URL Canonicalization – HTML Element to Address Duplicate Content Onsite

Canonical Element was added a while go in 2009 by Google,Yahoo and Bing as a solution to on-site duplicate content. For eg. if you have the following URLs

domain.com
www.domain.com
www.domain.com/index.html
domain.com/index.html
mobile.domain.com/

all pointing to the same content then using canonical element you can indicate in the html code of the web page which page should be treated as original.

URL Canonicalization, however this does not work across domains. For cross domain content duplication issue – 301 redirect is the solution. Another situation where canonical element is quite useful is with URLs with session id. URLs with session id’s is an issue with many dynamic sites.

One of the common mistakes is not redirecting non-www to www to vice-versa. Search engines treat

domain.com and www.domain.com as separate URLs, so if you don’t set the redirect you are implicitly creating duplicate of your site in the eye of search engine spider. Another major issue to bear in mind is dilution of backlinks.

www or non-www preference could be set in Google Webmaster Central as well. Google Webmaster Central

For WordPress All In One SEO Pack for URL canonicalization provides the option to automatically select and apply canonical link attribute to to the preferred URL of every page.

URL Canonicalization Plugin for Magento,Wordpress and Drupal here Canonical URL Plugin

More Details in this video by Matt Cutts

Unblock or Block Search Engines in WordPress

WordPress provides the facility to block and unblock search engines like Google. Following picture is self descriptive.

Block or Unblock Search Engines

Block or Unblock Search Engines

Need help with installation,configuration or customization of your WordPress site? Please get in touch.

Integrate WordPress Blog Into An Existing Site and Get More Visitors

One of the obvious ways to increase visitors to a site is to bulk it up with content. When I say bulk it up it doesn’t mean spam. Add top quality content around the products or services like How-To’s, Tips, News etc.

I hear you ask, what is top quality content?

Well, it simply means content that is informative,engaging and ultimately useful to a human visitor. At the same time bear in mind the search engine spiders – at it’s core these are programs deciding where to rank your content based on various factors. Catering to both humans and spiders/programs is often a challenge.
To understand these factors, one of the tutorials which I still recommend is – SEO Tutorial

Once you go through that tutorial you will have a basic but firm understanding of various SEO factors like on-page,offpage etc.

Once you have this understanding the site structure and content/page layout could be easily done.

Now if you have an existing site,integrating or adding WordPress to it is one of the easiest ways to bulk up your site. Here is an example
Debt Help and Debt Help Blog

The blog look and feel could be completely customized to go with your existing site. Or as in this case Life Insurance Quotes the entire site itself could be in WordPress making it very easy and flexible to manage and add content.

Are you looking to revamp your existing site to attract more visitors? We could help you add a WordPress Blog Section to articles or migrate your existing site as it is (or with improvements) to make it WordPress based, in other words making easily manageable and powerful.Please get in touch we are happy to help.

Why WordPress ? Why not WordPress? as it is the most popular content management platform with wide echo system of plugins and themes making it possible for us to make it sing and dance to any tune. Plugins like All-In-One-SEO,Easy WP SEO make it easy to handle the SEO factors easily and to a certain extend automatically helping you focus on adding content.

Adsense Ads Now Loads Faster

Google claims to have made the show_ads.js script faster making billions of webpages showing adsense load those ads faster. Adsense is a factor in slow loading of some pages, around 12% of the page load time.

The page should load half a second faster.

Adsense publishers don’t have to upload new code since the change is automatic. Right now, the changes are working with Chrome, Firefox, and Internet Explorer 8, with more browsers and versions included soon.

If you need to block the new ad version, set “google_enable_async = false” for each ad slot.

Full post from Google Blog Click here

Where to place your ads or call to action for best effect

Have you ever wondered which are the ideal places on a page for placing the ads or call to action?

Here is the answer from Google for a sample layout. Needless to say Google insists on putting the users first.

Google Heatmap

Google Heatmap

Here is tool to show click heat map of web pages ClickHeat Map

If you are looking for a WordPress theme optimized for better CTR then look at the CTR Theme as posted earlier

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