Webmaster Discussions

Blogs and article writing are essential tools of business. Anyone still questioning the value of well-written blogs and articles is simply not keeping pace. People are also questioning the difference between a blog and an article. The following answer is subjective and open to argument but a blog is information written in a casual, informal way and is simply a means of passing on current thoughts and attitudes. An article, such as those submitted to an article submission site, is a much more serious business with a strict code of conduct because the quality of the articles has to adhere to the standards set by the article submission sites.

One of the top article submission sites is EzineArticles and the sole purpose of getting articles listed on that website is to attract traffic to your own website. In other words, to create back links. Of course, for your article to be accepted on the EzineArticles website it has to be of genuine value to a reader, not simply self-promotion or blatant self-marketing. If the article is well-written, informative and of interest to publishers of newsletters, websites, blogs, forums, and printed publications, your website and information about your organisation is also printed. In other words, a well-written informative article that is subject-specific, can find its way to many thousands of Inboxes.

A number of articles written on a theme can generate an amazing level of traffic and create name awareness so that when publishers check what’s new on EzineArticles, they search for your name.

The key to success with writing articles is maintaining a good reputation. The rules laid down for the quality of the content certainly do help authors maintain high standards. Strict guidelines are not a block to the serious article writer but a superb filter, preventing less able authors from lowering the standard of the article submission website.

There are also strict rules that apply to publishers for the publication of articles posted on sites such as EzineArticles, and they are:

• Author’s copyright must be respected by publishing article in full;
• Author’s URL and/or contact details must accompany the published article;
• No altering of the article’s title or content;
• Any links within the article to be included;
• Never to post an article on an illegal website with pirated goods or connections to terrorism or racism; and
• The comprehensive list goes on and on.

If a publisher breaks any of the strict guidelines for use of articles then that publisher is banned from the article submission website.

It can take a bit of practice getting articles submitted but once you have learned the correct approach, it is one very good way to promote a service or organisation.

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I attended SEOmoz’s Open Site Explorer (OSE) webinar last Thursday, January 28, and learned some things on how to make the most of the new link analysis tool.

If you’ve been using Linkscape as one of your search engine optimisation tools you’re probably pretty happy with the functionalities that the service brings. At first glance it might seem that another link analysis tool would just be redundant and, for the most part, that is actually true. However there are some things that Open Site Explorer can give that Linkscape doesn’t really do and vice versa. In the future though Rand said that OSE and Linkscape will probably become integrated with one becoming the premium version.

One of the major difference is the number of links available per report: shows up to 10,000 links in OSE and 3,000 links in Linkscape. Note though that unless you are a SEOmoz Pro member you will only be shown details of 5 links in OSE and none in Linkscape. However, you do see the other important metrics such as overall page authority, domain authority, number of linking root domains, and total number of links including those that are “no followed”. These data are things you need to know where you stand in your link building effort, but it’s really the other data that gives you more actionable items.

According to Rand some of the things you can do with the data given by OSE include finding the following:

• 302 pages – What you can do is turn them into 301s
• 404 pages – You have to options for these pages: either put content in those pages or redirect them.
• Inbound links with low quality anchor text – Contact the owner of the linking page and ask them to change the anchor text to something you prefer.
• Links to competitors’ error pages – Don’t forget to analyze your competitors’ links. Do the same thing as #3 but make sure you explain to the person you are contacting to link to YOUR page, explain how linking to an error page can hurt them, and give your preferred anchor text. This isn’t really unethical since the link was pointing to an empty error page anyway.
• Links to old/poor pages – Redirect these links to newer pages that offer fresh and/or more relevant content.

One other thing that Rand suggested that stood out for me was in answer to a question by one of the participants. (Sorry I wasn’t able to take note of the person’s name. If you attended the same webinar and know, do let me know.) The question was: How can we use OSE to determine what to charge our clients?

Rand suggested that you simply check out the domain and page authority of your client’s page as well as the number of links. Then you check out your client’s competitors’ pages and compare the data, after which you can do a guestimate of how much effort you need to put into link building as well as how long it will take to creep up on the competitors in search rankings.

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So how is the social search engine relevant to SEO?

It is obviously important because we see how more and more each day search is turning into something more personal as search engines seek ways to improve the relevance of search results. What this means is that we (SEOs) should encourage clients to improve their online network and to start seriously considering or putting more effort in the social media efforts.

Here are a few tips on what you should immediately do to get the most of Google Social Search (remember this may be in experimental mode now but you want to reap the benefits even before it’s fully released):

Get a Google Account and update your public Google profile – Add links to your facebook, twitter, myspace, jaiku, blog, flickr, and whatever other links you want to appear when contacts (hopefully your clients or the friends of your friends, who can turn into clients) search for terms that appear as content in those links.

Get more active in social network sites – Been neglecting your social site accounts? Start adding friends and posting updates WITH KEYWORDS. Don’t get spammy but think of real updates where you can insert a keyword or two. Oh and don’t forget to set your profile on public.

Get reviewed – Find ways to get reviewed by real people on industry-specific sites or even on their websites. Remember the real aim for many clients is conversion and not just traffic. For this word of mouth is still the best way to go. In search terms social search and reviews from people in your social circle is still equivalent to word of mouth. The more people review your site/product/service the more chances you get to appear on the social search results of their contacts.

Hope you find this helpful. Happy Halloween everyone!

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The use of canonical tags to help solve the issue of web pages with valid duplicate content is now very well known, thanks to the announcement made by Yahoo, Bing, and Google last year that they would all be supporting canonical tags. However, more than a year later, the simple fact is that Google is the only one that has backed up its word and fully supports the attribute.

As of June this year, the last information we can find from Bing is that while it can understand the canonical tag, it does not interpret it as a command but only as a “hint”. This means that they do not necessarily “obey” the tag so that non-preferred URLs can still end up ranking better than your preferred URL. Bing’s algorithm will still be the one to determine which URL they will consider to be the primary URL. While Google also says that using the canonical tag does not always guarantee that they will follow the preferred URL at all times, it is obvious that they follow it most of the times. Even Yahoo seems to be doing better than Bing when it comes to clearing up the issue of primary URLs using canonical tags. Bing, however, has to catch up and take the canonical tag as more than a “hint”.

Despite the lack of full support of the canonical tag by Bing, it is still clear that its use is well worth it, especially since Google still rules the search world.

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In SEO, the term canonicalization refers to the process wherein URLs are standardized. What this simply means is that it is how you establish, or tell search engines, which URL you want them to display in search results as containing a certain document.

Canonicalization can be a big problem in SEO as search engines see different URL versions of the same page (i.e. http://www.phoenixrealm.com/ and http://phoenixrealm.com/) can lead to the following issues:

• having the URL versions flagged for containing duplicate content;
• having a non-preferred URL rank higher than the URL you prefer your users to land on; and
• splitting the link juice between the URLs.

To fix this issue, what you need to do is just let the search engines know that these URLs really just have one content and that there is one URL which you prefer them to show in their SERPs. To do this all you need to do is use the canonical tag.

The canonical tag is recognized by all the major search engines and is very easy to use. You just need to add the rel=”canonical” attribute as a link element to all the head pages of the non-preferred URLs. For the example above, if the preferred URL is the first one, then add

link rel=”canonical” href=”http://www.phoenixrealm.com/“

to the head section of the second URL so that the search engines will route all the link juice to the first URL and also only show that in their result pages.

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Related posts:

1. Current Canonical Tag Support from Google, Yahoo, and Bing
2. Matt Cutts Explains Canonical Tags on Video
3. Addressing the Duplicate Content Issue
4. ALT Tags – Every picture should tell a story
5. Do Meta Tags Help SEO?