There has been a bit of confusion over the rel=”canonical” tag and where to use it. The basic principle is summed up here, and is basically there to help webmasters instruct the search engines about how to handle duplicate content.

While the idea is to place the tag in the head section of any duplicate copies that have been distributed, confusion seems to occur when it comes to using the tag in the head section of the original piece of content.

It’s been covered a lot the past few months and it’s now official – site speed is one of Google’s ranking factors. Before you go worrying unecessarily about your slow site and how it’s going to lose all it’s traffic, it’s important to note that there are over 200 factors all with varying levels of importance in the algorithm.

If you think about what Google wants – great user experience – then it makes sense. If two websites are the same but one loads quicker, the quicker one is going to be more user friendly. What this doesn’t mean is that Google will start increasing the rankings for sites that have lower quality content but load quicker- it’s counter intuative.

While the incorrect use of title tags is one of the most common SEO mistakes, another common mistake is to over optimise for one specific keyword or phrase and lead to your website looking spammy.

A practice that has been around for a while but isn’t given a great deal of coverage is the process of buying expired domain with a lot of backlinks and 301 redirecting it to the website to benefit from all of those backlinks.

Expired domains are easy to find, but ones with good backlink profiles aren’t so common. What is even harder to get is an expired website with lots of good backlinks that are also relevant to your website.

With return on investment being a major part of SEO, you don’t want to be throwing your money away. These domains are going to cost you money and that great site with 10,000 backlinks may not be as valuable as it first seems. Let’s take a look at the reasons why:

There’s been quite a bit of talk over this subject, especially with the whole personalisation thing going on recently. The question is “is the click though rate on your website in the SERP’s a factor used when ranking your website?”

While the aim of this website is to help educate and inform on SEO practices, it is intended for those who already have a basic understanding of SEO. If you are looking for an introduction to SEO or a beginner’s guide I have listed a few resources below, with my description and opinions on them:

The 301 has always been something I thought I could rely on. Google loved it. I loved it. It made things simple, the idea that the value of a page could be transferred so simply and so search engine friendly was one of the things that made SEO that bit simpler. A client had two domains with links to both causing duplicate content issues? No problem, just 301 it.Moving to a new domain and want to keep all of your pagerank? No problem, just 301 it. Not any more it seems…

This being the first post of the website I wanted to make it about something that is becoming more and more apparent in the search engine landscape, and is also creeping slowly into the mainstream media. Tagged suitably (seemingly) as “SEO conscription”, it is the methods big brands are using to help them manipulate the search results and further increase the control they have over their markets. It also helps to highlight the importance of branding – even for small businesses.