What exactly are canonical URL’s

Canonical URL’s are basically different URL’s which point to exactly the same page on a website. Normally these url’s occur due to carelessness or lack of knowledge of the person/company who made your website and if you are getting SEO done and your seo company was unable to figure it out its a BIG blunder on their part. Matt cutts from google has explained this issue here : http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/seo-advice-url-canonicalization/

Some Common examples of Canonical URL’s and how does it effect your rankings :

• Your website is www.bluewigets.com but when you click on the logo or on the home button (or home text) you are redirected to a page with URL www.bluewigets.com/index.htm or ww.bluewigets.com/index.php . This is one of the most common case of canonical URL’s.Now as you can see both the url’s www.bluewigets.com and www.bluewigets.com/index.html contain exactly the same content but google will consider them as 2 different pages. This can result in distribution of authority of your page into 2 pages which is actually a single page.This can also lead to duplicate content issue as google will think that both of these different pages contain duplicate content.I have seen some very big company websites having this issue when we started working on their websites.
• When you are able to open your site by typing both www.sitename.com and sitename.com and both open as it is in google that means google might index all the URL’s with and without www thus its always recommended to redirect one to the other (see code at the end of the article for how to).
• When you have a printer friendly version of each article on your website :



• When your category structure of site automatically generates different versions of the same page :

How to correct this issue :

Canonical URL issue can be corrected by doing a 301 permanent redirect from different variations of your page to the variation you like the most. For example in the case when you have canonical url’s as www.bluewigets.com and www.bluewigets.com/index.html you can 301 redirect www.bluewigets.com/index.html to www.bluewigets.com

How to do a 301 permanent redirect

*I recommend that professionals should handle 301 redirects but those who like to DIY here are the details

I ll explain you the method of doing 301 redirect for the case where your website has both www and non www versions.

We can do a 301 redirect by writing a piece of code in the .htaccess file on the server (its located in the root folder on the server). If the file does not exist you can create one and upload it into the root folder of your server.

The code mentioned below will redirect non www version to www version of your site :

Options +FollowSymlinks

RewriteEngine on

rewritecond %{http_host} ^sitename.com [nc]

rewriterule ^(.*)$ http://www.sitename.com/$1 [r=301,nc]

I hope our visitors are able to make use of this article and grow their organic traffic by figuring out the canonical URL issue and then getting it corrected.

Feel free to contact us in case you have any doubts and we will be happy to help, You can also fill in the Free SEO consultation form and we will be happy to give a detailed seo proposal where we will point out all the technical issues and also propose a plan which you should follow to reach top of google for your target keyowrds.

Online videos medium

Did you know? Last year, YouTube turned out to be better than most search engines.

So more and more companies will look forward to target YouTube for optimising their websites. So if you are looking for great results and you haven’t yet opt the video way, its the time to begin.

Also remember that most companies are not aware of using YouTube as an optimisation tool. So in case you want maximum results, opting for YouTube could be a great option.

Use Twitter for Networking

Small business owners who didn’t have  much funding to promote their services took the assistance of social media. So more and more companies will look to take the connections they have made online and will learn to leverage them off.

For many SMB owners, Twitter will be a great tool to look for as far as networking effectively is concerned.

For instance- If you own a local travel business, you will not want Twitter to just build your company’s reputation. Rather you will want it to drive business towards you so that you can benefit effectively from those relationships. Isn’t?

Increased Local Awareness

You should not forget the tried and true SEO techniques. This is because it is very important now than it was ever before.

If you haven’t tied up your local listings and profiles till now, it is beyond time to do that.

Most search engines are focusing at the completeness and consistency of your local listings to rank them for your concerned queries. This huge ranking factor can be 100 percent under your control this way.

You must benefit from it and corner the four corners of local search by going through the process of claiming all your local listings, manage your customer reviews, get quality citations as well as do each and everything you can in order to build the authority of your site in the World Wide Web.

After the year 2009, more and more companies are aiming at opting for the right SEO techniques in order to stay ahead of their competitors.

The new year offers another chance to capture rankings and try out new marketing strategies.

This way you can take the benefit of areas where the search engines are looking to expand and place new importance.

Despite of what some companies may think, SEO for small businesses is equally important than it is for any other firm.

It is bigger and important than ever.

Let us now have a look at various trends to watch out for in the coming year.

The speed of the site plays a vital role in deciding how good a page is doing. The experts believe that the site speed can be used as a new ranking factor in the coming years.

Ultimately, the main aim of the Google is to help its users finding the information as early as possible. So how quickly a site loads is one factor, which surely fits into this.

So it is important for the site owners to reduce the load time of their sites. The order of things on your web page can affect its load time, thus it is necessary to make sure that you are using proper HTML and clean up your CSS and Java script. This way you can make sure that users will not have to wait while accessing your site.

Just to have the correct idea of how fast your site is loading, you can use tools like WebPageTest or Pingdom Page load. These tools offer easy ways to test out what is the load page time of your web page.

There are a number of free resources available to help such as:

–                  HTML Validation

–                  Page Speed Firefox Extension

–                  CSS

–                  Closure

More Social Media Optimization

The social forums are already a great medium for gaining links. Whether they were blogs, daily status or blogs.  All that mattered was that it had to be search engine friendly and had a link. Even if they had content that was linking baitable the readers who read them would be linked to other promotional sites and would advertise the product further. It was good for company already having page one ranking. But now it can also help you to push your competitors down the line. This technique has already benefitted some of the companies and in 2010 it will be used by more companies. But the best part in all this is the implementation of Real time search by Google where news, social media status and micro blogs are posted real time.

Better Link Development

This has existed for a long time but now you can link the spams so that it appears natural and is not caught by the Google spammers as well as the algorithmic powers and you can successfully promote your site. One can easily find it through having a look at their back link universe profile.

On page SEO

Coder skills will be mandatory requirement this year. On page or Off page SEO have common threads. So this year stress is also laid upon the links that you can create with the help of keyword rich tags, meta tags and header tags. The other thing that goes handy with this is coding the website in a proper manner. If this is done in an appropriate manner then nobody can stop you from getting better business from SEO.