• In the ecommerce websites for product descriptions

Any newly launched product has several distributors on the web. As a result, these websites offer the same text about the products and their features which thus makes them duplicate content on the web.

• Alternate print pages

Several websites on the web offer a specific printing format with the same content on them. If the owner of the website doesn’t make use of the robots.txt disallow command, then the search engines don’t index these web pages.

• Canonical issues

Search engines usually index the URLs as compared to the webpages and so, there are chances that they index the same website displayed in different forms. The content of the same website is hence showed as a copy of itself and hence the search engines don’t index these webpages.

Apart from these three reasons, there are several other situations such as session IDs for search engines, syndicated RSS feeds, etc. where in the search engines identifies duplicate content. We will post more details about those in near future. Keep following the KPMRS blog for these tips!

SEO (Search Engine Optimization) has become such a broad term today that whichever activity drives any traffic on your website is considered as an SEO Activity! In earlier days, we – as SEO Consultants -  used to focus specifically on the structure and content of websites only, which we called “On-page SEO”. We tried hard to make sure that our clients’ websites have been set up right with proper page titles, meta text, content placement, image names etc. But today, the definition of SEO has changed expanded drastically. Now-a-days, SEO as a service is divided into 2 categories :-

1. On-Page SEO - optimize content, internal links, meta tags etc
2. Off-page SEO - backlinks, social media, forum posting, press release etc.

Honestly, I don’t agree with the concept of Off-page SEO. You may call it ‘Off-page promotions’ or ‘Off-page optimization’ but ‘Off-page SEO’ definitely does not make sense to me. Wikipedia defines SEO as

the process of improving the volume or quality of traffic to a web site from search engines via natural or un-paid (organic or algorithmic) search results.

Then why is everyone writing so much about “Off-page SEO” when, ideally, the term even doesn’t exist at all? I leave this up to you all to help me find the answer in your comments below.

Just because it is such a popular term these days, I could not stop myself from using it as the title of my blog article even though I don’t agree with it This is also one of the problems with SEO Consultants & business owners like us – that we have to keep our readers/customers happy with giving them what they want to take!

Image Courtesy - www.topspotoptimisation.co.uk

Coming back to the topic of today’s discussion, which is about the best “Off-page SEO” tactics or “Off-page Promotion” (for my own sake) that can help you drive consistent traffic on to your website for a long run. These techniques are just the ones which I have tried myself and achieved reasonable success for my clients. You may have tried something else which worked for you so don’t hesitate to share that with our readers.

1.  Participate in Forums & discussion boards: 5-6 responses or 2-3 new questions a day (with your website’s URL in the signature) in 5 different popular forums a day is all that it will take to get a decent traffic on to your website. It will hardly take you more than 2 minutes to write a response or come up with a question to ask the community.  Spending 20 minutes a day religiously on forums for 2 weeks will start generating traffic on your website that you won’t even imagine.  Of course, you need to make sure that your responses and questions are intelligent & look like real contribution. Do not post for the sake of posting. It will give wrong impression and other forum members will look down upon you with contempt! Some will even mark you as spam leading to deletion of your account and your hopes as well.

Many SEO companies offer this service really cheap, say 1¢ per post. DO NOT fall for that. They will do more harm than any good. My advice would be that you should hire someone who (1) understands your business’s objectives and can (2) write decent English. He should  really contribute in the forums to lure other readers in clicking on his signature URL.

Some of my favorite SEO Forums are :

• Digitalpoint
• Webmaster World
• V7n Community

2. Publish Blogs / News / Press Releases & submit them in bookmarking websites - Everyone in the web community knows the importance of blog and news updates on your company/ product website. Not only it attracts search engine crawlers to visit your website more often, it also helps you generate more back links by submitting these articles on press release and bookmarking websites. Tons of bookmarking websites have sprouted up recently. And believe it or not, most of them are a good source of traffic generation for your website.  The ones that I use most frequently for my clients are :

• Stumbleupon
• Digg
• Delicious
• Reddit
• Mixx
• Propeller
• Kaboodle (for online stores)
• Yahoo Buzz
• Technorati
• Clipmarks

There are still more than 200 bookmarking websites which you should definitely consider for this task.

3. Create your social profile & share your news update with the community – The first names that lighten up in our minds are Facebook, Twitter & Myspace. Make sure you create a public social profile for the company that you are promoting. You ought to have your Facebook Fan page, Twitter profile, Youtube profile, LinkedIn profile (of yourself and/or your clients). All the websites I just mentioned require you to sign up and they provide you a unique URL of your profile. This is your social profile. Following are must-do activities whenever you have a new blog or new story published on your website or blog -

• Tweet about it on Twitter
• Do a status update on Facebook & LinkedIn
• Update status on Ecademy as well. Ecademy (has a lot of junk but) is still a good source of traffic once you have a strong network.
• Share your blog article on discussion boards & forum of these social networks.
• Flickr – “A picture is worth a thousand words” is not exactly true in the world of SEO which relies heavily on content full of words. But still Flickr stands out and can become a good source of traffic for your website. Just make sure that whenever you write an article, you add an image in your post and submit that image on your Flickr profile with apt tags and description. If you have an online store and sell products, make sure all the images of your products are also submitted on to your Flickr profile. Picasa, Photobucket & Picli are some other photo sharing networks.

Once your profile has been set up, you should start building a community by adding/inviting friends to join your network.

• Youtube
• Vimeo
• Dailymotion
• Slideshare (See a sample below)

5. Yahoo Answers & similar question/answer websites – I love Yahoo Answers and On Startup Answers community where you can post any question you want and community members will respond within hours. SEO companies are using similar sites to drive traffic by maneuvering questions in such a manner that makes other members click on their URLs. It may not be the best way to get the type of traffic you want but still it is one of the widely used method these days. Again, you have to be very cautious with your language so that it does not appear as spam.

6. Article re-writing and distribution – Haven’t we covered this in point (2) above? Not really. This is about article re-writing. Numerous SEO companies are hiring writers to re-write the same articles many times in different versions and keep distributing them on hundreds of press release & bookmarking websites.  It works quite often since your content is not copied and the crawlers will see it as original stuff.

7. Local business listings on search engines & yellow pages- All major search engines like Google, Bing & Yahoo offer business owners to submit their business with full details of name, address, phone number etc. This helps in getting local traffic for your website. Optimizing for local search listings is the discussion of a different topic that I will publish sometime in near future. For now, you should just make sure that your business has been listed on all local listings websites. A few examples of such sites are -

• Hotfrog,
• Business.com
• Superpages.com

These are some of the widely used “Off-page promotion” techniques by SEO Companies across the globe. Please feel free to keep your opinions on this post in the comment box below.

As always, don’t forget to subscribe to our feed.

• http://www.example.com (TYPE 1)
• http://example.com/(TYPE 2)
• http://www.example.com/index.html (TYPE 3)

These URLs may point to the same webpage and show same content but technically they all are different. Search engine crawlers consider them as all different URLs which means they all will compete with each other for their positions in SERP.

Think about a scenario where 100 websites have put your link on their home page. 30 of those sites are pointing to Type 1 URL. 25 are pointing to Type 2 URL. 45 are pointing to Type 3 URL.

Now they are all pointing to your home page but to different URLs. So you are losing a huge chunk of backlinks for 1 common page which you could have got if all 100 links were pointing to just one URL.

There is a very simple solution to fix this problem. Choose just one common URL (whichever you prefer) and forward all the other URLs to that one URL. Make sure you use 301 redirect to forward the URLs.

Using 301 redirects can greatly help in consolidating your website rankings

It is a very simple technique to make sure you do not loose any link juice in the SEO Campaign for your website. If you liked reading this article on the KPMRS Blog, make sure to subscribe to our feed!

Choosing the right keyword is the first and the most critical step of any SEO Campaign. Image courtesy yieldsoftware.com

1. In <title> tag – Search results always shows the title tag as your page title. The Title must be short and precise, say 6-12 words. The Keyword can be anywhere in the tag but preferably near the beginning.
2. In anchor text – Anchor text with keyword focus from external links is an important factor. Inbound links are considered positive not only for the site but for the keyword as well.
3. In headings – The Keywords placed on the heading in H1 is an important factor but the page should have actual text relevant to the keyword. Try to keep the heading precise (7-10 words). 
4. It is good to have the keyword as the first word of the heading.
5. In Domain Name – Domain names incorporating vital keywords is a very important factor.
6. In URL – Helps a lot to rank well but keyword should be in the other parts of the document. It should not be over optimized else you might be penalized.
7. Density – It is a measure to check the relevance of the web content. Keep less than 10% keyword density. Upto 7-8% for targeted 2-3 keywords and 1-2% for minor or secondary keywords on a page.
8. In the beginning of the document – It is a good practice to have the keyword in first 25-50 words of the document. Be it a table or a paragraph, try to keep it in the beginning of the document.
9. In Alt Tags – Label images on your page with <alt>/<title> tag filled with some keywords as spiders do read these tags.
10. In other Headlines – It is a good practice to have the keywords in other headlines (h2 – h6).
11. In Meta Tags – Yahoo and Bing still rely on them, Google does not. Having these tags properly filled will not harm, so just do it.
12. Proximity – It is the closeness between the 2 or more keywords. The closer the keywords the more likely it is to rank higher.
13. It is best to have the keywords one after the other i.e. with no words in between them.
    Eg : “discount perfume” is better than “discount on perfume”.
14. In Image names – Eg : Perfume.jpg – Good to have keywords in images names.
15. Secondary Keywords – Targeting and optimizing secondary keywords can be beneficial as they might have a lot less competition than the most popular keywords. Eg: discount Calvin Klien perfumes will have a lot less hits and a better targeted traffic.
16. Synonyms – Using synonyms on web pages is good as Search Engines have algorithms to take in to consideration synonyms for Keyword match and ranking especially for sites in English but it is not taken into account for many other languages. For instance, in the perfume site, “fragrance” is a synonym, Include synonyms on the page but do not rush to optimize every synonym.

Google ranks fifth for the keyword "Search Engine"

SEO in the earlier days
In earlier days people tried all means like keyword stuffing, doorway pages, hidden text, link farms etc, which are usually categorized as SEO’s Black Hat techniques. These techniques were widely popular among various internet marketing firms who used to implement them in order to push the site’s ranking on top of search engines. Now, search engine crawlers have not just become smarter, they’ve come a long way to become more intelligent that one can imagine. They are able to detect and block such websites which are being optimized using black hat techniques. You have to be very careful in choosing the right SEO company for your website for this particular reason.

Black Hat SEO is unpopular & heavily looked down upon by SE. Image by elliance.com

SEO in the present
It goes without saying that the time has changed. Now it is all about the content. Algorithms are used to rank the websites on search engines have changed dramatically. The smarter SEO firms have come to know the importance of natural content for the websites’ positions. So, instead of writing for the search engines, they are now writing for the real user which is what search engines like Google and Bing want. “Content is the king” has become the latest proverb in our English dictionaries.

In the coming days, we will talk in depth about the techniques are being employed by various internet marketing and SEO companies to optimize their site’s rankings on search engines. Stay tuned to our blog and don’t forget to check your own website’s ranks before you leave

Ciao!