It's time for the latest issue of the SEO Chat newsletter! We know how much you love seeing what Google has been up to lately, so the article we're highlighting this week from eWeek gives you a little insight. If you've heard of the Summer of Code events the search giant has sponsored before, you'll want to tell all of the programming students you know about this; if you haven't, read the article and do it soon, because Google will be closing its applications for the Summer of Code on April 3.

Now let me tell you about the articles we ran for you this week. We know many of you focus your efforts on making money online, so on Monday we kicked off a three-part series to cover that topic. On Tuesday, of possibly even more general interest, we published the second part of our five-part series on search engine optimization ranking factors. Those of you building content-focused sites, or writing for them, will want to read Wednesday's article, where we discussed a number of tips to help you write better content.

If you've ever wondered how important on-page optimization is for your SEO efforts, you might want to check out this week's thread. The original poster found it necessary to modify his content-filled home page and strip it down to the bare bones, while moving the content to other pages in his site. How did Google react to this? The answer might surprise you. Be sure to stop by the thread and join the discussion.

You'll also want to pay a visit to Tutorialized, where you'll find loads of instructive SEO-related tutorials. With nearly 100 educational pieces on everything from social media optimization to fixing the tags on your web pages, you're sure to find something to help increase your knowledge of SEO regardless of your level. And if your interests branch out into related areas, we also have a large number of tutorials on web site design and development, among other tech-related topics.

Finally, our Spotlight, just for readers of our newsletter, covers a new tag that Google created which is now honored by all of the major search engines. It's the link rel canonical tag, and it can help you with duplicate content issues. How? Scroll down to the Spotlight to find out.

As always, thanks for reading.

Until next time,
SEO Chat Staff

• News of the Weird goes an entire segment without making a fat joke. It is an episode you will tell you grandchildren about. That is if you were not so fat you could actually get some.
• A new segment appears on Tech News: Idiot of the Week. No, I am not talking about Jack.
• This week's Video of the Week is brought to you by: a writer too busy to write a third clip.

Watch the video!

Who does not want to write better content for Web pages? Great content can command online traffic, create revenue and help the writer of that content establish a good reputation or even an online fan following. Well-written, keyword-rich Web content is a very powerful tool. It is also what most Web sites on the Internet desire. When you know how to write better content, there is a lot you can achieve.

Content on the Web is a hot commodity and it is what everyone wants. Well-written, keyword-rich content is attractive to readers, Web masters and search engines. In order to use it to boost your page rankings, levels of traffic and even revenue, you will have to learn how to create that content. Master a few tips and tricks, and you will learn the secrets of how to write better content.

Writing Better Content

Anyone can learn the secrets of writing better content, and online content can always be better. To write really good online content, it is necessary to blend the needs of the site with the needs of the search engines - and all of this must be molded into an easy-to-read, interesting bit of information for casual Internet readers. It may sound like a lot, especially when factoring in those all-important keywords, but writing better content should always be the goal. After all, why bother if it is no good? Highly-polished, entertaining online content reflects well on you and the site where your content is displayed, and there is nothing wrong with that.

Read Write Better Content: Tips and Tricks

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Consider the bar raised

Links and Age as Search Engine Ranking Factors
by Ivan Strouchliak
2009-03-24

In this second part of a five-part series on the factors that cause web sites to rank in the search engines, we are going to take a close look at links and the age of the domain. We are also going to touch on the rate at which new pages are added, the rate at which new links are added, and hopefully torpedo once and for all the belief that toolbar page rank has anything to do with how high you rank on the search engine results pages (SERPs).

Topical Relationship of Linking Site

If the domain is trusted and the page you link is on is relevant, it can be enough to pass link power. Links from less relevant but powerful domains are still counted.

Getting a link from a niche website on your topic can help you with Google's Topic Sensitive Trust Rank and Topic Sensitive Page Rank, which require "community" links. Community links are links from websites in a specific topical community. If you can get a link from a niche website, even a new one, go for it.

Read Links and Age as Search Engine Ranking Factors

Making Money Online
by Joe Eitel
2009-03-23

With the advent and rise in popularity of the Internet, it is no surprise that more and more people have become interested in the topic of making money online. There is something special about the Internet that makes people truly believe that anyone can do anything. As it turns out, this is more or less the case: the Internet is the great equalizer of our time.

Part of what makes the Internet so great is the ease with which anyone can create their own business. If they already have a business, then they can multiply the size of it by magnitudes by expanding to the online market. By going online, you are able to reach a virtually limitless supply of customers who are all looking to buy your product.

Unfortunately, the ease with which an individual can set up a business online has led to a much higher rate of failure. Because people who are not as serious or entrepreneurial are now having a go at business, many of these people will not succeed without a very strong work ethic.

Read Making Money Online

Tutorialized is dedicated to programming, designing, and many other
tech related tutorials.

Online Branding by way of SEO
Brand - a trademark or a unique name to identify your product or a manufacturer.
Read the tutorial.

Creating Search Engine Friendly URLs Using .htaccess
Using .htaccess is simple and easy.
Read the tutorial.

Secrets Behind Link Building
On reading this post you should be able to do link building with simple steps.
Read the tutorial.

10 Tips To Improve Traffic
Learn these 10 steps to increase traffic to your site.
Read the tutorial.

Bring Customers and Business Together Through Proper Keywords
The title says it all. Easy methods.
Read the tutorial.

5 SEO Myths
Are you still spending too long on worthless SEO? This can help.
Read the tutorial.

How can this SEO Newsletter be better?

What do you like or dislike about this issue?
Is there a topic you want to learn more about?
What issues in search engine news are important to you? We'll consider your suggestions and ideas for improvement,
so please email us. Email us.

How much does on page optimization matter? Are there cases where you can have too much content on a page? These are the questions implied behind this week's thread, and it's encouraged a fair bit of discussion. Be sure to stop by the thread; the answers to the questions might surprise you!

On Page Optimization

Hi,

Just a query. I've always been an ardent supporter of on page content/optimization, and all of my pages are filled with lots of content optimized with keywords, h tags etc.

The problem now is I crammed my home page with tons of content but it spoils the look of it. I submitted my site to a web design evaluation site, and they said it has too much info and it's hard to breathe. My site offers lots of services btw.

So I took all the info on the home page and put it on a different page, and stripped back the home page so it contains the bare amount of info and all the links to the rest of the site.

So, would this now hurt my home page? Or would Google recognize that there's lots of content in the website and count that toward the home page?

After all there are many websites with intro splash pages with no content that don't seem to affect the SERPs of the website.

Users care about content more than Google does. Google cares about high quality inbound links. Your question is really more of a usability issue (IMO). A great book recommended previously by one or our top members is Landing Page Optimization by Tim Ash.

Other landing page suggestions are:

1. A call to action above the fold.

2. Signs of trust.

3. A single topic.

4. List of benefits.

5. An additional large call to action or multiple ones.

6. If a form exists, it is simple and concise.

7. Easy to read type.

8. Simple URL (ideally).

9. Cross browser tested.

10. No exit points.

11. Testimonials or third party product reviews.

As a footnote to this thread, Google has now cached my new "skinnier" home page and it hasn't made any difference to the SERPs. If anything it has improved a bit. I must have cut away 900 words of content and just left the bare bones.

Conclusion: On page optimization doesn't count for much at all.

(but u already knew that ;))

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

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A New Way to Establish Canonical Pages

If you haven't heard about the link rel=canonical tag yet, pay close attention. Google created the tag, but Yahoo, Microsoft, and Ask also honor it. If you've been concerned about duplicate content issues, it provides you with another way to tell the search engines which pages you want to specify as containing the original content that you want indexed.

Canonical issues crop up quite a bit for large, dynamic sites. In its web master blog, Google used a site selling Swedish gummy fish as an example. Say the preferred version of the URL for that page is fairly short. Well, visitors (including Googlebot) can get to that page through a number of URLs, often not as simple, and the content may show some variation. Say someone came to the product page by navigating to it from the category; you might display a bread crumb on that page which you don't want to appear on the canonical version. Tracking parameters or a session ID could also change the URL.

To fix these kinds of issues, all you need to do now is add the new tag to the head section of duplicate content URLs. This will tell Google and the other major search engines that the duplicates really refer to the canonical URL, which is the one that should be indexed. As you probably gathered from the example, the canonical page doesn't have to be an exact duplicate of the content; Google says they allow slight differences, such as in the sort order of a table of products. You can use a relative path to specify the canonical page, and you can even specify a URL that redirects as the canonical URL.

The tag does have its limits however. For instance, it's recommended that you make sure the link you've chosen to be canonical doesn't return a 404. And you can't use the tag to suggest a canonical URL on a completely different domain. So if your web site is example .com and you're selling widgets at example-widgets .com, you can't use the tag to redirect from the former to the latter. Even so, this tag should help ameliorate many headaches for a lot of web masters.