Latest SEO and SMO Updates

Top 10 India Free Classified Website for Increasing your Web Traffic and Sales

2015-10-08T05:20:00.001-07:00

Do you want more web traffic, leads and sales? Here I have shared with you India the Best Classified Website, where actual buyer and seller meet in one place. All these websites provide a Free Classified Submission in India into various categories include. Car, job, real estate, matrimonial, personals, media, computers, packers and movers, travel and vacation and lots more

Top 10 Free Classified Websites in India

http://olx.in/

http://www.quikr.com/

http://www.locanto.in/

http://www.clickindia.com/

http://www.click.in/

http://www.craigslist.co.in/

http://www.adeex.in/

http://www.adpost.com/in

http://easyvzee.com/

http://clickooz.com/

If you know any other good classified website, where actual buyer and seller meet than feel free to share me or comment here

Best 10 SEO Tips for Website

2014-11-02T20:49:00.000-08:00

You must know about this 10 SEO Factor Before and after launch new website

List of Website and Mobile Ads Networks and Traffic Sources!

2014-10-21T23:35:00.002-07:00

Pay Per Click Traffic Sources

Google Adwords – http://adwords.google.com
MSN Adcenter - https://adcenter.microsoft.com
Looksmart – LookSmart > Pay-Per-Click Search Advertising
7Search – 7Search | Pay-Per-Click Search Engine Advertising Network
Facebook Ads – Advertising | Facebook
MyAds – http://www.myads.com
Clicksor – Contextual Online Advertising and Behavioral Marketing Company
Marchex - Marchex : Pay Per Click
AdSide – AdSide
Adblade – Adblade - Online Advertising and Monetization Services
Adbrite – adBrite Exchange
AdSonar – http://www.adsonar.com
POF Ads - https://ads.pof.com
Advertise.com – Online Advertising Company : PPC : Email Traffic : Remarketing : Display Advertising : Online Ads : Pay Per Click Advertising : Advertise.com
Pulse360 – Pulse 360 - The Leader in Content Targeted Sponsored Links on the Web's Best Sites
AdClickMedia – AdClickMedia Advertising Network - Pay Per Click Advertising, online text advertising, banner advertising, and Interstitial advertising.
Bidvertiser – BidVertiser - Pay Per Click Advertising On Sites Of Your Choice.
Adknowledge – Adknowledge.com | The leading long tail marketplace
Findit-quick - Pay Per Click | Pay Per Click Advertising | PPC | PPC Advertising | Pay Per Click Search Engine
AdManage – Admanage affiliate and advertising network - PPC, CPC Banner, In Text, Display Ads, CPV, Domain Parking
Findology – http://www.findology.com
AdMarketplace – Performance-Driven Search Advertising | adMarketplace.com
Ezanga - http://www.ezanga.com/

Pay Per View Traffic Sources

Media Traffic – Media Traffic - CPV PPV Contextual Advertising
Trafficvance – Trafficvance :: Advanced Display & Text Link Traffic | Home
DirectCPV – Pay Per View PPV Cost Per View CPV Contextual Online Advertising Network
AdOnNetwork – Pay Per Click Advertising | Pop Under Ads | AdOn Network
Lead Impact – LeadImpact

Pay Per Text Traffic Sources

Infolinks – Pay Per Click Advertising - In Text Ads for Websites by Infolinks
Kontera – Kontera
50onRed – Performance is Paramount | 50 on Red
Vibrant Media – Vibrant - The Leaders of Contextual and In-Text Advertising
Linkworth – LinkWorth | Search Engine Marketing - Text Link Advertising
Inlinks - inLinks - In Content Link Market Place
InText – InTEXT SYSTEMS (wwwserver2)

Media Buy Traffic Sources

Casale Media – Casale Media - Home
Valueclick – http://www.valueclick.comhttp://www....ickformula.com
Tribal Fusion – Home « Tribal Fusion
Traffiq – http://www.trafficq.com
Yahoo AdReady - AdReady - Online Display Advertising Campaign Software for Agencies, Advertisers & Publishers | AdReady
Ask – http://www.ask.com/products/
Illyx - illyx Network | Affiliate platform Pay per install, impression, click
MegaClick - NOTICE
GoTraffic.com – Online traffic marketplace, where website owners and online marketers do business.
Advertising.com – Shopping Search | Ask.com
BuySellAds – Buy Ads | BuySellAds
DoubleClick – DoubleClick: The technology foundation for digital advertising
Burst Media - BURST MEDIA
Dashboard Ad - Dashboard Ad
Adengage - AdEngage - Engaging Internet Advertising
CPX Interactive - Welcome to CPX
Undertone - Undertone
Ad Pepper - ad pepper media: Home

Contextual Pop Ups

Adoori – Adoori - Reinvent Your Advertising.
Infinity ads - Contextual Advertising | Pop Under - Pop Up Ads - Targeted Internet Advertising Services

Retargeting

AdRoll – Retargeting and Display Advertising | AdRoll Retargeting
AdRetargeting – Ad Retargeting - Behavioral Retargeting - Behavioral Marketing - Search Retargeting
Fetchback - FetchBack - The Retargeting Company
Recrue Media - Retargeting Advertising | Retargeting Companies | Recrue Media

Domain Traffic

Elephant Traffic - https://www.elephant-traffic.com

Mobile

Admob – Mobile advertising with AdMob: mobile ads for apps ? Google Ads
Jumptap – Jumptap | The Leader In Targeted Mobile Advertising
inMobi – InMobi | Global Mobile Ad Network
Adfonic – Adfonic
Mojiva – Mobile Advertising with Mojiva's Mobile Ad Network
Mobclix – Mobile Advertising, App Advertising and Analytics, Mobile Ad Exchange, Mobclix

Best 21 Free Australia Business Listing Site List

2014-03-01T00:58:00.003-08:00

Top 21 Free Australia Business directory website List, this entire Business Listing website give you amazing traffic as well as pass high quality backlinks.

Free Australia Business Directory Site

No	Australia Business Directory
1	http://www.yellowpages.com.au
2	http://www.whitepages.com.au
3	http://www.truelocal.com.au
4	http://www.localbusinessguide.com.au
5	http://www.manta.com
6	http://www.startlocal.com.au
7	http://www.hotfrog.com.au
8	http://www.aussieweb.com.au
9	http://abdo.com.au/
10	http://www.kmdirectory.com.au/
11	http://www.aussiepages.com.au/
12	http://www.youfind.com.au/
13	http://www.yalwa.com.au/
14	http://directway.com.au/
15	http://www.webnetwork.com.au/
16	http://www.nationwide.com.au/
17	http://www.webfind.com.au/
18	http://www.enterprisesearch.com.au/
19	http://www.osearch.com.au/
20	http://australia-business-listing.com.au/
21	http://www.businesslistings.net.au/

Simple On Page SEO Checklist for 2013

2013-06-18T09:07:00.000-07:00

On Page SEO Checklist for 2013

Check how many pages Index in Google
Check canonical issue
Duplicate Content Issue
Not Proper Targeted Pages on the site
Metadata Issue
Pagination Issue
Check 404 pages send proper 404 code status. If not send proper 404 status may be occur soft 404 error and it's harmful for site.
Check Capitalization/Lower Case URLs issue
Check Category/Site Structure
Check Breadcrumb Structure
Check - Dynamic Metadata available or not
Check website speed at https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights
Check h1- h6
Check internal linking
Check number of mirror site

---------------- Check In Google Webmaster-------------------------------

Duplicate Title (Listed at Google Webmaster)
Duplicate Description (Listed at Google Webmaster)
Check Number of 404 URLs (Please check - Is it still index in Google SERP?)
Check Number of soft 404 URLs

---------------- Check In Screaming Frog-----------------------------------

Check all urls response code
Title Length (> 70 Character)
Description Length (> 165 Character)
Missing ALT Tag

----------------Check in sitemap---------------------------------

Check Broken URLs (404 Pages)
Capitalize urls
Check your HTML, XML and Image Sitemap

----------------Check in robots.txt---------------------------------

Correctly formatted
Includes link to XML sitemap

How to Start YouTube Advertising in 9 Steps

2013-05-20T09:49:00.003-07:00

Online video is huge – 100 hours of video is uploaded to YouTube every minute! Andvideo viewing doesn't seem to be slowing down any time soon.

If you're ready to advertise on YouTube for the first time – with one of those ads that pop up before you watch your video – then this basics guide is for you.

Although there is a lot more intricate information that goes into getting the best ROI from YouTube ads, this nine-step guide is simply a beginner's guide on how to start building your YouTube presence.

1. Create a Google AdWords Account

Your first stop is Google AdWords. If you already have an AdWords account, then go toadwords.google.com/video to create a new video ad campaign.

2. Link AdWords and YouTube

Make sure that your AdWords and YouTube accounts are linked together. You can complete this step from the navigation menu by clicking “Linked YouTube accounts”.

3. General Settings

When choosing the general settings for your ad, set your desired budget per day. It's better to start small and scale up as you get more familiar with the account and what good objectives are.

The typical spend is around $.01 - $0.23. You won't pay Google unless the viewer watches your ads all the way through. There is also more customization that can be allotted for bidding for the advanced advertisers.

4. Set the Locations Where You Want Your Ad to Show Up

You can choose countries, regions, cities, ZIP codes, IP addresses, etc, going as broad or as specific as you would like. The more specific, the better qualified your viewers will be. If you're just trying to build brand awareness, then going a little more broad might be helpful.

5. Upload Your Video

Next you will select the video that you want to showcase and upload it to your account from YouTube. For more advice on how to format your video for the best success on search engines before you upload it, see "12 Valuable Tips for Video SEO Beginners".

6. Advanced Settings

In the “advanced settings” section, you can choose what days/time of the day you want your ads to show (if there is a specific time you want to showcase your ads because a prospect is more likely to be compelled by your product), and the start and end date for your new ads.

I would suggest to shut off your ads from 12 a.m. to 6 a.m., and schedule your ads to run more during your prospects’ lunch and play hours when they are more likely to be on YouTube.

7. Device Targeting

Getting more in depth with “device targeting”, you can choose specific devices you want to target, whether it be mobile, desktop, laptop, tablets, etc. Get on the devices that you would be using to search for your product.

Are your consumers on their mobile phones? Are you advertising for a mobile app? Then go mobile.

8. Select Age, Gender, Topics & More

Here you can select age, gender, and get specific on what topics you want to show up for. The more specific you are, the better results you will get.

The more you go in depth into what categories, interests, words, websites, and phrases you want to show up for, the better targeted your audience will get. So be as specific as possible!

9. Choosing Keywords

When looking for specific keywords to target that your potential consumers will be searching for on YouTube, use the Google Keyword Tool to find relevant terms and get as specific as possible. These terms come from Google's search engine, not from YouTube, but they will still be useful in weeding out some of the keywords that could cause your ad to be viewed by the wrong person.

The longer the keyword, the more specific it is, and the more pertinent it will be to your business in capturing the right viewers.

View Resoruce: http://searchenginewatch.com/article/2269060/How-to-Start-YouTube-Advertising-in-9-Steps

10 Essential WordPress Plugins to Improve SEO & Usability

2013-05-20T09:34:00.001-07:00

After you've installed WordPress and covered the basics of improving WordPress for SEO and the user experience, it's time to go a bit deeper. Many great plugins are available to help your WordPress site when it comes to SEO, usability, and conversion. Here are 10 great plugins – most of which are available for free.

1. WordPress SEO by Yoast

http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/wordpress-seo/

Download this plugin now and use it on every WordPress site you own. This plugin, in my opinion, is as important as the WordPress installation itself. It's also extremely easy to use.

Also, if you haven't already, make sure to use Yoast's Google Analytics plugin.

2. Simple URLs

http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/simple-urls/

This plugin is great. You can track outbound links and control them completely right within the WordPress backend. If you add Disallow: /go/ into your robots.txt file it will also stop any authority from passing through the link itself.

You can use this plugin to keep track of these outbound links. For example, if you have affiliate links on your site, you can calculate a conversion rate from knowing the number of clicks to the number of people who purchase something via the affiliate link.

3. RB Internal Links

http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/rb-internal-links/

Although this plugin hasn't been updated in more than two years, it still should be included in every WordPress installation. This plugin helps with internal linking.

RB Internal Links is great because it uses the post ID to link internally rather than the URL itself. This means that if you want to change the URL of a page or post, then the URL will be updated dynamically.

This cuts the risk of internal 404 pages that can harm SEO for internal pages, as well as ensuring that no visitor reaches a page that does not exist.

4. NextGen Gallery and Lightbox Plus:

http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/lightbox-plus/
http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/nextgen-gallery/

These two plugins have been combined into one entry because they work hand-in-hand. Lightbox Plus uses Colorbox – a lightweight jQuery image gallery script that is the friendliest for performance and doesn't hinder on-page SEO. Although Lightbox is included as an option within NextGen itself, Lightbox Plus offers a lot more options for the appearance and behavior of Lightbox's execution.

NextGen as a plugin is all you need when it comes to image gallery management. You can define lots of things such as the image's title and alt tags, which solves any SEO image problems.

Its flexibility into WordPress themes is great too, as you can add templates to use with the shortcode NextGen offers (more information on using NextGen templates can be found here). So, for example, I may use my own image gallery viewer and want it to output a certain way so I create my own NextGen gallery template called gallery-alexmoss.php and upload it into a subfolder of my theme called nggallery.

Below is a template I have developed to work with Twitter's Bootstrap image carousel:

<?php if (!defined ('ABSPATH')) die ('No direct access allowed'); ?><?php if (!empty ($gallery)) : ?>

<div id="<?php echo $gallery->anchor ?>" class="carousel slide">

<?php $activenum="0"; foreach ( $images as $image ) : ?>

<li data-target="#<?php echo $gallery->anchor ?>" data-slide-to="<?php echo $activenum; ?>"<?php if ($activenum=="0") {echo ' class="active"'; } $activenum++; ?></li>

<?php endforeach; ?>

</ol>

<?php $activenum="1"; foreach ( $images as $image ) : ?>

<div id="ngg-image-<?php echo $image->pid ?>" class="item<?php if ($activenum=="1") {echo " active"; } $activenum++; ?>" <?php echo $image->style ?>>

<img title="<?php echo $image->alttext; ?>" alt="<?php echo $image->alttext; ?>" src="<?php echo $image->imageURL; ?>" />

<div class="carousel-caption"><h4><?php echo $image->alttext; ?></h4><p><?php echo $image->description; ?></p></div>

</div>

<?php endforeach; ?>

</div>

<a class="left carousel-control" href="#<?php echo $gallery->anchor ?>" data-slide="prev">&lsaquo;</a>

<a class="right carousel-control" href="#<?php echo $gallery->anchor ?>" data-slide="next">&rsaquo;</a>

</div>

<?php endif; ?>

5. Widget Logic

http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/widget-logic/

This plugin works specifically with your widgets. When installed, an extra option is added into each widget where you can define exactly where that widget should/shouldn't appear. This is great when you want to control what content appears in which sections of the site.

Here are a few examples of widget logic you can use:

is_category(X) || (is_single() && in_category(X)) - if viewing Category X or a post within Category X.
is_archive() - if viewing any archive page.
is_page() - if viewing a page.
!is_page() - if viewing anything other than a page. Note that the use of ! turns the condition into if is not.

When you use this plugin ensure that you are confident with using some PHP code as incorrect use can lead to potential problems.

6. Members

http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/members/

You may find that the default user roles provided by WordPress aren't enough for you to control the access that you want. This plugin adds flexibility to edit existing user roles as well as adding additional user roles. The plugin also comes with easy to use widgets and shortcodes so you can limit content based on the user's role.

7. Use Google Libraries

http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/use-google-libraries/

This very simple plugin that substitutes JavaScript libraries called locally on your own server with Google's own CDN. This saves on bandwidth, keeps using compressed versions of the scripts, and increases the chance that a user already has these files cached and therefore increases the general performance of your site.

8. W3 Total Cache

http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/w3-total-cache/

While we're on the subject of performance, W3 Total Cache is the most powerful and comprehensive caching plugin available. This plugin handles everything from combine and minification for both CSS and JS to HTML linebreak and comment removal, disk caching, browser caching and more.

It's useful to test any settings out to ensure that there are no issues once enabled and deployed but most of the time W3 plays ball with your WordPress installation.

9. Gravity Forms

http://3doo.rs/gravity

This is the best plugin available. Although paid (from $39), this plugin is a must have on any WordPress installation and pays for itself.

This plugin handles all kind of form generation and management from basic contact forms to complete content management. There is so much you can do within Gravity Forms that I can't cover it in this post alone. Some examples of how you can use Gravity Forms:

Basic contact forms: Also includes seamless integration with CAPTCHA
Contact forms with email routing: This is great for larger companies. Based on options filled out in the form, email is routed to a different address saving time sifting through a generic email address
MailChimp integration: You can use any form's email input and send that information to MailChimp directly through an add-on available (only for people who purchased the developer license) using MailChimp's API.
Creating content: Forms can actually generate posts or pages within your site. You can create a form that populates all the data needed to publish a new post or page, including the title, excerpt, body, featured image and more.

Another great thing about Gravity forms is that all entries are stored and viewable within the backend of the site meaning that some forms don't even need to have email notifications upon submission. Not enough for you? You can also export all entries as a CSV file, as well as being able to import and export all forms for you to backup or transfer to other sites.

10. Twitter Feed Pro:

http://3doordigital.com/wordpress/plugins/wp-twitter-feed-pro/

This is my own plugin. This paid plugin ($19.99) outputs a Twitter feed based on a number of settings using the shortcode. You can output your latest tweets or someone else's (or a combination), view replies and public mentions, view favorites of any username or search for any term or hashtag. There are also many options for customizing the look and feel of how the tweets are output.

There are two reasons I mention this plugin.

First is that tweets use HTML to output tweets rather than using jQuery (as this is the only other way to do so via Twitter's official embedded timeline widget).

Additionally, this plugin is fully compatible with Twitter API v1.1. Some other plugins or Twitter Feed options within WordPress themes use v1.0 of the API which will retire on June 11. If you want to know more about this issue, I have written about Twitter API v1.1 and its implication.

Summary

It has taken me a long time to find the best plugins to perform all kinds of different tasks and tweaks with WordPress. Finding trustworthy authors and plugins that are not abusive is extremely important so I like it when I find confidence in a plugin to use on my own sites, and more importantly, sites for my clients.

View Resource: http://searchenginewatch.com/article/2268750/10-Essential-WordPress-Plugins-to-Improve-SEO-Usability

Old Vs New SEO Straterge

2013-03-07T08:10:00.002-08:00

You can see here different between old seo work method and latest seo techinque after panda and penguin update. I hope this image better understand different between old vs seo straterge

10 most useful htaccess tips to improve your website

2012-12-18T08:28:00.000-08:00

Everyone will be familiar with tip number four, which is the classic 301 redirect that SEOs have come to know and love. However, the other tips in this list are less common, but are quite useful to know when you need them. After you've read this post, bookmark it, and hopefully it will save you some time in the future.

1) Make URLs SEO-friendly and future-proof

Back when I was more of a developer than an SEO, I built an e-commerce site selling vacations, with a product URL structure:

/vacations.php?country=italy

A nicer URL would probably be:

/vacations/italy/

The second version will allow me to move away from PHP later, it is probably better for SEO, and allows me to even put further sub-folders later if I want. However, it isn't realistic to create a new folder for every product or category. Besides, it all lives in a database normally.

Apache identifies files and how to handle them by their extensions, which we can override on a file by file basis:

<Files magic>

ForceType application/x-httpd-php5

</Files>

This will allow the 'magic' file, which is a PHP file without an extension, to then look like a folder and handle the 'inner' folders as parameters. You can test it out here (try changing the folder names inside the magic 'folder'):

http://www.tomanthony.co.uk/httest/magic/foo/bar/donk

2) Apply rel="canonical" to PDFs and images

The SEO community has adopted rel="canonical" quickly, and it is usually kicked around in discussions about IA and canonicalization issues, where before we only had redirects and blocking to solve a problem. It is a handy little tag that goes in the head section of an HTML page.

However, many people still don't know that you can apply rel="canonical" in an alternative way, using HTTP, for cases where there is no HTML to insert a tag into. An often cited example that can be used for applying rel="canonical" to PDFs is to point to an HTML version or to the download page for a PDF document.

An alternative use would be for applying rel="canonical" to image files. This suggestion came from a client of mine recently, and is something a couple of us had kicked about once before in the Distilled office. My first reaction to the client was that this practice sounded a little bit 'dodgy,' but the more I think about it, the more it seems reasonable.

They had a product range that attracts people to link to their images, but that isn't very helpful to them in terms of SEO (any traffic coming from image search is unlikely to convert), but rel="canonical" those links to images to the product page, and suddenly they are helpful links, and the rel="canonical" seems pretty reasonable.

Here is an example of applying HTTP rel="canonical" to a PDF and a JPG file:

<Files download.pdf>

Header add Link '<http://www.tomanthony.co.uk/httest/pdf-download.html>; rel="canonical"'

</Files>

<Files product.jpg>

Header add Link '<http://www.tomanthony.co.uk/httest/product-page.html>; rel="canonical"'

</Files>

We could also use some variables magic (you didn't know .htaccess could do variables!?) to apply this to all PDFs in a folder, linking back the HTML page with the same name (be careful with this if you are unsure):

RewriteRule ([^/]+)\.pdf$ - [E=FILENAME:$1]

<FilesMatch "\.pdf$">

Header add Link '<http://www.tomanthony.co.uk/httest/%{FILENAME}e.html>; rel="canonical"'

</FilesMatch>

You can read more about it here:

http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=139394

3) Robots directives

You can't instruct all search engines not to index a page, unless you allow them to access the page. If you block a page with robots.txt, then Google might still index it if it has a lot of links pointing to it. You need to put the noindex Meta Robots tag on every page you want to issue that instruction on. If you aren't using a CMS or are using one that is limited in its ease, this could be a lot of work. .htaccess to the rescue!

You can apply directives to all files in a directory by creating an .htaccess file in that directory and adding this command:

Header set X-Robots-Tag "noindex, noarchive, nosnippet"

If you want to read a bit more about this, I suggest this excellent post from Yoast:

http://yoast.com/x-robots-tag-play/

4) Various types of redirect

The common SEO redirect is ensuring that a canonical domain is used, normally www vs. non-www. There are also a couple of other redirects you might find useful. I have kept them simple here, but often times you will want to combine these to ensure you avoid chaining redirects:

# Ensure www on all URLs.

RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^example.com [NC]

RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.example.com/$1 [L,R=301]

# Ensure we are using HTTPS version of the site.

RewriteCond %{HTTPS} !on

RewriteRule (.*) https://%{HTTP_HOST}%{REQUEST_URI} [L,R=301]

# Ensure all URLs have a trailing slash.

RewriteBase /

RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f

RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} !(.*)/$

RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.example.com/$1/ [L,R=301]

5) Custom 404 error page

None of your visitors should be seeing a white error page with black techno-babble when they end up on at a broken URL. You should always be serving a nice 404 page which also gives the visitor links to get back on track.

You can also end up getting lots of links and traffic if you but your time and effort into a cool 404 page, like Distilled's:

This is very easy to setup with .htaccess:

ErrorDocument 404 /cool404.html

# Can also do the same for other errors...

ErrorDocument 500 /cool500.html

6) Send the Vary header to help crawl mobile content

If you are serving a mobile site on the same URLs as your main site, but rather than using responsive design you are altering the HTML, then you should be using the 'Vary' header to let Google know that the HTML changes for mobile users. This helps them to crawl and index your pages more appropriately:

https://developers.google.com/webmasters/smartphone-sites/details

Again, this is pretty simple to achieve with your .htaccess file, independent of your CMS or however your are implementing the HTML variations:

Header append Vary User-Agent

7) Improve caching for better site speed

There is an increasing focus on site speed, both from SEOs (because Google cares) and also from developers who know that more and more visitors are coming to sites over mobile connections.

You should be careful with this tip to ensure there aren't already caching systems in place, and that you choose appropriate caching length. However, if you want a quick and easy solution to set the number of seconds, you can use the below. Here I set static files to cache for 24 hours:

<FilesMatch ".(flv|gif|jpg|jpeg|png|ico|swf|js|css|pdf)$">

Header set Cache-Control "max-age=28800"

</FilesMatch>

8) An Apple-style 'Back Soon' maintenance page

Apple famously shows a 'Back Soon' note when they take their store down temporarily during product announcements, before it comes back with shiny new products to love or hate. When you are making significant changes to redirect users to such a page, a message such as this can be quite useful. However, it can also make it tough to check the changes you've made.

With this bit of .htaccess goodness, you can redirect people based on their IP address, so you can redirect everyone but your IP address and 127.0.0.1 (this is a special 'home' IP address):

RewriteCond %{REMOTE_ADDR}  !your_ip_address

RewriteCond %{REMOTE_ADDR}  !127.0.0.1

RewriteRule !offline.php$ http://www.example.com/back_soon.html [L,R=307]

9) Smarten up your URLs even when your CMS says "No!"

One of the biggest complaints I hear amongst SEOs is about how much this or that CMS "sucks." It can be intensely frustrating for an SEO when they are hampered by the restraints of a certain CMS, and one of those constraints is often that you are stuck with appaling URLs.

You can overcome this, turning product.php?id=3123 into /ray-guns/ in no time at all:

# Rewrite a specific product...

RewriteRule ray-guns/ product.php?id=3123

# ... or groups of them

RewriteRule product/([0-9]+)/ product.php?id=$1

This won't prevent people from visiting the crappy versions of the URLs, but combined with other redirects (based on IP) or with judicious use of rel="canonical," you improve the situation tremendously. Don't forget to update your internal links to the new ones. :)

10) Recruit via your HTTP headers

Ever looked closely at SEOmoz's HTTP headers? You might have missed the opportunity to get a job...

If you would like to add a custom header to your site, you can make up whatever headers and values you'd like:

Header set Hiring-Now "Looking for a job? Email us!"

It can be fun to leave messages for people poking around - I'll leave it to your imaginations! :)

Download the rules

You can grab all of these rules in quick-form from a compilation I made.

Viewing headers

If you are unsure about how to look at HTTP response headers, here's a great tool to get you started.

If you would rather do it in your browser, follow these steps:

Chrome on Windows: Ctrl-Shift-I and click 'Network' (then reload the page)
Chrome on Mac: Command-Option-I and click 'Network' (then reload the page)
Firefox: Install Live HTTP Headers

Thanks for reading, and don't forget to test anything you change! :)

View Source http://www.seomoz.org/blog/htaccess-file-snippets-for-seos

SEO Reppers Song Video with lyrics

2012-12-12T04:32:00.001-08:00

SEO Reppers Song

SEO Reppers lyrics

Your site design, the first thing people see.
It should be reflective of you and the industry.
Easy to look at, with a nice navigation
When they can't find what they wan it causes frustration
A click costs an action. To increase the temptation
Use appealing graphics that create motivation
You have animation please use in moderation
‘Cos search engines can't index the information

Display the logo of all associations
Highlight your content; therefore that’s an obligation.
Create clean design; you can use some decoration
But try to prevent any client hesitation
Every page that they click should provide an explanation
Should be easy to understand like having a conversation
Create a site style you can use your imagination
But make sure you use correct colour combinations
Do some investigation, looks at other organisations
But don’t duplicate or you might face a litigation
You done? Congratulations start construction

Move into production, please follow these instructions:
Your photoshop functions, slice that design
Do you layout with divs make sure there is a line
Please don’t use tables even though they work fine
When it come to indexing they give searchers a hard time
Make it easy for spiders to crawl what you provide
Removed font type, font colour and font size
No background colours, keep your coding real neat
And tag your look n feel on a separate style sheet
Better results with XMl and CSS,
Now you making progress, a ‘lil closer to success
Describe you doc type so the browser can relate
Make sure you do it great or it won’t validate

Check in all browsers, I do it directly
Gotta make sure that it renders correctly
Some use IE some others use flock
Some use AOL, I use Firefox
Title everything including links and images
Don’t use italics, use emphasis
Don’t use bold please use strong
Cos if u use bold that’s old and wrong

You use CSS your page should load quicker
Your client's satisfied like they easting on a Snicker
They stuck on ur page like u made it with a stickers
And then they convert now that the real kicker

Make u a lil richer, your site a lil slicker
Design and code right man I hope u get the picture
What I'm telling you is true man it should be a scripture
If it's built right you’ll be the pick of the litter
Everyone will wanna follow you like twitter

Competition will get bitter
You will shine like glitter
If u tryna grow; your company will get bigger
Design and code right man can you get with it?

Top Australian Free Classifieds Sites List in 2014

2012-09-07T05:41:00.002-07:00

http://www.truebuy.com.au/

http://australia.anunico.com

http://www.globeslist.com.au/

HTTP Status Code Guide Line

2012-08-17T05:35:00.000-07:00

HTTP Status Code

Tips for On Page Site Auditing

2012-08-04T03:40:00.002-07:00

A SEO site audit is a critical first step that SEOs must undertake to understand the state of SEO.

There are two basic options:

A quick hit site audit where you go through the top level diagnosis with the site in a few hours.
An exhaustive site audit that can take days.

If you choose perform the exhaustive site audit, there are three critical areas to keep in mind. They are:

On-page SEO audit
Technical site audit
Link audit

An on-page SEO audit will begin with obvious points, such as the title and meta description tags. Depending on your website this can get a pretty exhaustive document, so you're better served by creating an Excel sheet with your pages or site categories in rows and then each element of on-page SEO as your header.
Let's start by looking at few important elements of on-page SEO, why they're important, and tips on what you should look out for during your audit.

Title Tags

The purpose of a title tag is to make each page unique in terms of the page’s content. Since each page on your site should be unique, you need to have unique title tags for each page.
Title tags also carry huge weight in terms of how you rank, so try to spend as much time as possible on writing great title tags. A title tag should include keywords relevant to the page content.
For example, a website that sells shoes online has a page about men’s athletic shoes. The title tag might be written in the following format:
Mens Athletic Shoes: Brand name Athletic Shoes for Men at [company name]
The above example uses variations of the same keyword to account for keyword searches.
Also, the company name appears at the end of the title. This is critical because many sites use their prime title tag real estate (the beginning) with their company name.
However well-known your company and its brand may be, always use a popular keyword instead of your company name at the beginning of your title tag. Ideally, you may want to limit your title tag to be 40-69 characters at most.

Meta Tags

The meta description tag should be written like how you would for PPC ad copy. Just as good ad copy on PPC campaigns will increase your CTRs, a good meta description will increase your click-through rate (CTR) on organic search.
Make sure to describe what your page content is about, benefit or value to readers, and then a good call to action. Ensure that you spend some time writing your meta description. As a rule of thumb keep your meta description tags under 200 characters.

Missing Title Tags

In addition to writing unique title tags, keep a list in your Excel sheet on pages that are missing title tags or title tags with just your company name on it.
There are a lot of SEO software options available, but a good free option is Google’s Webmaster Tools. Go to the Optimization menu and then click on HTML improvements. There you will see many suggestions and among those are suggestions related with title tags.

Duplicate Title Tags

In Google Webmaster Tools under the same HTML improvements menu, there is a quick way to look at all your duplicate title tags on your site. Again, auditing duplicate title tags and writing unique title for each page can be a good win. These are on-page SEO factors that are low hanging fruits in nature but provide you with maximum bang for your effort.

Missing Alt tags

Besides having benefits like making your site disabilities compliant, alt tags are an important on-page SEO audit element. They play a big part in optimizing your images as these tags are picked up by engines when including your images as part of image search.
Audit your site well and see if alt tags are missing from your images or they have been incorrectly described.

Missing Image Names

Naming your images correctly plays a big part in image optimization. Make sure that images are named correctly when doing your auditing.
One common mistake companies make is when naming their company logo. Designers tend to name the logo as logo.jpg. Instead add your company name as part of the image name like [company name]-logo.jpg.
If you have products on your site then ensure that you are using accurate keyword to describe that product.
Image optimization can be one of those low-hanging fruits when conducting your on-page SEO audit but can drive good amount of traffic through image searches.

H Tags

Header tags tell the search engines that this is the headline of your page. While auditing your site look out for H tags – if you’re missing any, or you have too many. Ideally, your main headline should be in H1 and then maybe sub-headings in H2.

Keyword Mapping and Cannibalization

One thing that an on-page SEO audit should uncover are multiple uses of same keyword on different pages on the site. This is not optimal because you're:

Confusing the search engines as to which page should rank for the keyword in question and as such letting the engines decide.
Missing an opportunity to increase the number of keywords you're optimizing your site against.

A good keyword to page mapping strategy can help resolve this and it should be a critical part of your on-page SEO audit.

On-Page Copy

There is no rule that says you must have a minimum number of words on your page. But always keep in mind that you should be describing your content well and your visitors should easily understand what your page is about and what message you are trying to convey.
Think of it as writing good marketing copy. If you can convey your message in 50 or 100 or 200 words then that should be your on-page copy. Perform some guerilla usability and test your copy based on the results.

Helpful Link Building Tools

2012-07-27T05:44:00.000-07:00

1. Majestic Site Explorer (paid)

Majestic has gradually become a go-to link building tool. Its results are so fresh that you'll often able to find new links you've earned through broken link building that went up on pages you didn't ask about. Anyhow, here's how it can be used:

Bulk Backlink Checker: When you've found a batch of dead pages or sites, submit them all to the bulk link checker and set it to return results based on linking domains. Presto! You've got a list of dead sites or pages ordered by the number of inbound linking domains.
Find Linkers to Dead Pages: I haven't taken the time to master their reports, so I'm stuck with the top 5,000 backlinks. And this will include all the backlinks from a single domain. Typically in batches of 5,000 there are about 1,000-2,500 unique domains. Of those, usually about 500-1,000 are still actually live with links on them.
Find Links Pages for Dead Site Discovery: Start with a .gov site in your conceptual neighborhood (fda.gov for a health site) and then download linkers just to its home page. Then look in the URL strings for "links" or "resources." This will help you find hundreds of topical links pages that will undoubtedly contain some dead sites or pages.
New Link Reporting: In broken link building in particular it isn't always easy to find the results of your handy work – primarily because the page you request a link on isn't where you always end up. Since Majestic is updated so frequently, you'll often find new links on pages you didn't target, but from domains you did. For projects that are XX-links-per-month this is vital. Note: ahrefs.com (paid) can be used for this purpose as well – their index gets updated daily.

2. Link Prospector Tool

I designed this one. This tool facilitates web research, and in particular, link prospect discovery for a particular link building tactic.

Guest post opportunity discovery.
Links pages as BLB seeds: When starting a broken link building campaign you need a set of links pages to scrape so you have resource-oriented URLs to check. Helping fix a broken link is a much better foot in the door than "you link to our competitors."
Target site discovery: "Target site" sounds vague, but if sites exist at large scale (i.e., high school websites) there will be a footprint. Find it and you can find large numbers of these types of websites.

3. Keyword Combiner

I still use the heck out of a keyword combiner tool, for combining prospecting phrases rather than SEO keywords. There's one built into the link prospector but here's the one in my Chrome toolbar: Keyword Combination Tool.
Be warned though, some don't allow for quotation marks or other advanced operators. And the one linked to here is defaulted to doing a double combo.

4. Ubersuggest

This wonderful tool scrapes Google's suggestions, giving link prospectors instant access to the "problem space" around a given phrase. This is useful particularly at the early stages of a campaign.
Test it out with something like: "how do I" to get an idea of what it does. Then narrow in on your space. For example, try: "link building for" which leads Ubersuggest into helping you discover what people are actively searching for.

5. Outbound Link Scraper

Majestic and Google aren't the only tools for opportunity research out there... There are also lists, glorious lists ripe and succulent for the scraping. Whether it's a list of blogs for outreach or just a list of links from a page that we're checking for URL validity a link scraper is an awesome little tool to have handy.

8 Prospect Processing and Qualification Tools

Prospecting is only half the fun. Well, probably less than half the fun if you're counting time. Once you have those raw opportunities you have to have tools for deciding which ones make the cut to move on to the next stage.

1. The URL Status Checker

This one's dead-dumb simple. Input a list of URLs you want to check and then hit submit. You will need to check your dead URLs a couple times and still end up weeding through a few false positives.

2. Regex Filtering Tool

Up in the Majestic section above I describe pulling backlinks to authority sites and sifting through them for links and resource pages. This nifty little filter tool provides regular expressions for this.

3. Pick Shortest URL Per Domain

Sometimes you only need one URL from a domain, but you have hundreds (all mixed in with URLs from other domains). This free tool (login required) picks the shortest URL per domain and dumps the rest. Good for cleaning up lists of possible outreach targets.

4. List Comparison Tool

Sometimes you need to dedupe two lists without combining them. For this you need to use the list comparison tool. This thing can handle tens of thousands of URLs at a time. I've never pushed it farther than that – hopefully it doesn't get shut down after sharing it here!

5. The Super Deduper

Actually it's called just the dedupe lists tool but I prefer super deduper. This tool removes duplicates from lists of URLs, but be sure to remove the www. from your list first or you'll still have multiple instances of the same domain.

6. The Contact Finder

This tool (paid) finds between 20-80 percent of contacts from a list of URLs. Hand off the output of this tool to your human contact finding team to handle the email address selection and to go site by site to find the rest.

7. Archive.org

While anchor text can provide ample clues about the content of a page or site, nothing beats Archive.org for piecing together the purpose of a page. Some BLB outfits "repurpose" content from Archive.org.

8. The URL Opener

Numerous tools can open multiple tabs in your browser when hand-qualifying sites. I try to hand qualify as little as possible these days, but when I do I use the URL opener (also made by the Super Deduper guy).

2 Focus Enabling Tools

Do you spend time "researching trends" on Reddit? With a handy work timer and site blocking tools, you can more effectively regulate your intellectual indulgences.

1. Pomodoro Technique and App (work timer)

I'm not sure why this simple app and technique works, but it does.

2. I-AM-STUDYING BLOCKER

For those of us with chronic "I'll just check Facebook for a second-itis" this app shuts down all access to problem sites simply. It's made for studying but the interface is simple. If you don't like to think of yourself as studying you could try Stay Focused or Nanny.

4 Tools On My Radar

These are tools that I simply haven't made the time to either learn fully or implement yet:

The Link Building Toolbar (review here)
BuzzStream (Gosh, wouldn't it be great to record who not to outreach to in the future?)
Social Crawlytics (via BuzzStream post)
Trello - simple, free project management tool.

Folks now it's your turn. Please add the tools you use, and why/when below.

Hottest SEO Methods to Rank Higher & Avoid Over Optimization

2012-07-21T02:44:00.001-07:00

SEO Methods for 2012

Penguin and Panda updates have disregarded most of the SEO techniques that worked wonders once. This is the high time when webmasters and website owners need to consider what their end user would like and ultimately what search engines would find natural and rankable. After you build or tweak your website targeting the end user, link building and SEO techniques need to follow the search engines’ quality guidelines. Primary elements of quality SEO and link building that can please Google pets like Penguin and Panda are.

1) Great content that appeals your audience
2) Proper Anchor text variation
3) Finding and approach link prospects that relates with your industry and find your website worth linking to
4) The linking prospects are not connected with a bad neighborhood
5) Diversifying your link building and SEO techniques
6) Getting socially engaged with your audience]

Know More about Link Building Strategies and Why It’s Fail

2012-07-16T23:24:00.000-07:00

Some of these strategies I created. Others were handed to me. Over the years, I've discovered that the same reasons for failure kept cropping up. Thus, I thought it'd be helpful to outline the mistakes I've made and seen. Hopefully this helps you avoid the stress and headaches I've experienced along the way.
Here are the ways in which I've seen link building strategies fail and how you can make sure you don't get duped by these common pitfalls.

Link Building Strategy Content Strategy which Link Bait

Let me break it down...
The content strategy is the road map designed to create epic pieces of content. The link building strategy is how you plan on getting links. Sometimes you use content from your content strategy to get links, but sometimes you don't. Sometimes the content from your content strategy helps generate links all by itself, such as when people find it easily in search engines and start sharing it on their own sites. This process is not part of the link building strategy.

Producing a piece of link bait isn't a content strategy, either. Link bait is a piece of content that is created with the hopes of attracting a load of links. Link bait creators hope their content will go viral, and let me tell you, it is really difficult to churn out link bait after you produce a piece that goes viral. You're lucky if one goes viral, let alone multiple. Thus, link bait isn't a content strategy as it's not really sustainable.

In addition, link bait can create a bad user experience, say in the case that you are churning out infographic after infographic all hosted on your company blog. Frequent visitors to that blog might become alienated, especially in "boring" or small niches where you often need to think of tangential topics and audiences to make a successful piece of link bait.
Why should you know (and care about) the difference? Because getting link bait and content strategy confused can set your team up for failure. It often results in expectations not being met, as they will be unrealistic from the start. Plus, each of these strategies answers different questions as they are being created — such as the target market, goals, and metrics — all of which are vital to success. Miss one part and you could be missing an important piece of the big picture.

How to Win:

Create a content strategy that includes link bait (isn't all link bait) and figure out where you can leverage the content for link building. Simultaneously, create a link building strategy that drives additional links above and beyond what your content can do. For even more win, consider how you can coordinate with your social strategy to really leverage both your content and link building efforts.
The key here is collaboration and integration, which will ensure you don't miss opportunities for a win. Think you only have the resources to pursue one strategy (which I will call BS on)? I love this controversial article on content marketing being better than link building. I'm not saying I agree or disagree, I just love when authors take an aggressive stance :)

The "Strategy" Part is Left Out

Trusty old Wikipedia defines a strategy as, "A plan of action designed to achieve a vision." Unfortunately, a lot of times the planning and designing parts are left out, leaving a grandiose vision but no real road map for getting there. I see this a lot with companies who pride themselves in being agile. Sometimes they are just too agile, too shotgun and reckless, saying "let's go, go, go" and hoping to see some wins later on.

How to Win:

No brainer here: create a strategy. Know that executing one campaign after another with no connecting thread is not a strategy. Here are the top-level pieces both a winning content and link building strategy should have.

What - What is the purpose? What are the goals?
Who - This is two part, 1) Who will be accountable for the project? 2) Who is the target audience?
How - Again two part, 1) How will you reach this goal(s)? 2) How will you track it?
Why - Why is this piece of the strategy being pursued? This should be answered from both the business and user perspective.
When - When will this be executed? Create timelines and deadlines to execute each piece of the strategy.
Where - Where does this fit in? Knowing how it integrates with other efforts and where it fits into the grand scheme of things is essential.

Rather than re-invent the wheel, here are some useful resources for how to create link building and content strategies:

The Noob Guide to Link Building - helps see where planning fits into the grand scheme of things, top-level planning tips
Brainstorming your Link Building Strategy - pretty good guide outlining the important questions you need to ask yourself
Link Building Management - detailed workflow from a management perspective
Content Strategy Roadmap (slideshow) - Ignore the useless photos and promotion, the meat of this is good stuff

No Defined Goals

Part of a strategy is having a vision, but to achieve that vision you need to set goals. Typically, the best strategies have a number of goals, broken into both short term and long term. Some will argue that "ranking #1 for [insert highly competitive short tail keyword here]" is a goal, but since it is pretty lofty you need to ask yourself what short term goals can your team action in order to be number one.

How to Win:

Set up both long-term and short-term goals. Generally, the short-term goals will be stepping stones for reaching long-term goals, creating a tree of goals with actionable milestones. I found an acronym from a UK government agency that I thought was wonderful. It says that all goals are SMART:

No Urgency or Tracking in Place

In my experience, in-house link building teams tend to fall victim to this more often than agencies. Just as a link building strategy should have goals, there should be some urgency in reaching them. This is where tracking comes into play. I see a lack of urgency is often correlated with not having a system in place for inspiring that urgency. To be clear, what I mean when I say "urgency" is a timeline for reaching goals - essentially deadlines.
Every link builder is going to find a way to track how many links he/she is getting. It's human nature - we're out trying to get something and we want to see if we won or not. While I still find that the market struggles with developing a completely automated and instant way of tracking incoming links, there are manual processes that can aid in tracking how many links are received. However, this isn't the only tracking that's important.
Knowing the number of links is great, but what are those links doing for rankings? How have those incoming links fluctuated over the duration of the project? What does the anchor text spread look like? These are bigger picture questions that some teams fail to answer in tracking. It makes it very difficult to measure the effectiveness and ROI of your link building team if you aren't looking at tracking data over time. And what is more important is making sure you share these results with everyone on the team. The first set of people who should know the results should be the ones doing the work. Too often the link builders are left out of the loop and given indirect feedback like "we need to get more links."

How to Win:

Here is a top-level road map for implementing tracking procedures:

After defining the goals, determine KPIs for measuring if those goals have been reached.
Create a system for monitoring these KPIs, such as through Analytics or third-party tracking tools.
Regularly analyze the data. Aggregate it into digestible visualizations to help make sense of it all.
Draw conclusions.
Share these conclusions with the whole team.
As more data is collected, compare new data with historical results. Be sure to share these with the team as well.
Reassess strategy and determine where changes need to be made if applicable.

Expectations Aren't Managed

Everyone is going to have his/her own opinion, from the bosses to the link builders themselves. Those who own the project need to set a realistic bar and constantly communicate what everyone can expect. Keep in mind that some people won't be as forthcoming with their expectations, so the key is to ask, and preferably have their expectations documented somewhere for reference to hold everyone accountable.

How to Win:

It's safe to set the bar low so you can exceed expectations, but the key in that is just generally setting the bar. If you want to go even further, epmphasize constant and clear communication. A good workflow includes:

Learning what is expected from each party.
Negotiating those expectations.
Consistently reporting on where your team is at in meeting those expectations.
Reporting on the final results - were those expectations met or exceeded?

Resources Spread too Thin

I see this all the time. Let's put it in perspective with a hypothetical story.
The boss decides the company should try it's hand at some link building, so he designates one person to give it a go. Let's say it's Susy the copy writer. Off the cuff, the boss decides he wants Susy to start getting 30-50 links a week, and of course to complete all the other copy writing tasks required of her. With a pat on the back he tells new link builder Susy good luck.
It's not difficult to guess that Susy the link builder comes back with less than stellar results. Not only is the boss disappointed, but he also decides link building isn't good for the company. Susy is left feeling like she failed, disappointed in herself, and aggravated at her boss.
Link building isn't a get rich quick scheme..or at least it shouldn't be viewed as one.

How to Win:

Devote ample resources to your link building project. This can be easier said than done, especially when you operate a small business. A good start is to hire one person whose sole job function is link building. Susy the copy writer shouldn't also be dabbling in link building as nobody simply dabbles in link building.

Make sure to monitor everything he/she does in order to make a case study for obtaining more people and resources for link building. Especially when just starting out, companies can see a lot of big wins so make sure to track before and after progress to prove your case.
Depending on which strategy(ies) you pursue, the ideal team consists of:

Link builder(s) - Remember, results are determined by time x cost = # of wins. For more wins, you need to amp up the variables.
Content person(s) - A lot of link building strategies require content, so a strong team of writers and editors can help scale link building.
Creative person(s) - Designers and developers can really help amp up the content you produce.
Researcher(s) - Having someone who is an expert in data can make sure your resources are credible and your content is solid.
PR person(s) - This person has his/her finger on the pulse of media, knowing what is trending and what journalists are interested in.
Project manager - Sometimes this role isn't as explicit as this title suggests, but someone in charge of tracking and keeping an eye on the big picture can give your link builders more time to execute, rather than get caught up in monitoring.
Social media person(s) - Not essential, but it's great to have a dedicated person to leverage the link building opportunities social media presents.

Content is Consistently Crappy

This feels like it should be a no-brainer, but plenty of companies fail to make epic content. Sometimes this caused by looking for quick wins, resulting in not enough effort or resources devoted to content creation. However, a more common reason is not due to lack of experience, but falls on the fact that people just don't know. People tend to fall in love with their own ideas (often which are too promotional) and have trouble seeing whether or not the idea will really speak to anyone.

How to Win:

First, know that the content creation process is not a sweatshop. Content should be made with a lot of blood, sweat, and tears. A case study from Salon.com illustrates this concept well. Essentially, the webiste was able to increase traffic to the site by 40% by creating 33% less content. This supports the idea that content isn't a numbers game; it's a quality game.

Second, your content strategy should define accountabilities and create a workflow that implements a checks and balances system to ensure that you are creating epic content. If your content strategy is lacking, make sure you really understand how people are using the Internet and get the link builders involved with brainstorming, even if it's just to ask them. If you have minimal content building experience, it's important to have the people in the trenches involved in the discussion.
To make content creation even easier, I've created this checklist for what I believe all epic content should have. If you can't say "yes" or provide a compelling answer for each, you might need to go back to the drawing board. Print it out and put it next to your desk right now (high res version available up request).

Link Building Isn't Integrated with Other Marketing Channels

This section might be a bit misleading as link building can still be successful without being integrated into other channels. However, a lack of integration can be a serious glass roof on the ladder to link building awesomeness. There is only so much traditional link building can do. Big wins often encompass other divisions, such as PR, social media, the product team, and more. This is acknowledged well in Jon's link building strategy list - in the top filter notice the checkboxes under "Dependencies on Other Resources." The bigger your ideas, more departments will need to be involved. Without a seamless plan for integration and collaboration, working together is going to be one big mess (if it's even possible at all).

Besides being able to work harmoniously, another big reason you want integration is because you can capitalize on what everybody else is doing and make sure you capture all the wins possible from a particular campaign. A lot of the initiatives your PR team is running can be easily tweaked to fit into the SEO team's agenda as well. It's called "looking for low-hanging fruit", and it is impossible to implement this idea if you don't know what the other teams are doing.

How to Win:

Communicate, communicate, communicate. Especially at first, you are going to have to stay relevant by constantly communicating with the different marketing teams. I've found that taking the initiative and including these teams' interests in your link building initiatives shows them a clear example of how you can work together.
For example, if you are running contests with bloggers, looking out for the social media team's interests can help you make a case for why your teams should work together. It's the "I'll scratch your back if you scratch mine" philosophy, and you are initiating the "scratching". By laying out a work flow through example, you will inspire these teams to get you involved with their projects.

To do this, include them in every step from inception to execution and make it clear how you are addressing their goals. Ask questions and ask for input. Consider it internal egobait. Pretty soon, you'll have an open line of communication and your requests for regular cross-team meetings will be taken seriously. Before you know it, you will all be in the loop of what other teams are doing and collaborating on your different project calendars. Tread lightly so as not to step on any toes, and encourage hosting these calendars on a collaborative platform, such as a simple Google Doc. In the end, communication turns into collaboration, and that is where you will gain the most wins from your marketing efforts.

Link Building Team Members are Siloed

Just as marketing channels can be siloed, so can the different teams involved with link building. I mentioned above the different concentrations that should be represented in a complete link building team. Smaller teams tend to have no trouble including everyone in the strategy, as they all typically sit in the same room. But what if you have a large team? Maybe with offices in different locations?
It's easy to leave people out of the link building funnel; people figure the process will ship quicker if there are less chefs in the kitchen. However, this is the easiest way for a link building campaign to fail. Not every person on your team can be an expert in everything, so drawing from the experience and know-how that all team members have to offer will help you succeed.

How to Win:

Know each person(s) or teams core competencies. By knowing what each person/team can bring to the table, you'll be able to figure out where they fit into a particular link building campaign. The skills that each team member can bring to the table include:

Link builder - This person spends all day trolling the Internet and trying to promote content, dealing with rejections, and taking part in observational learning along the way. He/she can tell you if the idea is promotable, as well as insights into how to reach different target niches.
Content person - This person spends all day writing. He/she will know how to use the written word to represent the data on your infographic in a comprehensible way, while capturing your brand's voice and style to ensure consistency.
Creative person - This person knows how to represent complex data in a beautiful, visual way. He/she will be able to tell you possible roadblocks of the infographic idea from a design perspective, or suggest better ways to represent the information.
Researcher - This person crunches data all day. He/she will be able to collect credible sources for your piece, ensuring that the information is statistically sound and that your link builders don't get eaten alive by critics.
PR person - This person speaks to the media all day. He/she knows what journalists look for and will be able to tell you if your piece will be promotable to high-value publications.
Project manager - This person is the glue that holds the process together. He/she should be responsible for making sure the teams communicate and collaborate.
Social media person - This person knows what is trending in the social sphere. He/she can help promote the piece and tell you if the idea will be shared. He/she can help push your piece viral.

Without the help from all of these people, you are much more likely to create a piece that:

Doesn't target a specific audience.
Targets an audience that is difficult to infiltrate.
Targets an audience that is too small, making the likelihood of success small.
Isn't statistically sound, making it likely that it will be ripped apart during outreach.
Is visually limited because your design team was incapable of executing the grand vision.
Doesn't take off in the social space.

Ensure your teams work collaboratively and communicate to create an inherent checks and balances system for creating winning link building campaigns.

Relationships are Left Out

I'm a big proponent of link building being renamed relationship building. The lines between traditional PR and link building are being blurred, and to get a link you need to bring it back to basics: networking. People do things for people they know. Bloggers and journalists get solicited to build links all the time, and you need to make sure you are among the people they come to know if you want that link.
The "relationship" part is left out because link builders are constantly pressured by numbers. Those who aren't in the trenches don't understand how much goes into link building. I would argue that with some link building campaigns, the back and forth with a prospect takes up to 75% of the time. That number is often lost when looking at metrics like number of hours worked versus number of successful link placements.

How to Win:

First, educate your team and manage expectations. If you are the boss, understand that link building should take time. iAcquire wrote an article on the effort required to build links and I don't think it's far off.
As far as measurement, make sure that the time spent negotiating is taken into account. If you have a large team and sense a problem among your link builders of not knowing when to let go (which I think is a big beginner pitfall), sit down with them and role play. Have them fill out a time log to capture back and forth if you have to. Host a link building hack day and get in the trenches to see for yourself just how much back and forth you'll do. No matter the method, make sure that this is taken into account and encourage relationship building. It's what makes link building scalable — as you can go back to the same people and be introduced to new contacts — so don't give up. Pretty soon they'll get to a place where they can manage a relationship quicker and more efficiently.

Everyone Forgets the End Goal

Disclaimer: this is a #tellmehowyoureallyfeel moment and is my #1 gripe with link building. I think the term has been bastardized - it is so overused that people forget where it came from in the first place. It's not about the number of links. Link building was a means created to increase conversions. Conversions should be what you care about. Not the number of links. Not even how well your SERP positioning improves. If you are increasing the number of links, improving your SERP positioning, and seeing more traffic, absolutely NONE of this matters if that traffic isn't converting.
Because of this misconception, I think a lot of SEOs will say a big part of their job is educating their clients/bosses. It's quite easy to get caught up in the minutiae; counting the number of links and watching rank changes are easy to hold onto because they are the easiest to see. These are great short-term goals, but they are not the end goal.
My co-worker Carson Ward said this well:

How to Win:

Constantly remind yourself/your team of the end goal. Do this by measuring changes in conversions that are a result of the smaller wins. Especially while educating your clients/bosses, if they aren't constantly reminded of conversions, they will easily forget. This is where defining goals and managing expectations are super important.
Second, remember that link building — and SEO as a whole — is only part of the inbound marketing puzzle. The only reason people have an online business is to capture new customers on the web. SEO is only one way to do this, and link building is only one way SEO makes this happen. Know the big picture and understand how your efforts contribute to the grand vision.

Google Panda Update 3.9 on 12th July 2012

2012-07-12T21:25:00.000-07:00

Google Panda Update 3.9

This would be version 3.9 and happening only a little over 2 weeks after the last update, Google Panda 3.8.

There are SEOs and webmasters claiming recoveries from previous Panda damage and other webmasters claiming major drops in their rankings. Because some webmasters who were hit by Panda are claiming recoveries, this seems to be a Panda related update and not a Penguin update.

To be honest, I am not sure if this is indeed a real update. There is a nice number of posts in the forums but not typical levels of a Panda or Penguin refresh.

I will reach out to Google for a comment and update this post when I hear back.

Past Panda Updates:

Panda 3.8 on June 25th
Panda 3.7 on June 9th
Panda 3.6 on April 27th
Panda 3.5 on April 19th
Panda 3.4 on March 23rd
Panda 3.3 on about February 26th
Panda 3.2 on about January 15th
Panda 3.1 on November 18th
Panda 2.5.3 on October 19/20th
Panda 2.5.2 on October 13th
Panda 2.5.1 on October 9th
Panda 2.5 on September 28th
Panda 2.4 in August
Panda 2.3 on around July 22nd.
Panda 2.2 on June 18th or so.
Panda 2.1 on May 9th or so.
Panda 2.0 on April 11th or so.
Panda 1.0 on February 24th

Update: Google said there was no specific update.

Useful SEO Mozilla Firefox Add-ons

2012-07-10T04:42:00.001-07:00

Firefox SEO Add-ons

Yes, I know there are much more great FireFox plugins but I am sharing only those I am using myself and find really useful.

Useful SEO Mozilla Firefox Add-ons

2012-07-10T04:31:00.001-07:00

Firefox SEO Add-ons

Yes, I know there are much more great FireFox plugins but I am sharing only those I am using myself and find really useful.

Google Local Listing Optimization Tips

2012-07-09T21:09:00.000-07:00

10 Way to Improve your Gooogle Local Listing
What?
Ranking locally is much more critical with the evolvement of local listings across the web such as Google Places, Bing BBP, Yahoo local and the various social media channels. Google Places seems to consistently drive more traffic than any other local channel, sometimes upwards of 40% share of referring traffic for many of our clients.

Why?
Google has 65% market share at the moment, making Google Places the most important local listing to focus your attention on. This should be followed by Bing & Yahoo.

In October, Google updated their SERPs to showcase local listings alongside your organic result making your local listing that much more important. It’s now absolutely crucial to have your local listing 100% optimized and in sync with your on page/off page website strategy as well.

How?
So what can you do to improve your chances of ranking well locally? Below are the top 10 things you can do to improve your chances of ranking high and converting traffic from your Google local listings.

On-page optimization: Use the correct geo-location in all on-page optimization. Do not use the geo-location that you would like to rank for. For example, if you are located in Sunnyvale, you should use “Sunnyvale hotel” and not “Santa Clara hotel”. Its fine to use “Hotel near Santa Clara” but to state “Santa Clara Hotel” would not be accurate or helpful to your local strategy.
Local Submissions: Submit your website/business information to local data providers such as Acxiom, InfoUsa and Localeze. These data providers will feed your business information across the web to other business information channels, helping you build credibility across the web. In the long run, local submissions help you gain more local relevance and trust with the search engines and public users. It is critical to ensure your business information on your website is accurate and consistent across all of these sources. Incorrect business information will result in distrust from search engines and the public, and will negatively impact your local ranking and conversion.
Claim Google Places listings: The ability to optimize your listing is only possible once it is claimed and verified by you, the owner. This is a great way for you to control the information about your business.
Optimize Your Local Listing Account to 100%: Ensure each of the below buckets are optimized and completed.
- Correct business information: Ensure name, address, and phone number (NAP) on listing & website is correct.
- Categories: this is how Google knows what type of business you are.
- Hours of Operation
- Photos
- Videos
- Additional Details
- Update Place Page: Promote specials or events with specific calls to action
- Google Reviews Management Response: Respond to Google reviews via your Google Places account.
Encourage Online Reviews: Online reviews play into the local ranking algorithm. It’s not so much about the amount of reviews your hotel receives, but the quality of your reviews. Research which third party review sites are important to your industry/location and target those first. Don’t forget to encourage online reviews directly via your website as well. Google can now index your website reviews and pull them into your local listing. The more reviews, the better!
Respond to reviews: Doing so can help build/improve your hotel’s online reputation as it shows that management places great importance on customer service and satisfaction. Not only will this result in higher trust, but it can also lead to return visitors/guests.
Build citations from credible/authoritative sources: Online citations for your business are the equivalent to online referrals for your website. Citations are not links necessarily, but can be simple mentions of your NAP. The more credible online citation sources you accumulate, the more likely it is that your Google local listing will rank well.
Claim Hyperlocal listings: It’s important to claim your Facebook Places, Foursquare, and Gowalla listings. Hyperlocal listings give you local credibility, allow you to gain local relevance, and help you build a stronger local community following.
Ensure you cross-optimize and apply what works on your site to your Places Local Listing:
- Promote successful packages
- Promote most viewed/converting pages
- Promote Social Media channels
Google Boost: Participate in Google Boost to get some early traction to your local listing. You cannot control which keywords you appear for but it’s a great way to gain some additional exposure.

You can get your social media profile weight still if its "no follow"

2012-07-05T23:05:00.000-07:00

How does nofollow work with the Social Graph API (rel="nofollow me")?

If you host user profiles and allow users to link to other profiles on the web, we encourage you to mark those links with the rel="me" microformat so that they can be made available through the Social Graph API. For example:

<a href="http://blog.example.com" rel="me">My blog</a>

However, because these links are user-generated and may sometimes point to untrusted pages, we recommend that these links be marked with nofollow. For example:

<a href="http://blog.example.com" rel="me nofollow">My blog</a>

With rel="me nofollow", Google will continue to treat the rel="nofollow" as expected for search purposes, such as not transferring PageRank. However, for the Social Graph API, we will count the rel="me" link even when included with a nofollow.

If you are able to verify ownership of a link using an identity technology such as OpenID or OAuth, however, you may choose to remove the nofollow link.

To prevent crawling of a rel="me nofollow" URL, you can use robots.txt. Standard robots.txt exclusion rules are respected by both Googlebot and the Social Graph API.

However, you can be superstitious about the following best practice in using these relationship attribute:

rel="me"
Google now uses reciprocal link juice dumping factor. So, reciprocal links don't get the usual link juice for SEO. So, many people think that using rel="me" can save them, if they link from multiple sites that they own. This tag can be used for similar and related contents also.

rel="friend"
You can define a link as friend, which might have separate influence on the link when search engines plans to utilize the relationship. Without login, if you go to your public profile in Facebook, then you will see that your friends' profiles are linked with the rel="friend" tag. If your content is dependent on the contents of other links (e.g. if you are reviewing a post), then you can use the tag.

rel="external"
This tells the search engine that the link is not a "friend" nor "me". i.e. just a typical stranger. So, this might have different value in the eye of search engine. But, let me remind you that this is still a superstition.

What is Pruning Links

2012-07-02T22:43:00.000-07:00

Pruning Links

Once you have identified if bad links are pointing at your site, you need to start working to address it.
If you have 10,000 or more links to your site, this can seem like an insurmountable task – particularly if the people who acquired the bad links are no longer around to ask about what they did.
Here are some things you can do to simplify the cleanup process.

Categorize Your Links

Start by pulling the link data. At a minimum, pull it from Google Webmaster Tools, because that is what Google is reporting.
If you can, it is also great to get link data from Open Site Explorer and Majestic SEO. Integrate all this data into one master list.
Combining your data (and de-duping the results) gives you the largest possible list of links, as individual link data sources can only provide a sampling of the links to your site.
Once you have your master list, it's time to start simplifying the task a bit.

1. Sort Your Links by the Linking URL

Group the links by domain. If a domain links to you from 834 pages, just check 1-3 at most – chances are that if the links are bad on any of the pages, it's bad on all of them.
This by itself is a huge simplification of the task. For example, look at these example link counts:

The blog has 201,048 links from 778 domains. So instead of checking more than 200,000 pages, you only need to check 778 domains. The workload seems a lot lighter already, doesn't it?

2. Separate Links From Blogs

This is hard to do without doing a little programming, but the required programming is easy.
Look for URLs that have "blog" as part of the URL, or load the pages and see if you can find the string "Wordpress", "Moveable Type" and other such blog platforms on the page. This won't give you a complete list of blogs, but it will identify a lot of them for you.
You will need to look at these posts, but you can give the person doing the work simplified guidelines, such as telling them to look for:

Low quality posts.
In context links with rich anchor text.
Multiple links per post.

Also, if 1,100 blogs link to your site, and you look at 100 of them and see significant problems, you know you need to check them all (unfortunately!).
But, if you look at 200 or more and they are all clean, you might start to think you don't need to look at the rest. To be conservative, if you look at half of them, and they are all clean, chances are there was no bad blog campaign underway, and you can skip the rest and focus on looking at other problems.

3. Look for Multiple Links Per Page

This is another hint of a possible problem. Not definitive, of course.
For example, the other a guest post someone did on Forbes had six links to the site of the author, including rich anchor text links in the body of the post. It just looked "off."

People who buy links tend to be a bit greedy. To them, one rich link anchor text link is good, but several links are great – they want to get their money's worth.
The upside of this greed is it can make it easier for you to recognize potential bad links.
Tracking down pages with multiple links takes little bit of programming, but it isn't too hard.

4. Look for Pages That Link to You With Rich Anchor Text

This is again not a definitive flag, but can focus where you look for trouble.
Consider the inverse rule too – if the only links on the page to you use your URL or business name (assuming that these aren't keyword packed), then chances are that the page in question isn't a problem.
Focus your energy on pages that smell like trouble.

How to Create Robots.txt and Use of Wildcard and Dollar patters Match

2012-07-01T23:48:00.000-07:00

How to Create Robots.txt

The simplest robots.txt file uses two rules:

User-agent: the robot the following rule applies to
Disallow: the URL you want to block

These two lines are considered a single entry in the file. You can include as many entries as you want. You can include multiple Disallow lines and multiple user-agents in one entry.
Each section in the robots.txt file is separate and does not build upon previous sections. For example:

User-agent: *  Disallow: /folder1/    User-Agent: Googlebot  Disallow: /folder2/

In this example only the URLs matching /folder2/ would be disallowed for Googlebot.

User-agents and bots

A user-agent is a specific search engine robot. The Web Robots Database lists many common bots. You can set an entry to apply to a specific bot (by listing the name) or you can set it to apply to all bots (by listing an asterisk). An entry that applies to all bots looks like this:

User-agent: *

Google uses several different bots (user-agents). The bot we use for our web search is Googlebot. Our other bots like Googlebot-Mobile and Googlebot-Image follow rules you set up for Googlebot, but you can set up specific rules for these specific bots as well.

Blocking user-agents

The Disallow line lists the pages you want to block. You can list a specific URL or a pattern. The entry should begin with a forward slash (/).

To block the entire site, use a forward slash.
```
Disallow: /
```
To block a directory and everything in it, follow the directory name with a forward slash.
```
Disallow: /junk-directory/
```
To block a page, list the page.
```
Disallow: /private_file.html
```
To remove a specific image from Google Images, add the following:
```
User-agent: Googlebot-Image  Disallow: /images/dogs.jpg 
```
To remove all images on your site from Google Images:
```
User-agent: Googlebot-Image  Disallow: / 
```
To block files of a specific file type (for example, .gif), use the following:
```
User-agent: Googlebot  Disallow: /*.gif$
```
To prevent pages on your site from being crawled, while still displaying AdSense ads on those pages, disallow all bots other than Mediapartners-Google. This keeps the pages from appearing in search results, but allows the Mediapartners-Google robot to analyze the pages to determine the ads to show. The Mediapartners-Google robot doesn't share pages with the other Google user-agents. For example:
```
User-agent: *  Disallow: /    User-agent: Mediapartners-Google  Allow: /
```

Note that directives are case-sensitive. For instance, Disallow: /junk_file.asp would block http://www.example.com/junk_file.asp, but would allow http://www.example.com/Junk_file.asp. Googlebot will ignore white-space (in particular empty lines)and unknown directives in the robots.txt.
Googlebot supports submission of Sitemap files through the robots.txt file.

Pattern matching ( Wildcard and Dollar)

Googlebot (but not all search engines) respects some pattern matching.

To match a sequence of characters, use an asterisk (*). For instance, to block access to all subdirectories that begin with private:
```
User-agent: Googlebot  Disallow: /private*/
```
To block access to all URLs that include a question mark (?) (more specifically, any URL that begins with your domain name, followed by any string, followed by a question mark, followed by any string):
```
User-agent: Googlebot  Disallow: /*?
```
To specify matching the end of a URL, use $. For instance, to block any URLs that end with .xls:
```
User-agent: Googlebot   Disallow: /*.xls$
```
You can use this pattern matching in combination with the Allow directive. For instance, if a ? indicates a session ID, you may want to exclude all URLs that contain them to ensure Googlebot doesn't crawl duplicate pages. But URLs that end with a ? may be the version of the page that you do want included. For this situation, you can set your robots.txt file as follows:
```
User-agent: *  Allow: /*?$  Disallow: /*?
```
The Disallow: / *? directive will block any URL that includes a ? (more specifically, it will block any URL that begins with your domain name, followed by any string, followed by a question mark, followed by any string).
The Allow: /*?$ directive will allow any URL that ends in a ? (more specifically, it will allow any URL that begins with your domain name, followed by a string, followed by a ?, with no characters after the ?).

Save your robots.txt file by downloading the file or copying the contents to a text file and saving as robots.txt. Save the file to the highest-level directory of your site. The robots.txt file must reside in the root of the domain and must be named "robots.txt". A robots.txt file located in a subdirectory isn't valid, as bots only check for this file in the root of the domain. For instance, http://www.example.com/robots.txt is a valid location, but http://www.example.com/mysite/robots.txt is not.

Difference Between HTML Sitemap and XML Sitemap

2012-06-29T22:54:00.000-07:00

HTML Sitemap V/S XML Sitemap

An HTML sitemap allows site visitors to easily navigate a website. It is a bulleted outline text version of the site navigation. The anchor text displayed in the outline is linked to the page it references. Site visitors can go to the Sitemap to locate a topic they are unable to find by searching the site or navigating through the site menus.

This Sitemap can also be created in XML format and submitted to search engines so they can crawl the website in a more effective manner. Using the Sitemap, search engines become aware of every page on the site, including any URLs that are not discovered through the normal crawling process used by the engine. Sitemaps are helpful if a site has dynamic content, is new and does not have many links to it, or contains a lot of archived content that is not well-linked.

Which is better: an HTML site map or XML Sitemap?

How to Define Canonical in your Page

2012-06-28T21:04:00.001-07:00

It sounds like an easy question, doesn’t it? While we hear a lot about duplicate content since the Panda update(s), I’m amazed at how many people are still confused by a much more fundamental question – which URL for any given page is the canonical URL? While the idea of a canonical URL is simple enough, finding it for a large, data-driven site isn’t always so easy. This post will guide you through the process with some common cases that I see every week.

Let’s Play Count the Pages

Before we dive in, let’s cover the biggest misunderstanding that people have about “pages” on their websites. When we think of a page, we often think of a physical file containing code (whether it’s static HTML or script, like a PHP file). To a crawler, a page is any unique URL that it finds. One file could theoretically generate thousands of unique URLs, and every one of those is potentially a “page” in Google’s eyes.
It’s easy to smile and nod and all agree that we understand, but let’s put it to the test. In each of the following scenarios, how many pages does Google see?

(A) “Static” Site

www.example.com/
www.example.com/store
www.example.com/about
www.example.com/contact

(B) PHP-based Site

www.example.com/index.php
www.example.com/store.php
www.example.com/about.php
www.example.com/contact.php

(C) Single-template Site

www.example.com/index.php?page=home
www.example.com/index.php?page=store
www.example.com/index.php?page=about
www.example.com/index.php?page=contact

The answer is (A) 4, (B) 4, and (C) 4. In Google’s eyes, it doesn’t matter whether the pages have extensions (“.php”), the home-page is at the root (“/”) or at index.php, or even if every page is being driven off of one physical template. There are four unique URLs, and that means there are four pages. If Google can crawl them all, they’ll all be indexed (usually).
Let’s dive right into a few examples. Please note: these are just examples. I’m not recommending any of the URL structures in this post as ideal – I’m just trying to help you determine the correct canonical URL for any given situation.

Case 1: Tracking URLs

I’ll start with an easy one. Many sites still use URL parameters to track visitor sessions or links from affiliates. No matter what the parameter is called or which purpose it’s used for, it creates a duplicate for every individual visitor or affiliate. Here are a few examples:

www.example.com/store.php?session=1234
www.example.com/store.php?affiliate=5678
www.example.com/store.php?product=1234&affiliate=5678

In the first two examples, the session and affiliate ID create a copy, in essence, of the main store page. In both of these cases, the proper canonical URL is simply:

www.example.com/store.php

The last example is a bit trickier. There, we also have a “product=” parameter that drives the product being displayed. This parameter is essential – it determines the actual content of the page. So, only the “affiliate=” parameter should be stripped out, and the canonical URL is:

www.example.com/store.php?product=1234

This is just one of many cases where the canonical URL is NOT the root template or the URL with no parameters. Canonical URLs aren’t always short or pretty – many canonical URLs will have parameters. Again, I’m not arguing that this structure is ideal. I’m just saying that the canonical URL in this case would have to include the “product=” parameter.

Case 2: “Dynamic” URLs

Unfortunately, the word “dynamic” gets thrown around a little too freely – for the purposes of this blog post, I mean any URLs that pass variables to generate unique content. Those variables could look like traditional URL parameters or be embedded as “folders”.
A good example of the kind of URLs I’m talking about are blog post URLs. Take these four:

www.example.com/blog/1234
www.example.com/blog.php?id=1234
www.example.com/blog.php?id=1234&comments=on
www.example.com/blog/20120626

Again, it doesn’t matter whether the URLS have parameters or hide those parameters as virtual folders. All of these URLs use a unique value (either an ID or date) to generate a specific blog post. So what’s the canonical URL here? Obviously, if you canonicalize to “/blog”, you’re going to reduce your entire blog to one page. It’s a bit of a trick question, because the canonical URL could actually be something like this:

www.example.com/blog/this-is-a-blog-post

This is why we have such a hard time detecting the proper canonical URLs with automated tools – it really takes a deep knowledge of a site’s architecture and the builder’s intent. Don’t make assumptions based on the URL structure. You have to understand your architecture and crawl paths. If you just start stripping off URL parameters, you could cause an SEO disaster.

Case 3: The Home-page

It might seem strange to put the home page third, but the truth is that the first two cases were probably easier. Part of the problem is that home pages naturally spin out a lot of variations:

www.example.com
www.example.com/
www.example.com/default.html
www.example.com/index.php
www.example.com/index.php?page=about

Add in complications like secure pages (https:), and you can end up multiplying all of these variants. While this is technically true of any page, the problem tends to be more common for the home page, since it’s usually the most linked-to page (both internally and from external sites) by a large margin.
In most cases, the technically correct home-page URL is:

http://www.example.com/

…but there are exceptions (such as if you secure your entire site). I don’t see the trailing slash (“/”) causing a ton of problems on home pages these days, since most browsers and crawlers add it automatically, but I think it’s still a best practice to use it.
Another common exception is if your site automatically redirects to another version of the home-page – ASP is notorious about this, and often lands visitors and bots at “index.aspx” or a similar page. While that situation isn’t ideal, you don’t want to cross signals. If the redirect is necessary, then the target of that redirect (i.e. the “index.aspx” URL) should be your canonical URL.
Finally, be very careful about situation #5 – in that case, as I discussed in the first section of this post, the “index.php” code template is actually driving other pages with unique content. Canonicalizing that to the root or to “index.php” could collapse your site to one page in the Google index. That particular scenario is rare these days, but some CMS systems still use it.

Case 4: Product Pages

In some ways, product pages are a lot like the blog-post pages in Case #2, except moreso. You can naturally end up with a lot of variations on an e-commerce site, including:

www.example.com/store.php?id=1234
www.example.com/store/1234
www.example.com/store/this-is-a-product
www.example.com/store.php?id=1234&currency=us
www.example.com/store/1234/red
www.example.com/store/1234/large

If you have a URL like #3, then that’s going to be your canonical URL for the product in most cases (especially #1-#3). If you don’t, then work up the list. In other words, if you have #3, use it; if not, use #2; if not #2, use #1. You have to work with the structure you have.
URLs #4-#6 are a bit trickier. Something like the currency selector in #4 can be very complicated and depends on how those selections are implemented (user selection vs. IP-based geo-location, for example). For Google’s purposes, you would typically want them to use the dominant price for the site’s audience and canonical to the main product URL (#1-#3, depending on the site architecture). Indexing every price variant, unless you have multiple domains, is just going to make your content look thinner.
With #5 and #6, the URL indicates a product variant, let’s say a T-shirt that comes in different colors and sizes. This situation depends a lot on the structure and scope of the content. Technically, your T-shirt in red/large is unique, and yet that page could look “thin” in Google’s eyes. If you have a variant or two for a handful of products, it’s no big deal. If every product has 50 possible combinations, then I think you need to seriously consider canonicalization.

Case 5: Search Pages

Now, the ugliest case of them all – internal search pages. This is a double-edged sword, since Google isn’t a fan of search-within-search (their results landing on your results) in general and these pages tend to spin out of control. Here are some examples:

www.example.com/search.php?topic=1234
www.example.com/search/this-is-a-topic
www.example.com/topic
www.example.com/search.php?topic=1234&page=2
www.example.com/search.php?topic=1234&page=2&sort=desc
www.example.com/search.php?topic=1234&page=2&filter=price

The list, unfortunately, could go on and on. While it’s natural to think that the canonical version should be #1-#3 (depending on your URL structure, just like in Case #4), the trouble is pagination. Pages 2 and beyond of your topic search may appear thin, in some cases, but they return unique results and aren’t technically duplicates. Google’s solutions have changed over time, and their advice can be frustrating, but they currently say to use the rel=prev/next tags. Put simply, these tags tell Google that the pages are part of a series.
In cases like #5-#6, Google recommends you use rel=prev/next for the pagination but then a canonical tag for the “&page=2” version (to collapse the sorts and filters). Implementing this properly is very complicated and well beyond the scope of this post, but the main point is that you should not canonicalize all of your search pages to page 1. Adam Audette has an excellent post on pagination that demonstrates just how tricky this topic is.

Know Your Crawl Paths

Finally, an important reminder – the most important canonical signal is usually your internal links. If you use the canonical tag to point to one version of a URL, but then every internal link uses a different version, you’re sending a mixed signal and using the tag as a band-aid. The canonical URL should actually be canonical in practice – use it consistently. If you’re an outside SEO coming into a new site, make sure you understand the crawl paths first, before you go and add a bunch of tags. Don’t create a mess on top of a mess.

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How to Start YouTube Advertising in 9 Steps

1. Create a Google AdWords Account

2. Link AdWords and YouTube

3. General Settings

4. Set the Locations Where You Want Your Ad to Show Up

5. Upload Your Video

6. Advanced Settings

7. Device Targeting

8. Select Age, Gender, Topics & More

9. Choosing Keywords

10 Essential WordPress Plugins to Improve SEO & Usability

1. WordPress SEO by Yoast

2. Simple URLs

3. RB Internal Links

4. NextGen Gallery and Lightbox Plus:

5. Widget Logic

6. Members

7. Use Google Libraries

8. W3 Total Cache

9. Gravity Forms

10. Twitter Feed Pro:

Summary

Old Vs New SEO Straterge

10 most useful htaccess tips to improve your website

1) Make URLs SEO-friendly and future-proof

2) Apply rel="canonical" to PDFs and images

3) Robots directives

4) Various types of redirect

5) Custom 404 error page

6) Send the Vary header to help crawl mobile content

7) Improve caching for better site speed

8) An Apple-style 'Back Soon' maintenance page

9) Smarten up your URLs even when your CMS says "No!"

10) Recruit via your HTTP headers

Download the rules

Viewing headers

SEO Reppers Song Video with lyrics

SEO Reppers Song

Top Australian Free Classifieds Sites List in 2014

Australian Free Classifieds Ads Sites List

HTTP Status Code Guide Line

HTTP Status Code

Tips for On Page Site Auditing

Title Tags

Meta Tags

Missing Title Tags

Duplicate Title Tags

Missing Alt tags

Missing Image Names

H Tags

Keyword Mapping and Cannibalization

On-Page Copy

Helpful Link Building Tools

1. Majestic Site Explorer (paid)

2. Link Prospector Tool

3. Keyword Combiner

4. Ubersuggest

5. Outbound Link Scraper

8 Prospect Processing and Qualification Tools

1. The URL Status Checker

2. Regex Filtering Tool

3. Pick Shortest URL Per Domain

4. List Comparison Tool

5. The Super Deduper

6. The Contact Finder

7. Archive.org

8. The URL Opener

2 Focus Enabling Tools

1. Pomodoro Technique and App (work timer)

2. I-AM-STUDYING BLOCKER

4 Tools On My Radar