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That would be desirable, so you do not get any dupe content penality. It is then a question of which way you prefer the juice to flow. If Andrea's page is more targetted and getting the links, then rel canonical links from the blog to those pages may be more benificial.

It shouldn't, but I would always place rel canonical as the first line to ensure that it is indexed first and all references are relative to that. This is a developer preference as it is a good design practice. This works on pages we host and create. You should also inform webmaster tool of any parameters you use and to ignore them,even though you have the rel canonical.

Search engines will read all your parameters unless you tell google with webmaster tools what parameters to ignore. This can cause an issue with the url like domain.com/topic?keyword&somefield then pages that include the keyword and other parameters will share the link juice. So, if you have 10 options of somefield you will get ~1/10 value per page indexed.

So, it is better for you to use rewrites to include your keyword in the url and then mark parameters to not be indexed in Goggle etc.

I am not sure that it helps rankings yet, but it cannot hurt them and it will help at some point in the future. As search engines try harder to understand what sites are about, using contextual markup will help. These changes to HTML and also the schema.org rich snippets will be used in future and will help. SEO is evolutionally as are development practices and it is all about staying ahead of the competition when search engines change the playing field.

I do know following the guidelines here, getting strong relevent links built and ensuring a fast user experience helps rank on sites we built. Does it give us an advantage oer the competition? Maybe, only time will tell.

We are setting up a site at http://www,dreambuilders.com.au  which uses all those tags to seperate articles from navigation and the aside. It is still in development but the HTML 5 tags are set up.

Brett

Sure Diane, Thanks. If HTML5 there are specific tags to denote type of content.

• • means that the content between these tages is main content

• <nav>- is the navigation links</nav>

• <aside> - is subsiduary content, such as ad content and general information</aside>

This allows for seperation of interests and allows your site to have a logical flow and still provide contextual infromation about the content. If you look at our markup you see content wrapped in these tags.

Hi, I am a developer and hire an external SEO to do the link building but we do the site optimization following guidelines pointed out here and using the Moz Tools for our site www.oznappies.com

We tag to HTML5 where it is clear what an article or main section is and navigation or subsidary links are, as these are defined in the standard. This means we have total control of content meaning that Google will index. I also noticed that Google is including site speed in their beta analytics and so we optimise for performance, using best practices and cdn for js libraries. It is worth running your site through www.gtmetrics.com to see where you have performance issues that will affect rank in the near future, as Google is aiming at 5sec load time for user experience.

We are a new site (3 months old) and have moved from 100+ to page 1 for all our targeted key phrases, including the most competitive ones. We have in-house content authors writing original content every couple of days and posting on relevant forums and blog comments. We are now in the process of taging as schema.org rich snippets to prepare for search engines factoring this in.

We are seeing the same on the Australian Google and we are a start up (3 months old) by we are still climbing in rank, so it has no adverse effect on us.

I would get them in the shopper mindset and transfer it to the street. Ask them, do they go into a retail outlet and ask to see the '82374 in category?' as the shop assistant looks at them with a blank expression, or do they ask for a 'womens rain jacket'. When you bring it back to real life examples, I find customers understand what you are trying to convince them. So, why should it be different on line, if you want any rank benifit from the url it needs to have your key words in it. If you are targetting 'womens rain jacket' and you get a mention in a blog etc a anchor of 'www.company.com/womens/jackets/rain' still includes the keywords where as the cookie cutter url does not. It also makes the site look more professionally created than a DIY cookie cutter version.

Brent makes good points and you will see a inital wave ride in rank but it should bounce back higher. I like to also add Canonical head tags to make the new origin of the site's pages. I would also prepare a new sitemap and submit it, if there are a lot of pages, make the move in groups, with a resubmit after each group. We have had pages bounce back much quicker than 30 days too, some in as little as a week.

I figure brand in the case of a restraunt would be FoodEstablishment->LocalBusiness->Organization that sets your business branding across the site. Your would want to ensure any 404's that might happen go to the home or an informative search page, as a usability feature.

Brett

I would and do target content on a range of our pages, where I think we can give the viewer more useful information. If you list a sample menu you could use the 'offers' to provide prices and specials. You can use your customer reviews with the 'review' tag. It is also good to establish your brand throughout with the 'organization' tags. I do think this is a longer term strategy as Google is only starting to make use of some of the tags now and does not have a working test tool yet.

So, overall answer is maybe target your brand on each page and pick specific pages with strong useful content that you begin taging, at least until a good test tool allows you to check results.

If page.html is theultimate goal, then www.website.com/page.html?source=xxxyyy will give link juice to page.html, just make sure you tell webmaster tool site config that 'source' is a parameter and you will have the juice to flow to page.html. I would also add to make sure all the engines index it correctly.

I agree with Tompt, that syntax looks very much link the way farms do it and could get unwanted penalities from Google.

If the ultimate page is XXXYYY and you want that page to get link juice then www.website,com/XXXYYY is the best format as the page.html?=XXXYYY is not as strong. That can ge done with url rewrite and there are plenty of examples for most of the hosting platforms out there. If you not want to pass link juice then use javascript click event to make the call and Google will ignore it, especially if you set NOFOLLOW on the link anchor.

Since schema.org is the new standard and adopted by Bing, Google and Yahoo, it is the better option. It also has more detail in its schema.

You also have the opportunity to set up A-B comparison experiments to check results. I know those poistion are best for revenue, but you are looking for visitors. It is a matter of having the traffic level, then getting the revenue positions optimised. If the site looks too much like an ad site, then you will not get the tweets and other social markers working for you.

I will fix that, thanks, funny my seo did not pick up on that.

So, here is the confusing bit Ryan:

Keyphrase - Modern Cloth Nappies = meta description

Keyphrase - Reusabe Nappies = img alt

Both searches page 2 on google.com.au

It looks like the page may be dynamically generated, otherwise you would need to update that part of the page each time a new rating is given. There is a lot missing for either RDFa or schema.org rich snippets.

You would need to add the mark-up in the code that created the page, and that is probably best left for the site designer.

I have begun marking up the site for schema.org and Google has now begun indexing those pages with a weird result. Instead of using meta description in search it is using the ALT text from an item marged as ImageProp="image". I was hoping it would display the picture not change my description.

Any ideas?

You site looks great, quite clean and fitting the colour and mood for a dj. There are a couple of things though I notice as a web developer:

1. Your youtube links are not embeded (from a facebook feed), so someone clicking on them leaves your site - you should have these embeded so they can be played on your page with out leaving it and use links http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Eq6gFOXeOFk&rel=0 for the embeded videos. The rel=0 means when someone plays your video they will not see related videos when it ends. Those related videos could be from competitors.

2. Some of you anchor text text start 'Click here ...' that is really not strong key word use unless you are trying to rank for the keyword 'click here'. If you look at Google adwords you can find other keywords that Google thinks are a close match for the one you are targeting and then see how many people use that keyword. These would be more useful than the click here keywords now.

3. You are getting 2 404 errors - loader-small.gif and like.gif and most images do not have preset width and heights which means the page continually adjusts size as images are loaded on the first visit.

4. You may also want to consider HTML5 sectional markup to tell Google where the important content (section,article) is on the page and what is just navigation (nav) or sidebar (aside) content. Not sure if Google gives weight to this yet, but they will at some point.

Hope that help with the usability side of the site.