Coming soon to a palm tree near you, Beginner SEO Classes.

As mentioned in my previous post, Beginner S E O Training - Palm Springs & Online, I’ll be teaching a couple of courses for newbies to search engine optimization this fall.

Given the rather lengthy title I Built It, So Where Are They? Secrets To Search Engine Optimization, the class will be in partnership with the Center for Training and Development at College of the Desert in Palm Desert, CA. We’ve got two scheduled this fall:

Saturday, 10:00 AM - 2:00 PM; 1 session on October 13, 2007

Saturday, 10:00 AM - 2:00 PM; 1 session on November 3, 2007

The classes will take place on the College of the Desert campus in a computer classroom and will be an expanded version of my S E O 101 series. In addition to the usual lecture, pointers and demonstrations, I’ll be taking volunteers and walking through some of their web sites and providing suggestions on how they can do better with their search engine optimization efforts.

So, all you locals sign up because there is very limited space. As for you non-locals, well, we’re talking October or November in Palm Springs, here. You KNOW you wanna!

Having the same content on multiple pages can get you into trouble with the search engines.

Duplicate content is a hot, if not over discussed, topic among the search engine marketing community. In a nutshell, if you have basically the same content on more than one page, the search engines will choose the one they think is the most important and rank it and only it. If you do too much of this, you could get some demerits from the search engines. If you really overdo it with mirror sites and the like, you could get banned or at least penalized.

Most web sites will have at least some duplication of content. For instance, an e-commerce site will probably use a single template for every product page. The trick is to give each product page a unique title and description tag as well as some unique content on the page in the form of descriptive text and images. As a rule, something as simple as this can keep you out of trouble.

Here are some other tips that might come in handy.

1. Use tools like Copyscape.com to find stolen content. If you are concerned that other sites are stealing or scraping your content to use on their own pages, use this free web site to find out. Simply paste your URL into the form and do a search. What you will get is a list of pages with text that is similar to yours. If you see anything blatant, contact the offender and ask for your content to be removed. If they won’t, report them to the search engines.

2. Use analytics software. Your web analytics can tell you what pages are converting. Put those into your sitemap and any that aren’t converting that could be considered duplicates can be excluded in your robots.txt file or by using the “No Index” meta tag on the individual pages. That tells the spiders which pages you want indexed and there’s less risk one of the non-converting pages will be considered by the engine as the most important and index it instead.

3. Choose one domain for branding. Don’t go overboard and put up a bunch of domains with similar content on them. Focus on one. If you’ve already got several domains up, consolidate them into one and 301 redirect the others to it.

4. Test domains should be invisible. It you are using a domain simply for testing new designs, functions, etc., be sure it is not accessible to spiders or users, who will both be confused about which domain is the real thing.

5. Choose www or no www. Most search engines can figure this out these days, but it is still wise to choose whether your site is http://www.yourdomain.com or http://yourdomain.com. In the past, these have been seen as two separate sites and could cause duplication problems. Best to decide on one and 301 redirect the other to it.

6. Don’t do server load balancing. You’ve probably noticed sites whose URL will be something like http://www1.domain.com and then maybe http://www2.domain.com the next time. That’s server load balancing. Problem is, the search engines will see www, www1, www2, etc. as duplicate copies of the site. That’s asking for duplicate content problems.

7. Use absolute URLs. An absolute URL is http://www.yourdomain.com/yourpage.html as opposed to making the link on your page a relative URL like yourpage.html. This is especially important if you use secure pages (https). Without using absolute URLs, you can go to an https page and then try to leave by way of a relative link. Problem is, you’re still in https without that http://www.yourdomain.com/yourpage.html absolute link and every page you go to after that will be https://www.yourdomain.com/page.html instead of http://www.yourdomain.com/page.html . Not only is it a pain for the user who will get secure page notification pop-ups, but the spiders will see all https as a duplicate site. Besides, https pages generally should NOT be indexed.

8. Session IDs can be a nightmare. Yes, this problem will take some advanced technical help. The problem with session IDs is that on these dynamically created (database created, for you newbies) pages you can have exactly the same content on a multitude (thousands or even hundreds of thousands) of pages with completely different session IDs. Dump the session ID info into a cookie for all users or identify the spiders and strip the session IDs for them only. For more info, see Google Webmaster Guidelines.

9. WordPress Canonical URL Plugin. If you are using WordPress (as I do), install this plugin to take care of duplicate pages that can occur after you do permalink customization. Basically, this redirects posts in default WordPress URLs to your new URL structure.

10. Top level domains in different countries should not be a problem. If you have basically the same site up in different countries using country-specific domains, you will probably not have duplicate content issues. It’s best to host the sites in the appropriate countries and customize the language and keywords for each, though.

Bonus tip: Want to see what Google has indexed from your domain (or any domain for that matter) during, say, the past seven days? Just point your brower to http://www.google.com/search?q=site:yourdomain.com&as_qdr=d7 . Simply change the “yourdomain.com” to your actual domain name and alter the “=d7″ to be whatever number of days you are looking for (d5, d10, etc.). Or, change the “d” to “w” for weeks or “y” for years.

As always, these are just a few tips to help you avoid duplicate content issues. The suggestions on this page are by no means the only ways to deal with duplicate content.

I go into more detail in my S E O 101 workshop, offered to web site owners and small businesses. Check my blog at http://www.weboptimist.com for more information or contact me to set up a custom workshop for your business group of five or more people in the Palm Springs area of Southern California. Travel is possible for large groups.

As mentioned in a previous post, I will be doing a local live S E O training class based on my S E O 101 series here in the Palm Springs area this fall. Actually, it looks like there will be two classes, each on a Saturday and lasting four hours. This will not be one of those classes where I put up a Powerpoint presentation and lecture the whole time. This is a down to the dirt, nitty gritty, this-is-what-to-do-and-how-to-do-it beginners workshop where I will demonstrate the different aspects of search engine optimization, show examples and make suggestions for participants on pages from their own sites.

I’ll have more information on dates and times soon. For those of you who don’t live in our beautiful desert area and can’t make the classes (I do travel for larger classes), there are online alternatives you might want to consider. Here are a couple of favorites of mine.

Search Engine Workshops - These folks helped me get started. I had been doing web design for several years and had a knack for getting top rankings for my sites. I thought I knew just about everything I needed to know, but their certification program was one of the first offered and I decided to go for it. Boy, did I find out that I didn’t know everything about S E O! Not even close. This program was any eye opener for me and I highly recommend it.

Search Engine College - This is a newer program with courses written and conducted online by top rated search marketers. They offer downloadable industry certification courses for search engine optimization and pay per click marketing.

So, if you can’t make one of my courses, give these a try. Of course, I’d love to see you in sunny Palm Springs!

I’ll have schedule and other class information soon.

A few months ago I wrote a post suggesting that a link in the Business.com directory probably would not help you with your link building campaign because the links appeared to be redirected. You can read all of my concerns and reservations in the post Business.com’s Redirected Links along with updated comments.

Shortly after that post appeared I contacted Search Engine News to see what they knew about that directory’s linking structure. They had also removed Business.com from their list of recommendations as well. Search Engine News got back with me with a promise to test the links and come back with a definite answer.

They provided the answer in the Sept. 2007 issue. Here’s what they say:

If your site is in the business-to-business field, then we can once again feel comfortable with recommending that you add Business.com to your monthly marketing plan.

The bottom line is that we are back on the Business.com bandwagon—although we recommend that you zero in on the Standard listing if you’re using them for link building.

So, I’ve added Business.com back to my list of Best Directories and want to thank Search Engine News for their assistance. Thanks folks!

And, I have to give credit to the folks at Business.com for their ingenuity. Very clever linking strategy!

Just an example of a caption for this old flash camera photo for image optimization. Notice the reference to the URL in the image.

Google’s implementation of Universal Search has changed the whole search landscape and settled the often debated SEO issue of whether the use of ALT text and keywords in image file names have any effect on rankings. In two words - they do.

For those who don’t know what Universal Search is, Google is now blending search results from all of their search properties - web pages, images, books, videos, etc. Where a search in Google used to bring up a page of HTML results, you will now get all of the above. This means everything on your site must be optimized these days, not just your web pages.

So, as a follow-up to my original S E O 101 post, here are some tips to make the most of your site’s images.

1. Context is extremely important. Images can rank based on what surrounds them on the page. Pay attention to keyword text, headings, etc. on the page. Image-only sites generally only work well if it is an extremely well-known brand or product. Otherwise, you need keyword rich text.

2. URL content text is important, too. The text of your URL is looked at as part of the context surrounding the image. The domain name, directory name and filename of the image (name it with keywords) are taken into consideration as far as relevance.

3. Use captions if possible. Take a tip from newspaper photos and place keyword rich captions with your images. Make the text good, quality content, not keyword spam.

4. Proper image type is crucial. Make absolutely sure your photographs are .jpg and not .gif. The .jpg format is standard for photographs whereas the .gif format is normally used for graphic images.

5. Images can effect reputation management. Non-flattering images can really hurt you. Optimizing your images can help push any images you would rather the public not see off the results pages.

6. Create a sitemap feed of images. As with web pages, the search engines can follow a sitemap that you create of images that you want spidered.

7. Use descriptive ALT text. Search optimizers used to debate over whether ALT text had any influence on rankings. That debate is over. Optimize your images using descriptive keyword-rich ALT text. Don’t stuff the ALT attribute. Make it short and to the point. The keyword rich ALT text for your images could be the tie-breaker over who gets the top spot, so always use it.

8. Use the word “picture” or “photo” in your ALT text. Some searchers do use those words when they search for images.

9. Label images with your brand or URL. This will capture some home page traffic for you. Watermark the images or just add your URL somewhere.

10. Use high quality images. Unique images with good contrast tend to be the best.

11. Add photos to Google Maps. Fluff up your Google Maps listing with photos and images. These can influence visitors who find you through local search, etc.

12. Post images to Flickr. Open a Flickr account and put unique photos in your account. Basically, each photo you put up is its own web page with a title, description and tags. You can include a link back to your site and share the photos with other Flickr users and social sites.

13. Use Feedburner. I know this might sound strange since Feedburner is for RSS feeds, but if you handle your RSS feed through this free Google-owned service, you can also have images you post to your Flickr account included in the e-mail updates that are sent to e-mail subscribers of your RSS feed. This is all set up in your Feedburner account admin.

As always, these are just a few tips to get you going in your image optimization project. The suggestions on this page are by no means the only ways to optimize your images. Please note that many of these tips also apply to multimedia files like video and audio, too.

I go into more detail in my S E O 101 workshop, offered to web site owners and small businesses. Check my blog at http://www.weboptimist.com for more information or contact me to set up a custom workshop for your business group of five or more people in the Palm Springs area of Southern California. Travel is possible for large groups.