http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qTmo21O04Kk
SEOmoz Beginners Guide to SEO – Ch4 Part 4 Review
URL Structures
In this part of the SEOmoz Beginners Guide to SEO – Ch4 Part 4 Review we find out about Uniform Resource Locators or URLs and where we can find them.
You also pick up five ways to make your URL user friendly.
Make it easy to read
Keep it short
Get your keyword in the URL
Make sure it is readable in the address bar, no numbers and symbols
Use hyphens to separate words
Duplicate Content and Canonicalization
Learn that duplicate content gets you penalized.
To avoid it you’ll need to make one page your main content page and have any other pages that have the same content point to it.
To be able to point duplicate content to the main designated page for that content you have a couple of options.
One is called a 301 redirect. It’s a piece of code that points any page with the same content to another page that is the one you want recognized by the search engines.
The second option is the Canonical Tag. It’s also a piece of code that achieves the same end.
Take a look at the video to see how they are set up and used. You can also read the transcript of the video that follows this post copy.
Rich Snippets
Rich snippets is another way to have descriptive text appear in the Search Engine Results Page other than the mcta description tag.
You’ll see how to set up the code to use rich snippets and maximize the odds of having your content rank for relevance.
You get a demo of a rich snippet and see how google defines them and the types of information that can be used as rich snippets.
Protecting Your Content
The last part of this section of the chapter recommends pingomatic and how to set up your code to protect your authorship and the content of your site from scrapers.
People will try to steal your content and present it as theirs so you need to take precautions to prevent that.
And that is it.
So take a look at the video.
Remember to “tweet”, “like”, “Google +1″, “Pin” the post if you find the information helpful. It helps get it out to others who might need it. Many thanks for your support.
There is a transcript for those of you who prefer to read all about this. So just click the read button.
Hey, Claude Pellane here at Affiliate Starting Line. Welcome. This is
going to be the continuation of the SEOmoz Beginner’s Guide To SEO video
series. We’re in Chapter 4, Part 4. It starts off here with URL
structures; uniform resource locators; the web address for a particular
document are of great value from a search perspective. Yes, they are.
What they do here in this part of the chapter is show you that URLs appear
in some main parts of the web, namely in the search results, in the address
bar, and even in content. What do we mean by that? Let’s take a look. In
the search results you’re going to see URLs appear right under the title
and the link of the search results. Here is this URL. There’s another one
here. They’re in green, and they’re pretty easy to identify. Generally,
they want you to be able to see those, and you should be able to tell from
the URL what the site is about. The next place you find them is in the
address bar. Here’s the Walk-In Company, and there’s the address bar with
the URL for the website there. Address bar is place number two. Place
number three, in content. This is the content of a blog, and right up here
is a reference to a URL. That’s the third part, where you can see URLs.
That basically is what that explains in this part of the chapter.
The next part they want you to understand is that there are five different
features to a URL that you should employ when you are designing or picking
a URL for a site. A, Employ empathy. They want you to place yourself in
the mind of the user and see if you can accurately predict when you look at
a URL what that site is about. What that page is about that you’re about to
go to. The shorter, the better. The shorter the URL, the better. That’s
not always possible, but at the very least you want your URL to be
descriptive of the material, or the page, or the copy that people are going
to find.
Keyword use. If you can, make sure that the keyword, that is, the main
keyword for that piece of content that is going to follow, is in the URL.
It’s easier to do that with certain content management systems, like
WordPress. If you can do it, do it. We’ll see what that’s all about in a
second. Go static. The best URLs are humanly readable without a lot of
parameters and garbage in them. They show you one here. Here is a URL
with blog?ID=123. Wouldn’t it be a lot better if you just had keywords
separated by hyphens, and those are what the last two features they talk
about. Those are five different ways to look at designing a usable URL.
The next piece of content talks about canonical and duplicate versions of
content. Duplicate content means that you have the same content on two
different pages of a website or more, and that same content could be there
for a valid reason. You may have a printable user piece of a page, and
then you have an HTML version of the page, but the point is that the
material on that page is the same. Canonicalization happens when two or
more duplicate versions of a webpage appear on different URLs. Now you’re
getting the same content across several pages, but each one of those pages
has a different URL. What can you do about it? Because the reason you
don’t want to do that is that it, in a sense, confuses the search engines,
and they penalize you for it. You could lose page rank, or you drop in the
rankings, etc., and you really don’t want to do that.
To avoid it, there are two methods. One is to use a 301 redirect, which is
a fancy way of saying you can tell the search engine when it reaches a
page, “Hey, this is the same content as I’ve got on another page, so I’m
going to send you to that other page, because that’s the important page
that you should pay attention to.” A 301 redirect does that. In this
case, the 301 designates a redirection that is permanent. You always want
that to happen. That’s one way. The second way is by using a canonical
URL tag. This achieves exactly the same end, but it does it by using a
piece of code and putting it into your HTML page, and that usually comes in
the form, in the case of WordPress, of a plug-in.
In this particular case, we have a content on this website, and down here I
can come down here and have a space for a canonical URL, or a 301 redirect.
In which I can put the web address of whatever the main page is that I want
to send the search engine to because the content on this page is duplicate.
Here is an actual demonstration of the two different methods you can use,
to avoid the duplicate content situation. That is what this part of the
chapter explains. They show you down here the link structure that you
would use if you wanted to type it in yourself in HTML, so that’s a link
really equals with canonical in quotes, and then there’s an H ref equals,
and then in quotes is the blog URL, as the URL you want to send the search
engine to as the main repository of that information.
Rich Snippets. This is another concept that you should know about. It’s a
little bit down the line in sophistication. You really don’t have to worry
about this if you’re really just starting out. But you should know about
it, and then somewhere down the line you’ll want to pay attention to it. A
rich snippet is just a piece of information that describes your site, but
it’s put in a certain type of code that designates it for the search engine
as more important than your meta-data description. So, the search engine
will pull that up and use that to describe your website in the search
results. That’s really it.
On the righthand side it shows you the code that you would use instead of
the normal HTML code. What it does, is it’s also designed for certain
types of information. To show you a rich snippet right here, this is a
rich snippet. It’s a review of a restaurant, and the content here, that
you’re going to see is going to be different that what they have on their
meta tag description, but it’s more relevant to what you’re going to get
when you click on the page. So, it adds relevance, and by doing that it
adds to your odds of ranking for that information. There is a place in the
Google thing, that explains what rich snippets are about. Rich snippets
pertain to certain types of information. In this case reviews, people,
products, businesses and organizations, recipes, events and music. If your
information falls into any one of those categories, then there is rich
snippet code that you can use, to make the search results more relevant,
and you stand a better chance of ranking.
The last part of the chapter is defending your site’s honor. This is all
about people who scrape content. Someone takes content of your website and
tries to use it on theirs. You want a way to protect yourself, so that you
get recognized as the author, and the way you want to do that is by using
pinging. In this case, they recommend a program called Ping-o-matic. What
that does, is when you put content on your website it sends notifications
to Yahoo, Bing, Google, Technorati, major sites that you’ve just created
content. They’re going to be aware that you created that content, so
you’ll get it indexed first, etc. So when somebody takes it, they can’t
really try to pass it off as their own. They show you here some code that
you can use, in order to make sure that when people click on links in that
content it comes back to your website. So that way it will confirm that
it’s your content and nobody else. It goes down here and gives you a link
so that you can understand how you can enforce your copyright and what to
do when somebody steals your information.
This is the end of Chapter 4 of the SEOmoz Beginner’s Guide to SEO. I hope
this video has been hopeful. These are very important concepts. You want
to spend some time going through them and getting a good handle on them,
because it will help you succeed on line. So, that’s it. I hope this has
been helpful. This is Claude Pelanne of Affiliate Starting Line. Stay
with it, stay well, and we’ll talk to you soon.