GPWA Times Magazine - Issue 12 - April 2010

f HOT TIP – In the past when you moved domains to a new host (or in this case subdomains) it could take up toaweek.GoogleWMCnowhasa tool that makes this almost instantaneous. Just get your “A” address, move your contentandany redirects from thepar- ent site. (Remember, linking to thenew subdomain from your parent site will pass nearly 100% of the PR, trust and authority, even though it’s seen and treatedasa stand-aloneWeb site.) In a nutshell, I recommend that if you already have an existingWeb site with a TLDsuchasa .comor .cu.uk,and theyare your target market, do not use the geo- graphical targetingoption. Start building subdirectories using the top native lan- guage determined by looking at Google Analytics or your log files. Identify your top referrer language. If the languages are close, as it the case with the U.S., U.K.,NewZealandandAustralia, use the native idiom in the title, meta-tags and content. Build a new xml site map and manually submit it through all themain searchengines. The next step is to create a subdomain and get it hosted in the region that you are targeting. Build content in the native language, submit it and set up the geo- graphical target inWebmasterCentral. By implementing this strategy, you will have a significant advantageovermost of your competition (or a little less after this article is released). Whetherthesearch is initiated intheregion or outside the region, whether your site is located in theregionor justhosted there,or even if someone searches in thenative lan- guageormanually enters a specificGoogle engine like Google.com.mx or Google.es, youwillhave improvedsaturation. 7 Canonicalization – Because of development issues, server settings, programming plat- forms and even natural site progression a site may have multiple versions of a homepage, or evenanentire site. Let’s say you upgraded your site from an html site to a php site. Many times the crossover pages are left on the server and are craw- lable to the robots. These present several issues, two of themost serious being that you may have the same content and the newpagenevergets indexed, or linksback toyoumaybe todifferent versions. 8 I’ve seen a Web site that had eight individual and crawlable versions of the homepage live at the same time. Thiscanreduce thestrengthofyour page. (Everseeasite thathasa low- er homepage PR than an internal page?) The simplest and least painful way to fix this iswith301 redirects. 9 Other ImportantFactors Alt Attributes and Titles in Images – Use alt attributes on images to pre- serve content integritywhile providing internal links for ranking factor. Using thealt attribute in imagesallowsyou to reinforce topical relevancewith theon- 1. page, text-based content to improve a page’s relevance score. Anchor Text Optimization – Use per- tinent anchor text and do not waste link equity from excessively linking to nonreciprocating pages within a site. Employing anchor text optimization means using relevant keywords to link to relevant pages within a site. Do this enough andbefore youknow it you are virtual theming – creating a second- ary navigation contextually through keyword co-occurrence. This can dis- tinguish your site from competitors as each granular layer consolidates rank- ing factor for a Web site. This is why Wikipediadominates search results. Flattening Site Architecture – Keep your site architecture as flat as pos- sible or use breadcrumbs to aid in in- formation architecture and crawling. Don’tusesubfoldersexcessivelywithina Website:domain.com/categories/prod- ucts/colour/page.html vs. flattening the url and site by using more descriptive naming conventions for a page domain. 2. 3. Iknow I’mgoingtocatcha bitofflakfromcolleagues forreleasingsomeofthis information — Iseemtobe goodatdoingthat — but in theend it’saboutsharing informationandpassing it forward. 42 12 Top Secret SEO Tips