against your SEO or for your SEO

….and it has nothing to do with whether you have good or bad review! 

Here’s the BIGGEST secret to make YELP help your local search optimization – CONSISTENCY!

1. Verify your business information is consistent on your website and your domain registration.  Beware… if you change your domain registration address, your Google PageRank may drop to ZERO for a few weeks until Google re-ranks you.  If you need to change your registration address, don’t make any changes on your website before or after.  This shows Google that nothing changed other than the registration address, and gives you the best chance for Google to quickly put you back at your proper PageRank.

2.  Visit biz.Yelp.com and create your free business account.  Follow directions from this video.

3. Claim your business listings in Yahoo and Google.  Be sure to provide Google and Yahoo with the same local address and phone number you have listed for your domain registration and published on your website.

The post 3 Step Component of Local Search Optimization: Yelp Business Tools appeared first on Blend SEO.

When it comes to blog SEO, everyone talks about title tags, meta tags, search engine friendly URLs (slugs, permalinks, whatever you want to call them)…  That’s all pretty common stuff and there’s plenty of information about the WordPress SEO plugins to help you find them and set them up.  But here’s the most important thing that no one tells you to consider – website architecture.  This is closely related to silo linking, but MUCH more powerful.

Medium Blue Search Engine Marketing clients are sent my way when they need a little extra above and beyond ideas, technical recommendations and help for their organic search engine results.  Clients look to our search engine marketing consultancy for advice, but make their own ultimate decisions on optimizing their website.  The trend I’ve noticed is that most people are uninformed to a certain level of SEO information regardless of what their consultant recommends.  The most common unknown is the magnitude of missed opportunity not optimizing their website architecture.  And this is the biggest opportunity for setting up your wordpress blog so that it’s automated SEO feeds optimization for the rest of your website.

1. Where To Install a Blog: Subfolders, Subdomains or Separate Domains?
2. Fully Integrate Your Blog into Main Website Architecture
3. Optimize Your Website Navigation Anchor Text
4. Optimize Blog Categories
5. Remove Certain Parts of WordPress Default Template Blog Navigation

So you already have a website and you want to start a blog to help improve your website’s traffic, but where do you put it? Maybe you already have a blog and want to leverage it to benefit your main website.  These 5 steps will show you how to set up website architecture to maximize the impact of your blog on your main website.  Compared to a static website, blogs quickly gain power.  Architecture, silo interlinking, freshness and pinging built into WordPress along with SEO plugins make it a powerful online asset, often seen by spiders as independent or even none related to your main website.  If set up wrong, the power will dissipate into hordes of useless pages.  If set up right, link-juice, PageRank and traffic will be funneled from your blog and into your main website.

1.  Where To Install a Blog: Subfolders, Subdomains or Separate Domains?

Do you host it on WordPress.com? Do you give it it’s own unique domain name? Do you give it a subdomain like blog.domain.com?  I’ve seen people do all these things.  A blog can be very powerful and can quickly rival your main website rankings in search engines.  But put it in the wrong place, and this power is wasted.  Missed Opportunity.

The location where you install your blog: subfolder, subdomain or separate domain determines the URL structure for every page, post, comment, category, tag, etc in your blog.  The goal of the strategy I will show you, is to closely associate your blog URL structure with your main website.  Where is the best place to host your blog?  Where is the best place to install your blog?  Installed in the right place, your blog can be used to increase traffic and conversions on your main website.  Here are a few options to get the most SEO benefit out of your blog.

• Your best location for your blog: Sub-Folder.

  Host it on the same domain as your main website, installed in a sub-folder in the root folder.  In other words, your main website homepage (or index page) is located in the root folder.  Make a new folder inside the root folder and install your blog there.  This will create a URL structure like this: www.domain.com/blog/.?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss  But don’t be satisfied naming the folder “blog”.  You can do better SEO than that.  Apply the concepts in optimizing your navigation anchor text to your blog folder.

• Your next best option: Sub-Domain.

  Does your main website server not support WordPress?  If there is an issue with your host server, and you cannot install WordPress on the same server as your main website…. all is not lost.  You can use a subdomain.  Install and host WordPress on a different server, preferably a Linux server.  From the service that provides your domain name, set up a subdomain and point it to the new server hosting the WordPress files and database.  I won’t get into the specifics, but basically you will need to create an A record for subdomain.domain.com that points to the IP address of your root directory on the new server where the blog is installed.  Now you should have subdomain.domain.com where the blog (hosted remotely) appears. As far as visitors and search engines can tell, it will look as though your blog is a sub-domain attached to your main website.  A subdomain is treated by search engines as a separate website, but if you integrate the main website architecture into your blog, it will appear as part of the same website.

• Your third, and only remaining option: Separate Domain.

  If you have already installed and launched your blog on a separate domain name…and it is already gaining traction in search engines, it may be best to keep moving forward.  You may miss out on a URL structure, but the remaining steps below will be your best tools for funneling link-juice and traffic to your main website.

2.  Fully Integrate Your Blog into Main Website Architecture

What is website architecture anyway?  Basically, it’s your sitewide navigation. Any links that appear consistently on all pages of your main website will be recognized by search engines as navigation…whether they look like navigation or not.  This includes text links in the footer, text links at the top, any left-hand or right-hand navigation, and of course your horizontal navigation.  The one caveat to this being any navigation that cannot be followed by search engine spiders (I’ll leave search engine friendly navigation to a later article).  So, any sitewide links that can be crawled and followed by search engine spiders will constitute your navigation, the backbone of your website architecture.

Now consider your blog as an arm of your main website.  Think of it as another top level category of your website.  Include a text link to your blog in your sitewide navigation. Furthermore,consider putting links to your blog in more than one location of your navigation…the main navigation, as well as the top or footer links.  However, vary the navigation anchor text linking to your blog.

Next you will need to put your website navigation into your blog template.  To fully integrate your blog into your website, you must have your website navigation appear on every page of your blog.  When used properly, your blog will attract links and bring inbound link-juice and PageRank from other websites.  Your posts will contain fresh (as in recently published), unique content that will quickly rise in search engine results rankings for long tail search phrases.  By integrating your navigation, the backbone of your website architecture, you provide a highway for the link-juice and PageRank (and visitor traffic) to be distributed throughout your website.  In SEO terms, your main website homepage and blog homepage will be the 2 most powerful pages of your website.  The architecture of linking and automatic SEO already built into your WordPress blog is then leveraged for your main website.

But before you publish this new navigation on your main website and in the blog template…you’re going to want to optimize the anchor text.

3.  Optimize Your Website Navigation Anchor Text

At this point, you should have a couple places for text links to your blog within your navigation, and you may be wondering how to name your sub-domain or sub-folder where WordPress is installed.  Here you will find strategy to optimize your anchor-text, folder names and subdomain names. In this step we are applying basic SEO strategy to the uppermost level of your website.

Your navigation is the main highway for your website.  Links in your navigation are like exits from the highway.  The text used for each link is like the exit sign for the highway.  Highway signs tell you what you will find if you take that exit.  If I rely on highway signs to find my way, I need those signs to be as accurate and descriptive as possible for me to quickly read while driving.  Anchor-text for your navigation links need to tell human and search engine bots what they will find when they follow that link.

Generally website architecture is planned so that different pages are organized by subject matter and accessed by following the navigation links.  If you’ve done some optimization, you’ve already planned to send targeted traffic to different areas of your website.  You should have keyword phrases assigned to each of the pages where your main navigation links.  Those links in the main navigation are the most powerful links on your site and should also use your keywords or phrases identified for the pages to which they lead.  If you have a page about downtown Atlanta, then your highway sign or link needs to say “Downtown Atlanta”.  If you blog is about metro Atlanta area, than your link to the blog should say “Metro Atlanta”.  In other words, choose a set of keywords to target with your blog, and create thee anchortext appropriately.

The same goes for naming the folder or subdomain.  You want your targeted keywords for the blog in both the links as well as the URL.  What you name the folder or sub-domain where WordPress is installed will appear in the URL for the blog and for every page, post, category, tag, etc in the blog.

4. Optimize Blog Categories

Continued in a later post on Blog SEO.

5. Remove Certain Parts of WordPress Default Template Blog Navigation

Continued in a later post on Blog SEO.

The post 5 Steps For The Best Way to Set Up Your Blog For SEO appeared first on Blend SEO.

As an SEO professional, I know Yahoo search algorithms are noticeably more sophisticated than those of BING.  However, Bing has flashy rollover previews. Will Yahoo share search technology with Bing?

The answer is YES, but here’s the specifics. Yahoo will look the same as it currently does, but it will work a little differently.

PPC advertising results across the top and sides of Yahoo will exactly match the order of BING advertising results.  Paid search customers of Yahoo and Bing will be combined under a Yahoo account.  Sales people from Microsoft and Yahoo are currently comparing notes on their customers and working together to consolidate Bing and Yahoo paid search customers under one account.

Organic search results on Yahoo will initially have Bing algorithm feeding the list of results.  Yahoo will keep its structured data results (like shopping, maps, video, etc) popping in as rich snippets throughout the Bing generated search results. However, Yahoo will look the same as it does now – same style same interface.  None of the Bing flashy rollover previews or other search products will be infused into Yahoo.

Only those of us who recognize the difference in algorithm search results will notice a difference in Yahoo after it is injected with Bing technology… oh and also those people who have an organic listing in Yahoo bringing in business. Bing handles 302 redirects differently, so you may see multiple listings for the same website above yours if it uses a 302 redirect, pushing other results further down the page of off the first page.  Bing sometimes has trouble determining the homepage of a website and often treats the www.domain.com?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss page separately from http://domain.com?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss (without the www).  This can be a sign that link juice and power going into the top level of your site is split between www version and non-www version.  So will you likely find your website not showing up in the same position in Yahoo and possibly missing the www if you do not use a 301 base URL rewrite.

The interesting news, is that search technology for Bing will improve as Yahoo developers will be moved into Bing.  Yes, that’s right. Yahoo organic search engine developers will be working under the Bing roof to help infuse Yahoo’s advanced search algorithms into Bing.  This will bring Bing’s organic search technology closer to the quality of Google.

The post Yahoo Microsoft Deal, What’s It Mean to Yahoo Search Experience? appeared first on Blend SEO.