1. Help shoppers get around with improved navigation

Holiday shoppers are busy people and now, more than ever, people are shopping for and buying gifts online.  The last thing you want is to have the perfect holiday gift hidden among confusing or inconvenient navigation.  A good rule of thumb: no page on your website should be more than 2 clicks away.  If you don’t currently have a site map, get one!  This makes it easy for people to find what they’re looking for, decreasing the chances of abandonment and increasing the chance that you’ll get that conversion.  Put your holiday deals front and center, perhaps even including a holiday shopping menu tab or main landing page to give people the quickest route to purchase.

2. Refresh or update your site map

Speaking of site maps, is yours decorated in the holiday spirit?  By this, I mean make sure that all of your products, especially your holiday-specific ones are included in it.  Some products may only be available during the holidays and so you might have left them off of your site map.  This is the time to make sure they’re back on there and ready to be purchased.

3. Make keywords holiday-shopper friendly

If you already have keywords assigned for each of your pages and products, great.  Now is the time to dress those keywords up so they’re more appealing to holiday shoppers.  Words like “gifts” and “presents” will see an increase, so you should include these words when applicable and revisit your keyword research to see if there are any words that can be tweaked to be more holiday-specific.  Additionally, make sure you’ve included the most relevant and most accurate keywords possible.  People will be searching for the specific things they want, so if you have sweaters on sale, but your keywords don’t include “sweaters” or “sale”, you probably won’t rank well in the search engines, making it more difficult for shoppers to find you.  Do your due diligence now to make sure your site is holiday-ready.

4. Promote your products as good holiday gifts

Is your product the perfect gift for mom or what any dad would love to have?  Then say so.  Your product descriptions should be as detailed and accurate as possible to help people quickly make the decision to purchase without hunting around for more information.  You can help them make that decision by describing a product as “perfect for mom” or “the ultimate gift for your guy”.  The more information you can provide a shopper up-front, the less likely they’ll be to abandon your site to go looking for something with more information.  You can include this information in the title tags or meta descriptions as appropriate for an added search engine bonus.

5. Merry metas

To build on that, be sure that your meta descriptions are optimized for the holidays wherever appropriate.  While these don’t help your search rankings, they can ultimately be the deciding factor between a shopper clicking your link and the one above or below you.  Take the time to include information on shipping, holiday deals, the ideal recipient for certain products and anything else in keeping with the spirit of holiday shopping.  Include a call-to-action to persuade people to click on your click and discover the amazing holiday deals you have waiting for them.  But don’t forget the cheer!  Consider adding a little bit of holiday humor to bring a smile to people’s faces while shopping online.  It may make your meta more memorable and drive them to click through.

6. Don’t skimp on basics

Just like when your grandparents gave you socks for Christmas when you were little, it’s always important to consider the basics.  By this, I mean that you should ensure that your site is functioning in SEO terms. Do all of the links work?  Do all of your pages have title tags that are the appropriate length (70 characters or less)?  No number of holiday promotions will make up for a site that isn’t functioning well.  Not only can problems in the basics cause you to rank poorly in search engines (and thus decrease the likelihood that shoppers will find you), but it could also cause any shoppers who do find you to become quickly frustrated and leave.

7. Optimize your media

Holidays are the perfect time to add videos and images to your site.  Media makes your site more interesting and enjoyable to spend time on and it can serve as a valuable opportunity to give your potential customers more information on products and deals in a quick and aesthetically pleasing manner. This is also an opportunity for additional optimization.  Be sure you name your image and video files with accurate, descriptive keywords, including holiday specific keywords, if appropriate.  Also make sure that your image title and alt tags are in order to benefit shoppers on your site.  These actions will help search engines identify your offerings and serve them up to deal-eager shoppers, as well as improve the overall experience for shoppers while they’re on your site.

8. Boost link strength to popular items

Do you have some items you know are popular during the holidays?  Help get these pages more views and click throughs by linking to them from larger, higher ranking pages such as the homepage, as this will give them greater link juice, which may help them rank better in the search engines.  This is a great idea because, as I mentioned earlier, the easier you can make it for shoppers to get to your hot products, the greater the likelihood that they’ll actually get there and check out.

9. Make it easy to buy

Simply put, the more steps and hurdles there are to checking out, the less likely consumers are to go through them and make it to the actual purchase.  This doesn’t need to be specific to the holidays, but this is a great opportunity to make some changes to your check-out process—just as pages shouldn’t be too many clicks away from where a shopper is, nor should the check-out process be lengthy or difficult.  Streamline the purchase process if possible.  Consider placing an on-page buy button that allows shoppers to quickly and easily place an item into their cart and proceed to check out in one easy click.  Google Places can also factor heavily into shopping decisions, with people browsing locations and their offerings before actually going to the store.  Be sure your Google Place listings are updated and current if you have them—including products you have in-stock and any deals you may have—and include a link to your website to help shoppers gather their information ahead of time.

10. Make it social

Finally, don’t underestimate the importance of social media.  The holidays are about family and friends after all, so be prepared with some social media strategies to help your customers get to know you and your business.  Consider some new blog posts with gift ideas and be sure to include all the information a consumer may need right there on the page, along with an easy buy button, rather than directing them to your website where they then must track down the gift you’ve blogged about and purchase it.  Additionally, don’t neglect your Twitter and Facebook pages.  Holidays and shopping are social in nature and people will be searching social media platforms for deals, suggestions and reviews.  Knowing this, be sure you’re posting your deals and offerings in the form of Tweets and Facebook posts while including the appropriate wording.  Craft your 140-characters to be enticing to shoppers and include words like “good gift ideas”, “holiday deals,” etc., because these are the sorts of things people are looking for.

Are you ready for the holidays? Cyber Monday is only a month away so now is the time to get going on making your site the holiday shopping destination.  Hopefully with these tips, you and your customers will have a very merry holiday season.

When searching for an item on Google, you search with a keyword, but how do you receive a list of websites to choose from?  Google has a special algorithm that indexes sites based on different factors, such as how people link to a page and what words appear on it. This directly correlates with popularity and relevance, respectively.  However, these two factors are only a piece of the algorithm that determines the rankings you find on a search engine results page on Google.

Although new factors may cause changes in a website’s ranking, most may not be noticed and could have minor effects on actual page rankings.  Many of the potential changes have to do with the algorithm adjusting to the new factor, not the entire algorithm changing.   These additions to the algorithm can happen seamlessly, due to the thorough nature in which Google indexes each site.

So what exactly is Panda?  Panda is an update designed to find “low-quality” pages.  Therefore, if your site has an abundance of “low-quality” pages, Google will identify your entire site and negative results will occur.  This does not by any means completely eliminate your site from the Google search engine; however, it does limit your progress and outlook for upward mobility within Google.  Google’s main priority with this is to keep their search engine relevant and to help the visitors find what they came for, while avoiding poor quality.

If you have been “attacked” by the Panda, know that it runs on a schedule and not in a continuous fashion.  Therefore, if you’ve been affected, immediate changes will not improve your rankings until the next time that Panda is live.

In conclusion, I challenge readers to have consistency within their website, maintaining relevance to the intended target, as well as periodically checking pages for broken links and outdated content.  Remember that only you can prevent forest fires! Oh, wait….that’s the wrong bear.

For a while now, HTML 5 an CSS 3 have been available to the public and have been tested and manipulated like any new coding language. Some of the best (though not necessarily coolest or prettiest) new features of these two new additions are their abilities to integrate and embed video and dynamic content into a site’s code. Instead of referencing external files for this content, developers are now able to directly hard code video, animations, fonts and other content into their sites.

This sounds great, right? So why aren’t people using it? The main hold up right now is browser support. With the newest versions of Chrome, Internet Explorer and Firefox, support has recently been upgraded but the languages continue to lack full support. The chart below summarizes the support for each of the major browsers.

While many developers and SEO advocates would probably love to see embedded content, the browsers are holding back the transition to these new languages. Many internet users are still using outdated browsers like IE 7, which offers little to no support. Some designers are already using HTML 5 and CSS 3 because of their new and greatly improved capabilities, but they have to accept that a certain portion of their visitors will not be able to view their content as it was designed.

It will probably be many months, if not years, before HTML 5 and CSS 3 become the standard in web design, but there are some amazing tools surfacing in the market to help bridge the gap. Developers like Jilion (www.jilion.com) have created a method of providing both HTML 5 and Flash content at the same time. Their service, SublimeVideo, allows for web designers to place both HTML 5 and Flash video within their site, and the service will load whichever content the visitor is able to view. This type of service at least moves in the right direction while ensuring that all visitors will have an equal experience.

In the end, internet users will have to take the steps to upgrade their browsers to allow for a better web experience. In the meantime, we can continue to optimize as usual with the help of some inventive tools!

When you search in Google in the old index, you are not searching live on the Web; the results that are returned to you are most likely a couple of days to weeks old.  To better understand how searching works, watch this video: How Search Works

Google’s decision to create Caffeine was due to increased content on the Web. With so many people on the Internet frequently uploading videos, blogs, images, and Web pages they decided it was time for a new system. Google’s last index consisted of several layers, and it took weeks to update them because they would to analyze the entire Web. Caffeine analyzes smaller portions of the Web to continually update the index.

Besides Caffeine’s increased indexing speed, it will also rely more on keywords, and more importance will be place on exact matches in domain names. Another big change is that local results may be detected based on one’s  IP address even if they’re not logged in.

So what does this mean to the average Internet user? If you are searching in Google you will get fresher result and up to date information. If you are a content publisher that updates your site, Twitter, blog, or e-commerce store regularly you should receive improved rankings. This is bad news for those of you who aren’t adding content on a regular basis. You may start to see other sites pass yours in rankings based on the new indexing methods.

If you don’t update frequently, here are some things you can do to your website to avoid missing out on the Caffeine rush:

- Get an SEO friendly content management system that will allow for easy updates to your website.

- Add a blog to your site about the latest news in your industry and update it regularly.

- Add a link to your Twitter profile to your website.

- Post relevant pictures and videos.

- Get others to link to your site

Carrie Grimes, a Google software engineer is confident in the new system and stated “it’s a robust foundation that makes it possible for us to build an even faster and more comprehensive search engine that scales with the growth of information online and delivers even more relevant search results to you.”

Local search allows businesses to leverage their customers’ decisions. When an internet user needs to find an accountant in Des Moines, Iowa they go to their search engine to return results. They type in “Des Moines accountant” and up pops a 7-pack of results which includes businesses’: website, phone number, address, reviews, directions, coupons, tags (for less than a dollar a day, businesses can tag their location to stand out), maps, and pictures. Place Pages have an individual dashboard that allows business owners to view information about how many times people have found their business on Google, what keywords are used to find their business, and what areas people traveled from to get to their location.

Google Places, Yahoo! Local, and Bing Local are the 3 main search engines people use. To create a local listing on each of these sites you will need to have an account log in (ex. Windows Live ID, Google Accounts.) The links below will help you set up your local listing on these 3 main sites.

Google Places: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UtFuarYnWqU

Yahoo! Local: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FfgidVap-mM

Bing Local: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=826Xy11H6uw&feature=related

As a business owner there are many advantages of utilizing the local component of search engines, but it’s important that necessary steps are taken to provide a good ranking. Information is drawn from David Mihn’s 2010 Local Search Ranking Factors.

TOP FACTORS TO INCREASING RANKING IN LOCAL SEARCH

1. Claiming your Place Page

Claiming your page is essential for good rankings, however on average only 1 out of 5 businesses have claimed their page. If your page isn’t claimed search engines, like Google, will get information from third party sites, where the information could be incorrect. An unclaimed page also allows anyone to make edits on the page.

A claimed page lets search engines knows they have the most up to date information for the location. It is also vital that information about your business is accurate and consistent among the Major Data Providers (MDP) and search engines.

For example: To see if you have claimed your Place Page, start off by searching your location in Google. If the top right corner of the Place Page says edit this page or business owner, it means you have not claimed your page. If it says owner verified listing, you are good to go. If the page need claiming, then click business owner and it will direct you to log into your Google account and click edit business information. Google will then send letter with a pin and activation instructions.

2. Associating Place Page with Proper Categories

Categories are like keywords, just less specific. It’s important to know what the most commonly searched categories are for your industry. Businesses can now customize categories. This will allow them to differentiate themselves from competitors. Businesses should make sure to use one of Google, Yahoo!, or Bing’s default categories also. This will allow you to pop up with multiple keyword searches.

For example: A pizza joint would want to use the categories of pizza, Italian, restaurant, food, and deep dish.

3. Keyword in Place Page Title and Description

When a customer wants to find information about local upholstery businesses near their home they would type “upholstery” and their zip code. A business with the word “upholstery” in their name is most likely to be one of the first businesses returned because the keyword is in Place Page title.  It is customary that your Place Page title is the actual business name. Some businesses go around this rule and they find themselves booted off local pages for breaking standards. So future business owners, when naming your business incorporate your brand with a keyword.

When writing your 200 character description, it’s important to include keywords that you think your customers are searching. If the Place Page doesn’t have a keyword in it, having keywords in the description will help you rank in a broad range of searches. However, do not over pack the description with keywords cause this can also lead to a search engine dumping your listing.

4. Citations

Citations are listings of your business on third party sites that search engines and MDPs trust. Citations are as important to local search as inbound links are to SEO results. Having many citations is a good thing, but having high quality citations from respected sites is a better way to get indexed faster. What make a strong citation are the trust, age and authority of the website containing your information.

Good places for a business to get citations are from their vendors, clients, local charities where they volunteer or donate, partnering companies, and professional organizations. The Web version of the Yellow Pages is also an example of a trusted site that can be used for citations because it is a reputable source for business data.

5. Reviews

Search engines want to know what others are saying about the business. When a business gets reviews, it shows more information in the initial search. A star rating system will also be shown if the business has 5 or more reviews. Reviews are eye candy to customers because customers want know what others experienced with the business, not just what the business has to say about itself. Google and Bing help their listings out by pulling reviews from other sites and posting them to a listing on their respective sites.

1. Determine Where to Host Your Content Based on your Goals

If you want to use the video to bring customers to your site, and increase search referrals you should host it on your site. A properly optimized video can improve your search rankings for the right content. If you host the video on a third-party site like YouTube, the top search results for your video will probably be for the external site where your video resides instead of your own site, and you could miss out on the potential ranking.

If instead you want to show your video to the most amount of people you should host it on sites like YouTube. Mass-upload services can be used to get your video out to multiple video hosts. You can read more about the value of mass-uploading to determine if it will be worth pursuing for you and your company.

Popular sites that can host your videos:

• Youtube.com
• Metacafe.com
• Revver.com
• MySpace Videos
• Vimeo.com
• Dailymotion.com
• Viddler.com
• Yahoo Videos
• Google Videos

2. Optimize the Title and Description

The title and description should be aligned with the keyword strategy you have for your website and include key phrases from the video content. The description should be written in sentence form using keywords within the body of the text instead of just using a long list of keywords.

If you were going to write a description for a video about SEO in general, you want to write something like this: “In this video we discuss how to create a keyword strategy to improve your site’s rankings in terms of search engine optimization (SEO). We go on to describe why it is critical that the title tags, URLs, and copy are in alignment. You will also learn where else search engine crawlers look for relevant information after watching this video.”

What you don’t want your description to look like: “Video about optimized keywords, SEO video, title tags, URLs, good copy, Google bot.”

3. Utilize Transcriptions for Your Videos

Because search engines cannot understand the content in a video, you should include text transcripts for each video wherever you decide to host it. This should help improve your rankings and value to the search engines and video hosts because now they will have more information with which to determine your relevance.

Having transcripts for videos hosted on your own site will also increase the amount of textual content on your website giving you more opportunities to call out the key words and phrases that you want to rank for based on your keyword strategy.

4. Create Video Site Maps

A site map is used to help search engines index all the pages on your website by providing a short path (one or two clicks) to each page from one location. A video site map can be included within the site map for the whole site to help search engines index the videos you are hosting. Without this tool search engines may only be able to see the page on which the video resides, but not its content.

The video site map guideline from Google will help you get started.

5. Use Optimized URLs

Just as you would use URLs based on your overall keyword strategy for every other page on your site, the pages with the videos are no different. Try to incorporate a keyword or phrase that is relevant to the video within the URL.

This is a poor URL: http://www.yoursite.com/video123.html

Instead use something like this: http://www.yoursite.com/video/search-engine-optimization-tips.html

6. Less is More

The average length of the videos that are watched is just under 4 minutes. Watching a video is a time investment, and if the content isn’t interesting or relevant people will lose interest. If you’ve created a longer video presentation, try to break it down into a series of videos. You can then post videos on a schedule which will generate fresh content on your site or channel (if you’re hosting it at a third party site), and give you a boost towards your SEO each time you post.

7. Share the Video

Push the links to your videos out to all the social media sites like Facebook, Twitter, Delicious, StumbleUpon, and Digg. Also involve your employees and tell them to spread the word via their own social media and LinkedInaccounts. Include a link to the videos in your email blasts and newsletters that you send to your subscribers as well. If the content is useful and relevant, the viewers will appreciate it.

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Have you tried some of these techniques for your own videos? Have you noticed any change in traffic and/or conversions after posting your videos on either your own site or on a 3rd-party host?

1. URL Structure: URLs are an excellent way to leverage keywords for SEO. URLs should be structured properly with targeted key phrases. It would make sense to ensure that these URLs are in alignment with your keyword strategy to make sure the right words are being optimized. There should also be no more than 2 parameters, and no more than 3 folders (or directories) in the URL. Another thing we take into consideration is the use of dashes (or hyphens) as word separators instead of grouping words or using underscores. Google prefers “keyword1-keyword2” and treats them as separate words, which can improve your visibility.

-          Bad Examples:

• http://www.mysite.com/brands.php?object=1&type=2&kind=3&node=5&arg=6
• http://www.mysite.com/people/places/things/noun/car/dannyboy

-          Good Examples:

• http://www.mysite.com/brands.php?nike
• http://www.mysite.com/people/danny-boy/

2. Site Map: Ideally, the website should include a site map that is also in alignment with one or two key phrases per page chosen for the keyword strategy based on relevance, current rank, probability of success and traffic. The links on the site map should be current, and regularly updated. To ensure that the crawlers reach all of your pages you want each page no more than two clicks away from the home page. Making sure all of your pages are on the sitemap makes this possible.
3. Title Tags: Title tags are the words written in the upper left corner of the frame at the top of the browser. This is a critical area for SEO, in that keywords can be used to optimize each page and greater optimize presence in searches. Like URLs, these would be derived from your keyword strategy and would follow a consistent approach site-wide. Title Tags should be written to include one or two key phrases as well as the site brand. It should also be noted that staying within 70 characters ensures that the full title appears in Google searches. A useful tool to quickly check the amount of characters you have is: http://www.wordcountertool.com/

-          Bad Example: Yoursite.com – keyword1, keyword2, keyword3, keyword4

-          Good Example: Key phrase1 | YourSite.com

4. Site Code: If your site contains excessive code then the search engine crawlers could timeout before they read through everything on the page.  This can be avoided by using a style sheet file for CSS and java script include files to reduce the code. The reduction in code would allow the search engines to read and index the site quicker and ensure that they do not timeout before crawling it in its entirety.

Flash is useful and appealing from a visual design perspective, but it is much tougher for the search engines to index. Using optimized text descriptors on the flash code is necessary so that the search engines can index the message being presented. It is also recommended that text copy is included on the site with Flash to allow for the message being communicated to be indexed.

If a customer clicks a broken link or misspells the URL to a page on your site they will be redirected to a 404 page indicating that the page does not exist. Your site should have a custom 404 page that drives the user back to your sitemap so they can find what they were originally looking for. Otherwise they will see a default page that has no useful information, and because they have left your site your bounce rate will increase too. You can check what your error page looks like by typing in random text after your main URL (www.yoursite.com/xyz123). Bruce Clay’s blog also has more useful tips on improving your 404 page.

URL canonicalization is the process of choosing the best URL when there are several options. To a search engine, “www.yoursite.com” and “yoursite.com” are different URLs. This means your traffic can be divided between both sites, and this can hurt your rankings. To find out if this is going to cause problems for you, type in your URL with and without the “www” in the address bar. If the “www” does not appear automatically before “yoursite.com” that means multiple versions of your site are accessible by potential customers and search engines. You should code the site to always redirect to either www.yoursite.com or “yoursite.com,” whichever you prefer.  You can read more about canonicalization in one of our earlier posts if you want to learn more about this topic.

5. Content: The content of a page should have copy that can be optimized for specific keywords that naturally blends in. Typically 1 to 2 keywords per page is ideal, and those words should be consistent with the page title and URL (when appropriate). When we’re conducting an audit, we’re going to look to see if your keywords appear in the body of copy multiple times. For a more tips on writing good copy for SEO you can see: http://www.dailywritingtips.com/how-to-write-an-seo-article-part-1/

6. Back Links: These are links that are directed to your page from anywhere else on the Web. Having more links is almost always a good thing, but it is not the only thing that matters. Search engines also look at the quality of the website that is linking back to yours. If Microsoft or Apple has a link to your site it will matter a lot more than if your neighbor’s personal website links to you. You can find out how many back links you have by doing the following:

1. Go to www.yahoo.com

2.    In the search field type in: “linkdomain:yoursite.com –sitedomain:yoursite.com”

3.    Under the Yahoo! logo on the left side you will see “### results for….” This is the number of back links you have.

4.    Next you can check your competitors’ back links the same way and compare. Even though quantity isn’t the only thing that is important, it will give you a good idea of where you stand.

Now that you are familiar with the various aspects of a URL, you should determine the best way to optimize a URL for the search engines.  First, we need to discuss three crucial points:

1. Placing keywords in your URLs can help improve your rankings, however, existing URLs that have been changed need to be redirected to a new one. If URLs are not redirected, links and bookmarks directing to that URL will be broken, causing the page to drop out of the search engines. Be sure to use a 301 redirect to ensure that user traffic, links, and search engines are properly sent to the new URL.

2. If you already have a high-ranking website and/or page, more times then not, it is a bad idea to change your URL. .In other words, it is most always a bad decision to change your URL if you already have an existing high-ranking page.

3. Utilizing a keyword in your URL won’t impact your SEO results if that is your only strategy.  Alongside a robust SEO campaign, however, it is proven that the webpage with the keyword in the URL will receive a higher click-through rate and will outrank other sites that have not optimized their URLs.

Subdomains
Placing your keywords in the subdomain of your URLs can increase your rank in search engines. Though this can vary from time to time, the search engines will often assume that there is a strong relationship between keywords found in the subdomain and the content of the page, therefore providing a probable boost in the search engine ranking for that keyword.  Because of past abuses of this system, search engines no longer place as high as an emphasis on keywords in subdomains alone. However, in conjunction with a robust SEO campaign, including keywords in your subdomain will assist in driving the most qualified leads to your site.

While optimizing your subdomains please be sure not to go overboard. Search engines love content whose relevance is easily identifiable, but absolutely hate spam, so steer clear of any actions that the engines may red-flag. For example, many sites have a one word or phrase subdomain, and very often do not have multiple phrased sub domains (such as keyword1.keyword2.keyword3.yoursite.com).  These actions, which are not typical, cause the search engines to question and potentially penalize your site.  Additionally, keywords should only be used in subdomains for sites that have a large number of pages with distinctive content. CNN, for example, only assigns subdomains for pages with distinctive content (i.e. sportsilustrated.cnn.com). An overarching lesson to avoid calling your site into question is to keep all keywords relevant, necessary and concise.

Domains
As discussed in our Introduction to URLs tutorial, your domain is your registered domain name (such as www.riseinteractive.com).  Unlike subdomains, you don’t have the flexibility to alter your domain name. This is the reason why placing keywords in subdomains can result in ranking advantages.  Many extremely successful sites whose domain names don’t have anything to do with their products and/or services (i.e. Google, Yahoo, Ebay, etc) attach keywords in their subdomains to increase qualified traffic. If possible, include main keywords in your domain name.  If that is not possible, try to place your keywords in other, useful sections of your URL, such as your subdomain or subdirectories.

Subdirectories and file names.
If you’re unable to place your keyword in the domain name, and it isn’t optimal to put it into the subdomain, the next best alternative is to place it in the subdirectory or file name.  Typically, it does not matter which you use to contain the keyword, just be sure to use either one or the other. Also, be aware of repetitions in the URL, which are typically associated with spam and are thus ranked lower.  For example, http://www.riseinteractive.com/seo.html is okay whereas http://www.seo.com/seo.html would most likely be red flagged. Remember to continually analyze your search results so you are able to quickly determine what is and is not working optimally.

File Extensions
File extensions usually do not influence search rankings so long as the extension is one that is not normally connected with a web page. While, .html or .htm is the most often used file extension, we are seeing more file extensions in the top 10 search results that include .cfm, .php, .asp, and .aspx. So in terms of ranking, all of these file extensions are the same in the engines eyes.

Fine tune your URL structure
The following lists some additional facts worth taking into account when optimizing your URLs for the search engines:

1. Place the most generic keywords earlier in your URL structure.
For example, keywords such as “sports” should be placed in either your domain or subdomain name and more specific keywords, such as a particular team, should be a subdirectory or file name.

2. Use static, not dynamic URLs.
An example of a static and dynamic URL is http://www.shopping.aol.com/clothing/shirt/blue/large vs, http://shopping.aol.com/?ncid=AOLCOMMshopSRCHelnk0006&refCode=aolpartner_aolsearchtab.  When there are more than three variables in dynamic URL, a website rarely gets fully indexed.  Therefore, avoid using more than two if possible.  Ideally, static URLs are best.

3. Try not to use Session IDs.
Specific variable names, like ID, are also aspects that indexing-bots often stay away from.  This is because of what is called a session variable, which is a variable (i.e., number) that is different to each visitor to the site.  For example, a new number is generated inside the URL of that page for that specific visitor, so the URL changes with each person who visits the site. This happens each time someone visits a particular page. Thinking that the URL represents a new page, the search engine spiders can get “trapped” downloading the exact same page over and over again.  Because this wastes the search engines time and resources they have been programmed to do their best to avoid URLs that seem to have a session variable.

When all is said and done, taking these steps to optimize your URL’s is a worthwhile endeavor.  While it isn’t the foundation of a good SEO campaign, SEO friendly URLs definitely help you make your campaign as optimized as possible.

1. HTTP (Hyper Text Transport Protocol)

Definition:  An application-level protocol for collaborative information systems in which resources from the site can be viewed.

Key HTTP facts:

- Ensures that webpages can be indexed by search engines and allows us to see if a webpage can be reached in a web-browser.

- Determines which Communication Port to use. This is important because different protocols typically use different ports.

2. WWW (World Wide Web)

Definition: A system of internet servers that carry documents formatted in HTML (see below) that provides links to audio, video and graphic files and is accessed through the internet. WWW is a part of the domain name which is commonly known as the subdomain.

Key subdomain facts:

- Typically, websites contain either “www” or have no subdomain at all.

- Web sites with many pages, typically from larger companies, often use atypical subdomain names to differentiate between different major sections, topics within their sites or services. For example:  msnbc.msn.com.

- There can be multiple levels within subdomains. For example, assets.espn.go.com. There are often few restrictions to their length, but some scheme links may often be much longer.

- Typically, subdomains can, convert to a separate IP address than the primary domain name.

-A different subdomain is often a distinct webserver for non-SEO applications. Nevertheless, it continues to be under the control of the same primary domain owner. For example, CNN is the only site that can make use of uniquename.cnn.com because the Domain Name Server (DNS) addressing is tied to their primary domain, cnn.com, which is solely under CNN’s control.

- Subdomain names are not case-sensitive. For example, Msnbc.Msn.com is the same as msnbc.msn.com.

3. DOMAIN

Definition: Commonly referred to as Domain name, this is used to identify the host the host, or owner, of a specific website.

Key Domain Name facts

- The Domain Name System (DNS) translates the domain name section, along with the .com, into a numeric IP address. This is used to attach to the actual webserver that hosts the resource.

- The hostname is what the domain name is often referred to as. This is simply the name of the computer where it is hosted.

- A domain name may only be compiled of hyphens, digits or letters.

- Domain names can only be 63 characters in length, with few exceptions for extensions such as “.weather”, in order to accommodate the length of the extension.

- Like subdomains, domain names are not case-sensitive.

- “.com” is the last element of the domain name, referring to the Top Level Domain, or TLD, which is also not case sensitive.

- There are three different ways in which TLD’s can be classified:

- Generic: .com, .org, .gov, .edu, .biz, etc.

- Country Codes: .ca, .ru, .jp

- Infrastructure: .arpa (for SEO purposes we can ignore this TLD)

4. SUBDIRECTORY

Definition: A “file” in an organizational unit called a directory. For example, www.espn.com/basketball, in which “basketball” would be the subdirectory.

5. FILENAME

Definition: The name a computer attaches to a document to identify it

6. .HTML (Hypertext Markup Language)

Definition: An extension of the filename that tells us the programming language used to code the page. Simply put, .html tells us that it’s a normal webpage.

Note: While we have pointed out which URL aspects are not case-sensitive, everything that was covered beyond the TLD, such as subdirectory, filename, and extension, are all case-sensitive. This means that content.html is not the same as Content.Html.

What is URL canonicalization?

Though this concept can be a bit tricky to understand (and pronounce! “ca-non-ick-cull-eye-zay-shun”), it solves a fundamental problem that prevents Web sites from working at the optimum level. Typically, buckets of relevant content on a site will appear on multiple pages within that site, or sometimes even on multiple Web sites altogether. For example:

example.com

www.example.com

http://www.example.com

www.example.com/index.html

http://www.example.com/index.html

This is particularly relevant to SEO with regard to which information is returned for a particular search. In order to provide the best experience for the searcher, search engines attempt to limit the number of returns by means of eliminating redundancies within the returned results. If a search engine is not clear on which page to use, or sees the information as separate pages, it splits up the link juice among all of the pages, versus returning one, more powerful page/result.

So what?

What is exciting here is that we are now able to present a singular version of content, ensuring it receives the highest possible rankings based on domain strength, trust, relevance, etc. This prevents multiple pages from having to compete with each other and creates one strong source.

As discussed in our most recent post, SEO is one of the best ways to drive qualified traffic to your site. SEO is a low-cost, highly measurable means of lead-generation, and, to maximize campaign results, it is critical that it is as optimized as possible.  URL canonicalization presents yet another opportunity to leverage your website to its fullest potential.

How to resolve canonicalization issues

It is important to address various ways to avoid canonicalization issues. SEOBook.com provides a list of various tactics and we’ve highlighted a few of those to help you quickly identify areas you can improve:

Consistent link planning – Choose a linking norm, and stick to it. Maintaining consistent linking conventions (i.e. always link to www.example.com instead of also linking to www.example.com/index) will keep search results strong. This also applies to using either relative or absolute linkage, instead of using both. Remember, consistency is key!

Employ a 301 Redirect – Keep searchers informed of domain changes and maintain user-friendly search results. This tool automatically redirects pages that have been moved to a new location.

Beware of https:// vs. http:// versions of a site – Searches will sometimes return both pages, thereby diluting the search results.

Keep it original – When duplicating or cross-promoting content on a site, be sure to link to the original files on the site.

Make Google work for you – Google Webmaster Tools allows you to declare which version of a URL it should use (www.example.com vs. example.com/index).

website check tool – Helps identify a number of possible architecture problems, including canonicalization issues, on your site. Download tool at http://training.seobook.com/website-health-check.