The purpose of internal SEO is to optimize your web pages for ranking well in organic SERP. However without performing additional external SEO, you should know that no matter how well you optimize your website internally, you will not rank in the first pages for highly competitive keywords. With internal SEO you will rank higher on less competitive terms searches compared with search results with no internal SEO at all.

Internal SEO requires modifications of your web pages, so you need to be familiar with the web development technologies used to develop your website or you can ask someone who knows how to do these modifications. In case your website is still in the development phase, make sure that the programmers team follows the search engine optimization rules presented.

Internal SEO focuses on the following areas of a website / webpage:

Web Page Content

Content is (still) king. Original, rich content is the search engines’ robots preferred “food”. It’s logical that if you want to rank high in SERP for specific keywords you need to have relevant content for those keywords. But forget about search engines robots! The main reason you should have interesting content is your visitors; the robots will not buy your products and read your articles and they will not link back to your website from other websites. Your visitors will do that! So, your SEO efforts regarding content should focus on:

• Page Titles – The title of a webpage should be relevant to page’s content. Don’t use the same title for all your website pages;
• META Tags – These are HTML tags used in “the past” to provide information about the web pages. Google and other search engines disregard them, but there are a few search engines that still use them in ranking the pages. And with search engines continuously changing their algorithms, you never know when they might become important again. The most important meta tags SEO wise are: name=”keywords” and name=”description”;
• Format Tags – The text format tags like (bold, italic, h1, h2, h3) are used for titles, sub-titles or to highlight a word or an idea. Search engines know this and add more weight to those words or phrases;
• ALT Tags for Images – For an image, the ALT tag represents a description of that image that will appear in case the image source is no longer available or the visitor is using a text-only web browser (i.e. Lynx). Provide a description for all the images on your web pages;
• Keywords Density – Write original content, but make sure you have a good keywords density. The recommended average keyword density is 3-5%. Remember to count singular and plural versions as the same word. Start by writing for your visitors and edit the text afterwards so that it has the right keywords density. If you can not manage to get your keywords in, then they might not be the right keywords for your web page;
• Links Neighborhood - Some search engine weight the text surrounding a link with greater importance so links inside the paragraphs are more relevant than, let’s say, links in the footer navigation of the page.

To be continued …

In 2008 SEO Trends (I) we looked at the market for SEO services from the firm’s perspective. Let us now turn the camera and focus on the Internet users because they are in fact the final “consumers” of the search engines optimization efforts. Understanding consumers’ behavior is critical to any marketing campaigns and don’t be surprised to find out that there is a new breed of Internauts roaming the Internet.

There are many aspects to be looked at when analyzing the behavior of people surfing the Internet; we will focus on two that are relevant to our case: searching patterns and ad fatigue. When looking at the search engines market leader, we see that Google’s current rate of growth is on a downward trend. I’m not saying that they are not growing; I’m only saying that the rate at which they grow has slowed down. Google is experiencing lower click rates on search results ads and especially on their AdSense partner sites. Not only the click-through-rates (CTR) are lower than the previous years but advertisers are also complaining of having lower conversion rates too. And the lowest conversion rates come from advertisements on social media sites. Why is this happening? There are a few reasons why:

• Not everybody surfing the web wants to buy products, and especially not the kids watching movies on YouTube.
• Ad fatigue. People now know that the top SERP placed results are ads and don’t want to click on them because they’ve seen enough commercials already. Have you wondered why so many customizations are available for AdSense? Google is trying hard to blend their ads in partner sites so that people don’t think they are clicking ads, but there are really no more possible tricks to combat ad fatigue.
• Ad clickers are now Ad publishers. People click on AdSense. Publishers talk too much about AdSense. People now apply for AdSense. People once in the market for clicks are now sellers and hoping for clicks.

The searching patterns have changed also. People usually search for the first three-four months. People learn about new web sites and bookmark the ones with great content. People stay on those sites. People now type directly the website name in the address bar (or select it form the bookmarks list) or search for the name of the website.

SEO Changes

The major trend with Internet marketing today is the rush to get some visibility. The problem is that sometimes the desire to be ranked on top overshadows relevancy. And Internet users don’t like that, because they go to the search engines to find something relevant. So I reckon for 2008, the search engines’ “fight” with spammers and black-hat SEO will continue and the ranking algorithms will be further tweaked to get the most relevant pages on top. However there will be some tweaking that is not spam-related but user behavior driven. With the new breed of Internauts surfing the web and the ad fatigue, the need for more relevant pages will grow. But ranking algorithms already use web page content relevancy, incoming links from relevant web sites, etc. so is there anything else that can be used?

There is still some data that can further improve results relevancy, data like: time spent on a page, user’s bookmarks, direct visits, CTR levels through SERPs, bounce rates, etc. The problem is that this kind of data is hard to collect. There are though ways to collect it and we speculate that one of the reasons behind Yahoo pushing their tool bar and Google offering free analytics might be just that. They are trying to collect, understand and map the data to users’ behavior. As more data is gathered and processed, link popularity will become less important in ranking results.

But, until that happens, the power and number of incoming links will still play a major role in the search engine optimization techniques. One of the factors that are expected to gain more weight in determining the strength of a link will be the text surrounding the link. Links inside the text with relevant keywords around them will have more “juice”.

Summary

Despite the fact that economy will slowdown the need for visibility and better ROI will possible make SEO to go mainstream in 2008. Regardless of when, integration of online and traditional marketing will be inevitable; SEO will merge with the “marketing department” or at least the two services will be offered as a bundle.

This is the first blog entry from the SEO Tips and Tricks series and today we will discuss about duplicate content. Duplicate content refers to large matching blocks of content within the same website or across different websites. The search engines are trying to keep their results’ relevancy high so they don’t want duplicate content in their databases. There’s no point in having and showing pages with the same text. It doesn’t help the user and it occupies disk space. Webmasters and SEOs should minimize similar content in order to avoid search engines penalties.

The “penalties” for having duplicate content are not harmful to the website, but are harmful to your position in the SERPs, because while the website itself will not be penalized or de-indexed, the pages will duplicate content will be moved to the supplemental index and will not be shown in the search engine results pages. How exactly do the search engines’ duplicate content filters work is not known, but is assumed that: the crawling date, the authority of the website and the links pointing from one website to the other are taken into consideration when determining which website has the “original” content.

Tips and Tricks

Duplicate content within the website.
There are some steps you can take to prevent duplicate content from appearing on your website:

• Duplicate pages. You decided to create a printer-friendly version of each page so your visitors can print the information in an organized fashion. Great added value! However, the printer-friendly version is considered duplicate content. There are two ways to avoid that:
  1. Add a ‘noindex’ meta tag to your printer-friendly versions of the pages.
     

     <meta name=”robots” content=”noindex, nofollow” />

  2. Put all the versions in a specific folder and use robots.txt to disallow search engines’ bots to index those pages.
• Minimize boilerplate repetition. By providing a link to a page that has the text rather than repeating it on every page. However, sometimes it is desired to be able to showcase the text (i.e. testimonials), so here’s a nice trick to do it: take a “picture” of the text and display the text on each of the pages as a picture (.gif, .jpg, etc.).
• Duplicate URLs. Usually, to access the website, we can use both the www version of the URL as well as the non-www version of the URL. For the search engines, the two URLs are “different”, so that’s duplicate content. SEO wise that’s bad also; you are dividing the number of incoming links between the two pages. How to fix it?
  1. Use a .htaccess 301 Permanent Redirect to redirect all the non-www traffic to the www version. Open and edit the .htaccess file with the following lines:
     

     Options +FollowSymLinks
     RewriteEngine on
     RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^mysite.com [NC]
     RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.mysite.com/$1 [L,R=301]

  2. If you have a Google webmasters account, you can set a preferred domain for indexing (with or without www).

Duplicate content across websites.
There are two external SEO techniques used in web site promotion that create duplicate content: articles publishing and content syndication (i.e. RSS feeds on blogs). While these are useful in promoting your website, you must be careful with the duplicate content issues that may arise:

• Make sure, if possible, that each site that displays your articles or on which your content is syndicated includes a link back to your original article or blog entry.
• Create short-versions or modified versions of your articles (around 60-70% modified text) and use them for articles publishing instead of the original articles
• Don’t copy text from others (that’s an easy one!)
• Use duplicate detection tools to find out who’s copying your content and if they are not allowed to do it, file a complaint with the search engines. For Google use this link: file a DMCA request

Duplicate Content Tools

1. CopyScape.com is a well-known website that offers services to detect and protect your content against online plagiarism. Go to www.copyscape.com and enter the URL of your web site or web page. The script will look and retrieve similar pages.




2. DuplicateContent.net has another useful tool that allows you to compare two web pages and calculates the degree of HTML tags and text similarity between them. Use the duplicate content detector below to check for duplicate content:

Initially it was supposed to be just one article about the 2008 SEO trends, but as I kept organizing the ideas and finding new information it turned out to be quite a large entry so I decided to split the article in two parts:

• part (I) – A Bird’s Eye View
• part (II) – Visitors and Search Engines.

In the first part we’ll talk about SEO as part of the bigger picture and in the second one we’ll look at visitors and search engine trends for 2008.

A Bird’s Eye View

The search engine optimization is a paid service offered by SEO professionals and just like any other product or service; it is influenced by the “health” of an economy. With U.S being the largest producer and consumer of online advertising and online transactions, the growth rate of the U.S. economy plays an important role in the overall demand for search engine optimization services.

In January 2008, U.S. unexpectedly lost jobs for the first time in more than four years, raising concerns that the US economy could tip into recession. Higher gasoline prices combined with the slumping housing market increase the odds that the economy will at least slow down. But, if the economy slows down, marketers are going to look even harder for better ROI. And when it’s done right, it’s hard to beat the ROI of SEO.

Also in the news: … e-commerce sales of goods and services will continue to grow, despite forecasted economic slowdowns. In United States for example, the rate of growth is between 15-20% per year which clearly suggest that the market is still far from maturity. Online advertising spending will increase as well. In a recent study, Barry Parr, lead analyst at JupiterResearch, reported that the local sector will experience the biggest growth, slightly outpacing total online ad spending. Local online advertising spending is expected to increase 82 percent in the next five years, Parr reported.

S.E.O. and Traditional Marketing

The goal of your search engine optimization efforts is to get you visibility and quality traffic but the overall objective is to increase sales, and I’m using sales here as a broad term for a product/service sale, a subscription, a quote or whatever your website has to offer. So, you need to convert part of that traffic into sales, and the conversion rates depend mainly on how clear your marketing message is. Of course it’s better to have 1,000 visitors and a 1% conversion rate than 10 visitors and a 20% conversion rate, but, if possible, why not have the 20% conversion rate for those one thousand visitors too?

To improve conversion rates, you will need first to define your market by selecting the proper keywords for searches, to get traffic, to analyze the behavior of your visitors by analyzing the traffic to see what type of visitors came to your website, from where and which pages were the most and the least successful. Based on this information you will know what needs (or needs not) to be changed or tweaked.

Does this sound like traditional marketing? You better believe it! Starting with 2008, SEO agencies will not be just search results promoters, they will have to be marketing experts, public relations experts, image managers, etc. SEO has started to fall in line with traditional marketing and public relations tactics. However, the main function of search engine optimization will remain the same: increase the client’s websites visibility in SERPs. Traditional marketing is changing, and the change will “affect” SEO as well. Organizations are becoming more customer-centric and marketing is no longer seen as the sole responsibility of the marketing department but rather as a way of thinking, as a way of doing business.

The integration of online and traditional marketing seems inevitable so the “bundle” SEO-marketing will be the wining card for 2008. Either the companies will look for SEO-marketing services from the current search engine optimization agencies or they will staff their own full-time SEOs to work with the existing marketing department. We expect the demand for SEO specialists to rise. The need for accurate ROI reports will also drive the need for accurate traffic analysis tools. Things like traffic funneling and visitors’ behavior will become important in the effort of increasing the conversion rates. But, more about visitors and how to increase traffic in the 2008 SEO Trends (II) – Visitors and Search Engines article.

No matter if your website is an informational one or if it’s an online store to sell your products, you want people to come and visit it. Without visitors your information remains unknown and your products remain unsold. So, you need some sort of advertising in order to attract customers and visitors. A great deal of the web traffic you get is driven by the three major search engines: Google, Yahoo and MSN, because entering search queries in the search engines is a primary method of navigation for most of the Internet users. So it’s obvious that it is desired to have your website coming up in the search engine results pages (SERP).

With millions of websites out there, users usually check the first couple of results pages, so it’s important that your website is listed in those pages. You can do that by “buying” yourself a place in the sponsored links area or, showing up for free, through “organic” results. SEO, short for Search Engine Optimization is a collection of techniques and practices that will make your website show up in the first page(s) of organic SERP.

The objective of SEO

As in any other endeavor you need to have defined goals and objectives; because if you don’t know where you’re going, how do you know you got there? The goal for SEO is to rank in the first page(s) of the SERP for specific keywords with the final objective to bring in web traffic. So, the first step in obtaining good rankings is keywords researc. Effective keyword research is at the core of your SEO efforts can mean the difference between your success and failure.

The SEO – Internet Marketing relationship

SEO is a part of your overall web marketing efforts. It is an efficient tool to get you quality traffic, but to convert that traffic into sales it depends on how clear your marketing message is (”sale” here is used as a broad term for a product sale, a subscription, a quote, etc). To improve conversion rates, first you must analyze the traffic you’re getting, to see what type of visitors come to your website, traffic sources and which pages are the most and the least successful. This way you will know what needs (or needs not) to be changed on the pages and how your visitors are entering and leaving your website.

Think of SEO as the goal and the Internet marketing as the objective. Goals are general directions that are not specific enough to be measured (i.e. get better ranking, get more web traffic, etc.) while objectives are specific and measurable. They are concise, you can measure them (i.e. get $10,000 in product sales, get at least 200 subscribers to your newsletter, etc.)

In conclusion, SEO is the goal through which you can reach your web marketing objectives.

Additional reading:

• Understanding SEO
• Internal SEO
• External SEO