SEO Timbits - Rankings or Traffic? And When is Duplicate Content OK?

Wednesday January 02, 2008

Why use timbits in the title instead of tidbits? Simple, cause Tim Hortons coffee and Timbits are a great combination, simple, that's all. If you're not familiar with Timbits, they're much like donuts, except small and a little round ball, almost fit in the middle of a donut, and tasty.

So you have a website and you have a set number of keywords or an all important keyword or phrase that you solely eyeing and obsessed about. It happens to all of us at some point of a search marketing stage. There are always a few choice keyword/phrases that we want to get traffic from the search engines, this is natural. What we need to consider is to not base everything on just one keyword phrase and get caught up in the whole rankings phonomen. Sounds strange in a way right? While rankings are good to keep tabs on what is happening with your website in the search engines, this should not be the one and only sole determination for basing your campaign on.

With a search marketing campaign, we want qualified traffic, and this is where we want to dig into the traffic data that has been collected and what people have been searching to actually find your site and seeing what other linking sites are driving traffic. This is where we can capitalize on increasing traffic to your site.

So, as you are probably seeing, if you had to choose between rankings and traffic, lets hope you'll choose traffic. Solely going on rankings, chances are your competition will already have an advantage on you. In the end, it is about increasing qualified traffic your website and then selling your products and/or services. Going through your logs/stats you can usually find keywords that you may not of thought of, and this can be used to your advantage.

Duplicate Content

Duplicate content can be a problem or an issue at times. When is it really ok to have duplicate content?

1. If you have a .com website and a .de website in another language, this should cause any problems with the search engines.
2. If for example you have articles on your website and in printed form, this should be OK.
3. Often you may have different articles/content on the same issue, one for a novice and one for a more experienced person. As long as the content is different, (no copied sentences/paragraphs), then restating the info is OK.

 note: the duplicate content info was taken from an online podcast that Matt Cutts was interviewed on.

When will it become a problem?

• Mainly when you start to copy sentences, paragraphs and/or pages. Take the time to do it right

There are options for articles you can try if you want to post them on other websites. One option is to write an alternate version on the same topic so it will be different from the version on your site. This can be time consuming, I have done it on a few occasions. Another option is to wait a while before posting your article on other sites, give the search engines time to index it on your site first, then post it on other sites.

Thats all the SEO timbits for today.

Gerard Manning
Search Engine Placement Specialist
Search Engine Marketing Agency :: Manning Search Marketing