We are proud to announce that Verve Search was approached to write the “SEO Best Practise guide” for B2B Marketing Magazine this year. After a lengthy writing and editing process, ample amount of blood, sweat and tears (all included in the price) we are happy to say that the SEO Best Practise Guide is now finished – all 55 pages of it. Phew.

We can offer you the exclusive chance of a sneak preview HERE + in addition we can also offer you a discount of £20 as a pre-publication offer if you order the guide before 31st July (2010 of course)…The totlal cost of the guide is £130 (£150 post 31st July)

When we set about writing this guide we decided that we were going to share as much as possible, this guide gives you an insight into exactly how we (at Verve Search) carry out Search Engine Optimsiation. From keyword research and mapping to link development. We have also chosen to cover aspects such as optimising Video content and how to make the most out of Google Local (now called Google Places). Unlike most SEO guides out there this guide is NOT a promotional piece for our company but a genuine attempt in helping YOU the reader to understand and learn more about all aspects of SEO. Explained in plain English wihtout baffling techy speak to confuse you, we really do believe this guide is educational and useful.

EDIT: If you attend the “B2B Marketing SEO Seminar” on the 8th July you can get the ‘SEO Best Practise Guide’ for 1/2 PRICE!

—————————————————-

SEO Best Practise Guide Contents:

SECTION 1: Introduction to SEO

1.1 Search engine optimisation
1.2 The UK search engine market
1.3 Why use search engine marketing?
1.4 SEO’s place in the Internet marketing mix
1.5 How search engines work

SECTION 2: Technical SEO – The foundation of SEO

2.1 Site architecture
2.2 URL structure
2.3 Canonicalisation
2.4 Sitemap
2.5 Geo-targeting – hosting and domain
2.6 Technical toolbox

SECTION 3: On-page SEO

3.1 Keyword and competitor research
3.2 Conducting competitor research
3.3 Organising your research
3.4 Keyword research tools
3.5 Writing content with the search engines in mind
3.6 Keyword mapping
3.7 Current most important areas for content optimisation
3.8 Anchor text optimisation of internal linking

SECTION 4: Off-page SEO

4.1 The PageRank algorithm
4.2 TrustRank
4.3 Future importance of links
4.4 Link development
4.5 Evaluating link equity and carrying out link analysis
4.6 Link generation methods
4.7 Online public relations
4.8 Link baiting
4.9 Social media marketing as part of link development
4.10 Link analysis tools
4.11 Why link analysis is important

SECTION 5: Universal search

5.1 Optimising image content for universal search
5.2 Optimising video content for universal search

SECTION 6: Google places

6.1 Creating a local business listing
6.2 Optimising your local listing
6.3 Data citations

SECTION 7: Web analytics

7.1 Free and paid platforms
7.2 Importance of analytics when doing SEO
7.3 Setting up Google Analytics
7.4 Tracking the right metrics in analytics

APPENDIX i. Outsourcing SEO services

ii. Unethical SEO practices
iii. Future changes in SEO

GLOSSARY
—————————————————-

Happy reading…and please feel free to feedback what you thought of the guide! To request the guide please GO HERE and submit your details or email dominic.rookeallden[AT]b2bm.biz

After recently attending the SES 2010 conference I have finally found the time to upload my blogpost on Brian Eisenberg session on How to Increase Conversion Rates. It was a great session by Brian and I hope you take as much from the tips as I did.

Everyone loves a secret. Some people keep secrets, others like to gossip. Similar to the latter I couldn’t hold this one in any longer, so unlike most secrets here is one that can really benefit you. You ready? Ok, come closer…

Did you know the average conversion rate of a website is 3%

Even after all the vast increased capabilities of technology, design and analytics in the last 10 years it still hasn’t improved. Why? Read below and see.

1.    Communicate UVPs/UCPs (unique value propositions & unique campaign propositions)
Online users on average decide whether they want to purchase your product or service within 7 seconds so ensure you communicate your UVP/UCP simply and effectively

2.    Persuasive and Relevant Offers
In the B2C environment messages like ‘Free Shipping’ has a very small cost but a massive impact on conversion rates, surprisingly even scrapping a few £’s. For the B2B environment, consider ‘Free Trials’ as a persuasive offer.

3.    Reinforce Offers Sitewide
Surprising how many websites reinforce offers across the website except for the most important page – the checkout. Jacob Nielson said “Don’t make them think”, if you make them question whether they missed a stage and do not qualify for the offer then you are going to lose a sale. Customers make a decision on every click.

4.    They Maintain Scent
The term and concept ‘scent’ was discovered by Xerox in the late 90s. It essentially details the clues that a website can give to ensure users follow the right path. This includes imagery and colours as they can be visual clues that separate ages are connected. It is important not to focus on one page but the whole journey.

5.    Strong First Impression
Every type of advertising needs to create a human connection. It is widely believed that advertising mediums and even human interaction has 8 seconds before you form an opinion.

6.    Appeal to multiple personas/segments
Online users can be placed within 4 individual character types; competitive, spontaneous, methodical, humanistic.

Competitive
-    Price orientated
-    Know what they are looking for

Spontaneous
-    Make quick decisions
-    Look for clickable features

Methodical
-    Most time spent on pages
-    Analyse every detail

Humanistic
-    Look for human elements (reviews)
-    Like images of product/service

7.    They don’t do Slice/Dice Optimisation
The issue is time and resources; you need to look at the opportunity cost of implementing multi variations. The best way to test is for impact not variation and this is best suited to creating hypothesis such as ‘if A changes then would affect will this have on B’.

8.    Leverage Social Commerce
It is important to not only listen but to utilise the voice of the customer. Reviews make HUGE impacts on the conversion rate of websites.

9.    Using Social Voices in Navigation
By adding features such as ‘rating’ in the navigation it allows customers to view honest and peer opinions which is great since 78% of users trust peer reviews.

10.   Use Social Voices in Promotions
Let customer voices shape the content you write. By analysing customer conversations you can review strengths and weaknesses of your brand/product and address these issues in promotional content. Additionally, utilising user generated content in emails works well to increase conversions.

11.    Use Social Voices to Build Credibility
By implementing user generated content you increase your authenticity which will have a direct effect on decreasing bounce rate.

12.    Use Social Voices for Feedback and Research
Jacob Nielson states that “5 people can identify 80% of problems on a website” Ensure you use the free tools or undertake studies to highlight usability issues within your site. If you search Google for “69 free tools” you can find great resources.

13.    Use Persuasive Principles like Scarcity
Utilising persuasive statements such as “until stocks last”, or “for a limited time” can help drive conversions. This is especially important for spontaneous buyer types.

14.    Make Forms Engaging
Just because you managed to get users this far it doesn’t mean you should stop paying attention to the little details. The brand colours and design should be kept consistent so users know they are on the right path.
It is also a strong recommendation that you should you the thank you page as an opportunity to up sell your product or service.

15.    Provide Point of Action Assurances
Ensure that when users enquire they receive an assurance of a time when they will be contacted. Leads are shown to lose effectiveness by 6% after 1 hour delayed response time.

16.   Keep You in the Process
Don’t necessarily take people to the basket once clicked.

17.    Consider Email Preview
Ensure that the message you are trying to portray in emails can be read without downloading images. A large percentage of people with email will disregard emails if they have to download images.

18.    Budget for Experience
Clients will often spend budget on methods which aim to drive traffic to websites yet will debate whether to spend the same amount of time on website testing. Prioritise what is more important, increasing traffic by % or increasing conversions by %

You should build a better customer experience. Amazon run over 400 tests at any given time and are constantly monitoring what changes could positively affect their business.

19.    Utilise a system for Prioritization
When making changes to your website use a simple methods which highlights the ‘impact’ over ‘resources needed’. This will let you assess what changes can be made with relatively small effort and can let you plan further changes with your resources.

20.    They make data driven design decisions
Make educated and informed decisions based on data.

21.    How to execute Rapidly
The key to online is change. Websites need to be flexible and react to changes in the online environment.

5 steps which would help you move forward and see real progress:
1)     Identify problems, identify high bounce and exit rate
2)     Create a to do list
3)     Document your hypothesis
4)     Prioritise your to do list
5)     Start testing

We are turning 1 year on the 28th January, and to celebrate we are giving away 2 places to our SEO Training Course.  Worth £499 per place!

Interested in the chance of WINNING a place at the SEO Training Course on the 28th Jan, 2010? ALL you need to do is FOLLOW us on Twitter AND retweet the following:

RT @VerveSearch We are giving away 2 places to a 1 Day SEO Training Course on the 28th Jan, to enter visit http://is.gd/644WV

We will pick 2 winners on Friday (15th January) and contact you via DM on twitter.

NB! The place is not transferable and you must be available on the 28th January 2010. The prize does not include transport to the Verve Search offices, which is in Kingston Upon Thames (20 min from Waterloo station, London)

Click Here to view full details on the 1 Day SEO Training Course

I promised I would share my presentations from A4U so here’s the first installment. On Day1 of A4U Expo I spoke on the panel “Beyond Linkbaiting” with Kelvin Newman from Site Visibility and Dixon Jones from Receptional (and MajesticSEO). I very much enjoyed speaking on link development as it’s a key area of SEO and one Verve Search takes very seriously. At Verve Search we do all our link development in-house and don’t outsource as we believe it’s crucial for success to have SEOs working closely with the clients.

The presentation gives an insight into the key areas of link development strategies:

- Content Syndication (referred to in this presentation as Contentlinkation)
- Link baiting (the process of creating content with the objective of recieving links)
- Site Seeding (the research you do beforehand including competitor backlink analysis)
- Relationship building
- Press releases
- Events and Offline activity
- Social Media

Did you know women talk more than 15% more than men every day? Men smiling at that figure now should stop as 8% of you never cleaned your teeth this morning.  Welcome to the wonderful world of statistics. They give us an insight and a clearer indication of how successful our marketing campaigns are and highlight areas of weakness that need to be addressed. As Sir Arthur Conan Doyle famously stated:

“I never guess. It is a capital mistake to theorize before one has data. Insensibly one begins to twist facts to suit theories, instead of theories to suit facts.”

Google Local is a relatively new channel for marketers to obtain traffic and however much we theorise and assume how valuable it is, nothing will give clearer data than tracking and monitoring. We track and monitor every other aspect of our organic and paid search so why wouldn’t we want to track other channels that generate site traffic?

From an analytical point of view Google Local could previously only be measured if a browser came through the Google Maps section to our site.  We were not naturally able to measure visits from a Local Business Listing (LBL) unless we implemented tracking codes.  Now there are a few posts around the web detailing how we should track Google Local, in particular from Martijn Beijk who specialises in Google Local. What I found interesting after reading these posts was that no one ever replied back, detailing whether implementing the analytic codes created any problems and if so, how they dealt with these issues.

We recently implemented tracking code to one of our clients’ local business listings. We experienced some issues along the way which inspired me to write this post about how to track Google Local.

Track URLs in Local Business Centre

One method that was recommended by a few people was implementing a tagged URL within your local business listing through the local business centre. This included giving each local business listing a URL with GA parameters. By doing this, theoretically it should then appear in GA under traffic sources – campaigns

In order to tag a URL you should use the Google Analytics URL builder tool, which you can find here: http://www.google.com/support/googleanalytics/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=55578

You only need to fill in specific information in the tool. The campaign source (in this case; Google local), the campaign medium (local business listing) and also give it a campaign name to differentiate various listings, for example Search_Consultancy_London.

Just to clarify, if tracked correctly the statistics should appear within Traffic Sources – Medium – Local Business Listing

One aspect that you need to be aware of before you update the new tagged URL is to remove any “%2B” or “%20” symbols.  The symbol %2B is part of the URL encoding process and it merely means ‘+’, similarly to %20 which means space. In my experience and after discussing this with others these characters should be replaced with underscores. Hyphens are better from a search perspective but you are not trying to rank this page as it is merely a tagged URL.

Once you have inserted this tagged URL, the local business centre it states that it can take up to 48 hours for the change to be updated. We waited, and waited some more but the change never took place. Some people say you have to wait up to 2 weeks for Google to update their listings to include your utm source code within the URL. After 7 days the update still did not occur and we were not willing to wait any longer as a week without data was long enough. I still remain sceptical that this method works and would love to hear from anyone who implemented this -  was it successful and how long you had to wait? Are you still waiting?

Use Vanity URLs to track page views

Another option is to create separate landing page URLs for each listing that is within the Local Business Centre. The separate landing pages are essentially duplicate pages of the original URL but given a vanity URL name.

For Example:

Original URL:

http://www.example.com/location-service

Vanity URL:

http://www.example.com/localad-location-service

To avoid the duplicate content issue and to specify to Google the canonical URL we would simply input the canonical tag within the source code of the Vanity URL:

<link rel=”canonical” href=”http://www.example.com/location-service”/>

Once you have created this page, insert the vanity URL into the Google Local Business centre. The beauty of this method is that it appears in less than 48 hours and you can see instant results. Statistics would appear in content – top content – then type in “local” within the filter box.

However, there are some drawbacks to this method; the main factor is you are restricted to the amount of quantitative data you can analyse.

Since the URL of the local ad page has not been tagged it does not appear within the traffic sources as a ‘medium’. This prevents you from easily evaluating how much traffic this medium generated in comparison to other sources. Furthermore, site visits to the local ad page can only be determined through accessing the top landing pages within the content section of analytics which is not ideal.

Another negative aspect to tracking your local search this way is if you are running an ecommerce booking engine through your Google analytics you will not be able to analyse how much revenue was generated through Local search.

This can only be determined if you tag the URL, which brings me on to my last method.

Track Local campaign using 301 Redirects

This method may take a little bit more time in liaising with client programmers and web developers but it is the preferred and recommended method.

First you need to set up a vanity URL, but this time do not create a page, just a URL that will be 301 redirected to the original tagged URL which we spoke about in the beginning.

For Example:

http://www.example.com/localad-service-location

needs to be 301 redirected to the following URL

http://www.example.com/localad-service-location.htm/#utm_source=GoogleLocalutm_medium=local_business_listing&utm_campaign=london

This would then track all visitors and able us to see the TOTAL number of visits from Google Local Listings within the Traffic Source (separate to organic and everything else) under the medium local_business_listing (or whatever you decided to title your medium within the URL builder)

This will ensure reporting on monthly statistical data is far easier as you can compare the effectiveness of your campaign and evaluate individual segments.

The amount of data you can now analyse through this method is much greater than the previous method. Additionally to appearing under traffic sources – medium it will also appear as a tagged campaign under traffic sources – campaigns which will let you view each individual listings analytics.

It also provides you with further dimensions in which to breakdown the data, including:

•    keywords visitors typed into Google to trigger your listing
•    Visitor type (new vs. returning)
•    Visitor Country/territory/region

Most significantly, if you have e-commerce set up through analytics it allows you to view how successful your local ad is in terms of generating revenue.  Within traffic sources you can breakdown the following:

•    Overall Revenue
•    Transactions
•    Average Value
•    Conversion rate
•    Per visit value

We also found that by creating the Vanity URL and implementing this in the Local Business Centre it actually improved our local ranking.  We believe this is due to the added keywords within the Vanity URL so ensure you use appropriate and relevant keywords (without spamming) related to what you wish to appear in the local listings for.

We have previously covered Video Search Engine Optimistaion (VSEO)  but below is a video filmed at a recent B2B Marketing Search event where a line of marketers (and 1 Googler) was asked to give their opinion on Video Optimisation and the benefits of using video content within your website and on video channels such as YouTube.

I personally believe VSEO is a great opportunity to dominate the Search Engine Results pages and a fantastic way of also communicating with your customers once they are on your website. Video Optimisation should be part of you marketing efforts.

Gather round soldiers, up 2, 3, 4, up 2, 3, 4… We are on a covert mission to discover whether there is any weight or value placed on keywords in bold and italic tags. The final objective of this mission is not only to debunk myths but with your help and comments to finally bury them.

The value in regards to SEO is not the only factor that we will be analysing, the effect bold and italic tags has on usability and their ability to convert customers will also be considered.

Halt…. Attention:

Beliefs are split into two camps; some people believe that the bold tag is now ineffective whereas others still believe it holds value.  Within the SEOmoz ranking factors, the contributors (various respected industry figures) draw the conclusion the bold tag has a moderate importance.   Opinions and attitudes here range from “Has some weight as a ranking factor, but not very much”, “I’m still doing it sometimes, but I’m really starting to wonder why” to “We focus on communication to the user; we never bold terms in an effort to rank for them”

These opinions contrast particularly to the views from 3-4 years ago, where contributors to the SEOmoz ranking factors (2005) commented: “I think that this is still very important” and “H1 and BOLD are still vital indicators of important factors.” The belief was the algorithm used to determine that any keyword placed within a bold tag would be given value as to determining what the page is about. The question is, has Google now realised this was being manipulated for the search engines and not for the user as was its original intention? Additionally, is the bold tag now obsolete?

Why and How to utilise the bold tag

Personally I believe that the bold tag still holds slight value and should be incorporated within on-page content.  Search engines spiders can read and understand html code so it seems logical that the assigned keyword within a bold tag would carry a degree of importance to the page.  This question still remains to be decided whether it carries any ranking weight but undeniably it does carry visual weight.

The usability of a website is a big feature of converting visitors into customers. Bold tags are vital for catching readers that scan, reinforcing the belief that they have found the right page. Various eye tracking data indicates users are drawn to breaks in the text, including bold and italic fonts.

Furthermore, when online users read or scan text, they apparently will only re-evaluate their scan strategy when they detect particular formats. One of the main factors, that subconsciously make users eyes stop and evaluate; is bold tags.  So even if they hold no weight within search engines, I feel it is vital to ensure you give your website the best possible chance to connect with visitors.

Research always shows that user behaviour when consuming information on the internet follows a very basic pattern. In Jakob Nielsen’s words; site visitors don’t read; they scan. His study found that only 16% of people will read a post word by word. The implication is that readers need to be able to extract the key messages of a post at a glance, and not have to work for it. This means that content must be made scannable. Roll out the red carpet; cue the brass band and the victory march parade!  Welcome home Bold…

So to end, I was recently watching the film American History X and related to the part in the script when he said “it’s always good to end a paper with a quote, if someone else has already said it best. So if you can’t top it, steal from them and go out strong”.

So here is my victim, Seth Godin.  He undertook an experiment regarding eye tracking and said he learnt the following:

“The biggest lesson wasn’t news to me, but it might be to your boss: your visitors are not rational and organized and linear. You can’t count on them sitting still and hearing your story from beginning to end. They won’t. The answer is not to try to change human nature. It’s to embrace the hunting skills that people are bringing online (and to their daily offline media consumption) and to make your media match their needs.”

Resources:

The following resources can help you monitor how well your online content is doing in terms of time spent on page and users clicks.

Heat Mapping

Crazy Egg, ClickDensity, Google Analytics (Site Overlay)

After recently working with a client regarding Video Optimisation I found myself gagging to write an article about the potential benefits of video optimisation.  This is such article and will exist as a platform for my thought spilling, fact finding and jibber jabbing process.

Through the creation and posting of videos illustrating your products or service a sharp boost of brand awareness can be gained via user generated content sites like YouTube.  Currently 48% of internet users have been to a video sharing website like YouTube (fact finding = tick) So by simply positioning your brand online it can help to generate an extra channel of traffic to your website.

The expectant long term increase of site visitors is not the primary focus of hosting online videos as it can first and foremost be a successful and valuable asset to generate brand awareness for your client. Companies such as Nokia have successfully utilised YouTube to show off their products and latest phone features.  So far, the video has 1,222,525 views, 536 ratings and 799 comments.  By establishing a link to the blog from the YouTube page Nokia could leverage the viewers by turning them into website visitors. Since this is a FREE feature I will twist anyones arm for them to place a link! How can you turn down anything that is free, unless it happens to be swine flu of course.

Creating and distributing online videos can enable you to leverage compelling video content and enable you to obtain a consistent stream of traffic from sources outside of the search engines (thought spilling = tick)

No matter what market your client is in posted videos can help illustrate a wide range of products and services. This is a great way of interacting with the consumer and allowing them to not only read your brand message but to visualise it too.

A major turning point in Google displayed search results was the introduction of Universal search. There is an increased frequency of YouTube and other videos showing up in the Google search results. A long term goal is to eventually have your clients videos displayed in the Google search results for selected key terms.  Having a video in the search results can actually generate more traffic than a listing in a higher place due to the interactive nature of a video.  Video optimisation and the allowance of Google to host these in its search results creates a new channel for marketers to exploit and interact with consumers.  The comment feature in particular can be used to monitor the attitude and commonly held beliefs of consumers about the brand. This knowledge can be harnessed and be very valuable for changing negative brand opinions.

It is an ever growing common occurrence for a browser who searches for products and services via a search engine to perform a secondary search on YouTube to see if there are any videos or related content about the original search query. Having video content hosted there can increase the likelihood that the browser will decide to convert into a customer. Popular and successful videos can help become a positive and permanent addition to brand equity.

If there are any questions about this post or if you just want to say hello or even if you want to offer me free products to plug your service feel free to email me on samatvervesearch.com or follow me on Twitter @sammurray

In the past month I have been doing quite a few SEO Evaluations and technical audits of websites, and I have really enjoyed it, after  working as Head of Search for quite a while, I am genuinely loving getting back to doing more of the actual SEO work. The technical analysis, the digging into a sites link authority and even keyword and competitor research. In general I’m loving figuring out how a site is doing in the SERPs, why they’re not ranking well and how it can be improved. This is why I love SEO after all, it’s like a riddle or a puzzle, and I just got to figure it out =)

One of the things that keep on popping up over and over again in these evaluations is; websites having canonicalisation issues. So I thought I would write my first proper blogpost on Verve Search about this topic.

What is canonicalisation?

Except from being one of the most difficult words to write and pronounce… From the horse’s mouth: “Canonicalisation is the process of picking the best URL when there are several choices…”

Basically, quite often a web page will have several URLs for the same page, for example:

http://www.vervesearch.com
http://vervesearch.com (notice without the dub dub dub)

Both of these URLs load the same page, the homepage! There can also be other versions of the URL loading the same page with additional parameters such as /index.php  or even /home.php In addition the owner of a website might have bought several domains (TLDs), for example I also own the .co.uk TLD: http://www.vervesearch.co.uk If this additional domain is just pointed to the website/page this will again load the same page. So potentially I could have 8 different URLs loading the homepage for Verve Search.

This is a problem for several reasons, fundamentally because when the search engine visits your website the search engine spiders is likely to be having this experience:

It would be even more complicated for the search engine spiders if in addition to all these URLs your website also contained URL based sessionIDs (sessionIDs=dynamically generated a separate URL for each user in each session, including the spiders) For example http://www.vervesearch.com/?PHPSESSID=123 . Each page would then be likely to have hundreds, maybe even thousands, of separate URLs for the same page. The real problem then comes when the spiders indexes one of these sessionID URLs instead of your main URL. Yes it will look rubbish, BUT the real problem is that this URL is unlikely to have any link authority as it’s a unique URL just for the session when the spider crawled the site. The real problem is when loads of these URLs find their way into the search engine index, as these sesssion URLs are likely to have any link authority, so if you are trying to rank within a competitive market this could be holding your site back significantly. Worst case scenario the spiders can be indexing a sessionID instead of the main URL to a page.

Note: the reason some sites use sessionIDs is usually to be able to do in depth tracking of each session. For those of you that do this I would recommend using cookie based sessions instead of URL based session IDs. Yes, cookie based tracking might not be as accurate if users disables cookies but I believe it’s better in the long run as session based URLs could potentially harm your SEO efforts and over complicate things

How canonicalization issues affects link authority!

In your mind the http://www.yourdomain.com/ is usually your main URL, but don’t assume this is obvious to users and search engines. If you haven’t chosen a canonical URL (and implemented the appropriate redirects or rel=canonical tags, don’t worry explanation will come) it is likely that some links will go to one of the other URLs, for example a user types in my website direct into browser but uses the .co.uk TLD, it finds the page they wanted to link to and links to it using the .co.uk. Another example could be a user following an internal link and the internal link goes to /page/index.php but your link builders are getting links to the main URL, now you have links going to both URLs and the link authority is being diluted. You still following me? Now imagine you also have sessionIDs on your site and a user have visited your site, gets a sessionID and bookmarks the page (with the sessionID) then links to it via his/her blog. Now you have 3 different URLs to the same page with links, imagine how much more powerful the page would be if all of the links went to one URL??!!

How to fix canonicalisation problems

There is now 2 different ways of fixing canonicalization issues to your site. Quite recently Google announced supporting a new “canonical tag” that lets you specify in the HTML header that the URL in question should be treated as a “copy” and names the canonical URL that all link authority and content metrics should flow back to.

Example:
Within the HTML header of the page loading on this URL http://www.vervesearch.com/index.php   there would be a parameter like this:

<link rel=”canonical” href=”http://www.vervesearch.com/” />

This would “tell” the search engines that they should index the canonical URL specified in this tag and also weigh any link authority from the /index.php URL to the canonical URL. The rel=canonical tag should be implemented on every URL you have that is loading the same page (except from the main canonical URL you want to use of course).
This tag is really easy to implement and can solve a lot of canonicalization issues, BUT it has its limitations. For example you can’t use this for your country specific TLDs (which essentially a separate domain) or other additional domains you might have bought. There might also be issues with the fact that this tag only “redirects” the engines attention to the correct URL, users will still be able to use all the different URLs and within your analytics these are likely to come up as different pages.

My preferred method and a pretty air tight solution for canonicalization problems is using 301 redirects. A 301 redirect is a permanent redirect from one URL to another, using a 301 redirect will carry over any link authority from one URL to another, even from a different domain! As opposed to a 302 redirect which is a “temporary” redirect that won’t carry over the link authority and is general just rubbish. Just don’t use 302 redirects ok!! With a 301 redirect you will also avoid any user complications as even if the user types in a URL in the browser it will redirect to the canonical URL! Want to check if a URL is 301 redirecting correctly, try this redirect checker!

The problem with 301 redirects is that it is generally much harder to implement than the rel=canonical tag. To create a 301 redirect you will need to create (if you don’t already have one) an .htaccess file that you upload to the root of your server. More about how to implment 301 redirects in .htaccess files here.   If you are not a programmer or very technical, I advise you to get your programmer to do this for you, as messing with the .htaccess file can really mess with your site. Some hosting companies will have 301 redirect capabilities within your cPanel, which I have, in this case you can easily 301 redirect URLs and domains from there. If on the other hand your site is developed in .ASP or worse ASP.NET (only joking)please check out this site for instructions on how to do a 301 redirect when using IIS servers.

Making sure your websites URLs are organised and redirected appropriately, choosing one canonical URL that all other URLs will be redirected  to (either by 301 or rel=canonical tag) could potentially have a BIG impact on your SEO efforts. Don’t confuse the search engine spiders or your users, sort it out!

Please feel free to comment or add anything, I would love to hear about your experiences. And if you think you might have canonicalisation issue please comment and I will check it out for you, or alternatively email me:lisa [at] vervesearch.com

Further reading:

Google webmaster central blog on specifying your canonical tag
Matt Cutts on canonical tag and URL canonicalization
Obi One Kenobi (Rand) at SEOmoz on the URL canonical tag

Bas van den Beld from Searchcowboys interviewed me (Lisa Ditlefsen) at SMX London (Nov 2008), a few months later and I was part of the searchcowboys blogger crew. For more interviews like this visit SEO Roadshow.

Me and Bas talks about European search, how it is and likely future developments.

SEO Roadshow interview: Lisa Ditlefsen from NetTraject on Vimeo.