Welcome to this weeks SEO video blog, We are going to return to canonicalisation and how to correctly implement the canonical link element.

The principle behind canonicalisation link elements is to normalise your URL’s, this then helps search engines decide which of your pages is the authority for a particular piece of information and also allows Google to direct any link juice to the correct URL helping you search engine positions.

These can be important for content management systems and eCommerce website that generate identical pages with different URL’s. We have previously done a more in depth video on canonicalisation and webmaster tools blog also have an excellent video with Matt Cutts from Google explaining the principles, both of these are linked from the supporting blog post.

We have created a simple piece of php code which allows your to canonicalise your website quickly and easily, this weeks tutorial will show the installation and you can get the code from the blog post.

The implementation on this dynamic canonical link element is for php apache servers, it will allow you to tell Google which page is the authority for the content displayed.

The code does this in 2 ways, firstly It shows the full domain ie. www.domain.co.uk, so you have no issue with Google treating domain.co.uk as the primary source of content. You can also specify this in webmaster tools or use a .htaccess file to re-direct.

Secondly, if you have folder on your server,  for example /downloads/canonical/ and you want this folder to be classed as the authority, you can use the code supplied.

<link rel=”canonical” href=”http://www.crearecommunications.co.uk<?php echo str_replace(”index.php”, “”, preg_replace(”/\?[\w&\-\_\=]+/”,”",$_SERVER['REQUEST_URI']));?>” />

I have set an example on creare communications.

so we can see i have added the code to the header in my index.php file. Now when I upload the file and view the source of the index.php page, it displays within the canonical link element the URL /downloads/canonical/ and not /downloads/canonical/index.php, This means if Google finds this page it will automatically know that I want the origin of the pages content to lie with / and not index.php

We hope this helps you inform Google of your primary content and exclude any duplicate content issues, along with that it will help natural back links that are currently linked to the wrong URL to be re-directed to the canonical URL.

Thanks for watching if you have any questions or comment please leave them on the Youtube channel or supporting blog post.

http://www.crearecommunications.co.uk/downloads/canonical/

Script

Hi and welcome to this weeks SEO video blog, today we’re going to discuss organic SEO timescales and whether an SEO consultant can successfully predict an accurate timescale for a client or a website to perform.

The first thing to consider when assessing the potential success of a website is the domain name. There are several factors that are well worth checking.

Domain age: If the domain has been around for a long time then it will probably hold some authority in Google or other search engines.

Domain content: This can link in with the domain age, if your website has had related content on the domain for a period of time, it contributes to a smooth optimization process.

Domain Authority or Page Rank: Google assigns each web page with a page rank, Page rank is a link analysis algorithm that depends on the incoming and outgoing links on a website or web page. I you are unfamiliar with PageRank, we’ve included a Wikipedia link on our supporting blog post.

Domain Choice: If the domain name contains a keyword, this again contributes towards helping organic listings. You can of course, get to page one without one, but it all helps.

The importance of domains can be overlooked, but if you are optimizing a brand new domain name, you run this risk of Google easily spotting your eager SEO activity and potentially getting sand-boxed as a result. All SEO activity must be natural.

Secondly have a look at the content throughout the site, if it already mentions the chosen keywords then this will help the site to perform. Remember the SEO saying: ‘Content is king’.

Current performance is another important factor, If your web site appears for its phrases already, raising the phrases is easier than ranking them from scratch.

Next is Backward link analysis: If your website has a Page Rank, then it will more than likely have links pointing to it from other websites. An SEO consultant should analyze these incoming links and asses whether they could be manipulated to better reflect the keywords and content on the target website.

If an SEO consultant correctly analyses these variables – it can help them to predict the success and timescales of a new keyword campaign.

Thanks for watching, we hope this has been helpful. If you have any questions of comments please leave them on our YouTube Channel or supporting blog post.

News: In November Google rolled out breadcrumbs display in SERPs. The idea is that when a URL for a listing is too long it will be replaced by a breadcrumb, to help a user understand the context of that web page. Google quotes

“Some web addresses help you understand the structure of the site and how the specific page fits into the site hierarchy. For example, consider a search for the biography of Vint Cerf (Google’s Internet Evangelist). The URL for one result, “www.google.com/corporate/execs.html,” shows that the page is located in a page about “execs,” under “corporate,” which is on the “google.com” site. This can provide valuable context when deciding whether to click on the result.

Often, however, URLs are too long, too short, or too obscure to add useful information.“

Tutorial : This week we are going to look at the importance of internal linking for both usability and search engine optimisation. We have put together an example together that distributes a set of keywords throughout a simple 3 page website.

References:

http://www.crearecommunications.co.uk/examples/internal-linking.html

Script:

This week were going to take a look at the free link analysis software called ‘SEO spyglass’. You can download the free tool from http://www.link-assistant.com/seo-spyglass/.

Once installed and you start a new project you get a choice of 2 options:

1.) Enter a keyword you wish to rank well for.

2.) Enter a competitors URL to analysis.

We will start with the first option, when choosing a keyword, SEO spyglass automatically chooses the website that ranks first in your specified search query.

The second options provides you list of information about your own or your competitors backward links.

Unfortunately on the free version it only uses Google.com and not .co.uk, with backward links from Yahoo!. Once the software has found the first 1000 links of your chosen site it then prompts you to further analyise the links, click yes to this option and we will see the following.

Along the top of the screen you can see all the variables of the backward links:

The main one to look out for are:

• Anchored Text
• Page Rank
• External Links
• Total Links
• Link Value - This is determined by an algorithm built within SEO spyglass.

A few others you might recognise are:

• Dmoz Listings
• Alexa Rank

You can also perform multiple analysis against a few different competitors, have a play and see if you can put any of the tools to good use.

Please leave any comments or questions on the Youtube channel or Blog.

News : Keyword User Interface, this provides a list a specific keywords that Google has found while indexing your site. Google claim this is excellent for finding out if specific sites have been hacked and your site has started to appear for random keywords. Buy clicking the keyword, you get a list of URL’s that the keyword appears on.

We think it also allows you to see whether a particular phrase you are optimising for has been optimised to the full potential and more importantly that Google recognizes that the keyword is related to your site.

Tutorial: Webmaster tools tips

That are worth analysing are:

• Top search queries
• Crawl errors
• Links to your site
• Keywords
• HTML suggestions - Duplicate Meta data

Showcase: This weeks showcase is SEO Spyglass link analysis tool, you can find the free demo at http://www.link-assistant.com/seo-spyglass/. We will have a look into this more in next weeks tutorial.