Everyday, it seems we are working with new products and new tools. Though they both seem to bring with them all sorts of new problems. The goal of Three Bullet Thursday is to quickly shed a dim light on some of the newness around us, so we can smother pesky fires before they have a chance to ignite. My aim is to share three relevant points that come up throughout each week.

 

Welcome to the first edition of TBT!

(read time: 1m30s)

My personal favourite is the persistent mobile ad example with the gif showing how it sticks to the bottom of the page!
  • One Issue – One common issue I came across this week was duplicate content. This is when search engines (like Google or Bing) recognize that the text on a particular website has been copied from another existing website. Search engines don’t like this and will penalize the site that has copied its content.

In this case, a client created a second website and copied all of the content from the first website. This is bad practice and could have been avoided.

Solutions – The simplest solution would have been to simply create a “Locations” page on the first website eliminating the need for a second site. Since the new site was already created, our solution was to rewrite the content on each page so that it would not be treated as duplicate content.

Fun Fact: You may notice that big brands do this to avoid search penalties. Check out mazda.ca and mazda.com. Notice how all of the copy, and images are all different to avoid the issue of duplicate content (even the layout is different).

  • One Product – On that note, this week I want to highlight the importance and effectiveness of our 5 and 12 keyword SEO packages. It was through our SEO campaign that we discovered the issue above and were able to make the corrections.

When ranking websites, search engines look at over 200 factors, everything from content to site speed, to referral links. Our SEO team will analyze a website, find the errors and implement corrections to make sure that your client’s site is not being penalized or ‘hidden’ by search engines.

As a general rule, it can take about 6 – 12 months to take a website from beyond the 100th search result to the first page. This can change depending on competition. For example, a client of ours went from 100+ to the very first result in 1 month… Not bad!

If you have any questions about anything in this blog, or want to know more, feel free to email mmordak@glaciermediadigital.ca

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