It has been several months since the Search Engines collaborated and announced the “canonical” tag that you can add to your pages and help clean-up all the junk/duplicate pages out there.

While the canonical URL tag itself is very simple (see below), the evaluation of whether or not the tag is working or has an impact on search engine rankings (SERPs) is difficult.

Sample Canonical Tag:

<// link rel="canonical" href="http://www.yourcanonicalurl.com/" />
(the two /’s at the beginning would need to be removed when implementing)

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After you have gone through the process of carefully selecting your keywords and optimizing your content, you can sit back and watch your rankings shoot through the roof, right? Not necessarily. Your content is optimized, but do the search engines have the proper tools to find and index your content? The following are some of the oft-overlooked items that prepare your site for optimal indexing by the search engines.

Optimized Internal Linking

This process is sometimes referred to as siloing and is one of the most important aspects of search engine optimization.  Optimized internal linking is important, not only from a search engine standpoint, but from a usability standpoint.  Internal linking is an important way of directing the search engines to your most important pages.  The pages that are linked to the most, the search engines deem as the most important.  Also, linking to relevant pages from within your content allows users to easily find the content that should naturally progress them through your site.

Make Unique Titles and Descriptions

The search engines are all about unique content.  They attempt to weed out duplicate pages in order to provide unique and relevant results.  As a result, if a search engine comes across two pages that have the same page title or META description, there is a good chance that one of the pages will get passed over by the search engines, despite the content that actually appears on the page.  Writing good HTML titles and META tags can not only improve your search engine rankings, but it can also increase the amount of clicks that your search result gets by enticing the potential visitor.  Making sure that your pages have unique titles and descriptions is a great way to improve your chances of getting all of your relevant pages indexed into the search engines.

Write Unique Page Content

As mentioned earlier, the search engines don’t like copied or duplicated content.  If there is a discrepancy between duplicate content, the search engines will almost always use the original source as their top result.  If your site uses product feeds for its descriptions or if you copied your content from another site, it will be extremely difficult to get that page indexed by the search engines, much less achieve a high ranking for that page.  The search engines understand that not every word or phrase is going to be unique, so they give a small amount of leeway, but not much.  As such, it is recommended that each page contain around 70% unique content.  This allows for a quote that appears elsewhere, or a list of product specs that cannot be changed or altered.  If these items must appear on your site, it is imperative that you balance the copied content out with around 70% unique content.

Clean up Your Site’s Coding

The content that the user sees visually is often entirely different than the content that the search engines see when they spider your site.  This means that the spiders must filter through all of the coding on your site including page styling, JavaScript, and image filenames.  Much of the information contained in your coding is irrelevant to the search engines and can serve as a major distraction to the spiders when they visit your site.  Fortunately, much of the coding that hinders the spiders can be referenced externally such as external JavaScript or containing your site’s styling in .CSS files.  This will allow the search engines to quickly access and index the keyword rich content that you really want them to find.

When using proper search engine optimization techniques in conjunction with preparing your site for the search engines, you will be able to see the maximum results for your effort.

One of the key points made at least week’s PubCon conference in Las Vegas is that product feeds from manufacturers are considered duplicate content by most search engines.  If you think about it, this makes a lot of sense… if you have hundreds and thousands of e-commerce sites out there marketing their products with the original manufacturer’s product description and details, then you have hundreds & thousands of sites with the exact same product page (minus their own site template, etc.).

Why would the search engines want to show hundreds of pages of the exact same result?  Answer… They don’t want to.  They are going to pick one page from you or your competitor’s websites and display the results on a very limited basis; you won’t see the first 10 results in Google showing the exact same product description, etc.

I queried a snippet from a watch description of a popular online retailer in Google and got the following results:

Query: “14-karat gold case and bracelet. Cabochon crown”
Results: 87 pages with the exact phrase on them.

The solution: if you’re an online retailer serious about driving organic search traffic to your website, you better make sure that your content is unique and that you’ve “added value” to the manufacturer descriptions you’re using.  You can still use everything the manufacturer provides, but you should enrich EVERY PRODUCT with quality keyword phrases and also add your own descriptions and comments about the products.  Start with your top-selling products or your highest profit items and work your way down from there.

Ideas for adding value to your store’s content & descriptions:

• Custom write a description of each product and/or provide insight if you’re an expert.
• Provide “add your comments” or “review this product” type facilities for visitors to dynamically add the content for you (see Amazon.com product pages).

Overall, you just need to make sure you’re adding valuable, unique content to your pages in order to avoid being penalized for duplicate content.  Remember, if you and all your competitors are using the exact same thing, only one of you is going to be seen!  Be sure to differentiate.