A while back, Google introduced the Canonical Link Element to help site owners deal with duplicate pages getting indexed in Google (such as printer friendly pages, which have almost exactly the same content as the original article).

It’s very widely used now but it’s not 100% accurate and if you make a mistake with it (which can happen) then don’t expect Google to help you out, as this experiment shows.

For what it’s worth, I don’t use it on any of my sites.  You can build a site without having to bodge duplicate content up.

One of my favourite blogs is Red Cardinal and they have written a great study into how to request car insurance quotes online.

With some great screenshots, they’ve shown just how awful some of the major websites make the user experience.

Check it out over here: http://www.redcardinal.ie/conversion-optimisation/31-08-2009/how-to-smother-your-prospects-and-kill-your-leads

I’m now an contributor over at the excellent Ask the Expert section on the Start-up Community website.

http://www.startupcommunity.co.uk/speakerscorner/speaker.asp?id=74023

So if you have any website or internet marketing questions, head on over there and ask away.  There are lots of other resources for small business owners or start-ups too.

Dmoz is one of the more useful links to get.  Not only is it a trusted resource, since it’s hand edited, but many websites use it to build up their own link directory.  I’ve seen PR6 links from sites that get all of their data from dmoz.

It’s generally accepted that dmoz is tricky to get listed in because they have a small number of editors but a huge number of submissions.  However, there’s a difference between something being tricky and something being impossible.

For over a year now, I’ve been trying to get a couple of websites listed with Dmoz.  Not once have I had any success.  I though I’d try to contact dmoz to see what was going on but after a look through the site, I couldn’t find an email address or even a feedback form. This is despite them having the following sentence on their website:

“The Open Directory team welcomes comments and feedback about the directory generally. Please let us know what you think, and how we can improve the service. Thanks!”

They do have a blog, so I took a look at that and found the comments were generally all from frustrated people in the same boat as me except some had been waiting 3 years.  3 YEARS!

Perhaps I’m being picky but if you’re making your people wait 3 years then it might be time to look at your processes and see what can be done to streamline them.

I accept that dmoz is a volunteer run website and that it’s free to submit and be listed.  Really I shouldn’t be complaining at all because I’m not paying for anything.  But I do find the situation frustrating because there is no way to address the problem and there’s no feedback from them.  It’s genuinely and case of submitting and then crossing your fingers and hoping.

Have you got any tips on how to get a listing in dmoz?   Add them in the comments.

In the past, I’ve often told people not to go crazy and check their website rankings every day because they’ll end up going crazy.  If you see your website drop down a couple of places then it’s natural to go and change something to try and rectify it but you might actually cause a worse reaction.  Rankings can change day to day (and even hour to hour) and this is perfecly natural.  If you react at every little change then you’ll have no time for anything else and risk breaking your site properly!

Of course, I don’t always follow my own advice and I like to keep a track of where our websites are ranking for our most important keywords.  In the past I’ve done it manually because I didn’t find any tools that worked well for me.  They either kept querying Google repeatedly (which is against Google’s Terms of Service) or they were unreliable and would miss out days, websites and keywords meaning that the results that I got were pretty useless.

So I reverted to keeping a few spreadsheets and tracked the most important keywords for my main sites myself.  It was time intensive so I only did it once a week but it was good because you could see the competition as they came and went.  Still, it took a lot of time!

Over the past couple of weeks I’ve been trying out Advanced Web Ranking and it’s the first automated search engine ranking tool I’ve used that works well for me.  The nice thing about it is that it just works, calmly doing its thing in the background without getting in your way – that can’t be said for most of the tools out there.

It runs on my desktop, so doesn’t require installation on a server anywhere and it doesn’t screw up Google with repeated requests that ends up getting your IP banned.  I don’t know how it does it but it works in a perfectly natural way without upsetting Google – that’s a very good thing!

The key features for any product like this is that it should be able to track any number of websites, any number of keywords for those website and it should keep records so that you can see any trends over time.

AWR has all of these features and quite a few more.

Scheduling

You can set up your websites and the schedule AWR to check the rankings periodically.  So if you want to check your rankings every day then AWR will do and it runs as a service so you don’t need to have AWR running all of the time.  Of course, your computer needs to be switched on but if you’re at it all day then it’s not a big deal to schedule it to run at 11am every day.  There’s no noticable degredation in performance.

Reporting

The reporting functionality is fantastic.  You can create customised reports to show your keyword positions and schedule AWR to generate them periodically.  You can also email them – either to yourself or to your clients. So if you spend a lot oftime generation SEO reports then AWR can really seriously minimise the time you spend doing that.

Search Engines

I’ve only used AWR with Google but you can choose from a mind boggling range of search engines (regionalised or not) to check your rankings.

Graphs

The graphs are extremely useful because, at a single glance I can see my search engine ranking and immediately check out any issues with my keywords.  By showing a trending graph of each of my keywords, if I see a sudden drop or something that doesn’t quite look like, I can address it straight away.

In the past, checking every keyword every day was pretty much impossible in terms of the amount of time it would take, so if a keyword dropped out for any reason then you wouldn’t notice it unless you chanced upon it.  But now, by combining the scheduling functions with the keyword rank graphs you can immediately see any issues as they arise.  I’ll need to update my advice so that instead of checking your ranking every day, you check AWR every day to make sure that everything is ticking over nicely!

Do I have any criticisms?  Not really.  It took me a little bit of time to understand how I should be setting it up, but I didn’t really read the manual or check out the tutorial so I can’t complain about that!

Also, if you have a lot of keywords then it can take quite a while to gather the results.  So if you’re looking for the results quickly when you first set up the project then you’ll be disappointed.  But the tool is meant more as a reporting tool than an instant ranking tool and in that respect it is excellent.

Conclusions

I’m not one to get too excited about software but AWR works nicely.  Once you have everything set up then it sits in the background and only notifies you about its existence when you fire it up or when you get an email with the ranking data.

I haven’t yet fully explored the software so there is probably much more additional functionality for those that need it. There’s also a keyword research tool. For me though, it does everything that I need and without any drama.

Prices start at $99 for a single licence for the standard edition.  For most website owners, that will be enough and you’ll make your money back very quickly in the time you’ll save for checking rankings.

For more information, check out the AWR website at http://www.advancedwebranking.com

One of the things we’ve seen time and again is when someone has an old website that hasn’t been updated for months or even years.  They get a new website with wonderful SEO, they put it live fully expecting it to hit page 1 and it ends up lower down than it was originally!

Cue frantic changes and irate phone calls!

This is one of the hard parts of SEO – you need to have patience.  While your first impressions will be that your new website has been a colossal waste of money this is actually quite a normal reaction.

I don’t know why this happens – you’d have to ask Google and they probably won’t tell you – but I can imagine Google’s thought process going like this:

- OK, a month has passed, let’s go and check out www.customersite.co.uk and see if anything has happened

- Wow, it’s totally changed – there is nothing left over from the old site

- Well, I suppose I should promote it to the top of the listings because it’s been so well optimised

- But what if it hasn’t?  What if it’s been hacked? And why would they change everything on it in one go?

- Hmm, this isn’t totally normal.  It’s a site that never been updated for 6 months and all of a sudden EVERYTHING has changed on it!

- OK, I’m going to push it down the rankings a bit just in case it’s been hacked and keep an eye on it for a month or so.  If people are clicking on it then I’ll assume it’s OK and promote it to its rightful place.

Meanwhile, for a month you’re pulling your hair out wondering what’s gone wrong with the site and your web developer/SEO guy are getting phone calls from you every day asking what’s going on!

It’s frustrating – I know.  I doesn’t happen to every website but I’ve seen it happen.

Unfortunately there isn’t much you can do about it.  Just keep calm, don’t make any rash changes to the website (although feel free to update news stories etc) and in a month or two it’ll sort itself out.

I know a month or two sounds like a long time, but if you haven’t updated your site for months then Google has no reason to check your site out too often.  Yet another reason for making sure you update your site as often as you can.

Has this happened to you?  How long did it take to sort itself out and did you do anything to speed it up?

We’ve talked a lot about getting the right keywords and putting them in your documents but one thing I haven’t mentioned is where in your web page you should put.

Google assumes that if your page is about a particular topic then you’re more likely to mention that topic nearer the start of the page, so you should really aim to get your keywords in the first paragraph if possible.

The same goes for your title tags – the best place to get your keyword(s) is right at the very start of the title tag.

Also, without going crazy, make sure you mention your keywords a few times if it won’t affect the readability of the text.

Campaign Monitor is an excellent site for sending out newsletters.  We use it for our MMD newsletter and it works really well – lots of functions and behind the scenes works well as well.  Email servers are very jumpy about spam and newsletters can often be marked as spam, but if they come from Campaign Monitor’s servers then they usually get through.

However, at the weekend, Campaign Monitor’s servers were hacked into and the hackers sent some of their own spam to some of the account lists that they were storing.  This isn’t great news but Campaign Monitor dealt with it admirably.

For a start, they locked down their servers and did everything the can to stop this happening again.

Then, crucially, they contacted every member of Campaign Monitor to explain what happened, offer their apologies, tell them what the likely impact was and explain what they’re doing to avoid this happening again.  They also blogged about it as well – there was no attempt to avoid the bad publicity.

Their twitterstream is full of replies to people that were concerned about what’s happened.  They’re making a huge effort to deal with every single concern.

If you read the comments of their blog post you’ll see that there are very few criticisms of them.  People appreciated their response and their honesty and shared their upset at what had happened.

For me, this is a textbook example of how to deal with such a situation.  Fix it, minimise the chance of it happening again, tell everyone possibly affected by it and offer profuse apologies and then deal with every subsequent enquiry.

Campaign Monitor have come out of this looking very good indeed.

This is part of an occasional series looking at some of the poorer websites found on the web today. For the previous post, click here.

Today we’re looking at the visual crime that is http://www.msy.com.au/ – “The Name You Can Trust”.

I’m not too sure where to start with this one.  It’s a sort of minimalist design in that it has no images but it’s let down by being drenched by colours and having links going everywhere.

To be honest, it’s giving me a headache because I don’t know what to focus on first.  The colours are dreadful – for some reason they’ve got solid borders in purples, reds and blues on a lot of the text in an attempt to make it stand out.  Not a bad idea in principle but it seems to be applied all over the shop in a random way – especially on this page: http://www.msy.com.au/Parts/manufacturerPromotional.htm.  That just makes it look terrible rather than drawing the eye to one particular element.

That bring me to another thing, every link that you click opens in a new window.  This is so incredibly annoying. Assuming that I actually wanted to go through the site and look at all the information on the site (I don’t) then I would have literally 30 or 40 new tabs in my browser.  Madness.

The thing the site does best is enable you to find their retail premises.  If you want to find a shop then you’re pretty well catered for as long as you have a magnifying glass and you can see the right link to click – the text is so small that it can hardly be read.

Finally, there’s something called “YES, We Are Ready & Works!!!” – I don’t know what it means but it must be important because they’ve said it twice.

From what I can see, this website has:

• details of all of the locations they have shops
• information on vacancies
• information on what parts and systems they stock, plus prices
• special offers

That’s not too complicated really but they’ve managed to make a total hash of presenting this information on their website.

As a company with what looks like around 20 retail branches across the country, their website is letting them down badly. The image is incredibly amateur and so I wouldn’t spend one Australian dollar with them.  It seems to be that they can’t be IT experts as they claim and have a website like this.

However, you don’t get to have 20 shops if you don’t have a clue about IT so their website.  So whatever the truth is, this website is really damaging their business.

My advice to them, as it is to most people with a really crummy website – spend some money, get a good web designer and a good copywriter in.  Build a professional website with effective navigation, compelling copy and a professional image.  It’ll be money well spent because you’ll see an increase in business from it and you’ll recoup your money through additional sales pretty quickly.

There are a huge stack of tools out there to help you make the most of Twitter.  There are varying levels of quality but one of the tools that I’ve been playing with today is Tweepi and it’s impressed me hugely.

Geeky Follow

One of the problems that people have with Twitter is finding people that are worth following.  My advice is to search for a particular topic and then follow the people that are tweeting about that topic.  One other way is to find an authority in that space and look at the people that are followign that authority.

Geeky Follow shows you their followers and lists how often they tweet, how often they are retweeted and their follower numbers and ratios.  The reason for the name, Geeky Follow, is that you can use statistics to work out whether you’d like to follow those people.  It’s quite an innovative way of finding new people to follow.

Geeky Cleanup

You might find that you have hundreds of people following you but that none of them actually tweet.  Also, some people look at your follower numbers and ratios before deciding whether to follow you or not so it’s actually quite important to keep some kind of balance.  If you’re following 1000 people but only 5 people are following you then people will assume you have nothing of interest to say.  But if you are following 1000 people and 1500 are following you then it might encourage more people to follow you.

So you can remove those people you’re following that never tweet by using Geeky Cleanup to identify them.

Geeky Flush

Geeky Flush is used in a similar way to Geeky Cleanup because it identifies those people that you are following but who aren’t following you and removes them.  Of course, you don’t want to remove EVERYONE that isn’t following you because there are plenty of interesting people that aren’t following you!  But Geeky Flush helps you identify those people you’re following that aren’t providing you with any benefits.

Geeky Reciprocate does the oppostite – finds those people following you that you’re not following.

Of course, if you’re not fussed at all about your follower numbers or ratios then you won’t be interested in Tweepi, but if you want to analyse them then this is one of the best tools I’ve come across.