Sites have been using the rel=canonical link element for a while now to help offset duplicate content issues that cannot be eliminated through URL consolidation. While not a perfect solution it is often the best option available in cases like duplicate content caused by appending tracking codes to URLs (e.g. ?source=rss, ?xid=newsletter, ?nav=home). Marketing teams […]

With Blekko officially launching this week the new search engine is getting a lot of attention particularly in the search marketing community because of SEO data it provides. There is a good overview of Blekko’s SEO Tools on Search Engine Land so I won’t go into detail on that here. But I was curious to […]

Monitoring search trends and hot topics for keyword targeting and content ideas is a common practice among publishers these days. While this pollutes the search results when taken to the extreme (see below), done right it is an effective editorial SEO tactic. The Hot Searches on Google Trends tend to be dominated by topics like […]

As first covered by Malcolm Coles and later confirmed by Google, for search queries that include a specific domain Google is now showing a larger number of results from that site on page one. This gives publishers the opportunity for greater exposure to users looking for content from their specific site (and who may not […]

Now that site speed is officially a Google ranking factor site performance and page load time are important for SEO as well as usability. So how well do major news sites perform in these areas? To get a basic idea I ran Page Speed, the open source Firefox/Firebug add-on that Google recommends, on the home […]

The major search engines are making real-time search a priority, resulting in good visibility opportunities for news sites especially for breaking news. Google, Bing and Yahoo are all experimenting with various forms of real-time results now and making deals with Twitter, Facebook and other social sites. So how can news sites maximize their real-time search […]

Ever notice all the tags that some blogs add to their posts? Adding a few meaningful tags is fine but news sites in particular have a habit of taking this practice much too far. The Huffington Post is a good high-profile example:

This week both Brian Solis and SEOMoz made reference to a recent Forrester report forecasting US interactive marketing budgets for the next five years. You can check out their posts for the aspects of the report they covered. What caught my eye was the chart on budget allocation across various industries in 2009: