Category: SEO

Handling Parameters to Prevent Duplicate Content

One of the challenges SEO managers face is to minimize the amount duplicate content on their sites. Duplicate content can be problematic of the following reasons:

PageRank Dilution: as the backlinks to your pages will be pointing to various version of your pages, rather than the canonical version of the pages getting all the benefits, your PageRank will be divided between various pages.
Crawl Efficiency: search engines rather than focusing on crawling your unique content, they end up crawling the same content available on multiple URLs. The larger your site is, the more sever the issue will be.

One of the causes of duplicate content is parameters in the URLs. The parameters are added to the URLs for various reasons such as:

Tracking purposes
Sorting SRPs
Page Layout
Filtering search results (e.g., by price)
Session Ids
Product Ids
Affiliate Ids

URL parameters usually fall into two categories: 1) parameters that do not change page content 2) parameters that change the content page.

Both Google and Bing Webmasters tools offer the option to handle your parameters to minimize duplicate content problems on your site. This is a different action from creating a robots.txt file, where you can also include specific instructions on how to handle parameters.

Google provides webmasters with a list of the parameters they’ve found in the URLs on their sites and provide them with suggestions on how to handle the parameters. You can confirm or reject those suggestions and can add parameters that aren’t listed. In Google Webmaster Tools, you can ask Google to ignore up to 15 parameters. Please note that the tool is case sensitive.

Google Webmaster Tools Parameter Handling

Ignoring Parameters in Google Webmaster Tools

Interesting enough, even if you ask Google to ignore some parameters, they do not always honour your request – some times for good reasons! You need to be careful which parameters you ignore as you could potentially ask Google to ignore important parameters that, if dropped from the index, could wipe out large number of your URLs from their index.

Recently Google made the interface more user-friendly to minimize the chances of making mistakes while providing Google with more details. You can now choose from one of the following options:

Let Googlegot decide – to be used when you are not sure how the parameter behaves
Every URL – to help Google determine if a URL is unique
Only URLs with value=x – to instruct Google which version of URLs to crawl
No URLs – to explicitly ask Google not to crawl certain URLs

You can also canonicalize the URLs by adding the rel=”canonical”element to the source of your preferred URL.

Bing Webmaster Tools also offers a similar URL Normalization tool to help Bing manage crawl more efficiently and avoid unnecessary site bandwidth usage by Bing brawler.

Parameter names cannot exceed 100 characters and maximum number of parameters that can be ignored in Bing is 20. Like Google, Bing takes these settings as hints and does not guarantee to ignore the parameters.

Adding a Parameter to Bing URL Normalization Tool

Jul 24, 2011 | 0 comments | View Post

Google Boost – Advertising for Local Businesses

To help those who search for local businesses, Google has been offering local vertical and to help local businesses to promote their businesses provided them with local business center (renamed to Google Places).

Recently Google introduced a new feature called Google Boost which allows businesses to create search ads directly from their Google Places account eliminating the need to create and run local ads using Google AdWords.

With Google Boost, businesses set up their ads once and do not need to manage their ads on an ongoing basis after the initial set up. The ads added to Google Places, may appear either in the Sponsored Links section of Google or Google Maps results pages.

Google Boost for Local Businesses

Google Boost can have major impact both on SEO and PPC Advertising. As Google boost will take over most of the SERPs, small businesses need to pay more attention to their Google Places account and add as much information about their business as possible and optimize their listings.

It will also entice more small businesses to get sponsored links through Google Boost making the local phrases more competitive.

Of course this is a beta feature which is being tested in San Francisco, Houston and Chicago. Interested businesses outside these locations can request to receive notification when Google Boost becomes available in their area by filling out this form.

Nov 07, 2010 | 0 comments | View Post

Google Instant Impact on Organic & Paid Search

In my previous post, I mentioned about the introduction of Google Instant – an enhancement to the way Google shows its search results based on a predictive model and its potential impact on both SEO and SEM.

These changes can impact the performance of AdWords campaigns and your PPC Advertising campaigns. Although Google Instant would not change the way ads are served, ads will now be shown for a new “predicted query.”

Even thought it might behave differently depending on your keyword phrases, Google Instant most likely decreases your overall impression levels, increase your CTR and improve the quality of your clicks since it helps people search using terms that more directly connect them. This could potentially bring down your CPC and improve your overall campaign performance. However, there are other possibilities as well.

When your audience searches using Google Instant, the following scenarios might happen:

The searcher begins to type a search query and clicks anywhere on the page (a search result, an ad, a spell correction, vertical searches, or a related search).
The user chooses a particular query by clicking the Search button, pressing Enter, or selecting one of the predicted queries. This scenario could hurt the long tail and increase the competition for head keywords which can increase the CPC. This will help Google maximize its revenue by getting a higher number of clicks at higher CPC while reducing the pressure on their infrasturcutre.
The user stops typing, and the results are displayed for a minimum of three seconds. In this scenario, as visitors might not finish typing their query completely, this may dilute the impression data for some phrases. You can track the impact of this by looking at the referring keywords in your Google Analytics account.

In terms of organic search results and the impact on SEO, there has been no algorithmic change to the way Google ranks sites. Nevertheless, very much like paid search, Google Instant will push the number of organic queries from long to head terms which means that sites that have higher authority and rank high for broader terms will benefit from this change.

It will also make having a first fold position even more important as users may not click on the search button to see the results below the fold.

Sep 14, 2010 | 0 comments | View Post

Optimizing for Bing – SEO after Search Alliance

As I mentioned in my previous post (Yahoo & Microsoft Search Alliance), the alliance is well on its way. Some Bing results have already started to show up on Yahoo particularly in US. As a result of the testing, some sites have seen fluctuations on their rankings.

The search alliance also impacts organic search (web, image and video). Microsoft will be responsible for the platform serving organic search used by both companies (Yahoo & Microsoft).

It is possible that the current ranking of your site on Yahoo changes when Yahoo’s organic search results are powered by Bing. Once the transition occurs, your ranking will be largely based on how Bing indexes and ranks your website for a particular search query. Though there might be some adjustments on the way, the current Bing search results are a good indicator of how your site may rank on Yahoo! after the transition.

Comparing your organic keyword rankings on Yahoo and Bing will help you gauge the possibility of rise or drop in your organic traffic after the transition is fully in place. If rankings are doing better in Bing than in Yahoo, then there should be a rise in traffic and lower if your ranking is currently doing better in Yahoo.

Bing’s crawler is scheduled to come out of beta in October and will be re-branded as bingbot replacing msnbot. Bingbot will still honor directives the same way msnbot does. Nevertheless, the main objective of this move is to improve crawling efficiency and increase the number of documents being crawled by Bing.

Given the fact that moving forward the combined traffic of Yahoo and Bing will account for almost 30% of the search market share, SEO consultants cannot ignore Bing as a rounding error anymore. SEO specialists need to pay more attention to how their sites rank on Bing and take the necessary actions to ensure they improve their visibility. Some of the actions that can be taken are:

Create XML sitemaps for your web properties and submit through your Bing Webmaster Tools account.
Expand your link building campaigns for your important pages in your web properties. Make sure you create link baits to get more deep links.

SEO for Bing, in most part, works with Google SEO best practices. Nevertheless, in the next few months, Bing Webmaster Tools will be web marketers best friend. They need to create their webmaster account with Microsoft if not already in place, submit XML sitemaps, run diagnostics and examine performance indicators.

You might need to adjust your pay per click campaigns so that you deal with the traffic shift. In another post I will cover the impact of the merger of Microsoft and Yahoo search results on PPC campaigns.

Aug 11, 2010 | 0 comments | View Post

Site Speed – A Factor in Google Algorithm

Just 2 years after introducing Landing Page Impact on AdWords Quality Score, Google just announced that they are now using site speed as a factor in their search ranking algorithm.

Currently, website speed does not have a huge impact on the ranking and still site relevance and backlinks are more important factors in SEO; however, this is another factor that search engine optimization experts need to take into consideration.

You can use tools such as Firebug Firefox add-on, Yahoo’s YSlow tool or Google Webmaster tools to monitor and improve your site’s speed.

Google Webmaster Tools - Site Load Time

Some techniques that you can take to improve your website’s speed are:

• Optimize web graphics
• Reduce the file sizes
• Compress JavaScript
• Reduce CSS size
• Utilize HTTP caching
• Minimize browser reflow
• Reduce HTML document size by eliminating optional elements
• Use fewer redirects

By speeding up your site, not only you may help your SEO efforts and search ranking but also you can potentially improve user experience, average time on your site as well as conversion rate.

Apr 13, 2010 | 0 comments | View Post

SES 2009 – Search Engine Strategies Conference

Time flies…June is around the corner and so is Toronto SES 2009. It is as if it was just yesterday, I attended SMX Search Analytics Toronto and exhibited at Toronto Search Engine Strategies Conference back in 2008.

We will be again exhibiting at 2009 SES event which will be held at Sheraton Centre Toronto Hotel. This year’s SES conferences will be held on June 8th and June 9th. In addition, on June 10th, there will be some SEM and SEO training programs (more on SEM SEO Training).

I am so excited about this year’s SES conference. At a time of recession, more and more marketers are concerned about their marketing dollars. Search Engine Strategies is a great opportunity for marketers to learn more about the power of Search Engine Marketing and Search Engine Optimization.

If search marketing campaigns are executed properly they can prove to be one of the most effective channels for marketers.

I will post more updates on the 2009 SES Toronto.

Nima Asrar Haghighi, SEM SEO Expert

May 31, 2009 | 0 comments | View Post

SMX Search Analytics – Toronto

After Danny Sullivan and Chris Sherman departed from Search Engine Strategies (SES) conference and expo series, initiated SMX Search Marketing Expo. SMX brings together some of the sharpest minds in the search engine marketing industry.

Earlier in April, I attended Toronto SMX Search Analytics Conference and Expo. The purpose of Search Analytics is to provide marketers with insight into their visitors, customers and those who bounced away. The promise of the event is to equip advanced search marketers with tools, tactics and strategies that can maximize the effectiveness of their search engine marketing campaigns.

Toronto SMX Search Analytics conference kicked off by keynote speaker, Venessa Fox and covered topics such as:

Analyzing & Converting Organic Search Traffic – Covering SEO KPIs
Analyzing & Converting Paid Search Traffic – Utilizing Web Analytics to measure PPC campaigns
Up Close with Google Analytics – Measuring traffic utilizing GA
Top Ten Customized Search Analytics Reports – Creating Custom Executive Dashboards
Successful Testing for Improved Search Marketing ROI – A/B and Multivariate Testing
Traffic Segmentation & Why It Matters – segmenting organic and paid search traffic by location, demographic and psychographics to improve ROI
Search Analytics & Competitive Intelligence – Analyzing competitors’ strategies and bit them at their own game
Creating a Data-Driven Culture – Building an Analytics and data driven culture in the organization

The two-day Toronto SMX Search Analytics program was jam-pack of information. While SES Toronto is a great source of information for marketers interested in Search Engine Marketing, SMX series are more suitable for more seasoned search marketers.

Nima Asrar Haghighi, SEM & SEO Expert

Apr 14, 2009 | 1 comment | View Post

Most Popular SEM SEO Expert BLog Posts of 2008

After a great and relatively long vacation in Dubai, I am back in Toronto. It’s the time to ponder how another year passed, what I have achieved and what I should plan for 2009. So, I reviewed 2008 traffic to the site. Here are the most popular blog posts:

Also by reviewing the keywords that have sent traffic to the site, I have identified some topics that people are seeking information about. I will gradually address the issues in the upcoming posts in 2009.

Nima Asrar Haghighi

Jan 13, 2009 | 0 comments | View Post

XML Sitemap for Large Sites

In my previous two articles (How to Generate XML Sitemap for Your Website and Submit XML Sitemap to Google, Yahoo and MSN), I explained how you can generate XML sitemaps and submit them to search engines.

What if your website has a large number of pages? How do you create and submit XML sitemaps for large websites (e.g., e-commerce, publishing, price comparison sites)?

An XML sitemap file can contain up to 50,000 URLs and should be smaller than 10 MB. So, if your site is larger than these limits, you need to break your sitemap into several smaller XML sitemaps. You then need to list all the sitemaps in a sitemap index file. Please note that XML sitemap index file cannot contain more than 1,000 XML sitemaps.

The XML sitemap index file has a similar format to that of regular XML Sitemap file. The Sitemap index file uses the following XML tags:

sitemapindex: the parent tag surrounds the file and contains the individual sitemaps
sitemap: the individual XML Sitemap
loc: the location of the sitemap
lastmod: the last modified date of the sitemap

Sample XML Sitemap Index

Here is an example of how an XML Sitemap index file looks like:

< ?xml version=”1.0″ encoding=”UTF-8″ ?>
– < xmlns=”http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9″>
– < sitemap>
< loc>http://www.yoursite.com/sitemap.xml< /loc>
< lastmod>2008-12-06T13:51:06+00:00< /lastmod>
< /sitemap>
– < sitemap>
< loc>http://www.yoursite.com/sitemap2.xml< /loc>
< lastmod>2008-12-06T13:51:06+00:00< /lastmod>
< /sitemap>
– < sitemap>
< loc>http://www.yoursite.com/sitemap3.xml< /loc>
< lastmod>2008-12-06T13:51:06+00:00< /lastmod>
< /sitemap>
< /sitemapindex>

You can write a script that helps you automate the XML sitemap generation and updates. The script can append new pages to the XML sitemap as they are created. However, you need to set up a rule to make sure that your sitemap does not go over its maximum size. Once a sitemap is reached its quota, a new one should be created and appended to the XML sitemap index file.

Nima Asrar Haghighi, SEO Expert

Dec 07, 2008 | 0 comments | View Post

SEO Training in Toronto- Courses for Learning PPC

With the growth of search engine optimization and marketing and the ever growing demand for SEM and SEO experts who could help augment online marketing campaigns, more marketing and web design professionals are looking for SEM (ppc advertising) and SEO training courses to learn about the latest search engine optimization & marketing techniques.

As an early SEO and PPC adopter, I learned search engine optimization and marketing techniques by working on an online property, as I mentioned in my post: Back to the Future, and by trying new methods to improve search engines rankings and increasing traffic. As at the time, there were no formal SEM (pay-per-click) and SEO training courses, the only option was to go after trial and error methodology. The advantage of training yourself on SEO and SEM is the trill and self satisfaction of learning new SEO techniques and getting to put your thinking hat on. However, the disadvantage is that you learn at the cost of time and possible mistakes you make along the way which could potentially prove very costly in PPC advertising (AdWords, YSM, MSN adCenter).

How to Learn SEO & PPC?

Even though there are not many universities and colleges that offer SEO and PPC training courses, you can shorten the learning curve either by reading various SEM and SEO blogs online (check my blogroll for some good sites), read books on the topic (e.g., Search Engine Marketing Inc., Search Engine Optimization: An Hour a Day, SEO Bible) or talk to SEM SEO Experts to learn the basic and advanced search engine marketing techniques. Please note that there are many myths around search engine optimization. So, don’t put your trust in what you read unless you have tested the ideas and have seen their positive or negative impacts.

If you would like to learn search engine optimization and are looking for PPC & SEO training courses in Toronto, you can try search engine strategies Toronto workshops or SEMPO courses. You can always try to pick my brain as well.

Nima Asrar Haghighi, Toronto-based SEM, SEO, PPC Expert

Related Article: SEM Expertise Needed to Be an SEM Expert

Nov 22, 2008 | 2 comments | View Post

Google Search Based Keyword Tool – SKTool

Google just announced the introduction of its new keyword search tool. Google’s new free keyword suggestion tool is called Search-based Keyword Tool (SKTool or SbKT).

Whether you use keyword research tools for SEO or PPC advertising using AdWords, YSM (previously Overture), MSN and adCenter, you can benefit from Google’s new and free keyword tool.

The Search-based Keyword Tool helps you leverage search query data relevant to your website’s content by giving you keywords that Google believes are relevant to your site but are not currently part of your AdWords campaigns. By using this new tool, not only you can prevent any missed opportunities but also can work on improving the Quality Score of your AdWords campaigns by selecting keywords that Google finds most relevant.

So, What is Search-based Keyword Suggestion Tool?

This tool provides you with keyword ideas that are relevant and specific to your site. Google analyzes the landing page on your website and suggests keyword queries that have occured on Google properties over the past year. The suggested keywords are organized into subcategories.

In the first look, the tool looks like Google AdWords External Keyword Research Tool, however, SKTool (SbKT) combines the knowledge of your website together with Google’s query database to suggest relevant keywords for your AdWords campaigns.

The keyword tool looks at the content on each page within your website and pairs keyword suggestions with specific pages that Google believes are most relevant. Of course it is important to use your own judgment before selecting any of the suggested keywords and not to put your faith in the hands of machines ;0).

The tool also offers average bid required to place your ad in the top three position of Google search engine results pages. Another cool feature of this new keyword tool is that it checks for deleted, paused and negative keywords in your AdWords account to ensure they do not suggest any duplicate keywords.

What could make Google search-based keyword tool so special is its ability to provide you with the top keywords across all categories and not just the keywords related to your website. Once the tool is out of beta, it could be the new best friend for PPC and SEO professionals.

Nima Asrar Haghighi, SEM Expert

Nov 18, 2008 | 0 comments | View Post

SEO vs. PPC Promotion Strategies

Marketing SEO vs. PPC Promotion StrategiesSEO or SEM? This is a question you might have asked yourself. You have the budget to allocate either to SEO market your products and services or take advantage of PPC advertising to promote your website.

When deciding on your marketing strategies, there are many factors that you need to take into consideration.On the first look, SEO seems to be the perfect answer as it could attract as much as 70% of the searchers whereas your PPC promotion could draw only 30% of the search volume. Search Engine Optimization has other benefits as well.

SEO Benefits
• Once you have a high rankings on search engines, you can start getting traffic without directly paying for that traffic.
• Generate Possibly higher CTR.
• Gain more credibility among searchers.• Once you rank high organically, more people find your site and link back to you.

However, there are some challenges with SEO. First off, there is no guarantee that your site get first ranking even if you implement all your SEO strategies. Secondly it usually takes a while to be able to gain high rankings on search engines results pages (specially on Google, Yahoo and MSN). Thirdly search engines algorithms could change and impact all your SEO efforts. Fourthly, you have less control over messaging and the selection of landing pages. Fifthly, A/B or multi variant testing would be way more complicated.

PPC Benefits
By incorporating Pay per click advertising into your website promotion strategy, you will be able to put your message in front of your audience at the exact time they are looking for. Some of the benefits of pay per click advertising are:

• Quick time to market.• Flexibility in changing messages.
• Quick measurement of response.
• Easy A/B or multi variant testing of ad copies and landing pages.
• Ability to target audience in specific locations by geo-targeting.
• Set and control daily budget.

The challenges with SEM (PPC) advertising is that you need to keep paying for the traffic. As mentioned before it also only attract about 30% of the traffic.

So, let’s ask the question again. Should you allocate your marketing budget to organic SEO or sponsored PPC ads? The answer is both. Depending on what your objectives are or how urgent your marketing needs are you might decide on how to allocate your budget.

No matter which strategy you are using it is important that you track their performance by designing KPIs to measure the success of your SEO and PPC initiatives utilizing your Web Analytics application.

In most cases, when SEO and PPC are used together as part of an integrated marketing strategy they could create a great synergy that could create your company with competitive advantage.

SEO Benefits from PPC
As I mentioned in my post on SEO and Personalization, SEO can indirectly benefit from PPC advertising. By getting more visibility through PPC advertising, you increase the chances of getting backlinks from your audience which in turns helps improve your PageRank and SEO ranking in the long run.

In addition, by analyzing your PPC campaign you will get a better understanding of what keywords contribute to your ROI best. Then you can use those keywords to optimize your website for.

PPC advertising also create more awareness and branding for your site which in turn could help you lift your response rate.

Having multiple listings on the first page of search engines you can further reinforce your message and build credibility for your business.

PPC Benefits from SEO
When your website ranks high on search engines such as Google, Yahoo and MSN, your ads could start getting higher CTR as people find your site more credible.

Additionally a well optimized page could help improve your Quality Score for your PPC ads. This is getting more and more important as SEO and PPC are getting more and more interconnected.

Before spending time and budget to invest in your SEO strategies, you can run test PPC campaign to identify the pest performing phrases.

Both PPC advertising and SEO are excellent strategies for marketing your website. However, to be successful in a competitive industry you need to utilize the synergy between PPC and SEO. The key is to know when to emphasize on one and when to rely on the other or when to employ both. SEO is most effective when you are trying to reach long term objectives whereas PPC is most effective when you need immediate traffic.

Nima Asrar Haghighi, SEM SEO Expert

Oct 30, 2008 | 0 comments | View Post

Not for Profit Conference – 2008 NFP Seminar by CMA

I will be speaking at 2008 CMA Not-for-Profit Conference on October 7, 2008 here in Toronto. The objective of this seminar is to share with the non profit organizations ways to develop an inegrated marketing strategy and to showcase innovative concepts in the not-for-profit industry.

The audience for this event will be marketing and management teams from non for profit organizations and agencies.

In this speech I will cover how search engine marketing and search engine optimization can be a powerful tool for marketing managers while web analytics can provide executives and management teams with insight on their marketing campaigns.

I will also touch base on Google Grants for non-profit organizations can be utilized for fundraising.

Learn more about this non-for profit conference.

Nima Asrar Haghighi – SEM SEO Expert

Sep 25, 2008 | 0 comments | View Post