Other than being annoying to geeks like me, there are plenty of reasons why you should redirect uppercase URLs to lowercase.

Domain names, such as http://www.seOverflow.com, are not case-sensitive so you can display that however you’d like, whether it’s on the web or in marketing materials. Pages on your site however, such as this one, http://www.seoverflow.com/What-We-Offer/Link-Building/, work differently.

• Case-sensitivity on Linux servers result in 404 errors
• Google will consider upper and lowercase URLs different pages
• Pages will show up as duplicates in analytics

Case sensitivity: Windows servers are normally not case-sensitive, but Windows servers typically cost more than Linux servers and do not have as many features as Linux, so most people choose to host their websites on Linux, which are case-sensitive. If you create a page on your site that has capital letters and someone tries to visit it with lowercase letters, they will see a 404 error page. This can also be a problem if the site goes through a redesign and all pages are changed to lowercase. All of those old URLs will become inaccessible and all of the links on the internet going to those pages will break. Many CMS’s like WordPress and Drupal will fix case sensitivity problems, even on a Linux server, in case you’re checkin’.

Google gets confused: Google sees non-www and www versions of a website as two different URLs and the same goes for uppercase and lowercase versions of the same page. This can spread page authority and link equity among the two pages when instead you should be sending it all to one page and giving it the ability to rank as highly as possible.

Analytics issues: I’m not sure how it works with other analytics programs, but in Google Analytics, I’ve heard that uppercase and lowercase versions of the same page show up separately, each with their own data. If you don’t think to look at data for both pages, you’re not getting an accurate representation of that page.

Arghh! Why Do People Create Uppercase URLs Anyway?

There are actually several good reasons why someone might want capitalize page URLs.

• Readability (Pay-Per-Click, print, or television)
• Branding purposes
• Some webmasters just think it looks better (ok, that’s not a good reason)

Readability and branding are the most common reasons that people display their URLs with capital letters. You’ll see it all the time in pay-per-click ads and instead of clicking the ads, some people might copy and paste the URL into their browsers. Branding is another big reason for capitalizing letters in URLs, especially when handing out print materials that have special landing pages.

For any of the above reasons, someone might visit your website by typing the URL with capitalization, or they might type it in lowercase, even if you’ve displayed it capitalized. People might link to your site both ways too, so you need to make sure both uppercase and lowercase versions are accessible.

Wipe Those Tears Away. Fixing Your URLs is Easy!

If you only have a few pages with capitalized URLs, you can simply set up some easy 301 redirects. If you have a ton of pages that need to be redirected though, you’ll probably find it much easier to set a RewriteRule in htaccess to change all uppercase URLs to lowercase URLs. Check out that link for everything you need to paste right into your htaccess file. There’s also much simpler code you can paste in your httpd.conf file, if you have access to it. I suggest doing this for all of your sites, whether you have a URL problem or not, just as a handy catchall to prevent problems in the future.

The author over at AskApache.com (<—— See what I did there? Ha. I’m so funny.) says that this code won’t slow down the site in any way, so you have no reason not to just do this right now.

* image courtesy of CortneeB

Account Settings

Remember that there are four different types of keyword match-types available on Google, and you have to be prepared to use all of them and optimize your account based upon them. Break out your search and display campaigns separately. These are two entirely different beasts and need to be understood and approached as such.

Remember that Google now assumes you want to match for plurals on your keywords–adjust your settings if you don’t want Google to make an as…..

Ad Group Organization

Break out your keywords into the smallest ad groups with similar match types.

(A co-worker describes the approach of adding hundreds of keywords to a single ad group as the “vomit approach” – love that – because it is often as successful at times as eating spoiled food and hoping to run a marathon after having done so.)

The search engines are going to reward you with a higher quality score, and (ultimately) a lower keyword bid if you avoid the “vomit approach”. Write your ads to be as specific as possible to the keywords in those groups. Create a theme in your ads that matches the key terms. And remember this one very important thing when it comes to your ads:

TEST TEST TEST TEST!

Test ad copy.

Test what is successful in one ad group and what works in other ad groups.

Test multiple variations of ad copy. The search engines are going to reward you and in turn your audience is going to reward you by providing more conversions.

Keyword Considerations

Remember that your quality scores affect your keyword bids. It’s an inverse relationship: the lower your QS, the higher your bid. You’ve got to be willing to make the necessary changes such as including the key terms on the landing pages, adding negatives to the account, and writing ads that are tailored to the keywords in an ad group.

It’s not uncommon to see only broad match keywords or someone as daring as to add a few phrase matches–learn all four match-types and use them. Bid up the keywords that are working based upon a Cost Per Acquisition (CPA) and/or Return On Ad Spend (ROAS) goal. Bid down those that suck. Search for more specific keywords to add to your account via the search query report.

Landing Pages

Another mistake we see is where someone will send a searcher to a very high level page and/or a landing page that has zero relevancy to the keywords. This tactic may have worked in the Wild West of PPC some 10+ years ago, but the search engines are about presenting the most relevant information to their audiences.

You’ve got to be willing to play this game if you want to be a player.

Remember your target audience when you create your landing pages. Take into consideration their level of understanding of the keywords used. Make sure you’ve got a call to action on the pages and place trust factors/testimonials on the pages themselves.

Conversion Tracking

At a bare minimum, you should be utilizing AdWords tracking as well as BING tracking (if you’re advertising on BING). You should also make sure the tracking is accurate.

Why pay for paid search if you can’t properly gauge what is going on? Seriously?

Another free and highly recommended tracking option is Google Analytics. It takes a little more sophistication, but you are able to easily determine Cost Per Acquisition and/or ROAS goals using this.

Call tracking is also something that should be considered if you are receiving a fair number of leads and/or sales via the phone. Call tracking can often be integrated into Google Analytics, and your reports for clients. If your company is seeking sales leads based upon PPC – consider looking into an end-to-end CRM solution.

Keep in mind that this piece only touches the surface of PPC optimization basics. Since PPC is constantly changing – keep checking the search engine blogs for enhancements as well as other blogs (such as seOverflow’s own blog) to stay abreast of what is going on in this dynamic world. Until next time….

Below are a list of some of the things every PPC manager needs to be aware of and on top of inside a client’s account:

1. Budget management
2. BING
3. Account settings
4. Ad group organization
5. Keyword considerations
6. Landing pages
7. Conversion tracking

Budget management

Managing a budget is a huge challenge. Let’s face it, not all of our clients have an unlimited budget at their disposal. Finding inexpensive keywords is not always a solution – especially in the law, medical, and insurance industries. Budgets can easily exceed what we’ve set for the account, and there are not a lot of easy solutions for this.

A limited budget can also limit your highest performing campaigns. A few options available are day-parting the account, continually searching through your search query report to uncover irrelevant keyword terms that are coming into the report, sticking to phrase & exact match exclusively and/or praying to your old/new god of choice.

Just remember that if you are sticking to the phrase/exact match scenario that keyword expands are going to be limited–you’re going to miss out on expanding your account.

Migrating your account from Google to BING

BING is something that you have to consider for your clients (it’s how you’re going to reach the Microsoft/Yahoo people out there). At seOverflow, we often have clients that are only advertising on Google. As an account matures and/or more budget becomes available, you really need to take a look at moving the client to BING. This transition is especially important in the eCommerce world. We suggest moving over your highest performing campaigns/ad groups, and then optimizing them on BING as the account progresses.

BING’s audience behavior is often different–ad copy responses and even keywords that are most successful are often very different here, and you need to be prepared to react differently in this space. Essentially, you can’t use the same cookie cutter approach you’ve developed for AdWords and expect it to be as successful on BING .

In its simplest terms, BING and Google take a look at these major factors when considering Quality Score:

1. Landing page relevancy to the keywords and ad copy
2. Ad copy and how it relates the landing pages and keywords in the ad groups
3. Keywords and how they work with the landing pages and ad copy
4. Click-Through-Rate
5. Account history

Here are some PPC quality score tips we’ve discovered at seOverflow on how to improve your quality score:

• Create tightly themed ad groups. What we mean by this is you need to keep keywords that are similar to one another in the ad group. Place no more than 20 keywords inside the ad group.
• Keep all broad, expanded broad, phrase, and exact keywords in their own ad groups. Add negatives of the 3 match types not in that ad group.
• Create ad copy that has relevant keywords inside the ads. Continually look for your highest trafficked terms and/or highest converting terms. Use these in the ad copy.
• Use the {KeyWord} insert on Google or {Param2} on BING Yahoo. This allows whatever the individual searched on to be included in the ad itself. (If you’re bidding on competitor terms – don’t use this. You may get a cease & desist letter and/or shame.)
• Continually test ad copy (at least A/B testing – perhaps A/B/C or even A/B/C/D for your top performers). If something is working – figure out why. Replicate this in this ad group and in others.
• Continually search for negative keywords in Google’s Search Query Report. This will improve your click-through-rate by eliminating irrelevant searches.
• Make sure the landing pages are relevant to your ad copy and keywords by adding your most relevant keywords (highest trafficked terms and/or highest converting terms) to the landing pages.

Quality score improvement is an ongoing and continuous process. Your competitors are likely doing it. If they aren’t – it will keep you one step ahead of them. If they are, and you are not – then you’re falling behind.

How, you might ask?  Maybe their expectations aren’t realistic.  Maybe they are so busy or unresponsive it’s hard to meet deadlines and a relatively short project can drag on for months.  Or maybe they’ve been burned by an unprofessional and subpar SEO company in the past; which can lead to lingering trust issues and a need to micro-manage the project, therefore stifling the work flow.

So what can Agencies do to either avoid these issues or at least lessen the potential of them during the project?  There are many and you are likely already familiar with some, but let’s take a minute to look at 5 basic ways we can help ensure our client’s needs are top priority while working in a way we, SEO professionals, can do what we do best.

1) Weeding out potential clients in the sales process that are not a good ‘fit’

No one really wants to turn away business, but after a few “problem” clients it doesn’t take long to notice certain patterns that almost always convert clients to unhappy campers once the project gets underway.  Red flags include clients wanting to rush through the process, clients who want premium services on an underfunded budget, and clients who only want to sign a contract for X amount of hours but we know good and well it could easily take double that to produce the results they are expecting.  Finally, often times we speak with potential clients who have unrealistic expectations; they are competing for highly competitive keywords and expect immediate results.

Lesson here – it will probably save an Agency a lot of time, headache and money to tell a client “we’re not a good fit for you” rather than bringing on these type of clients time after time, which easily can end in both sides being unhappy. Of course, whether to bring on a potentially problem client has to be looked at objectively and quantitatively rather than from the perspective of “I think this client could be a pain in the ass.”   Bottom line…propose a clear and concise contract, explaining it thoroughly to the client during the sales process and reiterate it during the initial project kick-off call, making sure all parties are on the same page with goals & expectations.

2) Kick-Off Meeting

It is essential to setup a kick-off meeting between the key players of your team and the Clients at the onset of a project.  Face to face is preferable, but video or phone is the majority of what we do at seOverflow given our clients are all around the US and world!

This initial meeting will start the relationship building that is all-important in short and long term projects.  Second to the sales process, I think this is the most important juncture where an Agency can contribute significantly, and positively, to the client’s overall satisfaction of the project.  You’ve got to connect with the client and communicate everyone’s needs during this call.  You not only get to know who you will be working with but you will learn what their company’s needs are; today’s needs, next month’s needs, and long term needs/goals.  If all goes well you’ll probably find things your client didn’t know that they needed; if not in the kick-off meeting definitely somewhere later in the process.  When this happens the client knows you’ve got their best interest at heart and they aren’t just another project of the month.

The final details I cover in a kick-off meeting are some of the specifics of the contract – the scope of work.  It is helpful to reiterate the numbers of hours to be worked, deliverables, time frame, et cetera.  This will help prevent problems later on and is another step to wash away assumptions and setup clear expectations for both parties.

3) Phone calls

I am the first to attest it is so much easier to send a client an email than to call them on the phone.  Yes, the majority of my correspondence with clients is via email but there are times when a phone call could prove more beneficial. Good times to call your clients include:

-          If you haven’t heard from them in a while or they are non-responsive to email

-          If something exciting or new has happened; an increase in rankings, traffic and/or conversions for example

-          To clarify technical issues that could be better explained via phone

-          To schedule a meeting

I could add a lot more here but you get the point. It’s about connecting with our clients in a more personal level.  Not only are you connecting interpersonally with them,  it is more organic and you may end up talking about or resolving a few other issues that would not have come out of a single email.

4) Transitions/Hand-Offs

At seOverflow we have a soft transition from On-Page SEO to the Link Building side of things.  It is important for one or more of the On-Page team to join the transition meeting into the Link Building phase.  This is a great time to not only introduce new members of the team, but to be a familiar voice and to answer any lingering questions before the client transitions into a new phase of the project. Clients don’t necessarily want to feel shuffled around.  If they know they have at least one person who has a pulse on the project they are much more open to staff changes.

5) Communicate, communicate, communicate

This isn’t really a step; it should have been present from the beginning; through the sales process, kick-off meeting, emails and phone calls, and project transitions.  It is much easier to talk about something before it happens, than to talk about how to fix something after it happens – be proactive!  Remember, your clients are human beings just like you.  Sometimes they will have a bad day, sometimes they will forget deadlines or meetings, sometimes they will mess something up – it’s ok.  As long as there has been a strong foundation of communication throughout the project everything should be alright.  You can always reschedule meetings and make new deadlines; you cannot, however, gain trust or active and willing participation from a client if all you do is send boiler plate emails and not engage the human side of the relationship.

What do you do?

Before you spend hours diving into technical SEO issues and wondering if which of your sketchy links got you bitten by Penguin, Check the obvious!

Disclaimer: After having spent HOURS looking into potential reasons for a traffic drop on a client site only to notice a site-wide noindex tag, you would think I would have learned my lesson. Nope. It had to happened TWO more times before I had finally had enough and created a checklist.

The other day I had a client ask me to look into why traffic had dropped and my first idea was to start looking at the link profile. Then I remembered this checklist, started there, and I noticed the noindex,nofollow tag site-wide. Finding that saved me untold time of checking other things. Check the obvious first!

Side note: I have no idea why adding a noindex,nofollow tag site-wide is such a common occurrence. DO NOT DO THIS!

Anyway, whether you manage clients or work in-house, it is likely that there are people that can access your sites and make changes without checking with you. These people often don’t think about SEO when they are making changes and when something goes wrong, it is super helpful to have a checklist that starts with the most obvious things first.

Here’s the checklist I’ve been using and I hope it saves you time and headaches in the future:

Step 1: Check the Obvious (aka It ain’t got no gas in it)

• Check robots.txt file: is the whole site or major sections of the site blocked?
• Check for noindex tag: check the homepage and a couple main pages to see if the noindex tag has been applied site-wide.
• Check to see if there is a canonical tag referencing the wrong version of the page (domain.com canonicaled to www.domain.com while www.domian.com is 301′d to domain.com)
• Is Analytics still tracking? Has someone inadvertently removed the tracking code from some or all pages? Use Screaming Frog to check Analytics.
• Check GWT for any error messages, malware, hacking, unnatural link messages, etc.

If it is not something easy to find (it has gas in it), you want gather more data and look at whether or not you’ve been hit by a Panda or Penguin update.

Step 2: Gather more Data and Check for Panda or Penguin

• When did the decrease start?
• Is the traffic decrease seasonal (check year-over-year data) or is it due to ranking drops?
• Is it a group of pages/keywords or is it site-wide?
• Compare top keywords or keyword groups pre-drop and post-drop to narrow down what has been affected.
• Was there successful PR or media mentions prior to the drop that temporarily inflated traffic numbers?
• Does it correlate with an algorithm update?
• Is the drop just Google or across all search engines (compare post-decrease to pre-decrease and view by search engine)?

There are lots of posts that do a great job on checking for those impacts (such as this and this), so I won’t go into detail here aside from generally cleaning up content and links.

If at this point you’ve ruled out the obvious and it’s not an algorithm update, now it’s the time to dig in deeper to see what’s doing.

Step 3: Potential Causes (other than Penguin or Panda)

Has anything changed on the site around the time of the decrease that could have had an impact? Review and document changes, and then determine if that’s the cause such as:

• Navigation changes
• Page redirects
• Copy changes
• Title tag changes

Step 4: Tools for Further Analysis

In addition to getting those answers, dig into some tools:

• Dig deeper into Google Webmaster Tools for any errors or issues (indexation, sitemaps, etc.)
• Look at the campaign in SEOmoz for regular errors, etc.
• Look at historical SEOmoz data: (campaign>competitive analysis>history) to see if their Moz metrics decreased over time and if it correlates to the drop.
• Do a site:domain search and see if anything looks off.
• Run the site through http://woorank.com and http://www.siteliner.com.
• Check out Raven’s Site Auditor.

Step 5: Develop a Plan to Fix the Problem

• Compile your data in terms of the decrease timeframes and levels.
• Work up a process for fixing the issues.
• Communicate everything to the client or your boss.
• Create tasks and a plan for fixing issues.
• Monitor results and speak to it on your next report.

Step 6: Lessons Learned

Once you’ve identified the problem and fixed it, use this as a learning opportunity to inform those that made the changes of their impacts so that similar things don’t happen in the future.

You can access this checklist in Google Spreadsheet format here as well. Hopefully you won’t need it.

If you’ve got anything to add to the checklist please leave it in the comments.

Boilerplate copy is the paragraph or so of text, usually provided by the manufacturer or distributor, that can be used over and over again to describe the products that retailers are selling. These pre-written product descriptions are a major time-saver to eCommerce webmasters, particularly if they have thousands upon thousands of products in their catalog. Many retail websites get descriptions for their products directly from a third-party product feeds and other sources that share the same content with hundreds, or thousands of other websites.

But competitor X uses the same boilerplate copy as I do and they outrank me by miles! Why don’t they get a duplicate content penalty?

First of all, your website will not be penalized for using boilerplate content. If you have a bunch of duplicate content across a bunch of domains that is clearly intended to manipulate search rankings, then yes…you will be penalized. Beyond that, Google wants to do it’s best to show only unique documents in their search results. In order to do this efficiently, duplicate versions are filtered out and Google attempts to serve the document hosted by the strongest website.

While you’re not being penalized, you are not really giving search engines any content that sets you apart from anyone else who uses the same text. If content is king then why would you let someone force search engines to choose some other way to rank and index your pages?

When Google finds two nearly identical pages on the Web, it will pick the one with higher PageRank to serve in its results. According to a paper published by Google researchers Daniel Peng and Frank Dabek, even inbound links will be forwarded from the lower ranking page to the highest ranking one. The paper this was published in is called Large-scale Incremental Processing Using Distributed Transactions and Notifications, from 2010, and it is every bit as action-packed as the title would have you believe.

Here’s an interesting example… While researching this post, I went around and asked my coworkers to name a product they use every day. One of our link building managers suggested face-wash, and I randomly chose Neutrogena® Fresh Foaming Cleanser. The only duplicate copy on the first page of results is shared by drugstore.com (ranking second after the manufacturer) and amazon.com, which ranks fourth after a Google Image Search seven-pack.

There is one pair of page-1 results that use the same copy

Without even looking, I think we can agree that Amazon has a far better domain authority (DA 100) than Drugstore.com (DA 86). It appears that Drugstore.com has a leg-up Amazon in URL-level metrics. Page Authority is a little bit higher than Amazon, and their Trust & Citation Flow are significantly higher. Furthermore Drugstore.com has better mozTrust and mozRank. This tells me that it most likely has has a stronger and more diverse link profile, while Amazon has garbage.

If you’re having trouble figuring out why your competitor’s pages are ranking for a particular search, when they have the same text content as you do, this is one of the biggest factors to consider. When the text is the same from website to website, Google has to choose factors besides content to decide where to rank your pages.

…and it’s not just bad for search engine rankings.

You sell your products to people who have, in many cases, hundreds or thousands of your competitors to choose from. It is far easier for your business to achieve success when you set yourself apart from your competitors.

Navigate to a popular manufacturer’s web page, choose a product, and copy the product description. Paste the text into Google and see how many websites use the exact same words. In the case of this Sony Alpha a37 SLT-A37K DSLR camera, Google found over 42,000 pages that use the same text as the features paragraph from store.sony.com. You also see that Sony’s own store ranks #2 instead of #1.

Ok, so what? Your customer isn’t typing boilerplate text into a search engine, so this doesn’t mean much, right? Try querying just the product name, without quotes, the same way that your customer might. In this example, I queried Sony Alpha a37 SLT-A37K DSLR camera with Translucent Mirror Technology.

Six out of the ten page #1 results are retail websites. Five of them have pretty much the same pricing, although one was about $100 higher. Ritz Camera and Dell both use the manufacturer’s copy in their meta descriptions. Only Dell uses the boilerplate text in the body of the page. All of the other pages, besides store.sony.com, appear to use unique, descriptive content that is useful and tries to guide users into making a purchasing decision. In addition there are glossaries, consumer reviews, shipping deals, special promotions and other content that is unique to each specific website.

The Bottom Line

The most successful eCommerce websites use their pages to entice, engage and inform shoppers. Besides just describing products, they offer their visitors authority, trust and attempt express to users why their website is the best one to buy from. Search around a little bit more and you will see that even top-ranking websites that use boilerplate copy also use original and useful content that ranks well, attracts links naturally and converts shoppers.

Using original content is necessary to get the most value out of your eCommerce website’s category and product pages. Google considers duplicate content to be a bad user experience, and will try its best to filter out all documents but the one on the website it considers to be the most important. Creating unique and helpful content will provide trust and authority to shoppers, and will increase the likelihood that they will choose your shop to purchase from. Let your original, helpful and engaging content be the first ranking factor Google has to choose from.

Lastly, it should be said that copy alone is not going to solve your ranking problems. eCommerce is a fast-growing and highly competitive field. A strong site, with clean code and a healthy backlink profile working together with unique and engaging product copy is the best and most efficient way to improve your search engine rankings. One of the secrets to having a strong site is making sure that you stand out from your competition in as many different ways as you can. By making sure the information on your site is unique, helpful and popular you are creating a concrete foundation on which to build your website to be a better marketing vehicle then even Amazon.com, in some cases.

Why should I take your word for it?

You don’t have to. Have a look at what Matt “Cueball” Cutts had to say about it…

This is the result of the first round of eCommerce copy research. I would love to know more about your experience and insight. Please don’t hesitate to leave some of the benefit of your own experience.

BuzzStream recently invited 6 SEO experts, including seOverflow’s Everett Sizemore, to provide their top tips on eCommerce Link Building in 2013.

For more information on how the link building experts at seOverflow can build a successful 2013 campaign for your eCommerce website, please contact Alexis Gradishar at 303-905-1504 ext 1819 or alexis@seoverflow.com.

It was after this update happened that the message became crystal clear. Google is ultimately concerned with relevance and user experience. Any attempt to circumvent either, or both, of these concepts will be met with a rankings struggle. Pages with thin or useless content, content farms and sites with ads that outweigh content were hit hard. In April of this year, Google rolled out another major update that was intended to crack-down on spam, over-optimization and links that don’t add value to a user’s experience on your website.

These updates didn’t shake up the way I was doing things, however. As far as my SEO philosophy was concerned things like advertisement-heavy microsites, irrelevant content and dodgy link schemes have no place in any website that was valuable enough to get a marketing budget. That’s not to say there isn’t a toolbox of super-cool tricks that any SEO can use to increase your ranking potential for a set of target keywords. The secret is learning how to work together with search technology in a way that not only makes your site easier to crawl and index, but also improves the overall experience for your visitors.

Earlier this year Search Engine Land published a post comparing a SEO account manager to a SEO janitor. It’s a great post, and I recommend that you spend some time reading it. While a lot of on-page work involves scrubbing previous SEO’s activities, cleaning up old code, devalued strategies and polishing up keyword targets, the janitor comparison doesn’t begin to come close to describing how cool a job like this really is.

Image Credit

Each and every website that you visit is a machine with an engine, style and a functional purpose. As with any machine, your website needs regular maintenance. SEO tactics that worked 6-7 years ago don’t always hold up as well today. Maybe you designed your site’s navigation to disperse internal PageRank with nofollow attributes. Since Google changed the way links consume PageRank in 2008, all this fancy nofollow menu will do today is absorb valuable authority without passing it on to your other important pages. Removing these nofollow attributes from your menu will allow PageRank to flow freely and naturally through your website. More importantly, search engine robots will be able to navigate your site with the same natural flow.

Perhaps your web developer thought that they could raise your local rankings by making exact duplicates of your website on 15-20 geo-targeted subdomains. While this could potentially raise your rankings for a little while, your site will ultimately be caught by Google’s duplicate content filter, which can make a ranking adjustment that would cause your site to disappear from search.

Image Credit

In order to avoid accidental duplicate content, many webmasters would choose to noindex/nofollow paginated blog archives. Since Google announced pagination with rel=“next” and rel=“prev”, blog archive pages no longer have to weigh down the rest of your site. Whether or not they know it, many webmasters are adding next/prev and canonical tags to pages that also employ noindex/nofollow. All this will do is add three lines of code that are basically useless; sort of like installing seat belts in a car with no wheels.

While going through your website we’re looking at all the individual parts, how they work together and how easily a search engine spider can crawl from page to page. One of our key on-page optimization goals is to make sure that a spider can get through your website as efficiently as possible, while picking up as much key information that we give it. While it shoots through your site we make sure that it can see every important detail of your web pages, in the way that you intend it to be seen. Do you need Google to understand that your three business locations use the same phone number? If you have three different addresses on your contact page, how will search engines know which location to display to someone searching from a specific region?

As the newest member of the on-page optimization team at seOverflow, it is my goal to help you bring your website to a high standard of efficiency. I check to make sure your keywords are appropriately framed in solid content. I look at all of the moving parts to clean out any blockages (crawl issues), make sure that they are well-oiled (updated keyword strategy) and free of rust (outdated SEO tactics), and ready to be topped off with a full tank of fuel (link building). Regardless of what type of machine your website is, from a luxury sedan to a zippy little rat-rod, or even a charter bus; regular on-page maintenance will keep your site up with the latest search technology standards and maximize the potential of your ongoing SEO program.