Another reason for taking such drastic measures had to do with being on Drupal. Seems I’m a bit of a CMS tinkerer and I’m always changing platforms just to have an excuse to see what’s under the hood of something new. I have experience working with Drupal, Expression Engine, Textpattern, and a number of others (now even Ektron CMS400.NET professionally), but I always end up coming back to Wordpress. I know, I know…Wordpress is not a CMS, but Wordpress is one of the few tools I’ve used that seems to be built from the ground up from a publisher’s perspective. And isn’t that what it’s ultimately about? Without getting into a lot of Drupal-bashing, I’ll just say that Drupal seems to be built by Drupal developers, for Drupal developers. If you’ve ever let your Drupal install get out of date and tried to upgrade through multiple releases, you know what I’m talking about. No more of that for me.

So I guess I’ll copy over a couple SEO articles I did earlier this year and post them retroactively. Other than that there’s not much to see here. I do have a number of events coming up that I’ll be posting about and topics I’d like to discuss. But this is marketing/social media/web geek land from now on. Fortunately I can now focus on writing instead of untangling CMS messes in my spare time.

When conducting a site audit, the low-hanging fruit for most good SEO folks is identifying duplicate content issues. On-page factors and link popularity can almost always use some improvement, but they’re not usually the kinds of things that actually do harm to your search engine rankings. Duplicate content, on the other hand, can actually hurt a web page that might otherwise have a good chance at a high ranking.

The Problem

Duplicate content issues arise when multiple URLs point to the same content. Consider the following URLs:

http://www.fec.gov/

http://fec.gov/

http://www.fec.gov/index.shtml

http://fec.gov/index.shtml

They all point to the home page of the Federal Election Commission, but they’re all different. So why’s that a problem?

A Political Analogy

Imagine an election where there are 1,000,000 registered voters – 500,000 Republicans and 500,000 Democrats. Three candidates – one Democrat, one Republican, and one right-leaning Independent – are running in the election. If you’re a partisan Republican, the obvious problem here is that the right-leaning Independent is likely going to split your party’s vote and the Democrat will have a better chance of winning the election.

The ranking of your web pages works in a similar way. Every time an external web page links to one of your web pages, it’s like a vote for that page. To rank high in search engines, you want as many votes for your page as possible. Since search engines view each URL as a separate page, the last thing you want to do is split the votes intended for a specific page among multiple URLs. This is essentially the problem of duplicate content: multiple URLs pointing to the same content.

Don’t let duplicate content split the vote for your pages!

The Fix: Canonical URLs

The non-technical explanation: decide on one standard URL for every page of your site and make sure that’s the one you always use. Also make sure any non-standard versions get redirected to the standard version.

The technical explanation: the standard URL you select is called a canonical URL. That’s a good term to whip out if you’re ever hiring an SEO person, but don’t ever use that term around anyone else or you’ll sound like an ass. Trust me.

Upon selecting a canonical URL for a given page of content, redirect any variation of that URL to the canonical version and issue a 301 header response (moved permanently).

For a great technical resource on how to do this, check out Steven Hargrove’s post, How to Redirect a Web Page, The Smart Way

Google’s Easier Fix

Recently Google announced a new way to specify your canonical URL, which will be supported by most major search engines. Now you can simply add a

tag to the head section of your web pages to specify the exact URL you wish to have indexed for a given page. To fix the FEC’s home page above, they might simply add the following:

<link rel=”canonical” href=”http://www.fec.gov/” />

Although I’m sure this feature does a good job at getting rid of duplicate content issues, I’m skeptical about whether it will pass link value as well as the 301 redirect does. I’ll be testing this soon, so I look forward to reporting back on its effectiveness.

Canonical Link Element Resources

If you’re interested in finding out more about the Canonical Link Element, you’ll find great articles at Conversation Marketing and SEOMoz. Also check out this video from Matt Cutts at SMX West:

Yes. More than ever.

If interest in a subject is an indicator of relevance, then SEO is clearly still alive and kicking. This graph, taken from Google Insights for Search, shows searches for “seo” at an all-time high.

The thing is though, SEO is changing…a lot.  It’s not about keywords in meta tags and PageRank anymore.  There are some big changes on the horizon for SEO professionals, and even though we’ve been seeing some of them for quite a while, 2009 might end up being the year we see the dials get cranked up significantly on the newer factors.

Incidentally, this article focuses primarily on Google since a) Google generates the lion’s share of organic search traffic, b) Yahoo! isn’t exactly leading the way in search these days, and c) Microsoft can’t even pay people to use their search engine. However, it stands to reason that any of the trends below that prove successful will be duplicated by other search engines.

So what does an SEO pro need to know?  Here’s my list…

Emerging Factors in SEO for 2009

Search Engine Circumvention

The extensive use of social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter can, to some extent, take the place of search engines in the sense that people are using them to find information. On Twitter, for example, you’ll find many direct requests for recommendations on various products, services, and information. In this example, search engines are circumvented altogether in favor of information exchanges within trusted social groups. I see this as a growing trend.

Social actions

Circumvention aside, social networks can help SEO quite a bit too. All those Diggs, Stumbles, Tweets, and Delicious bookmarks that come about as a result of publishing your outstanding content can generate significant direct traffic and drastically improve your site’s backlink profile, thereby improving organic rankings. Algorithmically speaking, it’s both conceivable and likely that the number of social actions corresponding to a particular URL will have direct affect on the search engine ranking for that URL.

Google SearchWiki

Google’s SearchWiki feature could dramatically affect search engine rankings if it achieves critical mass. I’m not referring to the literal change in rankings that takes place when a user selects a site to rank higher, but rather the Digg-like mechanism that’s created by many of these actions being recorded and subsequently introduced into Google’s ranking algorithm.

Semantic Search, Behavior-based Search, & Intent-based Search

I group these together because they are all equally fuzzy and debatable from my perspective, and each is intrinsically linked to the other. Semantic search attempts to understand a word or phrase’s meaning through disambiguation. For example, is a search for “the cure” in reference to the band or the book? Next, you have to understand semantics in order to present search results that contain related subject matter, which is of course the goal of behavior-based search. And finally, if you’ve compiled lots of data about the meaning and relationships of people’s searches, you can begin to anticipate and introduce new, eerily fascinating content to the unsuspecting user. Don’t be evil, huh? We’ll see.

Organic Click-through Rate

Click-through rate (CTR) has long been an important factor in determining your Quality Score for Google Adwords SEM campaigns, which determines what you’ll have to pay for each click on a given key phrase. It only makes sense that Google would apply CTR data to its algorithm for organic search results. If ten people search for “blue widgets” and four of them click on your link, you’ve got a 40% CTR. Whether or not that’s good depends on your position in the SERPs. If you’re in the #1 spot, a 40% CTR sucks and your rankings will drop. If you’re in the #7 spot, a 40% CTR is awesome and this will be reflected iteratively as the rankings shuffle.

Time on Site & Bounce Rates

This has likely been a ranking factor for some time, but as the analytical capabilities of the major search engines evolve, so too will their ability to measure and quantify user engagement as a means of determining search engine rankings. If you’re lucky enough to have a site that has good organic search rankings, yet struggles with a high bounce rate and low time on site, you should consider your days of high rankings numbered unless you can create more site stickiness. This will almost certainly become more important as a ranking factor considering the ease with which it can be measured today.

Universal Search

We’ve seen multimedia search results intermingled within the search engine results pages (SERPs) since around mid-2007, but we’re seeing them more and more. SEO folks need to be thinking about optimizing not only web pages, but every type of indexable media you see displayed in those universal search results.

Location-Based Search Results

Differences in the SERPs viewed from different geographical locations has been clearly evident for quite a while. I made the mistake once of bragging about a #1 result for a competitive phrase during a phone conversation with my boss from within the same building. Turned out his connection was routed through one of our corporate data centers in another state, and mine was going through a local Wi-Fi connection in our local office in Maryland. I tried to explain the location-based search thing, but he wasn’t impressed.

Conclusion

SEO has become a multi-disciplinary profession.  A serious SEO professional has to understand marketing, audience development, statistical analysis, web development, social trends, linguistics, and more. This makes SEO more relevant than ever – SEO 2.0, if you will.

So…what factors do you think will influence organic rankings the most in 2009?

Related Articles

This article was inspired by and expands upon several ideas presented in these two excellent articles:

• SEO 2009: Adapt or Die
• Will Personal Search Turn SEO On Its Ear?