The article we have for you this week covered something that every business site is supposed to have: an About Us page. Judging from many of the About Us pages that one can find online, it's frequently treated as an afterthought, and it shouldn't be. Someone who checks your About Us page is interested in your company, so you should give them what they're looking for. Do that, and you just might see an improvement in your bottom line.

You'll find some very interesting SEO-related tutorials among the ones we've highlighted from Tutorialized this week. Would you like to get more traffic to your site? One of our tutorials offers up 65 tips. How about getting Google ads for free? It's all here, and more. Check them out today, and don't forget to take a look at the other tutorials we have on Tutorialized!

If you're worried about potential duplicate content issues, you'll want to read our Thread of the Week. In fact, if you're planning on offering your visitors a choice of viewing certain content either in HTML or PDF form, you will definitely want to read it. Human visitors like that kind of choice...so what's the best way to offer it without the search engines picking it up as "duplicate content" and penalizing you? Check out the thread to find out.

Finally, our Spotlight, just for readers of our newsletter, brings news of some great functionality Google just added to its Webmaster Tools. You can now tell them where your site belongs! Not sure why you should care whether Google puts your web site geographically in the United States or the United Kingdom? Scroll down and read the Spotlight for an educational experience.

Until next time,
SEO Chat Staff

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All White Papers.

SEO Index

Your About Us Page is Not Just a Placeholder

LinkedIn Stays All Business with New Social Features

Google Not Best for All Searches

    SEO on Tutorialized

 SEO Thread of The Week

 SEO Chat News Spotlight

Introducing Tech News by Developer Shed. News you can't use.

It's edgy! It's irreverent! It's all about technology! It's news you can't use, and you won't want to miss it! View this week's edition to learn the answers to these burning questions:

Why did Hillary hurt Obama's feelings? And doesn't Obama sound suspiciously like...Osama? You decide... Now that the magic carpet has been invented, is carpet-bombing next? How you make a single mother trying to raise a family on minimum wage cry? Watch this video to find out... What do you do when a kid beats you up at school? Turn into a Fire Mage and set him on fire, that's what.. Fed up with not getting what you want for Christmas? Do what this guy did and gun down Santa Claus. Watch the video!

Your About Us Page is Not Just a Placeholder
by Terri Wells -- 2008-01-02

I’ve read the “About Us” pages for a lot of companies, both professionally and as a curious consumer. Some of them piqued my interest, others made me laugh, but the vast majority put me to sleep. Why would a company blow a great opportunity to close a deal?

I mean that seriously. Anyone who is looking at a company's "About Us" page has more than a casual interest in the firm. One of the items I read while researching this article said that customers who read a company's "About Us" page have a slightly higher conversion rate than those who don't. It's almost like those "About Us" readers are saying, "okay, here's one last shot to convince me to buy from you."

But if you're going to convince them, you'd better make it good. I'm not talking about a hard sell, though. Save that for your product pages, if you must. An "About Us" page is not about selling, per se. It's about communication. Granted, it's a sort of one-sided communication, since you can't really have a dialog with your customers on your "About Us" page. But you can imagine your customers' end of the conversation and answer the kinds of questions they're likely to ask.

Read Your About Us Page is Not Just a Placeholder

LinkedIn Stays All Business with New Social Features
by Terri Wells -- 2007-12-26

LinkedIn, the social network for business professionals, stepped out of the shadow of larger sites competing in this market with new features designed to help its nearly 17 million members get ahead in their careers. In doing so, it’s showing that there is a lot more to online networking than blogging about last night’s party and sending virtual drinks to your friends.

I freely admit that I haven’t done much on LinkedIn with my profile or on the social network in general. That’s partly because there really didn’t seem to be a lot to do on the network when I joined. I don’t always think to take advantage of business networking opportunities even when I’m face to face with someone, so using the site seemed a little “unnatural” to me. It looks like LinkedIn is trying to change that.

The company has rolled out a slew of changes since the beginning of October. Some of these are things that other social networks do as a matter of course. For example, after adding photos to LinkedIn profiles, the company added the option of letting users display their photos with all of their communication. That’s a natural thing for a dating site to do, but its importance is enhanced in a business context, as Chris Richman notes in LinkedIn’s official blog. “Imagine being able to identify whether an invitation is from someone you had a conversation with at a recent event vs. someone you don’t recognize,” he explained. With fears that social sites can help foster identity theft, this is no small consideration.

Read LinkedIn Stays All Business with New Social Features

Google Not Best for All Searches
by Terri Wells -- 2007-12-19

When you’re looking for information, do you go to an encyclopedia or a specialized book? If you answered “Neither; I check the Internet,” don’t click away. The question has more relevance for the major search engines, particularly Google, than you might think.

I still use Google as my default search engine, and so do many others trying to find information on the Internet. Online research and rankings site comScore recently released figures that revealed the U.S. traffic rankings of sites competing in the search marketplace. For the month of October 2007, Google held on to a major lead. Users performed 6.1 billion core searches at Google’s sites, a figure that represents 58.5 percent of the search market. The second place search company, Yahoo, claims less than a quarter of the search market.

Can millions and millions of Internet users be wrong? Yes and no. The truth of the matter is, not all searches are created equal. Google, however, treats them as if they are. That’s not surprising; frankly, with as many searchers as Google sees using its main search page, it can’t really do otherwise. So every search is treated as if it is looking for general information, even though the user’s intentions may be to get a very specific piece of information.

Read Google Not Best for All Searches

Tutorialized has a dedicated SEO section for Search Optimization, Website Marketing, and many other SEO/SEM related tutorials.

IPB SEO
Three important, almost mandate tips on invisionfree power board search engine optimization.
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65 Ways to Get Traffic to Your Website
T here are a lot of Ways to Get Traffic. Here are 65 of them...
Read the tutorial.

6 Tips for Web sites
It is important when flipping your website, to make sure it is in a niche market for growth.
Read the tutorial.

How to choose the best hosting?
10 things you should know before buying web hosting.
Read the tutorial.

A way of getting google ads free
This is just a simple way to get google ads for free.
Read the tutorial.

Duplicate content: will PDF version hurt me?

Hello,

I have a VERY LONG academic article that I want to place online (more than 50,000 words).

The article has many important words sprinkled throughout it like autoimmunity, squamous, and mastopathy.

I will divide my content into "chapters" that are about 700 words long.

Each chapter will be available in PDF format.

I understand that search engines do not like duplicate content.

What if I have the exact content in BOTH the HTML version and the PDF version? Will my search-engine placement be compromised because of the duplicate content?

One SEO veteran told me to place the PDF files in a directory that my robots .txt blocks search-engines from looking in, but I do not want to do this because if someone searches for PDF documents I want to be found:

[link deleted; showed Google search for keyword mastopathy with PDF as file type]

Will the PDF versions help or hurt me?

One idea I had is to give my pdf versions a lower priority in the sitemaps .xml file.

Please share your thoughts, thanks!

They don't like it if you're using the same content as 5 other websites, if you are repeating your own content on your own site then you are safe.

What will happen is that the search engines will decide which is more important, the HTML version or the PDF and will display only it in the results pages. If it is vital that one or the other version show up, there are several things you can do to tell the SEs that one is more important than the other.

Take a look at how citeseer .ist .psu .edu does it.

The approach I'd take is:

1) Embed links in the PDF back to your site and the article. If others link to the PDF version rather than the html pages, you'll still get the benefit of link juice flowing to other pages within your site. Also, if others link to the PDF and there are no embedded links, you lose the potential traffic benefits. How many times have you seen .pdf and .doc documents in the SERPs that contain no references or links to the site from which they came?!

2) Nofollow the link from the html page to the PDF. Don't block the PDF version with robots .txt otherwise you'll lose any benefit from other sites linking to it.

The nofollowed link will save the internal link juice being wasted on a page you don't intend ranking for, and instead it'll be passed elsewhere in your site.

3) If you really don't want the PDF to appear in the SERPs, then consider throwing a noindex HTTP header for the PDF file: X-Robots-Tag: noindex

Any incoming link juice to the PDF from other sites will still flow to your site through the links within the document.

Posts from this thread may have been abridged or removed. Forum members are responsible for the content of these posts.
Read the full thread.

New Capability Added to Google Webmaster Tools

The Internet makes the idea of where your business is located geographically meaningless, since that bunch of electrons can be viewed by anyone in the world with the right equipment. Someone in Iowa can do business with someone in Tokyo as easily as they do business with someone down the street. That's the theory, anyway; in reality, it isn't quite that simple.

While .com is the most popular domain name extension, there are a number of country codes (uk, .ca, .dk, etc) that tell visitors where you're located. That's not the full story, though; you can have a domain name with an extension denoting the UK that was built and is maintained by web designers in the US, hosted on servers in Canada. So where are you really? And if you can't answer that question, how do you expect the search engines to know?

That's not an academic question. Your domain name extension and the physical location of your site's server both affect how your site ranks in regional versions of search engines (such as google .co .uk). If your business - or your most important target market - is located in a particular country, wouldn't it be helpful to be able to tell the search engines where you are?

Now you can. Google just added some new functionality to their Webmaster Tools. It lets you tell them to which country your particular domain and subdomains "belong." So a multinational company that has example.com as its main domain can tell Google that japan .example .com belongs in Japan, canada .example .com belongs in Canada, and so forth.

It's about time, according to many webmasters. Amanda Camp, an engineer with Google Webmaster Tools, notes that the search engine heard at one of the SES conferences last year "that this was one of the most important issues for them [webmasters], so we've been working hard to come up with a solution that would be easy and would benefit searchers as well." If you've been waiting for this kind of functionality, wait no longer. Log in to your Webmaster Tools and take advantage of this new level of control.

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