Angie Stewart, Online Marketing Consultant for Maginus, working as part of Maginus’ Online Marketing Agency has written this guest blog post on the best use of Canonical Tags. It’s often misunderstood, even in the SEO business but can help you take control of your website.

How to Use Canonical Tags:

Take Control and Clean Up Duplicate Content

What is a Canonical Link Tag?

When you hear the words ‘canonical element’, ‘canonical tag’, ‘canonical URL tag’, ‘rel canonical’, ‘rel=canonical’ and last but not least ‘canonical link tag’, relax, these all refer to the same function.

When multiple ULS’s exist that display the same content, the ‘canonical link tag’ is located in the head section of a webpage indicating to search engines the canonical or ideal page which should be displayed.

When would you use a canonical tag?

Canonical Link Tags are a great way to enforce order and consistency when duplicate content issues arise. When content is identical or very similar – it may present itself on various pages and be accessible through numerous, different URLs .

Duplicate content can occur for the following reasons:

Duplicate content caused by filtering

Duplication is often caused by filtering products within a website. i.e.
www.mywinesite.com/frenchwine

This page displays a write up about French wines and a list of French wines available for sale. It also allows me to filter by price range, colour and vintage of the wine I desire.

When I filter, I get a URL, such as:
www.mywinesite.com/frenchwine/?CategoryID_4049

Effectively, this is the same page, the write up about French wines is still the same, the only difference is that the selection of wines displayed as been reduced to match my filter.

Because they have two separate URL’s they will be seen as separate pages by Google and other search engines.

Duplicate content caused by URL parameters, like session IDs or tracking IDs

Tracking parameters exist to identify the different sauces through which traffic is driven to a given page. Session Ids exist to identify a specific user. Whilst both are extremely useful, they can cause duplicate content.

Again as explained above, the outcome is the same content identified via different URLs.

In both instances using a Canonical Link Tag is a simple and quick means of indicating which URL is the primary, most important or preferred URL.

Why should you care?

So you understand what a canonical is and when it should be implemented, but how and why is this really going to help you and your site?

The answer is this; duplicate content can negatively affect your website in the following ways:

• Reduced Crawling & Indexing. Search engine crawlers have a limited bandwidth on each site (based on numerous factors). If the crawler is able to crawl 100 pages of your site in a visit, you want it to be 100 unique pages, not 100 of which only 10 will make the search results.
• Reduced ‘Link-Juice’. If a page has 10 possible URLs, then those 10 URLs might all have external links pointing to them. You want all that ‘link-juice’ going to your ‘canonical page’. By using the canonical command, links to all URLs will be consolidated to the one specified as canonical.

How is the canonical link tag implemented?

A canonical link tag can be implemented in the header of the HTML website.

• Make sure to URLs are “standardised” or “normalised” and consistent in the navigational journey.
• Adjust your content management system to indicate only the URLs you want.
• Once you’ve picked your ideal / ‘canonical’ URL make sure you are consistent with your internal linking so that they lead to the same site.

In the head of all non-priority pages, simply, add a tag to specify the version of URL you want to prioritise e.g.

<link rel=”canonical” href= “http://www.mywinesite.com/frenchwine”/>

One Final Note

I often get asked the following questions regarding canonical tags:

1. Can a canonical page be redirected?
A canonical page can be redirected if necessary and Google state that if this occurs they will process the redirect as usual and try to index it.
2. Can a canonical tag be used to suggest a preferred page on a different domain?
This is a good question, mostly because this has changed since the implementation of the canonical tag. Originally the answer was no, but in December 2009, Google announced they support cross-domain canonical tag use.

It really is amazing how some Content Management Systems have been build with little or no regard for Search Engine Optimisation. Out of the box, there are CMS that do not allow customised page titles or alt tags on images. Some CMS like WordPress are good straight out of the box but can be made better with plugins like All-in-One SEO or by using the Thesis Theme.

So if you’re having a website built using a CMS, what should you make sure is provided. Here’s my checklist:

Essential:

• Customisable Page Title’s – The title should be completely configurable
• Meta-tags for each page – well, meta-description anyway
• H1 heading on each page – (still not standard in Joomla!)
• H2 headings for sub-headings
• Ability to add links within text content
• Ability to no-follow those links if required
• Ability to add alt-tags to images
• A structure that avoids duplicate content being shown on multiple URL’s within your site e.g. full length content items on category or tags pages

Would also like to see:

• Ability to generate and store accurate XML sitemaps for submission to Google Webmaster Tools etc
• Broken links are flagged on your dashboard
• Easy user-friendly URL’s implemented as standard

Anything else you’d like to see in a super SEO friendly CMS?

A while back I posted the solution I use for WordPress friendly URL’s on a Namesco Zeus server and it seems to have helped out a bunch of people so I thought I’d publish the script I use on Joomla.

Joomla’s standard friendly URL’s use the mod_rewrite function in an htaccess file which isn’t available when hosting on a Zeus server. You need to provide a script called rewrite.script that uses intructions Zeus understands.

Below is the code I use in my rewrite.script file. Take this code, paste it in a text editor and save it as rewrite.script. Then upload it to the web root of your Joomla installation.

map path into SCRATCH:path from %{URL}
look for file at %{SCRATCH:path}
if matched then goto RULE_END
look for dir at %{SCRATCH:path}
if matched then goto RULE_END
match URL into $ with ^/index.php
if matched then goto RULE_END
insensitive match URL into $ with (/|\.php|\.html|\.feed|\.pdf|\.raw|/[^.]*)$
if matched then set URL = /index.php
RULE_END:

Next go to your Joomla Global configuration and switch the Friendly URL’s on.

And fingers crossed you should have friendly URL’s switched on.

If it doesn’t work, just switch them off again in your global configuration.

Footnote – not being a Zeus server tech I’m not really sure how the script works, so can’t really supply any support on it.

UPDATE: The above script didn’t work for me when I was using SOBI2 on a Joomla site. Thankfully though Root Creative had posted a script on their site that worked perfectly. Try it if you have trouble with the one above, try Root Creative’s one.

One can’t help but notice the amount of Google Local listings being shown before the main organic search listings whenever a search is made containing a geographical location. If your business would benefit at all from geographically targeted searches then you should get it listed on Google Local.

This is an excellent way to gain a good listing for your site without hours of SEO or spending loads on PPC. It’s certainly not hard to do, costs absolutely nothing and the results are really quick in most cases (as long as you choose to register with phone verification).

Of the businesses I’ve signed up most have received targeted visitors from their listing. If they hadn’t been listed they wouldn’t have received those visitors.

Fill in all the boxes on the signup and ensure a few of your key search terms are scattered around in the description and then go through the verification process. Before you know it you could be dominating the top of the search results pages for your business type in your town.

Add your site to Google Local here.

When I’m advising clients on how to improve their website, normally I have to push really, really hard to encourage them to update the website regularly with new content. Blogging is obviously an easy way to do this but there are others ways. e.g. an e-commerce shop might add customer reviews, extended descriptions etc on a regular basis. Sometimes I’ll recommend adding a news page as an alternative way of saying “go write a blog”.

The thing is, normally when I recommend a path like that, the good intention is there but the site doesn’t get updated that often. As a result most sites do OK in search engines but are never firing on all cylinders.

What happens when the plan goes the other way? What when you start writing screeds and screeds of content, or worse yet, cut’n'pasting thousands of pages of old Powerpoint presentations, proposals, case studies, technical documents etc?

Does your customer really need or want it? Sure search engines will lap it up and it will probably bring more one-time visitors into your site, but do you really want to be feeding all this stuff into your loyal readers RSS feed or email newsletter?

So how do you get it right?

If you are planning on adding tons of less-than interesting content, do it in a way that places it in an archive or knowledge base. Try not to throw it down the throats of your repeat visitors or readers. Keep it out of the RSS feed and don’t tell people in your newsletter that you’ve just uploaded a technical document from 2001.

Or better yet, why not pick and choose the best of the content and leave the rest out? The stuff that you do put in could be introduced in such a way that it lets your reader know the relevance of putting it in now.

Do it that way and introduce it to your readers in the right way and they might just end up lapping it up. If you simply deluge people with crap they will unsubscribe. If you’re serious about adding content there’s definitely a balance that has to be achieved. Get it right and you’ll reap the rewards of loads of visitors from search engines AND loads of repeat visitors.

Nowadays every B&B seems to have a website. It’s essential in the travel and tourism industry. People shop online for their holiday accommodation and to ignore that is to ignore a large percentage of potential customers. Once the website is running though, what can a B&B do to start achieving more visitors from the web?

- Make sure your site contains the right keywords in the right places. If you run a B&B in Crieff, make sure that B&B Crieff is in the Title, in an H1 heading, and mentioned a few times in the content of your home page any other pages where it is appropriate.

- Use the Google Adwords Keyword Tool to find other similar search terms that people use to find accommodation in Crieff too. Incorporate those search terms into appropriate pages in your site, again putting them in the Title, H1 and body content positions.

- Signup to Google Webmaster Tools and create and submit a sitemap for your website. Register the same sitemap with Yahoo through Yahoo Site Explorer.

There are loads of other on-site SEO tips to get stuck into but those basics will at least help get your site found. In addition there are loads of off-site actions you can undertake to help boost your search rankings.

- Claim your listing on Google Local. Google Local results are showing up at the top of searches for loads of geographical searches. If I do a search for B&B Crieff in Google the first 10 listings are those who have claimed their Google Local listing for their B&B.

- Make sure your B&B is listed on Trip Advisor and encourage all your visitors to leave a review there (perhaps by emailing them a day or two after they’ve gone home with a link to your tripadvisor page). The Trip Advisor reviews are being displayed with the Google Local results mentioned above so it would be worth pursuing even if Trip Advisor wasn’t already one of the biggest travel sites to get listed on.

- If you’re not bad at writing, you might consider running a blog on your B&B site. News of what’s happening in the B&B is bound to be of interest to your repeat visitors and may attract new ones. A blog is also an easy way to update a site regularly to keep search engine spiders coming to your site.

- Get into social media. Twitter and Facebook are great ways to connect with guests who’ve already stayed with you and possibly find new guests. A full run-down on social media networking is outside the remit of this article but I’ll try and follow up with some tips in a later article.

- Find some travel forums, join and take part. Put your website link in your profile and signature where allowed and then get active. Try and give useful information to as many people as you can and use the forum regularly. Aardvark Travel forums are a good place to get started with this.

Those are just a few hints to help a B&B get listed a bit better on Google. Obviously a full SEO strategy will go into more depth and address more areas than this but hopefully it will help a few people get started down the path to better rankings.

I’ve seen a lot of Joomla 1.5 sites recently where the homepage title is simply “Home”. Obviously this isn’t an ideal situation and you generally want your homepage title to include your best search term for the site. It’s very easy to fix though:

• From your Joomla Admin Dashboard go to Menus > Main Menu
• Click on the Home link in the table of menu items
• In the right column, open the Parameters – System tab
• Put your optimised title in the Page Title box
• If you want your optimised title to be repeated on the home page above any article titles check the Yes button below for Display Page Title. Otherwise if you just want it to show in the browser title bar leave it at No
• Save out of there and refresh your Joomla home page to find your optimised title right there in the browser title bar

It’s not just from an SEO point of view that you want that title to show up properly in Joomla. If a customer is searching for widgets and their search results present them with your site titled “Home” in the 1st position and yor competitor titled “Joe Brown’s Cheap Widget Warehouse” I think I know who’t going to get the click and the sale. So, if you are building a site in Joomla, make sure you get an optimised title on to the home page.

With all the press release writing, article writing, brand building and online profile building that a good SEO will undertake these days, are we in danger of becoming the new PR people?

SEO used to be a simple matter of optimising a site and submitting it to some directories and search engines. Stuff those keywords in and get to the top of Infoseek in no time.

Nowadays the SEO person often has to fulfill a larger role and often they are the only marketing contact that the client makes. We get asked for advice on advertising, SEO, content creation, site usability, building brand with press releases, viral campaigns, linkbaiting, social networking etc.

11 years ago I used to work in a rented corner of a PR office and I could hear the discussions they were having with clients. Much of them were the same, though the web was less prominent in those days for distributing the clients message. Now though the web is at the forefront of any brand building, and SEO is one of the core aspects of that, so I guess it makes sense that we’re now taking on a much more public relations orientated role.

Look at it this way, if you are working on building awareness of a site by commenting on blogs on your clients behalf, you’re putting a very public message out there that reflects on your client. Same goes for building a forum profile with your client’s link in the signature – everything you say has to be measured and weighed to ensure it is putting out the right message about your client.

So next time one of your relatives asks what SEO is, you can just answer “It’s just like public relations”.

Image Credit

Had a giggle at this article in the Guardian.

Apparently journo’s are being encouraged to include high traffic search terms in their headlines. Some good examples in there too. The author might be taking the Michael a little bit but the truth is newspapers carry a bit of weight in terms of rankings and if they start optimising their headlines and page titles with big hitter keywords, chances are they will get a bucket of traffic from it.

Hope it doesn’t mean the end of superb headlines like this one:
“Super Cally Go Ballistic, Celtic Are Atrocious”
One of my all time favourite newspaper headlines. Probably wouldn’t get past the optimisation police now.

The thing that has puzzled me about Joomla with regards to SEO is the inability to change the HTML title for a page without changing the content title.
Today I came across a perfect little mambot that allows you to do just that. It’s called JooFox Content Title and simply puts the contents of the Title Alias field on each content item into the HTML Title field for the page. Download it, install it and publish it then try it out and start creating some proper search engine optimised titles in Joomla. Perfect.