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

How to Use Canonical Tags:

Take Control and Clean Up Duplicate Content

What is a Canonical Link Tag?

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

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

When would you use a canonical tag?

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

Duplicate content can occur for the following reasons:

Duplicate content caused by filtering

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Why should you care?

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

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

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

How is the canonical link tag implemented?

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

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

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

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

One Final Note

I often get asked the following questions regarding canonical tags:

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

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

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

Essential:

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

Would also like to see:

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

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

This week I launched a website for a new Perthshire Kennels that has just opened outside Crieff. The owner, Shena has years of experience in working with dogs and is sure to make the kennels a great success.

The site brief was for a simple but professional site to get information across to customers and should include an availability calendar. The site should also be easily updateable. For this reason I chose WordPress as the framework for the site and put together an appropriate theme and layout. WordPress is particularly suitable for sites such as this as it’s easy for clients to learn how to update and even add new sections such as a blog, or more plugins e.g. a gallery.

Also required was a new logo for the business which I designed. You can see it proudly paraded on Shena’s car and T-shirt above. It never fails to give me a buzz when I see something I designed driving round town on a client’s car.

Good luck to Shena & Conalter Kennels with the new business.

Tonight I downloaded the WordPress app for iPhone from the iPhone App Store. I was full of hope that it would make blogging by phone a little easier. Sadly though I couldn’t even get the app set up and I’m glad I didn’t have to pay for it.

First off the app couldn’t find a file called xmlrpc.php. Turns out Namesco deny access to that particular file. Duly renamed as recommended the app still struggled to save my blog settings. Every attempt to set it up resulted in the app self-closing. After around 10 attempts I gave up and deleted the app.

When an app is this unreliable in simply getting it set up it doesn’t inspire confidence that it will work eventually. Imagine spending an hour writing a blog post then the app shuts down unexpectedly before your post has been published.

It would appear that for now it is easier and safer to simply use your regular wordpress interface through Safari. You’ll need to put the text editor into HTML source though before you can type but it’s no great hardship. And that is exactly how this post was written.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

This is a guest post from London based translation company, Lingo24.

So you’re starting a new website? Abroad or at home? How lovely. The gestation period, from first tentative steps to Tsar of Cyberspace could easily take a year. Unless you fail first.

Fortunately, there is a wealth of online marketing wisdom at your fingertips which, with proper application and sheer hard work, can yield impressive results. From AdWords to CSS, there are ways to woo Google and, if not ensure, at least help your website get seen and appreciated.

From the outset you cannot overstate the importance of Google. It commands 65 percent of the US search engine market and 90 percent of the European market. Put plainly, when you set up the most important feature is your Google ranking. Experts will tell you that some of its criteria are well known (like external linking) and some part of the algorithm is secret. And the implication is that the internet monolith has a lot of control over any fledgling business.
To conquer the cyber giant and get the footfall that you require there are various issues you will have to think about, here are a few of them:

Domain
The world is a village, and we do business on its many streets all the time. But some of those streets have their own way of doing things and you, wanting to launch your website in different countries, cannot afford to adopt a ‘one-size-fits-all’ policy. It’s important for the domain to be hosted on a server in the country you target. As obvious as this may seem, this is the kind of research that lays the foundation for future success.

METAS
Any contact with the internet and computers involves jargon, and some you cannot avoid. The principles of METAS are, however, essential to your purpose and must be understood. In short, Google or Yahoo! or any other search engine find your website and bring web users to it because of certain elements in your website. These are METAS.

METAS are tags inserted into the plain old HTML text of your website. An SEO campaign is in fact a process of Search Engine Optimization, that moves your website further up the ladder when people do a Google search on the product you offer. One component of them is Keywords. These are words that, in theory, will bring Google’s little seekers (called spiders) to you when someone-somewhere looks for the words that you have and they want.

Keywords have now devalued so much that some even doubt whether they work at all. This is due to unscrupulous webmasters who word-stuff their sites, to draw undeserved attention to them. Of more use now are title tags and description tags.
AdWords
It can take a long time for your website to become established, as search engines need to trust you. It can take about 4-6 months before they do start to trust you and to bring your name up.”

This is a long time for any business to wait, and you may wonder if there is a way of speeding the process up. Enter the AdWord. These are high profile words that Google auctions. Every time someone clicks on a word you have bought, you pay Google for the advertising. This has of course led to rival companies clicking on one another’s AdWords, to increase their competitors’ bills. But there are now sophisticated ways of tracking this and if caught culprits are barred from Google. A very serious sanction in today’s online world.

AdWords are an expensive way to bring attention to yourself and if you want to raise your profile using them you must budget accordingly.

Organic traffic is infinitely preferable. AdWords do no more than artificially raise your profile, and once you have got people coming to your website because they heard it was good you can abandon this expensive marketing ploy. For you now have a sustainable audience.

You can also make deals with other websites, whereby web users can be drawn to your site from theirs. This should be a higher profile one and it also counts as the desired ‘organic traffic.’

Design
Last but not least. While your website’s text is written in HTML the fancy design parts are usually CSS (Cascade Style Sheets). Everything that draws the human eye to your glittering prose is embedded in the CSS. It also simplifies the HTML and makes it easier for the spiders to read. If your website is structured in an organised manner, with no unnecessary HTML code then web spiders will be able to read and understand your site more easily. It can be a major factor in improving your search engine ranking.

So there you have it.

A successful SEO campaign can make or break your company. It is not an easy path to tread, nor is it a short one. Your campaign has truly been successful when you go to the Google tool bar and see your website rated somewhere between 0 and 3. 5 is the stuff that dreams are made of and 10 is reserved for the big boys. It is all about how you play the game. Follow the advice of a reputable consultant and if you play by Google’s rules you’ll do good.

About the Author: Christian Arno is the founder of Lingo24, a translation company which specialises in website localisation.

If you’re upgrading an old version of Joomla, it can help to make sure your hosting is running both PHP5 and MySQL5.

Lots of people will still be on version 4 of both and while Joomla may seem like it installs OK, lots of components and modules with either not install or not display correctly.

However, many people are still having problems with PHP5.3 so err on the safe side and stick to 5.2 for PHP just now if you have the choice.

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

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

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

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

Add your site to Google Local here.

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

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

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

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

So how do you get it right?

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

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

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

Many people using WordPress to build themselves a website these days use an automated installer system provided by their server company. These are handy tools but I have 2 problems with them:

1. The version of WordPress is rarely the most up to date

2. There is what seems a throwaway question that is actually very important in the installation process

It’s the second point I want to refer to here. When installing WordPress there is a question that asks whether you want to allow search engines (Google, Technorati) etc to access your blog. Many internet users trained to say NO to any privacy questions (Do you want to sign-up for our newsletter? Can we give your email address to anyone we please?) will automatically say no to this question too.

Those budding site builders then go on to create a fine site and great content but they’re just not getting anywhere in Google. There’s a reason. Saying no to the installation question about search engines inserts a Noindex, Nofollow tag into the website source code. This means that no matter how hard you try to get into Google it’s just not going to index you.

Thankfully though there’s a quick fix. If you go to the Settings > Privacy section of your blog admin menu you can find the setting in there and give access to the spiders who really want to index your site. Then, providing you’ve got a few links pointing at your site, the spiders should be around to visit soon and your listings should appear shortly after that.