Website Promotion and SEO: Content or Canonical Tags?
There are two ways to approach the basic task of getting a web site on to the front page of search engine results. Both are necessary, but neither are sufficient.
The first approach can be summarised by the oft-heard refrain of "content is king". This is a greatly simplified view of the world that says that if you produce good, relevant content, readers will come and search engines will smile upon you.
When we talk about 'good, relevant content' we mostly mean content that is focussed on its subject, and relevant to the website it appears on.
Time was, this was seen as a purely mathematical issue. Whether an article was relevant could be understood in terms of the frequency of keywords, where those keywords appeared in an article, and whether they were included in headlines and metatags.
This is still true today, but with one major proviso. It turns out that if I write an article such as this one about website promotion and SEO, I will naturally use those terms at a frequency which suggests that they are the focus of the article (especially if they happen to match the content of the metatags which accompany the article).
This is a good thing. It just means that search engines such as Google are designing algorithms that recognise human traits in writing.
So you could say (and it would be true) that nothing has really changed in this area, except that 1) algorithms are increasingly sophisticated and b) crucially, the advice that must be given to website content writers has changed. It used to be: "include up to three keywords or keyword phrases in your article, and make sure that they occur at a frequency of x% of the total number of words in the article". Now the advice is: "write naturally".
Why isn't this 'write naturally' vibe enough on its own? This is where the second approach to website promotion and SEO comes in.
Search engine rules and algorithms change over time. There is the big question of the importance of quality inbound links to your web site, which sadly must be the subject of another article. Suffice it to say, things have changed here too, but there are still people out there peddling the lie of "any link at any cost".
Beyond linking strategies, there is the plain old boring stuff that involves a) understanding what changes search engines are making to the ways in which they work, and b) implementing those changes.
A great example of this is the issue of canonical tags. To quote the Google Webmaster Central Blog on this, Google now supports a
"format that allows you to publicly specify your preferred version of a URL. If your site has identical or vastly similar content that's accessible through multiple URLs, this format provides you with more control over the URL returned in search results. It also helps to make sure that properties such as link popularity are consolidated to your preferred version".
(See the rest of Google's blog post at http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2009/02/specify-your-canonical.html )
This is crucial information for Ecommerce (and other) site owners. Although Google, Yahoo and Live Search will still attempt to understand what similar or duplicate content they should include when they return search results, the best way to handle this from now on is to include the link rel="canonical" tag in the appropriate place.
In the future it may be possible for search engines to return 'perfect' search results based only on content. That will free writers from their dependence on technical experts, webmasters and SEO practitioners. Until then, publishing successful websites will continue to be a complex mix of art and technology.
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