Professional SEO Specialist - janet bartoli roussos

Canonicalization, besides the fact that it’s a great word, it is important in your SEO efforts. Put simply, canonicalization is more than one URL that may be used to deliver the same resource.

To start with try this simple test to detect canonicalization issues:

1) Search for site:mysite.com, and site:www.mysite.com.
2) Similarly for the index and non-index pages.

Is there a difference in Pages Indexed?
If there is a difference, then most likely you have canonicalization issues.

Direct quote from Matt Cutts blog albeit a little dated (2006)

“But technically all of these urls are different. A web server could return completely different content for all the urls above. When Google “canonicalizes” a url, we try to pick the url that seems like the best representative from that set.

Q: So how do I make sure that Google picks the url that I want?
A: One thing that helps is to pick the url that you want and use that url consistently across your entire site. For example, don’t make half of your links go to http://example.com/ and the other half go to http://www.example.com/ . Instead, pick the url you prefer and always use that format for your internal links.”

Ok, now for the newest update - just read over at search engine roundtable this morning that Jill Whalen had done some site auditing and found that Google appears to have merged the index page with the root page of the domain. In other words if you happen to have www.site.com/index.html or site.com they are now being seen by Google as one, where it always had been seen as two separate pages.

So, this could either be a one-off situation or Google may very well decide to change things up a bit - just to keep us on our toes!

Google recently launched its Google Analytics “lite” version of analytics for your YouTube videos.

Once logged into your YouTube account, you can view those videos you have uploaded and those statistics.

1. how often a video’s viewed in different geographic regions
2. how popular it is relative to all videos in a market over a period of time
3. how long until a video becomes popular (hmmm not sure about this one)
4. what happens to video views as popularity peaks

I oversee several clients who don’t or aren’t able to see those very granular results they’d like to see, so any more information than how many have viewed or comments for their videos is always a help.

I always enjoy the NYC SES conferences. I was only able to get to the conference just one day this year. I jumped into the conversion track yesterday for the converting visitors into buyers. I especially liked what Mike Moran of IBM had to say - you can read all the highlights of his talk in the searchengineland notes.

One of the many good points, which is pretty basic, but often overlooked is looking at your site every day, test and re-test. If something just does not work, change it and don’t wait until the next re-design, which happens way too often with many clients I see. Know how many of your visitors are converting into actual buyers. What are your visitors doing? Here’s a typical retail type site: Learn > Shop > Buy > Get > Use > and back to learn again, because they will need to upgrade their memory or battery or whatever.

I have some book recommendations too: Avinash’s Web Analytics 1 hour per day (I am going to read and review this later on for you) and Mike Moran’s “Do it Wrong Quickly” mikemoran.com.

Of course it’s all about the test, test and test some more!

Need a tool that doesn’t require an API or hundreds of dollars? Well besides Google Analytics (my personal favorite) our team just came across a site called sheerseo. This tool, which is free, has a number of cool and not so great features. The historical data is great. You can track within a graph how specific keywords are performing and quickly see your current ranking.

The not so great keyword density appears as well. If your new to SEO keyword density is not a great SEO factor - you should include keyword rich content in your pages, yes, but to measure what percentage your keywords should be from page to page - isn’t something to consider. The reason I mention this is because there are still those out there that think this is important. You could easily have 100 words on a page and if that page’s primary keyword is “family breakfast” all I have to do is ensure that keyword is included in the content 10-15 times and I have 10-15% of my content with my primary. Is that going to really help boost my rankings? Answer: No it wont. I have seen pages with just the title tag optimized do really well (albeit not for too long without the other major factors).

Give the free tool a shot and see how it works, or doesn’t for you. FYI: this is no Omniture, Hitbox or Google Analytics tool here. Just enjoy it for what it is and have some fun!

Just thought I would share this - Since I use my iGoogle religiously, I thought I would share something very cool with all of you. You can now add your webmaster tools to your iGoogle page.

1. Visit Webmaster Tools and select any site that you’ve validated from the dashboard.
2. Click on the Tools section.
3. Click on Gadgets sub-section.
4. Click on the big “Add an iGoogle Webmaster Tools homepage” button.
5. Click the “Add to Google” button on the following confirm page to add the new tab to iGoogle.
6. Now you’re in iGoogle, where you should see your new Google Webmaster Tools tab with a number of Gadgets.

Enjoy!