Last week I was a speaker at the Search Engine Boot Camp conference held in Auckland.

It was a 1 day event and held at the Hilton Hotel. The day was divided in two, with the morning focusing on SEO & PPC search marketing, whilst the afternoon was primarily on social media marketing (SMM). There was a good range of speakers & some interesting presentations which the audience seemed to appreciate.

Search Marketing Agenda

• Keyword Research
• Link Building Fundamentals
• SEO Content Creation
• Paid Search Optimisation
• Landing Page Optimisation

Social Media Agenda

• Social Media Ecosystem
• Managing SMM Campaigns (Social Media Marketing)
• Twitter Marketing Tips
• Tracking the Success of Search & Social Media (Web Analytics)
• Integrating Search & Social into your communications mix
• How do you make sure Social Media works for you

I was 3′rd speaker off the rank & the topic I was charged to present on was ‘SEO Content Creation’. In other words, how to maximise search engine organic rankings through on-page code and content SEO (search engine optimisation). I finished up with some tips which hopefully attendees will find useful.

I’ve previously attended & spoken at Search Engine Boot Camp & have to say that this was significantly better than previous ones. The audience was switched on & very engaged. Lot’s of positive feedback from people I spoke to & similar comments echoed in Twitter #sebc.

If you attended, your comments on this are welcomed below.

NZ marketers are finally realising the value of search marketing.

Latest figures from the IAB show online advertising spend continues to grow & that paid search is now the biggest online marketing channel in NZ.

Hallelujah!

At last we’re starting to catch up with other markets where 50% or more of online spend is invested in paid search.

There are plenty of good reasons for this level of investment. Here are 3:

1. Traffic from search engines – by definition, people actively interested in finding out more about your company & products – is highly valued by marketers. These visitors are more engaged than other site visitors, viewing more than twice the number of pages per session & spending twice as much time onsite.
2. Search engines are now seen by users as an arbiter as to the sites – and brands – of value. In one study by Yahoo! & Compete, 61% of users responded that they expect brand leaders to consistently appear in the top search engine results.
3. In their annual polling of marketers as to the most effective forms of offline & online advertising, both eMarketer and MarketingSherpa have consistently concluded that, along with email marketing, SEO & Paid Search Marketing are the strongest tactics producing the best Return on Investment (ROI).

In summary, the reason marketers are increasingly investing in search is simple – it works! And very cost effectively compared to other channels.

If you’re not doing it yet, maybe it’s time you gave it serious consideration. Your competitors probably are…

Keyword research is arguably the most import aspect of SEO. Selecting the most appropriate keyword phrases a website should be optimised for is ultimately the key to successful search engine marketing.

After all, if you’re not targeting the right keywords and phrases, then even the best rankings are of little value!

Selecting keywords is a balance of choosing phrases that are:

• relevant to your web site and target audience (this is essential)
• sufficiently popular search phrases to warrant targeting (i.e. people are actually using these search phrases)
• and, where possible, have a low number of competing sites.

The ideal scenario is finding a keyword phrase that is relevant to your site, often searched on, but for which there are few competing web sites.

To illustrate how to go about keyword selection, let’s look at the keyword “SEO“. This is an acronym for “search engine optimisation” if you use British spelling, as we do in New Zealand, or “search engine optimization” using the US spelling (z instead of s).

All versions are relevant to our website – so which should we target?

Whilst there’s a range of keyword research tools available but to keeps this simple we’ll limit ourselves here to the very useful Google Insights for Search tool. The great thing about this tool is that it allows you to see keyword trends over time, with the option of segmenting by country & category. This is a big advantage over many keyword research tools which generally are US centric & so don’t always provide information relevant to other English speaking markets, like New Zealand.

This difference in keyword usage is reflected below in the Google Insights for Search screen grabs. The first shows the relative popularity on a global basis of “seo”; “search engine optimisation”, & “search engine optimization”.

As you can see the keyword “seo” is the most popular by a significant margin, whereas “search engine optimisation” trails way back in 3′rd place.

Based on this it’s clear that “SEO” is a term well worth targeting. However before discounting “search engine optimisation” as a keyword to target, take a look at the Regional Interest breakdown below the main chart. As you’ll see in UK, Australia, New Zealand & Ireland the UK spelling “search engine optimisation” (blue coloured bar) is more popular than the US spelling “search engine optimization” (red coloured bar).

This is difference is further apparent when Google Insights for Search is re-run with results filtered just for New Zealand, as shown below. (Note, due to the limited NZ data for NZ the “All categories” filter has to be applied because Google doesn’t have enough data when the “Internet” category is applied).

As you can see, whilst “SEO” is still the most popular keyword, its lead is not as dominant & “search engine optimisation” is more popular than “search engine optimization”. So does this mean an SEO firm targeting a New Zealand audience should ignore “search engine optimization” & just focus trying to rank well for “SEO” & “search engine optimisation”?

No!

It’s clear that Kiwi’s are using all 3 terms & as the “Rising Searches” report shows that both “SEO” & “search engine optimization” are fast growing in popularity. (Rising searches highlight searches that have experienced significant growth in a given time period, with respect to the preceding time period). In time I wouldn’t be at all surprised if “search engine optimization” becomes more used than “search engine optimisation” by New Zealanders searching on Google.

So in this case the smart move is to do SEO optimisation for all 3 keywords with the goal of ranking well in Google for SEO, search engine optimisation, & search engine optimization.

We’re in the throes of doing SEO on our own website, so let’s see how our rankings for these keywords improve over time. Currently whilst we rank well for these terms when appended with “New Zealand”, our rankings in Google NZ for these keywords by themselves is less than stellar. As at 13 July we only rank #17 for “SEO”; #19 for “search engine optimisation” & we’re not even in the top 30 results for “search engine optimization”. 

That will change. Watch this space…

Chances are your website has duplicate content. This is a common SEO issue affecting many sites and can have a detrimental impact on search engine rankings.

The good news is that this problem can now be fixed easily due to the introduction by search engines of the rel=”canonical” tag.

This article explains how to apply this tag to your website so you avoid problems associated with duplicate content.

First though, just what is duplicate content? And should you care?

Google defines duplicate content as “substantive blocks of content within or across domains that either completely matches other content or is appreciably similar.”  Whilst there are unscrupulous webmasters who steal and scrape content from other sites, Google recognises that most duplicate content is not deceptive or deliberate.

Many sites inadvertently contain duplicate content simply because pages within the site can be found under multiple distinct URLs. Common examples of this are forums, blogs & ecommerce catalogue websites.

With blogs the same content can commonly be found with different URLs under different categories & archives. Ecommerce catalogue websites also frequently present the same content under different categories. And this is further compounded if session IDs, tracking IDs, affiliate IDs or other parameters are used.

For a long time in the SEO community there was a common misconception that Google penalises sites for containing duplicate content. However last year Google advised they recognise many sites do contain duplicate content and that they don’t penalise sites for this. (The exception is if duplicate content is being used to manipulate rankings and deceive search engine users).

What Does This Mean For Your Website?

So unless you’re operating on the dark side and scraping content from other websites does this mean you no longer need to worry about having duplicate content within your website? Unfortunately the answer is NO.

Whilst there aren’t duplicate content penalties per se, duplicate content can still hurt how your site ranks in Google and other search engines.

The reason for this is that search engines don’t want to include duplicate versions of a page in their search results because this undermines the credibility of their results. So when a site contains the same content under multiple URLs search engines will choose one version to list in their results and ignore the rest. The page chosen by search engines is called the “canonical” page. A canonical page is simply the preferred version of a set of pages with highly similar content.

Google usually does a pretty good job at picking the right page, but they don’t always get it right and may end up listing a different version of the page to what you’d prefer. Even when they do get it right, the major problem of duplicate content is that you lose the benefits of link “juice” from sites that are linking to duplicate versions of the page, rather than the canonical URL. (Remember links play a major role in search engine rankings and because search engines ignore duplicate versions of pages link juice to these duplicate pages is lost. As a result your search engine rankings can suffer).

If you have a large site with lots of duplicate pages a further problem is that your entire website may not be indexed because search engines are spending too much time crawling and sorting duplicate pages.

Traditionally the way of dealing with duplicate content has involved using the robots.txt file and no index meta tags to block duplicate pages from being indexed, plus 301 re-directs. Doing this can be tricky and, if you get it wrong, have disastrous results.

Canonical Link Tag

Fortunately the major search engines have made managing duplicate content a whole lot easier for webmasters through the recent introduction of the rel=”canonical” link tag. Using this tag allows you to specify to search engines the canonical version of each page you want them to index.

To do this you simply add the tag into the <head> section of duplicate pages you don’t want indexed.  The tag has the format below and in the “href=” part you specify the URL you want search engines to treat as the preferred or canonical version of the page.

<link rel=”canonical” href=http://www.mysite.co.nz/realpageurl.html>

The cool thing about this tag is that not only does it prevent search engines from indexing the wrong version of a page, but even better, it ensures links pointing to duplicate pages are attributed to the canonical version of the page. So even if other sites are pointing to duplicate versions of a page you’ll now still benefit from this link juice.

Here is an example of this being used:

A site selling clothing may have multiple pages listing an identical set of shirts with the only difference being the order in which items are listed, e.g. one page may display shirts sorted in style order, while another page displays the same shirts listed by price.

http://www.example.co.nz/product.php?item=shirts&sort=style

http://www.example.co.nz/product.php?item=shirts&sort=price

Apart from sort order the above pages are identical. To specify a canonical link to the page http://www.example.co.nz/product.php?item=shirts the following should be added to the <head> section of the above non-canonical pages:

<link rel=”canonical” href=”http://www.example.co.nz/product.php?item=shirts”/>

This can also be used if pages are available in both secure & non-secure formats (i.e. https & http). By using rel=”canonical” you can specify one as the canonical version of the page.

Eg say you want the non-secure version of http://www.mysite.co.nz/widgets to be canonical.  To do this add <link rel=”canonical” href=”http://www. mysite.co.nz/widgets “/> to the <head> section of the secure page version (i.e. https://www.mysite.co.nz/widgets)

Not A Complete Fix

Using this method to manage duplicate content is something all webmasters should be able to implement. If you do use this something to bear in mind is that this tag is a suggestion rather than a directive and search engines will ignore it if the canonical version of the page has:

• Not yet been indexed
• The canonical page is a duplicate of another page also specified as canonical
• The canonical page returns a 404 error.

If any of these situations apply then the search engines will revert to choosing a canonical version of the page, as they will if you don’t use the rel=”canonical” tag.

Spammers Beware

Finally, devious webmasters may be thinking they can use this tag as a way to redirect link juice from less important to more important pages that aren’t duplicates, whilst still allowing the less important pages to still be found by visitors. We advise you not to try this. The canonical tag is only supposed to be used for pages that actually are duplicates. If you abuse it and apply the tag to pages that aren’t duplicates then you run a real risk of getting your site penalised.

So long as you use this tag correctly it should make managing duplicate content issues much easier for you than before. For more information from Google about canonicalization check out http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=139394