You can use Google Trends to see what’s happening in the world of search as well as in realizing past trends or keyword patterns that you can leverage when planning for future events.

Buying cycles

In the Western world, there are certain known buying cycles throughout the year. For example, the money modifier gift starts to spike from early November. It reaches its peak a few days prior to Christmas, only to go back to its regular level by the end of December. Figure 14-1 shows this concept.

Figure 14-1. Google Trends: Keyword “gift”

Online retailers know this sort of information and are always looking to capitalize on these trends. From an SEO perspective, site owners are typically advised to optimize their sites well before their anticipated shopping surge event, as it takes some time for search engines to index their content.

The trick when creating short-term content is to do it while the specific topic is still “hot.” Better yet, if you can anticipate the future buzz the content will generate, you will be a step ahead of your competition. Figure 14-2 illustrates search and news article volume trends for the keyword susan boyle (the unexpected frontrunner on the televised singing competition, “Britain’s Got Talent”).

Figure 14-2. Short-term content: Google Trends

From Figure 14-2, it should be easy to see what transpired over the past few years. From the beginning of 2004 to about April 2009, this keyword was not even on the map. Everything changed after the show was televised. News sites and blogs alike were in a frenzy to cover this emerging story.

Just a few months later, search volumes tumbled. And when you look closely at the graph in Figure 14-2, you can see another pattern. Figure 14-3 shows the same graph, but on a 12-month scale. You can see that in terms of search volume, interest in susan boyle was highest at the start of the graph (point A in the figure). When you look at the news reference volume graph, you can see how the news and blog sites scrambled to cover the news, as indicated by the first peak in the graph.

Shortly thereafter, the search volume plummeted (between points B and C in the figure), which is also reflected in the number of news articles generated during that time. By the time the second search volume peak appeared around mid-May (point C), many more news sites were competing for essentially the same story (and the same content). By July 2009 (point D), the search volume index and news reference volume were nearly identical.

Figure 14-3. Short-term content: Unexpected buzz

Although I am not going to go into detail on TV headlines that produce search volume peaks, this discussion should reinforce the importance of being ready to produce content so that you are one of the first sites to capture any unexpected buzz. You want to catch the first peak, as in this case, so that your content will be unique and fresh and you won’t have to deal with a large number of competitor sites in the same news space. You want to capture the search frenzy at its earliest.

Now let’s examine what happens when you can anticipate a certain event. For example, the most popular tennis tournament takes place every year at Wimbledon. Figure 14-4 shows a Google Trends graph for the keyword wimbledon.

Figure 14-4. Short-term content: Expected buzz

Several things should be clear when you look at Figure 14-4. The two peaks—indicating search volume index and news reference volume—are very much in sync. This should speak loudly about the preparation and production of content that mimics the buzz coming out of the tournament.

The high peak occurs around the tournament finals at the end of June; hence the highest news coverage during that time frame. Creating short-term content of expected events is much easier than doing the same for unexpected events. However, you will be facing a lot more competition for the same storylines.

If you are producing lots of semantically similar content, you should consider making it easy for people to add comments to that content. Each comment helps make your associated content page more unique. Content uniqueness is something to strive for, especially if you are in a competitive niche.

Modern sites try to make it easy for their visitors to comment on and share their content. Engaging visitors adds an element of trust when people can say what they wish to say about your products, services, ideas, and so forth. This is mutually beneficial, as you can use your visitors’ feedback to improve your products and services.

Staying ahead of the competition requires continual work. You cannot just design your site and leave. Creating a continuous buzz and interest is necessary to foster and cultivate your brand or business.

All things change. You need to ensure that your site is on top of the latest happenings in your particular niche. Using old information to attract visitors will not work.

Creating additional content to get more traffic is one of the oldest tricks in the book. Search engines are getting smarter by day, so to make this work, your content will need to be unique.

Make no mistake: the fact that content is unique does not automatically say anything about its quality. However, search engines can get a pretty good idea about the quality of your content based on many different factors, such as site trust, social bookmarking, user click-throughs, and so on.

A canonical link is like a preferred link. This preference comes to light when we are dealing with duplicate content and when search engines choose which link should be favored over all others when referring to identical page content.

Matt Cutts, Google search quality engineer, defines canonicalization on his blog site as follows:

You place the canonical link element in the header part of the HTML file, within the <head> tag. Its format is simply:

<link rel="canonical" href="http://www.mydomain.com/keyword.html" />

Let’s say you have a page, http://www.mydomain.com/pants.html, which you want to be the preferred page, as it points to the original (main) document. But you also have three other pages that refer to the same content page, as in the following:

To apply the newly supported canonical link element, you would place the following in each of the three preceding URLs, in the HTML header section:

<html>
<head>
<!-- other header tags/elements -->
<link rel="canonical" href="http://www.mydomain.com/pants.html" />
</head>
<body>
<!--page copy text and elements -->
</body>
</html>

Although the introduction of the canonical link element certainly solves some duplication problems, it does not solve them all. In its current implementation, you can use it only for pages on the same domain or a related subdomain.

Here are examples in which the canonical link element can be applied:

Here are examples in which the canonical link element cannot be applied:

The reason the big search engines do not support cross-domain canonical linking is likely related to spam. Imagine a domain being hijacked, and then hackers using the canonical link element to link the hijacked domain to one of their own in an attempt to pass link juice from the hijacked domain. Although the canonical link element is not a perfect solution, it should be a part of your standard SEO toolkit when dealing with content duplication.

Take care when using canonical link elements, as you could run into a situation such as this:

<!-- Page A -->
<html>
<head>
<link rel="canonical" href="http://www.mydomain.com/b.html" />
</head>
<body><!-- ... page A text ... -->
</html>

<!-- Page B -->
<html>
<head>
<link rel="canonical" href="http://www.mydomain.com/a.html" />
</head>
<body><!-- ... page B text ... -->
</html>

In this example, Page A indicates a preferred page, Page B. Similarly, Page B indicates a preferred page, Page A. This scenario constitutes an infinite loop. In this situation, search engines will pick the page they think is the preferred page, or they might even ignore the element, leaving the possibility of a duplicate content penalty.

There is certainly a debate as to the use of the trailing slash (/) in URLs. The implied meaning of a trailing slash in URLs is that of a directory. A URL with no trailing slash implies a specific file. With the use of URL rewriting, this meaning has become somewhat blurry in a sense. URLs that you see in web browsers may or may not be their true (unaltered) representations when interpreted at the web server.

From an SEO perspective, URL consistency is the only thing that matters. Google Webmaster Tools does report duplicate content URLs. For example, Google will tell you whether you have two URLs, as in the following fragment:

http://www.mysite.com/ultimate-perl-tutorial
http://www.mysite.com/ultimate-perl-tutorial/

You can handle this scenario by using the following URL rewriting (.htaccess) fragment:

RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} !(.*)/$
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.mysite.com/$1/ [R=301,L]

All requests will now be redirected (using the HTTP 301 permanent redirect) to the URL version with the trailing slash. If you prefer not to use a trailing slash, you can use the following:

RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} ^(.+)/$
RewriteRule ^(.+)/$  /$1 [R=301,L]

The notable difference in this example is in the second line of code, which checks to make sure the resource is not a directory.

Sometimes people will make mistakes by adding multiple slashes to your page URLs in local or external inbound links. To eliminate this situation, you can use the following URL rewriting segment:

RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} ^(.*)//(.*)$
RewriteRule . %1/%2 [R=301,L]

You do have the time and control to enforce how people link to your site. Suppose you own a domain called SiteA.com that can be reached by either http://siteA.com or http://www.siteA.com. You’ve decided to use the http://www.siteA.com version. You can easily implement this with the following URL rewriting (.htaccess) fragment:

RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^siteA.com$
RewriteRule (.*) http://www.siteA.com/$1 [R=301,L]

If you purchased a few misspelled domains, you can use a similar method to redirect those misspelled domains. The following is the URL rewriting (.htaccess) fragment to use:

RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^www.typodomain.com$
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.principaldomain.com$1 [R=301,L,NC]

RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^typodomain.com$
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.principaldomain.com$1 [R=301,L,NC]

In this example, we are redirecting both http://typodomain.com and http://www.typodomain.com to http://www.principaldomain.com.

Sometimes you may want to use secure web browser–to–web server communications. In this case, you will want to redirect all of the pertinent HTTP requests to their HTTPS counterparts. You can do this by using the following (.htaccess) fragment:

RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTPS} off
RewriteRule (.*) https://%{HTTP_HOST}%{REQUEST_URI} [R=301,L,NC]

If you have an e-commerce store, you may want to redirect users back to HTTP for all pages except those containing a specific URL part. If all of your billing (payment) pages need to be run over HTTPS and all of the billing content is under the https://mywebstore.com/payments path, you can use the following (.htaccess) fragment:

RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTPS} on
RewriteRule !^payments(/|$) http://%{HTTP_HOST}%{REQUEST_URI} [R=301,L,NC]

There are two types of site mirroring: legitimate and unethical. We will discuss the legitimate case. For whatever reason, website owners might need to create multiple mirror sites of essentially the same content. If one site was to go down, they could quickly switch the traffic to the other site (with the same or a different URL).

If this is the case with your site arrangement, you want to make sure you block search engines from crawling your mirror sites. For starters, you can disallow crawling in robots.txt. You can also apply the noindex meta tag or the X-Robots-Tag equivalent.

If you happen to syndicate your content on other sites, Google advises the following:

You may also want to consider syndicating just the article teasers instead of the articles in their entirety.

You can list all of your important pages in your Sitemaps, as we discussed in Chapter 10. Although search engines do not provide guarantees when it comes to what they index, you can try this approach. If you have many similar pages, you might want to consolidate them as per Google’s advice.

Another way to bring your important pages back to the forefront is to link to them from your other internal pages. You can do the same with any external backlinks.

In addition, you could bundle important long-term content pages in another hotspot reference area for easy finding. One example of this concept is with sticky posts in forums that include posts, such as forum guidelines and forum rules. For other types of sites, you might have a top-level page that links to these important links.

Many newer CMSs also provide an article subcategory view. This approach takes advantage of the semantic relationships between different articles. This provides for better semantic structure of the site.

If you’re changing your custom code, ensure that you block duplicate paths to your content. Even if you are using a free or paid CMS, chances are you will need to make some SEO tweaks to minimize and eliminate content duplication.

Hot link prevention is one of the oldest ways webmasters can prevent other sites from using their bandwidth. You can implement hot link prevention with a few lines of code in your .htaccess file:

RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^$
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^http://(www.)?mycoolsite.com/.*$ [NC]
RewriteRule .(gif|jpg|png|vsd|doc|xls|js|css)$ - [F]

When you add this code to your site, no one will be able to directly access any of the document types as specified in the rewrite rule.

The psychology of image search is different from regular searches. Image searchers are usually more patient. At the same time, they are pickier. Therefore, optimizing your images makes sense. The added benefit of image optimization is that your images will show up in the main search results blended with text results. They also appear on Google Maps.

Images need to be accessible. Ensure that your robots.txt file is not blocking your image folder. Make sure X-Robots-Tags are not being used on your server (sending the noindex HTTP header). You can see whether any of your existing images are indexed by Google by issuing the following commands (when in the Images tab):

site:mysite.com
site:mysite.com filetype:png

You can do the same thing in Bing by issuing the following command:

site:mysite.com

The image filename should contain keywords separated by hyphens. Ideally, the full path to the image will contain related keywords. All images should have the ALT text with specified width and height parameters.

Consider making images clickable, surrounded by relevant descriptive copy. If an image is clickable, the destination page should be on the same topic and should include the same or a larger version of the image. When linking to images, use descriptive anchor text with pertinent keywords.

To include your site’s articles in Google News, you will need to submit your link to Google for approval, as described at http://bit.ly/1UeZHp. Google will review the link to ensure that it meets its guidelines. There is no guarantee of inclusion.

When approved, utilize the Google News Sitemaps when submitting your news content. We already talked about creating news Sitemaps in Chapter 10. In early 2009, Google published several tips for optimizing articles for Google News. Here are the eight optimization tips Google recommends:

With the Google News platform, the more clicks your articles produce, the better. Google is tracking all of the clicks on its Google News portal. As of this writing, the following is the HTTP header fragment when clicking on one of the articles:

GET /news/url?sa=t&ct2=ca%2F0_0_s_0_0_t&usg=AFQjCNFjVmWpHfAZj—
UVnmQA6HjxXyuYg&cid=1292192065&ei=cqR7SsD5Fqjm9ASm_p-
OAw&rt=HOMEPAGE&vm=STANDARD&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.cbc.ca%2Fhealth%2F
story%2F2009%2F08%2F06%2Fswine-flu-vaccine.html HTTP/1.1

This request is then followed by a 302 (temporary) HTTP redirect to the (news) source site:

HTTP/1.x 302 Found
Cache-Control: private
Content-Type: text/html; charset=UTF-8
Location: http://www.cbc.ca/health/story/2009/08/06/swine-flu-vaccine.html
Date: Fri, 07 Aug 2009 03:50:21 GMT
Server: NFE/1.0
Content-Length: 261
http://www.cbc.ca/health/story/2009/08/06/swine-flu-vaccine.html

In this way, Google can easily test and promote articles that are getting the most clicks.

The Google Product Search platform allows sellers to create product feeds. Sellers can increase their website traffic and sales. The platform setup is free of charge. You can create your account by registering for an account with Google Base. According to Google:

Currently, Google Base supports the following product feed formats: tab delimited, RSS 1.0, RSS 2.0, Atom 0.3, Atom 1.0, and API. When constructing your feeds, pay special attention to the product title and description fields. These are the fields that will appear in the Google Product Search results. Make use of your targeted keywords with a call to action.

It is believed that Google favors older feeds just like it favors older domains. Also note that Google Product Search lists seller ratings as well as product reviews in its search results. Products with better reviews are favored in the search results. Figure 14-6 shows a sample Google Product Search results page.

Figure 14-6. Google Product Search results page