Did you know that Search Engines can penalise your pages if they are deemed to contain duplicate content? Just how much of a penalty you may incur is not precisely known, but bearing this in mind, you should try and avoid duplicating content across your site. So, how do you find out if you have too much duplicate content? Well, there’s a tool that can help you identify the problem, called the Similar Page Checker. You simply provide the URLs of two pages you want to check and it goes off and calculates how similar they are.

You can use this for any type of website, whether it’s a joke site, a site about motor home repairs or even a webmaster site like this one. Just another tool to add to your toolbox!

I came across an interesting post that outlines 5 warning signs of a weak social media strategy. These signs consist of:

• Lack of Focus on a Few Social Networks
• No Responsibility for Executing Social Media Activities
• Daily Tasks are Not Aligned with Social Media Strategy
• Metrics Are Not Being Measured
• There is No Social Media Strategy in the First Place!!

There are some interesting points that you need to look out for, especially if you’re hiring someone to do the job for you. It doesn’t matter if you’re selling ballet shoes or weight loss success stories, you need to make sure you know what you’re jumping into, otherwise you’re just wasting your money.

Actually, speaking about money, the most important part of your Social Media Strategy should always be an expectation of the ROI you’re targeting. You need to keep measuring the positive benefits of your campaigns to make sure you’re getting value from your activities.

This is where Google Sets can help. It’s an interesting tool from Google that lets you specify a bunch of words and will come up with words that form part of the same set. So, if you specify “red”, “blue”, “green” for example, Google Sets figures out that you’re talking about colours and will suggest a few more. Regardless if you’re working on a site that does home insurance quotes, or something as niche as an auction plugin for WordPress, figuring out the right keywords will help encourage more directed traffic to reach your website. Check out Google Sets, you may be surprised at the result.

photo credit: lazytcrochet

Cloaking is a technique that tries to trick search engines into ranking your site higher than it should. It works on the basis of checking whether the website is being accessed by a normal browser or buy a search engine and serving different content to both. Normal browser will see your standard content, while search engines will see a page stuffed with keywords and other devices designed to help ranking. So, for example, if your website sells adipex diet pills, you would show your sales page to legitimate users, but show search engines a page with a variety of brands to try and trick them into sending your competitor’s traffic your way.

As you can imagine, search engines don’t like this technique and you run the risk of being delisted for someone something like this. There’s a tool I can recommend to check if your site is being cloaked, which is the SEO Cloaking Checker tool. Just stick your URL in there and let the tool work it’s magic.

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Some of those are relevant, but some aren’t. I guess it’s up to you to use your discretion at that point.

Excellent write up on Search Engine Land doing a thorough SEO analysis on Bill Gates’ blog. It’s a great primer into search engine optimisation all grounded in some excellent SEO principles. There’s no need for the best seo software when you know what you’re doing. Whether you’re an experienced SEO engineer; or just trying to learn something to try and improve the performance of your site, it’s a great blog post to read and a great way to learn some of the guiding principles around search engine optimisation.

The trick as always is to make sure you’ve done some background research to enable your online strategy. It doesn’t matter if you’re marketing something as large as a Concorde, or as small as a Diamond Initial Pendant, knowing the boundaries of what you’re trying to do can be very helpful.

I guess, like with all things, a balance is what’s needed. You wouldn’t use just one lighting fixture in your house, yet you wouldn’ flood it with light either. Being aware of what’s needed and balancing out the different factors is usually the best way to go.