Call it PageRank attrition or PageRank decay, but the story seems to be that 301 redirects cause it.

OK, I guess this doesn’t surprise me, but what’s the real story here? Is it that you shouldn’t do 301 redirects? No, sometimes that may in fact be the best thing to do. I think the real lesson is to plan your website and Internet marketing strategy so that you don’t have to resort to 301 redirects.  Otherwise, there may be times when you do want to redirect a page to another page or an entire site even.

I won’t go into all the scenarios when such a redirect might be necessary. I will say that PageRank is not the holy grail of metrics. It’s somewhat important in earning trust, but if you find yourself having learned that previous ways of conducting business online are less effective than buying a new domain name and starting over, a 301 redirect might actually help you. Besides, your new domain is going to gain PageRank of its own so in time that attrition won’t really matter.

A lot has been said in the last couple of years about duplicate content. Some people think you’ll be penalized if you get caught with it. Others know that you just don’t get credit for content that appears multiple times across various websites. But is it always a bad thing to have duplicate content?

While I wouldn’t encourage webmasters to just go out and start adding the same article to every website they own, the truth is you can make money from duplicate content.

There is one instance where duplicate content can benefit you. If you have an affiliate program and a tried and tested sales page that you know works, you can offer your sales page for use to all of your affiliates. That sales page would sit on each affiliate’s website and all traffic each page sends to you will be tracked with an affiliate code so that you can pass the proper credit to each affiliate.

So how does this benefit you and your affiliates? Obviously, it won’t benefit your affiliates as far as SEO is concerned. That sales page’s first publication – on your website – will be the one indexed. And now you’re asking, “Won’t that discourage your affiliates?” No, not really.

Most of your affiliates are going to drive traffic to their sales page with PPC ads, blogs and articles. SEO won’t matter to them. If the sales page converts traffic to customers then it will do its job no matter how the affiliates drive traffic to it. They won’t be so much concerned with SEO for that page as they will conversions.

In that case, duplicate content would be good. But don’t tell that to the SEOs who just repeat the same mantra they heard someone else say.

Relax. Google doesn’t rank websites based on meta descriptions. It’s not a factor at all. But those descriptions do appear as snippets in Google’s search engine results pages. People click on listings based on the snippet. If the snippet sells the click through then more people will click on your listing.

Note that all of this is informed by the following data:

• Google delivers personalized search for everyone, signed in to their personal account or not
• Google chooses a snippet based on the search query
• Your meta description will not always be the snippet
• The more someone clicks through to your website, the higher your website will go in the SERPs when they search for relevant keywords

If you optimize your meta descriptions for search you stand a much better chance of rising higher in the rankings. It’s not because Google will favor it, but because the traffic will elevate it.

SEO is a tool, and like any tool it has its proper application and its limitations. For instance, if you want to build a house you’ll need a step ladder, some hammers and nails, various sizes of plywood and other lumber, drywall, and some paint, plus a few other items. If you want to fix a leak in your car’s radiator hose then you’ll need the proper tools for doing that. Hammer and nails won’t help you.

As a marketing tool, SEO is useful for helping you rank your web pages for the keywords that you want to target. But it does have its limitations.

SEO can’t help you build relationships. It can’t help you sell your product. It can’t get attention on your favorite social network. And it can’t perm your hair. Limitations.

The one thing that SEO can do, and do better than anything else, is push your website up in the search engine rankings. Of course, you have to do all the right things to make that happen. Just like using a hammer; use it incorrectly and it won’t do much to help you build that house. But use it properly and it can do wonders.

SEO is a useful tool. Learn how to use it and it will serve you well.

Yesterday we discussed asynchronous tracking and page load time. But there’s more to page load than a simple script and I believe Google is about to get serious about including page load times in its ranking algorithms.

Google John Mueller has a great blog post on Site Performance and how it can help you improve your page load times.

I did a little bit of playing around with this tool and I’m pretty impressed. It’s quite simple, really, but very useful. Suggestions for improving a site’s page load time include such things as:

• Enable gzip compression
• Combine external JavaScript
• Minimize DNS lookups
• Combine external CSS

I’ve got a feeling these are all pretty common issues. For instance, how many CSS files do your pages have? A lot of webmasters use 2 or 3 CSS files for their pages when 1 will do. And DNS lookups can kill a site. If you have a lot of external files that are housed on another server, that can seriously slow your load time.

If you are serious about being a top-notch webmaster and want to improve your site's performance, take a good look at your page load times and do whatever you can to improve them.

Deloitte Services National Retail Foundation did a recent survey about social media and retail this holiday season … what they discovered:

• 47 percent of retailers plan to increase social media use for the holidays

• 75 percent of retailers will improve their Facebook pages

• 59 percent of retailers will boost Twitter use

• 60 percent of consumers will use social media to locate coupons and discounts

• 53 percent of consumers will research gift ideas through social media

And yesterday, I read this article that is all about Best Buy’s retail strategy – all about Tweets and Friends.

My question to you is … are you using social media for your business yet?  And if not … why not?

I had a great time during my radio interview with Erika Lyremark of DAILY WHIP, and that show is live right now (or available for play-back at any time).

Erika, a results-oriented professional coach, says, “DAILY WHIP is about making a hardcore commitment to taking action to improve your career and your life. I have learned that there are two pains in life:  One is the pain of regret; the other is the pain of self-discipline.  It is up to you to choose your pain.”

This motto so speaks to my mission of helping small and mid-size business owners implement your social media strategy — as evidenced by the survey results and the article mentioned above, as your competitors jump on the social media bandwagon you are going to be faced with two choices – join the conversation happening online and watch your business thrive, or regret that you didn’t when you had the chance.

The time is now – Carpe diem!

Caroline

It’s easy to get confused about such concepts as PageRank and search engine rankings if you don’t spend a great deal of time studying how search engines work. One common misconception about search rankings is that they are tied to one’s PageRank number. This is not the case.

PageRank is a way Google has devised to assign an authority number to websites within the same niche based on how many other sites link to it and the authority ratings of those sites. It is an algorithm based largely on quantity and quality of backlinks.

While search engine rankings also rely, to some extent, on backlink analysis, the factors influencing are much broader in scope. There are literally hundreds of factors that influence how a web page ranks for the keywords it targets. One important ranking factor is domain age. A website that has been around for 10 years or longer has a much higher chance of ranking for a particular keyword than a page that is just 1 year old. The age difference, however, is not a guarantee of higher rankings as that ranking factor is used in conjunction with hundreds of other ranking factors. But it is one factor that can give a particular website an edge in the ranking wars.

Webmasters should not confuse PageRank and search engine rankings. They are not related and one does not influence the other.

SEO has had its ups and downs. For the most part, most SEOs are honorable people trying to earn a living. But there are a few – more than a few, actually – who are not so honorable. They’ll send you spam e-mail or send spam on your behalf, they’ll try to game the search engines by buying and selling links or creating doorway pages and cloaking their links, or just do something stupid like submit thousands of links at one time that draw a huge red flag.

Not much has changed. SEO is still a dangerous business. But it’s a necessary business.

You cannot succeed online today without some kind of knowledge of SEO and a strategy for ranking your web pages in the search engines. Nevertheless, you can’t trust everyone. Be careful who you select to run your SEO campaigns. Ask lots of questions and stay tuned to what they’re doing at all times. Otherwise, it can cost you more than your fair share of business.

Do you know what the most important SEO factor is today? Even after ten years of search engine optimization best practices, there is still one SEO factor that outshines them all: Quality, Original Content.

That’s not to say that other factors aren’t important. Number of inbound links, link relevance, keyword density, keywords in URLs, keywords in title tags, meta tags, alt tags, authority of pages linking in, link age, and hundreds of other factors that influence SEO are still important. Some are more important than others. And most of these factors, when coupled with other factors, still are more powerful.

But overall, nothing compares to unique, original, quality content. All other factors being equal, quality original content still outshines all others as the most important SEO factor. Keep your content golden and your SEO will be golden.

There’s an age old debate in Internet marketing circles still brewing. Are back links more important or should you be more concerned with on-page SEO factors?

Honestly, backlinks don’t matter a bit if your on-page SEO is off kilter. Imagine 1,000 inbound links pointing to a blank page. Think that will do good? Probably not. Who will read it?

I hope you see the point. Before you ever start thinking about building inbound links to your web pages you need to first make sure they are well optimized and ready to convert traffic. Otherwise, you’re just wasting your time.

Having said that, however, once you do have your web pages well optimized and ready to close traffic, there’s no substitute for smart link building. Backlinks are golden.