Ask Kalena

Oooh you're back! Lookin good. Have you lost weight? Yes, that was a compliment designed to butter you up for my next question. Subscribed to my feed yet? :-)

Hi Kalena

I use a company that “specializes” in mortgage sites and hosting. Since I am in the process of applying everything I am learning, I saw fit to have my site graded by one of the many online tools available.

The tool showed that my site is coming up for both the www and non www versions of my domain. When I enquired with my host about doing a 301 for my domain to one version, they said

“There is nothing we or you can reset on the Xsites as this is beyond anything we have control over. We do not support any of this nor have the capability for any one else to have it”.

How much is it going to hurt me in SEO if I don’t get this fixed like the site grader suggested?

Alex

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Hi Alex

What you’re referring to here is domain canonicalization.

Search engines can sometimes index both www and non www versions of your domain, creating duplicate content headaches for you and also link popularity dilution. Therefore, it’s best for SEO purposes if you can stick with one version of your domain and make sure all links point to that version. The www version is my recommendation because most sites will link to you using that version anyway.

Judging by the response you got from your hosts, it sounds like they’re not familiar with the issue of domain canonicalization, which is concerning. If your site host won’t allow you to use a 301 to create a conditional redirect to your preferred version, you probably need to get a new host!

Alternatively, you can use the Canonical Link Element. You can also specify your preferred URL version in Google Webmaster Tools.

My blog post Does the canonicalization of my URL impact my search engine rankings? might also be of interest.

Today marks a milestone for me.

On behalf of the Canterbury Development Corporation, I presented a 3 hour SEO workshop to a group of small to medium business owners based in Christchurch. Nothing too unusual about that, I’ve run workshops before and have presented at conferences and seminars quite a few times over the years.

But what made today different was that it was the very first time I can remember NOT being nervous prior to the event.

Let me explain. I HATE public speaking. Ok, so most people hate it. But the idea of speaking in public makes me sweaty palms anxious and physically ill.  My legs wobble while I’m up on stage, I develop a deer-in-the-headlights stare and I tend to mumble or speak too fast in the hope that the whole ordeal will be over faster. Consequently, I’m not very good at it. Think Bridget Jones without the amusing vocabulary.

But I continue to accept speaking opportunities and MAKE myself go through it. Why? Because I don’t like things that scare me and I want to conquer the fear. I’ve had other people tell me that the more you speak in public, the better you get and the less it intimidates you, so I’ve followed their advice and keep saying YES to situations requiring me to address an audience.

Today, that persistence seems to have paid off. It’s true I was a little jittery yesterday as it dawned on me I would be speaking in front of an audience in a few hours, but that initial fear lasted about 20 minutes. I slept well last night and today, I woke up feeling great. A gym class in the morning got my adrenalin flowing and by the time 1pm rolled around I was feeling confident and, (for the very first time), actually excited about the idea of getting up in front of an audience. I kept waiting for the butterflies to announce themselves in my stomach but they never came!

I spoke more confidently than ever before, had fun with the attendees and enjoyed myself from start to finish. It helped that I had prepared really well, made my slides interesting and interactive, plus I had a very responsive audience. I’m sure all these things contributed, but after 10 years of public speaking terror,  today felt like a huge personal milestone and I’m very proud to have passed it.

Now, if I could just conquer my fear of clowns.

In a single day, Bing has increased the number of fans of their Facebook page by 500 percent. How? By using clever social media advertising embedded within the popular Facebook application Farmville.

The advert appeared yesterday inside the game Farmville, encouraging players to become a fan of Bing in exchange for free farm cash (the virtual currency used within Farmville). As an incentive for players to act, Bing positioned themselves as the ideal search engine to help them win the game with tips and solutions for how best to use their crops and animals. Probably the cleverest part of the promotion was the fact that users could fan the Bing page without interrupting their game.

As a follow up, Microsoft’s social media team then set about creating dedicated updates for Farmville users on the Bing Facebook page.

The Bing Facebook page started the day yesterday with around 100,000 fans and that figure is now well above 500,000.

Dear Kalena

A client asked me to check results on about 30 of her company’s list of search terms (breast augmentation L.A.; breast augmentation Beverly Hills; nose job L.A. etc. etc.)

Question: am I going to get reliable results by just typing those terms into a Google search box on my computer — 90 miles away from the client — and noting the SERPs?

Charles

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Hi Charles

With Google Personalized Search, Google Social Search and Universal Search thrown into the mix, these days the SERPs that one person sees may not be the same SERPs another person sees – even if they are located in the same room!

If your client wants to know specific rankings, make sure you are logged out of any Google accounts and then run the checks. It might be faster if you use an online rank checking tool – you can find these listed under the tools category at SearchEngineWiki.com or by running a Google search.

BUT, if I were you, I would run those search terms through keyword research tools to make sure your client is targeting the right terms in the first place. It might be that she is targeting terms that very few people type into search engines, OR terms that are too competitive for her to achieve high rankings. Your keyword research might pinpoint better choices for her.

Good luck!

Hey Kalena,

What are your thoughts on having links to other pages of my web site at the bottom of each of my web pages? Will this help or hurt our rankings? Is this a more outdated practice?

Thanks! -Lisa

Hi Lisa,

Including Links within a site wide footer is a fairly common practice that has been around for a long time – and in fact has seen a bit of a resurgence in the designs of a lot of Web 2.0 sites.

Providing you are sensible in the use of these types of links they should help, rather than hurt your rankings.  In many cases the footer provides a logical place to provide links to the main sections of your site – and also allows you to include search engine friendly text based (and keyword rich) anchor text.

Footer links can make it easier for users to navigate your site – without having to scroll back to the top of the page.  However,  I recommend that you use footer links in moderation – I suggest a maximum of a dozen or so.  If there are too many (particularly if they are heavily keyword optimised) they can start to look spammy (to search engines as well as users) and may start to have a negative impact on rankings and conversions.

Google has also suggested that you should try and limit the number of links per page  to a maximum of about 100.  If you have a large number of links in your page footers this could become an issue.

As a general rule, if it’s good for your users it will be good for search rankings.  If you are thinking of doing anything to your site primarily for the benefit of the search engines rather than your users, then you should think long and hard before going ahead with it.

Andy Henderson
Ireckon Web Marketing