Clint's Web Marketing Blog

One of the most frequent issues or concerns I talk most about with my clients is duplicate content. Is it true that Google will penalize you for your duplicate content? Simply, yes they will.
Google has a webmaster help center and has a very good publication about duplicate content. Also check out the webmaster central blog where there is a great post about duplicate content as well. I suggest reading both as the information you read there is straight from Google. Because this information is out there, I don’t want to sound like a broken record on this issue, so I will just cover a three points.

1. “How to check for duplicate content?” It is a true pain in the butt to check for duplicated content, but thankfully someone a lot smarter than me has come to our rescue - www.copyscape.com. You can enter the URL of the page you want to check and CopyScape will return a list of pages that Google has indexed that contain text that is duplicated on your site, or for more detail you can subscribe to their copysentry service. I get asked all the time about “What percent of a page or website has to be duplicated before I get penalized?” the answer is 13.3333%. Sorry, just kidding, unfortunately none of the search engines reveal this information, mainly because if they did people would know the exact line to get to before they crossed it and would inhibit the search engines’ ability to prevent duplicate content.

2. “How can I make sure I don’t have duplicate content?” Simple, make sure it is written by humans, completely different from any other combination of letters, symbols or words on the web and clearly not manipulated or just reorganized. Here are a couple tips to avoid having your content duplicated:

• Make sure that your content is copy written exclusively for your use.
  
• If you have multiple domains that point to the same website content, take advantage of permanent redirection. (301 status report) This informs the spider of the redirection so they understand you are not putting up duplicate content.
  
• When you find duplicate content in your website, rewrite it in your own words so that the search engines can reindex the page with the new, original content.

3. “What to do if you feel someone has duplicated your content?” You can report the duplicate content issue to Google under the DMCA guidelines they provide at http://www.google.com/dmca.html

If you have any question or want to discuss in-depth your situation I would love to hear from you.

I get requests every day about optimization and search engine marketing (SEM). The goal of Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is to improve your website’s organic listings for a specific set of targeted keywords, i.e. Denver Lasik, San Francisco Cosmetic Dentist, or Cincinnati Personal Injury Lawyer. Each search engine has a ranking system of algorithms, methods of determining relevancy, and how often it will index pages. Unfortunately, this information is not made public. There are, however, what I call “Best Practices” to use to give your webpage a better shot at being recognized by the search engines and have them find it relevant and credible for those keywords or search terms. There are many “Best Practices” to use, so this post will cover the single most important one, content.

Content, and the organization of your content, is the single most important need for search engine optimization. Search engines rely on the content of a webpage to assess how pertinent and credible that information is to a specific search. The more strategically and unfailing a phrase is used within the content of a web page, the more pertinent and credible the search engines may consider that page to be for that phrase. This is called keyword density, but there is a point where too much of this will appear “spammy,” and raise a red flag in the search engines eyes and hurt your credibility. Another red flag is using duplicate or plagiarized copy. This will also hurt your credibility (to be covered in more detail in my next blog).

Writing content that is made for search engines requires a lot of work. You need to make sure it isn’t just “copy and paste” content. You also need to make sure that it is formatted in a way that it is easy to read and understand for any consumer that will come to your website. People read information from a screen much differently than a magazine or newspaper. I suggest writing at no higher than a 10th grade level. I also suggest having your content written just for your website. With that being said, when I work with a client, I need them to be devoted to the content and review it and give their input. After all, this website is a reflection of you and your practice.

After you have developed and written all the content to get your webpage up and live, (I suggest having 25 to 50 pages of content depending on how competitive your market is), there is an ongoing maintenance that needs to be preformed to keep your content up-to-date and fresh. This way, when the search engine comes around and indexes your pages, it will always see new, fresh content. Search engines love to see fresh content and they will index your pages more frequently when they see it.

There are a couple of ways of doing this, such as adding new pages every month, like FAQ pages, or specific procedure pages. However, the easiest way to add pages and keep fresh content is a blog. Blogging is so easy. You can write about a patient or client that just came through your door and was ecstatic with the their results from your practice. You can also put testimonials into your blog (in addition to an actual testimonials page). Also, develop links within your blog to direct the consumer to target pages. For example, if you are blogging about porcelain veneers, have a link to your porcelain veneers page so they can get more information.

These are just a couple “Best Practices” to use. In the paragraph above, I wrote about links within your blog, which helps with link building. Link building is another way to help your search engine results. If you would like to discuss link building, content development, or any other SEO-related questions, I would be happy to talk with you.

One of my clients recently asked me if they should do nothing? Meaning should they just keep doing what they are doing with the marketing they already have in place. My answer is really pretty simple and someone has already said it better than I ever could "If you keep doing what you're doing , you will keep getting what you're getting." With the economy the way it is you should never just do nothing. You should still be spending marketing dollars but spend them more wisely and in a more cost-effective way. When you're talking about web marketing and search engine optimization, time is the one thing we can never get back. Meaning it takes time for you to show up on the first page of the search engines. It doesn't just happen over night. You don't want to be desperate for leads and just now looking at the Internet to provide those leads. They won't come immediately, and you will be starving for six months and your competitors will be capitalizing on you having just done nothing.