8 Canonicalization best practices in plain english

Canonicalization sounds like a process for recognizing sainthood, or maybe a training course in aiming large projectile weapons. But it’s actually one of the most important aspects of organic SEO. Good canonicalization means search engines crawl more pages of your site; it means that link authority and PageRank get consolidated, so you have a stronger link profile; and it means fewer broken links from other sites. Bad canonicalization gets you all that stuff, but with the opposite effect.
Canonicalization defined
The Ian-Lurie-mangles-the-meaning-so-computer-geeks-cringe-definition of canonicalization is: “every resource on your web site has a single web address.”
Every resource means every page, every image, every video, etc..
Single web address means there’s only one Uniform Resource Locator (URL) for each page of content, image, video, etc..
A URL looks like this:
http://www.mysite.com/
Or, it could be: http://www.mysite.com/blah/foo.html.
Or, it could be: http://www.mysite.com/blah/foo.php?meh=123.
Or… Oh, you get the idea.
Note that I said ‘page of content’. That means that a single article, product description or list of articles should appear at a single URL. You should never have multiple URLs for, say, one product description, or one article.
Some of the absurdly bloated content management systems and e-commerce suites out there make canonicalization a challenge. But it’s worth it.
Consequences of bad canonicalization
Here’s an example of ‘bad’ canonicalization: Let’s say I’ve opened a games store: Ian’s Nerdvana (I owe Dave Barry for the term ‘nerdvana’). My store’s home page lives at:
http://www.iansnerdvana.com/
But it also lives at
http://iansnerdvana.com/
and
http://www.iansnerdvana.com/index.html
So what? People will find the home page at all three versions. They won’t know the difference, right? Well, yeah. But search engines will. Googlebot sees the three above URLs as three different pages on the web. That has two consequences that hurt SEO.
First, you lose link authority. If blogger 1 comes to ‘www.iansnerdvana.com’ and links to that page, blogger 2 lands on ‘iansnerdvana.com’ and links to that URL, and blogger 3 lands on ‘www.iansnerdvana.com/index.html’ and links to that page, Googlebot sees three links to three different pages, and applies 1 ‘vote’ to each one. These three links could have sent three authoritative signals to Googlebot for my site’s home page. Instead, they’re split into three weaker individual votes for three different pages. It’s as if Ross Perot or Ralph Nader were sitting in front of my site, siphoning off votes. It’s link love mayhem.
If I weren’t such a loser, I would’ve set up my site so that my home page ‘lived’ at one unique URL – ‘www.iansnerdvana.com’. Then all 3 bloggers would have linked to that page, and Googlebot would instead apply all three votes to a single page. If I care about link authority – and who doesn’t, I ask you? – then that’s a far better outcome.
Secondly, search engines won’t crawl your site as deeply as they might. Search engines allocate resources for each crawl. No one knows exactly how, but it’s safe to say Googlebot won’t just wander around your site until its found every page. At some point, it gives up and leaves. If multiple pages on my site have multiple URLs, then visiting search bots waste time tracking down all of those different versions. That’s time they could spend crawling other unique pages, instead. So fewer unique pages of my site end up in the search index, and I have fewer chances to rank.
Don’t feel bad, though. Even SEO agencies screw it up. Here’s one with their home page at both ‘www.site.com/’ and ‘www.site.com/index.php’. Oops:
Best practices
You can avoid the heartbreak of bad canonicalization, or at least minimize it, by doing a few simple things:
Use 301 redirection to ensure that your home page is only found at one URL. If you don’t know how, read Stephan Spencer’s column about rewrites and redirects.
Link consistently to your home page from within your own site. Use a single URL for your home page. Don’t mix in instances of ‘www.iansnerdvana.com/index.html’ with ‘www.iansnerdvana.com’. If you aren’t doing this properly right now, a quick change may have a big impact on SEO.
Don’t use tracking IDs in internal site navigation. A lot of sites add stuff like ‘?source=blog’ in their navigation. That lets them use their analytics reports to track user movement within, to and from their site. Instead, learn to use your web analytics referrer and navigation path reports. If you must use tracking IDs, change your software to use a hash mark (a ‘#’ sign) instead of a question mark. Search engines ignore everything after the hash, so you’ll avoid confusion.
Don’t use tracking IDs in organic links from other sites. If you get a link on another site, and want it to help with your SEO, don’t put a tracking ID in that, either.
Be careful with pagination. Many sites have pagination, where visitors can click a 1, 2, 3 etc. to jump to later pages in search results, product lists or articles. That’s fine, but make sure that the each page has a single URL. For example, if page 1 of the article is ‘www.iansnerdvana.com/article.html’ when I click the article link from the home page, make sure that the number ‘1′ in the pagination takes me there, too, instead of to ‘www.iansnerdvana.com/article.html?page=1′.
Set up preventative redirects. Make sure that ‘iansnerdvana.com’ 301 redirects to ‘www.iansnerdvana.com’.
Exclude ‘e-mail a friend’ pages. Most content management systems that have ‘e-mail a friend’ options direct the user to a unique page that has the same form and content. But every instance of that page has a unique URL like ‘ID=123′, to tell the server which product or article to forward. It’s canonical higgeldy-piggeldy. Use robots.txt and the meta robots tag to exclude these from search engine crawls.
Use common sense when building your site. Think, man/woman! If you need to change the header, footer or other page element based on where on your site the visitor came from, do it with cookies, or by sniffing out the referring URL. Design to do this ahead of time.
What about rel=canonical?
The canonical tag is a neat little gadget that’s supposed to let you tell search engines the correct URL for any page. So, by adding <link rel=”canonical” href=”http://www.iansnerdvana.com/”> to any page, I could tell visiting search bots to index just that version, and to direct all link authority to that one URL. It sounds ideal.
It’s not. First, Yahoo! and Bing don’t yet have confirmed support for it. Second, you can’t rely on tags of this nature, as search engines may change their minds later. Google’s done it. So don’t stake your SEO strategy on it. Third, why not do it right the first time? In addition to SEO benefits, a canonically clean site should run faster, present fewer maintenance headaches and place less load on server and bandwidth resources.
Let’s get canonical!
So, get out there and start cleaning up your site. Canonicalization fixes are generally simple, have a broad impact and let you fix multiple SEO problems at once. You’ll get more link authority, deeper site crawls and better rankings. What’s not to love?

copied, originally posted on Jun 17, 2010 at 1:14pm ET by Ian Lurie

Choosing a Website Designer

Choosing a good website designer is one of the most important decisions that you’ll make. Choose a bad one and you could be left out of pocket with a poor business image to promote, but choose a good one and your business will have an excellent grounding.
When choosing which website designer to go with there are certain aspects that require checking and questions to be asked:
Does the website come with a content management system?
If it doesn’t think strongly about whether you require one. Being unable to make text changes without sending over the changes to a web designer is time consuming and costly.
Check their portfolio
Look at the design of their websites, how fast they load, how they look in different browsers, and whether the sites have been a success. Don’t be afraid to ask to able to speak to previous customers – excellent web designers should be more than happy to provide you with references.
Agree on a fixed price for the project, not an hourly rate
Agreeing a fixed price is the industry standard but there are still some website designers out there that claim that they have to work at an hourly rate. Never agree to this. Paying hourly rewards inefficiency and you’ll almost always end up paying more than you should.
What happens if changes are required to the initial design?
Misunderstanding and bad feeling is sometimes created through customers asking web designers to make too many changes to the overall design. Clarify this process before going ahead – you should be able to request as many changes (within reason) that are required.
Never pay for everything up-front
If you’re paying builders to build a house you wouldn’t pay them all the money up-front. It’s the same with web design – the final installment should be due once the website is complete.
If they mention SEO see if you can find their other websites for particular keywords
Many web designers are mentioning that they can provide search engine optimisation (SEO) support as well as web design. In truth, few web designers fully understand search engine optimisation, and even fewer would be willing to dedicate the time to optimise your new site through researching appropriate keywords and working on link building. In short, if they mention SEO take a look in the search engines for yourself.
What kind of after-development support is provided?
It’s all very well having a website designed at a great price but if the after-sales support is priced extortionately then you haven’t got a good deal. Find out how much changes will cost, and if possible try to negotiate one month free support after your website has been completed – there are always unexpected changes that are required.
Ignore the size of the company
The web design industry is not about developing economies of scale. Size doesn’t matter. Often a smaller company will be the better choice as each project they undertake is more critical to their success.
Where are they based?
They don’t have to be based in your local area but it’s usually beneficial to have someone who is based in the same country. Having different working hours causes delays and is particularly frustrating when there’s a problem and your web designers aren’t even awake.
Feel free to ask about academic background and qualifications
Asking about these qualifications is fine but the answer shouldn’t give you your conclusive answer regarding whether to recruit them. Qualifications don’t create great designers – creative flair tends to come from within. Whilst qualifications do help with background functionality people who have taught themselves are often equally capable, and you can be sure that they enjoy what they do.
How long have they been in business?
This is important. You don’t want web designers that are around one day and gone the next.
Can they help with other marketing material?
Web designers will usually design your company logo but find out whether they can design your other marketing material as well, such as leaflets and letterheads.
How do they test on different browsers?
There are so many websites out there that are incompatible with certain browsers, and often the owners themselves aren’t even aware of the problem. Good website designers should check that the site is displayed properly in all browsers.
What security features are used?
No one wants to have an excellent website designed, build up a list of members, only to have a hacker destroy it all. Ask what the web designers intend to do about this.
Is the website database backed up?
Sometimes however much security you have an unfortunate incident or dedicated hacker can delete your database. Therefore check that your database will be backed up regularly.
Will you create your own unique design or customize existing design frameworks?
There are many standard design frameworks that can be used and using them is particularly appealing for web designers because of the time saved. Make sure that you’ll be receiving a unique design and, if not, that you’re paying an amount to reflect this.
What about hosting?
Find out whether the developers can host your site and if they can’t whether they can arrange for reliable hosting with another company.
Look for a rapport
This is very important. The relationship with your web designers is likely to be a long one so it’s vitally important that you get on well with each other.

originally:  http://www.marketingminefield.co.uk/choosing-a-website-designer/

The Exact Content You Need to Achieve 6 of Your Biggest Marketing Goals

Want to know how I know I'm a marketer? 
The other day I caught myself referring to the message in a birthday card as "content." 
(I believe the direct quote was, "Don't lick that envelope yet, I still have to write the content.")
Needless to say, content is one of those "all-encompassing" marketing terms. It's eBooks, and blog articles, and infographics, and videos, and tweets, and birthday card messages, and, well, you get the point.
For this reason, it's common for marketers to feel overwhelmed when they are advised to "create content" for their business. 
It's not so much that they don't think it'll work, but rather, they don't know where to start. 
So, to shed some light on the situation, we've detailed six different marketing goals alongside the type of content you need to achieve them.
Goal #1: "We need more sales qualified leads."
The Solution: Educational Content
For website visitors to feel comfortable moving forward with a purchase, it's critical businesses have a plan in place for educating and readying them. 
Educational content takes many different sizes, shapes, and forms.
Most notably, businesses have seen a lot of success creating informational blog posts and eBooks as a way to address and alleviate consumer pain points.
Take Moz, for example.
Moz sells SEO products that help businesses improve their search rankings, drive more traffic back to their website, and ultimately, earn customers. However, in order for Moz to close a sale, it needs to ensure its audience a) knows what SEO is and b) sees the value in improving their search rankings. 
To do this, Moz offers a variety of SEO resources via the learning center on its website. 

These resources are bucketed into different categories, difficulty levels, and content formats to help visitors easily discover educational content that lends itself to their specific needs and questions.

Goal #2: "We need to keep visitors on the site longer."

The Solution: Free Tools & Interactive Content

If you want to keep visitors on your website longer, you need to give them something to do beyond skimming an article. This is where free tools and various types of interactive content really come in handy.
By serving up content that encourages more exploration and engagement, it becomes much easier to move visitors closer to a conversion.
If you can pair that participatory element with a piece of content that provides a solution to one of your visitor’s paint points, you have an opportunity to create a really memorable experience. 
For example, HubSpot created this free Invoice Template Generator to help small businesses get a handle on one of the less glamorous aspects of running a business: invoicing.   

The free tool allows the visitor to take control of the outcome by inviting them to plug and play their information, customize colors, and drag-and-drop brand logos into the mix.
When creating free tools and interactive content, put yourself in the shoes of your user.
What elements would you want to click on, customize, expand, and explore? Keep these things top-of-mind as you develop the content and it won’t go unnoticed.





Goal #3: "We need to grow our presence of social media."


The Solution: Shareable Content
When it comes to increasing social media visibility, creating content people can’t help but share is key. 
If you take a look at Buzzsumo’s analysis of the most shared content on Facebook in 2017, you’ll notice a few trends:

• Video content
• Quizzes
• News
• Research
• Emotion-driven content

This comes as no surprise, as the share-ability of a piece of content often boils down to format and subject matter, and while there’s no exact science for creating a viral piece of content, honing in on these shareable trends can help you increase the probability that people will share your post. 

Problem #4: "We need to drive more traffic back to the website."

The Solution: Search-optimized Content

Search-optimized content, as a general term, refers to any piece of content you’ve strategically created with the goal of increasing visibility, improving usefulness, or inspiring action.
From a tactical standpoint, this could mean:

• Blog posts or site pages optimized for a specific keyword
• Blog post or site pages designed to match a specific intent
• Blog post or site pages optimized for Google’s featured snippet
• Pillar pages that broadly cover a particular topic
• And more

For the sake of giving you something actionable to get started with here, let’s take a closer look at how featured snippet content -- the content that appears as a summary answering a query directly on a SERP -- can help you drive more traffic back to your website. 
Just take a look at this blog post from Search Engine Watch that appears when you search for “what is a featured snippet” on Google.


Aside from the fact that this piece of content appears at the very top of the page, it commands attention on the SERP because it teases a response to the searcher’s query. 
Want to try snagging a snippet spot for a search query that’s related to your business? Check out this article for tips on how to format snippet-worthy content.

Problem #5: "We need to prove our capabilities."

The Solution: Case Studies

Case studies serve are an essential piece of content because they provide researching prospects with the evidence they need to pin your business as a credible one; one worth doing business with.
If you have a success story that you think would make for an awesome case study, consider the following before you get started: 

• Be specific: Avoid ambiguity by serving up real numbers. Defining actual data will help to clarify the impact your product or service had on the business or individual while increasing the validity of your claims.
• Make them available: Don't hide your case studies. In addition to including them in your main navigation, consider peppering them into email newsletters and email interactions with prospects.
• Explore different formats: While many case studies adhere to a traditional format, feel free to explore different ways of presenting the information. Podcasts, infographics, and SlideShares are all viable options. 

Looking for inspiration? Here’s a great example of how OpenTable -- an online restaurant reservations service -- lowered its cost-per-reservation and achieved a cheaper cost-per-click using Instagram ads. 


Notice how the “success story” calls out really clear, impressive takeaways upfront, and then dives deeper into the solution below the fold. The key is to catch a visitor’s attention early, so they can’t help but want to know more about how you helped that business reach their goals.

Problem #6: "We need to generate brand awareness."

The Solution: User-generated Content

User-generated content campaigns serve as a relevant way to create an invitation for interaction. With user-generated content comes dialogue, and with dialogue comes word-of-mouth marketing, which ultimately contributes to increased brand awareness. 
By employing a campaign that encourages your audience to submit their contributions through various social media platforms, you're tapping into their existing following to attract even more eyeballs.
For example, the American prescription glasses brand, Warby Parker, ingeniously invited its audience to try on a few pairs of glasses at home, and then post the various options on social media to solicit feedback from their following. 
The ask felt natural, as people are used to consulting their friends and family when making decisions, which simplified the decision to participate and resulted in a ton of engagement via the #WarbyParkerHomeTryOn. 

The best part? The content wasn’t limited to a particular platform, which meant people could collect feedback from the network where they felt most comfortable -- Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, YouTube, and so on.




Originally:  https://www.impactbnd.com/blog/the-content-you-need-to-achieve-every-single-marketing-goal

Overview of Pay per Click (PPC) Advertising

Pay per Click (PPC) is an advertising technique used mainly on search engines, but can also be applied on websites and advertising networks. The most popular pay per click advertising network is Google Adwords.
Pay per Click has reformed the online advertising industry. Back in 2005 £4.70 billion was spent on pay per click marketing, and that figure has grown substantially in the last couple of years.
Advantages of PPC include that you only pay if people visit your website, therefore making it a highly accountable form of advertising. With some pay per click advertising networks, such as Google Adwords, you can also target specific geographical areas, set an overall budget, and a cost-per-click limit. This means that it’s suitable for even the smallest budget.
There are a couple of disadvantages with click-fraud estimated to be 15-20% despite being played down by Google, and it can be expensive to bid for keywords in highly competitive industries.
However, as a general rule all websites should strongly consider pay per click advertising. It can be very effective if done properly, and without a presence in search engines you’ll be missing out on many potential customers.

Steps to follow:

Choose keywords

Don’t target generic one-word keywords. This will be very expensive and the hits you do receive are likely to be relatively untargeted and speculative. Keep costs down and conversions up by choosing specific keyword phrases relevant to your industry or product.

Target effectively

If you have a UK-based site or one targeting only the local area then ensure that you specify this.

Writing the advert

Research suggests that click-throughs are on average 50% higher when terms in the title are repeated in the description below. Ensure that the title is relevant rather than intriguing so that only potential customers click on it.

Set a budget

Often you can set a daily and monthly budget. If PPC advertising is working well and producing sales profitably set as high a budget as possible. Setting a higher budget will also help your ad to appear higher in the sponsored links section.
Once set up your ads will often start showing within 15 minutes. It’s this speed combined with the highly targeted performance-based nature of PPC that has propelled pay per click advertising to be the most popular form of online advertising by far.
At first glance pay per click advertising can seem straightforward and simple. However, inexperienced users can quickly see their budget swallowed with very few results achieved. To get more from your budget check out how to get results with PPC advertising.

originally: http://www.marketingminefield.co.uk/ppc-advertising-overview/