Fat Models

On the subject of penalistation for duplicate content. Google says ….

Duplicate content on a site is not grounds for action on that site unless it appears that the intent of the duplicate content is to be deceptive and manipulate search engine results. If your site suffers from duplicate content issues, and you don’t follow the advice listed above, we do a good job of choosing a version of the content to show in our search results.

So there you go. If you want to read more about this subject check out the official blog post (that I have partly duplicated!) here … http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2008/09/demystifying-duplicate-content-penalty.html

I recently had a meeting with a very interesting chap regarding SEO for a website I am working on. We talked about the general SEO stuff -h1’s, meta-descriptions, page titles and robot fodder, as well as link building strategies.

I must admint SEO is not my favourite subject but it is clearly a must for any website looking to make an impact on the web. I’ve known this for a long time and have always practised good SEO when coding websites – tableless design, separation of presentation and html code, semantic use of tags, etc. and had some good results. Localisation seems to be an easy win when choosing key phrases which has been fine for the smaller sites with local target audiences but it’s not going to work for the larger national/international companies.

Link building strategies seem to be the next step in gaining better ranking for a site in all the major search engines.

Link velocity is the relationship between the number of inbound links you have and the time it has taken for those links to appear. The way to achieve this is through mind numbing work, trawling through the relevant directories and adding links, finding overseas (non-competitive) competitors and linking with them and not forgetting the social bookmarking sites. Get yourself registered on them and add links to your site. If you can do this in a short period of time you will increase your link velocity and be picked up on Google’s radar.

Blogs are a really good way to increase your SERP’s too. You may have to invest time and money into creating great content but it will reward you. Either pay a journalist to create the content for you on a regular basis, maybe find a recent graduate with a grasp of the English language or even write the content yourself. The idea is that sites will want to link to your content. This is known as Link Baiting.

If you can do all of this and maintain it you will see a marked improvement in your rank.

Thanks to Cass for this valuable insight.