While a lot of things about SEO are quite obvious, there are other things about it that are not, such as what to do if you have no choice but to duplicate a piece of a news story. To ensure your website performs as well as possible, here are some SEO tips to help you effectively compete for and achieve top ranking.
Web Rankings
There are many questions regarding how Google ranks websites. The main question is whether or not Google uses the same algorithm to rank search engine results. For example, many wonder if the first few results on the page may focus on freshness while the last few results focus on something like social signals.
The fact is that the same algorithm returns many web results and then sorts them in order of what Google thinks about the reputation of the site and its relevancy to the niche. This is how Google determines what the first position is. One of the best SEO tips that you can take advantage of is to just focus on everything from website freshness to social networking and quality backlinks.
URL Canonical for Duplicate Content
Sometimes duplicate content is warranted. Perhaps you are covering breaking news on your website and so is everyone else. If you use a piece of a news story that is probably published over multiple URLs, you will want to use the URL canonical tag to avoid being penalized by the duplicate content filter. The URL canonical tag can point to the original source.
Many times, breaking news content is short-term duplicated content. The URL canonical tag will allow you to use the content for the short-term while you get matters cleaned up on your site. Once the story is no longer breaking news and everything is moved around accordingly, you should be fine, especially if you do not have large amounts of duplicated content on your site.
Different Countries under One TLD
Of course you want your SEO to be as perfect as possible. If you have websites or a client with websites that service different countries and they are all hosted under different top level domains (TLDs) under one IP number, you may be wondering if Google would rather you have a single IP per TLD. The good news is that they can be put on one IP address. Google uses the TLD as the indicator of where the site needs to be indexed.