Vanessa's Note: Beware of this, makes it more competitive now, less direct linking. If you are running an AdWords campaign for a website on a shared domains, then you'll want to be aware of a new policy for displaying those URLs in your ads. From now on, the ad must show more clearly the destination a user will be heading to should they click on your ad. Let's say you have a blog at Blogspot. Perhaps you sell your handmade goods on there and you want to drive traffic. Your ad now needs to show the Blogspot name in the URL, like this: exampleblogname.blogspot.com instead of just blogspot.com I've seen quite a few people choose a name for their Blogspot blog and then give their blog a different name. You may want to consider finding a name that's consistent to avoid confusion in your AdWords ads. Read the full story

Vanessa's Note: When designing your site, treat it like your personal space or home. Imagine the Google bot is like a mischievous child you need to set boundaries for, tell it where it can go, where it cannot go, and keep things simple and boxed up. Follow Gray Wolf's directions below by using 'noindex' tags and the 'robots.txt' file to direct and limit site access. Last week at SES Chicago, we were sitting in some site review panels and came across an identical problem on two completely different sites: duplicate content on both secure and non secure pages. Here’s a summary of how the problem occurs. Your shopping cart exists at https://example.com/cart/ Instead of building all of your links with absolute URL’s, you build them with relative links. Once a spider comes across a secure page with relative internal links, it will follow them. The problem is all of these links lead to secure pages, so search engines now have two versions of your website, and you have a potential internal duplicate content problem. While this isn’t a defcon 1 catastrophic failure issue, it’s an easy one to prevent and solve. Remember that everything you do to make your site easier for search engine spiders to understand will always work in your favor and that you never want to rely on band aid solutions to solve bad architecture problems.

• Use absolute URL’s if at all possible. Use a server side variable to build the domain so you can move files easily from development to production without worrying about creating issues.
• Use a server side programing solution to force pages to be secure/non secure. Don’t give someone the ability to checkout without being secure. By the same token, don’t let someone browse in secure mode.
• Use a “noindex/nofollow” meta tag on all of your cart/checkout pages.
• Use “disallow/noindex” directives in your robots.txt files. Sure it’s redundant if used with the meta tags, but it’s better to be safe than sorry in this case.
• Use the “nofollow” tag on the shopping cart/checkout link. You aren’t trying to sculpt page rank here but implement bot herding. Shopping cart, checkout, login, and admin pages are some of the few internal links where  I still recommend using this tag.

You might also want to check out a previous article I did with some Shopping Cart SEO Tips. Advertisement: Track your keyword rankings over time with SEO Keyword Ranking This post originally came from Michael Gray who is an SEO Consultant. Be sure not to miss the Thesis Wordpress Theme review. Secure Pages, Shopping Carts and Duplicate Content Related posts:

1. How to Create Duplicate Content on Someone Else’s Wordpress Blog Recently on this blog I went through the process of...
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3. Using Sitemaps to Combat Duplicate Content If you talked to anyone at the recent pubcon you...

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A lot of people have made a New Year’s resolution to lose weight in 2010. For website owners, you might have made a similar commitment to lose some undesired thing: your high bounce rate. To make this type of resolution come true, first you need to understand what causes a visitor to bounce from your website. Then you’ll be able to understand how some simple changes can keep people on your site and result in more online sales.

Why do Visitors Bounce?

Recently, while visiting my family in Canada I was looking for a specific Toronto Blue Jays baseball hat. I visited three sports apparel stores. The first two were similar. I spent only a few minutes in each store after finding out they didn’t have the hat I wanted. Then I found a sports store that sold only hats. I spent more time in this store browsing over the large selection of hats. But they didn’t have the style of hat I was looking for, and a similar style wasn’t available in my size. So I left.

We can compare this experience to searching online. If I was searching online for the baseball hat and I visited three sites similar to those stores, the first two sites would get a high bounce rate from my visit, and the third site would have a lower bounce rate but still not convert into a sale. I would “bounce” from each of the websites because I couldn’t find what I was looking for in the same way I left each of the stores when I couldn’t find what I was looking for.

How can you Reduce Your Bounce Rate?

If you consider my example of shopping for the baseball hat, each store could have reduced the chance of me “bouncing” from the store by expanding the inventory that they carried, or by not being listed on the mall directory as a store that would possibly have the hat I wanted. If we take these concepts and apply them to a website, you will get a similar affect with the bounce rate of the site. You can lower the bounce rate of your website if you:

1. Provide more products or services relating to what was being searched for: Expand your product line to include all products available to sell that are relevant to the keywords your website is ranked for and make sure your products are easily found on your site. If you sell services you can break down your services into some that are more specialized. If I offer Internet marketing services, I could offer different focused services like organic SEO services or PPC management services that both relate to Internet marketing.
2. Target the most relevant search terms: I have mentioned the importance of targeting relevant search terms in a couple other posts and I will mention it again. You might have a business selling tropical fish online but that doesn’t mean that “tropical fish” is going to be a good term to get your website ranked for. I could be searching for “tropical fish” because I want to take my kids to see tropical fish at an aquarium. If I found your site that sold tropical fish, I wouldn’t stay at your site for more than a second because it isn’t relevant to what I was searching for. Think of the most targeted terms that relate to your products or services and optimize for those terms.
3. Incorporate a clean and user friendly site design: The bounce rate can be reduced by using easy navigation and a clean, appealing design. Make the products easy to find. Links to service or product pages should be clearly labeled. Include prominent links on your homepage to top selling products or most popular services. Check your products or services pages to see how easy it was to find them and make sure it doesn’t take more than two clicks to find them.

If you have a New Year’s resolution to lower the bounce rate of your website in 2010, then these tips will help you to accomplish that goal. May 2010 bring you success in your online business ventures.

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Chances are you’ve seen me complain about Google local suggest throwing local results in for queries that shouldn’t be local. IMHO unless I specify a local parameter you shouldn’t be suggesting one. I understand that might be personal preference. Recently, however, I’ve seen queries with local results that contradict the one included in the search term. IMHO this reaffirms how broken and nearly useless Google SERP’s are becoming today.

Recently, I was doing a search for [beaches of the caribbean] and Google decided it would be helpful to include local results from my nearest ISP location, Bellmore*.

If I am searching for locations that aren’t populated/well established, I could understand Google not quite getting the location name. But if Google is as intuitive as they want us to believe, then it should know full well the “Caribbean” is a location. And Bellmore is a location.  But Bellmore is on Long Island, New York. The Caribbean is about 2000 miles south. The way Google is currently guessing makes the search suggestions as annoying and useless as Microsoft clippy. However, unlike Microsoft, Google treats us like children and doesn’t give us the ability to turn it off. Please Google stop coddling the developers and releasing half-baked functions into the algorithm. At this point it’s becoming embarrassing.

*For those of you with really good memories, I actually live in Wantagh not Bellmore. But that’s ok, since almost every ISP trace routine lists me as Bellmore.

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This post originally came from Michael Gray who is an SEO Consultant. Be sure not to miss the Thesis Wordpress Theme review.

Google Local Suggest Nearly Broken and Mostly Useless

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Last week Google launched real time SERP’s, which included the possibility for twitter and facebook updates to appear in searches for popular information, news, or for someone’s name. The potential for libel and potential for spam has already been discussed. What hasn’t been addressed is the problems it can create for reputation management. Specificall, how it can create problems for everyone … everyone, that is, except Google Employees … First off, we need a list of Google employees and their twitter handles. While this list isn’t exhaustive, it does have a number of  high profile figures, or people that I have met or interacted with:

• ericschmidt / Eric Schmidt
• marissamayer / Marissa Mayer
• mattcutts / Matt Cutts
• brianwhite / Brian White
• nathanjohns / Nathan Johns
• beahburger / Beah Burger
• reidyokoyama / Reid Yokoyama
• wysz / Michael Wyszomierski
• pedrodias / Pedro Dias
• susanmoskwa / Susan Moskwa
• thatadamguy / Adam Lasnik
• johnmu / John Mueller
• maileohye / Maile Ohye
• avinashkaushik / Avinash Kaushik cdibona / Chris DiBona
• iamjason / Jason Morrison
• jhuber / Jeff Huber
• joshu / Joshua Schachter
• kraneland / David Krane
• larrybrilliant / Larry Brilliant
• mikeleotta / Mike Leotta
• rklau / Rick Klau
• skamdar / Sagar Kamdar

That’s 23 high-profile, well-known, public Google employees, none of whom will have to deal with the problems of twitter real time results displaying in the SERP for their names. Surely that distinction is a coincidence. Now, if this were a real life discussion, the nearest Googler would chime in with the “correlation isn’t causation” reasoning, which happens to be true. The problem is I’ve heard that line one too many times from Google employees.  At this point, it seems more like a Mountain View version of Godwin’s Law. Google employees invoke it when they don’t like where the questioning is going, and they want to end the discussion. See, we’ve still got those 23 employees with no real time twitter streams… Pulling the “correlation isn’t causation” reasoning is a bit like the Cardassian who tried to get Captain Jean Luc Picard to admit to seeing five lights when there were only four… Click here to view the embedded video. C’mon Google. Why are you polluting Dave Naylor’s SERP with twitter results but not your employees? Why are you polluting Lisa Barone’s results yet you don’t show your own engineers? What don’t you guys like about Tony Adam that makes you want to give twitter the ability to create problems for him? What is it Google? Are the tweets of your own employees not quality content? Are they not trustworthy enough? Are they not relevant? Or is there a secret hidden agenda? If you want to talk about the benefits of real time tweets to the SERP for a person’s name, then you have to be willing to deal with the potential for having your own reputation management problems… Put your money where your mouth is. And if you aren’t willing to, then put an end to the bad idea before someone does get hurt. photo credit: Chovee Advertisement: LinkWheeler was created to offer a well priced and extremely effective form of SEM – The linkwheel. Don’t pay a fortune for useless SEO services, get LinkWheeler! This post originally came from Michael Gray who is an SEO Consultant. Be sure not to miss the Thesis Wordpress Theme review. Is Google Playing Monkey Games With Real Time Search Related posts:

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