Wondering if using manufacturer-provided copy will cause duplicate content issues for your site?

Manufacturers often provide copy about their products so that retailers can use it to describe those products to potential buyers. Although this copy may be useful to people who arrive at a retail website, manufacturer-created copy causes multiple duplicate content issues from a search engine optimization standpoint.

You may be asking: why should I care if duplicate content issues cause problems for the search engine spiders?

Take a look at search engines from a search engine company’s perspective (Google, Yahoo, Bing and so forth). Each of the search engines want online searchers to choose to use their services, right? To get this to happen, a search engine focuses on providing the best results for each search query; to quote the most successful of the search engine companies about one of the ways that they accomplish this: “Google tries hard to index and show pages with distinct information.”

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Spring is coming – so it’s time to freshen up your website by once again choosing keywords for your site and updating your web page content.

When was the last time that you conducted keyword research on your site? If the answer is a year – or more – then it’s definitely time to repeat the process. First, rerun all the keyphrases that you’ve been using. (The Search Guru provides links to terrific free keyword research tool options.)

What changes do you notice in your keyword research results? Why do you think those changes are occurring? What do they mean to your business?

For example, perhaps you’ve been featuring the luxury version of your product, because keyword research had previously indicated that there was significant interest in that product line. Perhaps, in today’s more uncertain economy, fewer people are searching for the luxury version of your product – but there is much stronger search traffic now on another product line of yours. How will this change your business – and search – strategies?

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Here’s The Search Guru ebook review of The Web Content Recipe Book: 21 irresistible content ideas to wow visitors and boost your search engine optimization.

This ebook is written by multiple authors associated with Wordtracker, the professional keyword research tool; a copy of this ebook was given to us for review purposes.

The sub-title of the ebook does a great job of sharing both its scope and purpose, which is to present readers with numerous ways of writing web page content to help your company:

• engage customers
• increase online traffic
• build your business

That’s pretty straightforward – and useful stuff for anyone engaged in e-commerce today.

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Organic SEO tips: how to create a landing page

Let’s say that you sell 20 products online, with each one falling into one of two categories: Product Type A and Product Type B. You’ve created a unique page for each of your products, which is terrific, but what’s the next step?

The next step is to create a landing page for Product Type A, with links to each of the ten products in this category, and a landing page for Product Type B, with links to each of the ten products in that category.

This internal linking strategy will accomplish two goals:

• make it easier for human site visitors to find the products they need
• make it easier for the search engine spiders to index the content and return these URLs in response to relevant search queries

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For holiday spirit all year round, create SEO content that makes it easy for people to give perfect gifts to their loved ones.

People love to give gifts! A comprehensive study, Gifting Report 2006 , indicated that the average gift-giver spends nearly $2,000 annually on gifts. Sure, holiday gift giving accounts for a significant portion of that – with about 60 percent of those funds going to Christmas presents, Hanukkah gifts and so forth. But, that means that 40 percent of gift-giving purchases – for birthdays, weddings, anniversaries and the like – occur throughout the calendar year.

What does that mean to you and your SEO copywriting?

You should be choosing keywords for gift giving and creating benefit statements that help the gift giver select the best possible presents for their loved ones all year long. Read the rest of this entry »