Denver Media provided custom WordPress Theme design and content migration.

About AweSun Renewable Energy:

AweSun provides full service consulting, design, installation and maintenance of solar Photovoltaic (PV) electric systems.

View the site at: www.awesunenergy.com

Denver Media provided custom WordPress Theme design and content migration.

About Quick-Set Auto Glass:

Quick-Set Auto Glass has been serving Colorado’s auto glass needs since 1985. In 1996, the Short family took over the business and has based its growth on honesty, integrity and hard work.

View the site at: www.quicksetautoglass.com

Denver Media provided custom WordPress Theme design, content migration and Denver website hosting.

About Excellence in Building:

Excellence in Building has been constructing and repairing residential homes for over 10 years. We have the capability to perform all phases of construction including: roofing, carpentry, siding/exterior, interior finishes.

View the site at: www.excellenceinbuilding.com

Why Canonicalization Matters From A Linking Perspective
by Rick DeJarnette

Search engine optimization (SEO) can be like any other technical field of study. It is filled with specialized jargon that, to a newbie, can be more than intimidating. I recall that feeling was especially strong when I first encountered the term canonicalization.

It is a 14-letter, seven-syllable monster of a term. I first heard it spoken, and had to ask the person who said it to repeat it. It didn’t help. (It had been a long day!)

The truth of the matter is that canonicalization is not all that complicated to understand if the explanation is lucid. So let’s try to explain what it means, why it’s important, and what it has to do with linking.

What Is Canonicalization?

In mathematics, when the same data can be represented in multiple ways, it is best to standardize that representation by establishing the data’s canonical form, the one primary form in which it will be used. In the computer science field, the act of defining the canonical form of data is called canonicalization.

Simply put, canonicalization defines the one primary way you’ll use to write data, such as a URL string. As webmaster, you can choose which canonical form to use for a given URL on your site, but once selected, the chosen form should always be the way that URL is written.

Why Canonicalization Is Important

Fundamentally, you need to know that search engines do not index pages by their content. They index URLs. The content associated with the indexed URLs is brought in to the search engine database, but URLs are what possess ranking.

What complicates matters in search (and why canonicalization is important) is that the same content page can have multiple URLs associated with it.

I’m not talking about when Web spammers scrape your content and publish it on their own website. I’m talking about variations of URLs on your website all pointing to the same page.

For example, the following hypothetical URLs would likely all point to the same page (in this case, the home page of a site):

• example.com
• www.example.com
• www.example.com/
• www.example.com/index.html
• www.example.com/index.html?var1=105
• www.example.com/index.html?var1=105&var2=abc

As you can see, a valid URL may either include or omit the subdomain prefix “www.”, a trailing slash after the top-level domain, the default webpage name for a folder, and/or one or more URL parameter suffixes (there are even more, but these are the most common). They can also be used in various combinations. The possible permutations of the above examples can quickly add up to a large number of URLs all pointing to the same content page.

Read the entire article at: Search Engine Land

by George Aspland

I was recently doing some link building for a client and noticed that a LinkedIn profile for their top competitor appeared in the listing of strong incoming links in one of the review tools we use.

But our client also has LinkedIn profiles pointing to their website, so I wondered, why weren’t those links appearing in the strong link listings too? So, I set out to look at the differences that might affect the strength of incoming links from LinkedIn.

In this article, I’ll cover a couple of steps you can take to help improve the visibility of your LinkedIn content with search engines as well as within the LinkedIn community, increase the exposure of your LinkedIn updates, and improve traffic to the Web content you point to in LinkedIn updates.

It’s important to realize that LinkedIn isn’t only for B2B. It’s effective for any company to network with connections in the industry, with vendors and partners, to find resources, for recruiting, etc.

Setup A LinkedIn Company Page

One of the main differences between our client’s LinkedIn Profile(s) and the profiles of that top competitor was that their competitor has a LinkedIn Company Page with employees associated with it. Our client has some employees with profiles that link to their website, but they do not have a Company Page.

What are LinkedIn Company Pages?

From Linkedin: “Company Pages are a company’s profile of record on LinkedIn and a powerful way to speak to millions of professionals through word-of-mouth recommendations and trusted testimonials. It’s like a LinkedIn profile for a company.

Company Pages present an opportunity to reveal the human side of your company. Provide a peek at the individuals behind your brand and highlight how members use your products.

As an example, here is Search Engine Land’s LinkedIn Company Page.

How To Setup A Linkedin Company Page

A current employee whose position is listed on their own LinkedIn profile can setup a Company Page. You’ll need a company email address (e.g. john@companyname.com) that is one of the confirmed addressees on your LinkedIn account.

Start here and follow the steps to setup your Company Page.

Here are some helpful resources about Company Pages:

LinkedIn Learning Center article on Company Pages

LinkedIn FAQs about Company Pages

Associate Employees With Your Company Page

Once your company page is setup, have some of your employees associate their LinkedIn profiles with your Company Page.  Here are the steps to associate a profile with a Company Page:

1. Click Profile at the top of your home page.
2. Click Edit next to your current position at the company.
3. Click the Change Company link.
4. Type the full company name.
5. Select the correct company name from the dropdown list.
6. Click Update.

Read entire article at: Search Engine Land

I’ve been spending a couple of weeks this summer in the Distilled office looking at the way they do linkbait in order to write up a guide on it.

Whilst researching and reading around what people had posted before, it became clear there were a handful of problems which kept cropping up why people were failing at linkbait. In this post, I hope to address some of the biggest headaches SEOs had.

We’ve Had Very Limited Success

1. No Outreach Plan

Don’t wait until you’ve hit publish to start thinking about outreach. Like a marketing campaign in itself, you wouldn’t build prototypes, injection-moulding systems and have a container load of widgets shipped across from China before you’ve spoken to and got reassurance from your customers well in advance that they’d love to buy it; ideally with pre-orders.

The same applies to linkbait.

You want to reach out to at least some of the linkerati beforehand and get your “guaranteed five links” before you even start your piece of linkbait. The good news is if lots of people are interested from the beginning and think it’s a good concept, other people will probably like it and link to it later on too.

I interviewed some of the London Distilled SEO and PR team on their tips for effective outreach. Here’s a sneak peak:

If you’ve already launched, Wiep Knol has some excellent tips for breathing life back into your linkbait here.

Denver Media provided custom WordPress theme design, photography and multimedia integration.

About T.M. Grace Builders

TM Grace Builders was formed in 2011 by bringing some of Denver’s most talented construction professionals together. With over 60 years of collective experience, TM Grace’s team can bring your dreams to reality!

Visit T.M. Grace Builders: www.tmgrace.com

Denver Media provided custom WordPress Theme and Denver Website Hosting services.

About H20

H2O TECH, Inc., a green driven company, has the latest, most advanced and extremely efficient patented technologies in the “water remediation” industry. The public is being inundated with “green and alternate energy companies.

Visit H2O Technologies: www.h20technologiesinc.com

Solar Glass

Denver Media provide Denver SEO and Denver Website design services on WordPress platform.

About SolarGlass

SolarGlass has been selling windows, doors, and skylights to homeowners, custom builders, commercial and residential contractors and retrofit installers since 1981. And with each window sold, a promise has been made to care for our customers’ homes.

Visit their site to see more!  www.solarglass.com

Google Study: PPC Ads Do NOT Cannibalize Your Organic Traffic

by Matt Van Wagner

Though I’ve never met him personally, I admit to being a big Hal Varian fan. For those who don’t recognize the name, Dr. Varian is the Chief Economist at Google and like me, one of the oldest guys in his company.

Over the past few years, he and his team of researchers have made my life simpler by providing pithy answers to some of search’s mythically difficult questions, like “How do search auctions work?” and “Does ad position effect conversion rates?”

Last week, his team at Google released the results of their research that answers a question that paid search managers across the world get asked on a regular basis: “Why the [bleep] are we advertising on our own [bleeping] brand terms when we are ranked #1 for those [bleepety-bleep-bleeping] terms already?  [Bleep]!”

Though the Google research team posed the question in a slightly more scientifically-fashionable way for their research, they essentially set out to answer the question of whether or not paid search ads cannibalize traffic from corresponding organic listings for the same keywords.

Their findings, in true Varian-esque style, were simple, direct and memorable. They found that paid search ads give you a 89% incremental lift in site visitors – above and beyond traffic you would normally expect from your organic listings.

You can download the study at the Google Research Blog:  “Incremental Clicks Impact Of Search Advertising” by David X. Chan, Yuan Yuan, Jim Koehler and Deepak Kumar.

Is A Google Study That Proves Google Paid Search Works Valid?

You don’t have to be a committed cynic or skeptic to question the results of Google’s research on its own search properties. It’s only natural to raise the question of self-interest, but since Google has made no bones about the fact that it is their own research, they are being upfront and candid.

In their report, they provide pretty good detail on their methodology and their statistical methods though it is provided only in summary form.

But, in fact, the study seems to support the prevailing conventional wisdom in our industry and even some earlier studies on the impact of paid advertising on brand terms and natural traffic. It certainly supports Brad Geddes findings in his Search Engine Land column last week, “Should You Bid On A Keyword If You Rank Organically For That Term?”

Read the entire article at: Search Engine Land