My topic for the Intermediate Search Strategy session was “natural search,” so for my presentation I focused on a couple of great tools that make your SEO efforts a little bit easier. I also talked about some ways to handle duplicate content (either within your site or or on other sites) and keyword cannibalization (when more than one of your site’s pages are competing for rankings for the same search term), because I think that it’s important to minimize these two issues when optimizing your site.

The first tool I mentioned, Xenu, is a free downloadable program that crawls whatever URL you enter. After the crawling is complete, the program generates a report detailing which links were found to be broken or not functioning, which URLs were being redirected, which URLs are valid and submittable to search engines, and much more. Xenu is great because it provides a lot of information about your site to you in a simple, relatively quick manner–all you have to do is run the report and work on other tasks while you’re waiting for it to finish. The information it provides is useful, valuable, and time-saving.

The second tool I mentioned was SEOmoz’s very own Rank Checker tool.
The Rank Checker checks the ranking for whatever URL and keyword or phrase you provide. It supports Google, Yahoo, MSN, and Ask, as well as their foreign TLDs. The rankings are then archived so you can compare them over time and analyze position changes. While the tool does have limited free accessibility (you can monitor 5 keywords/search terms per day with a free account, while Premium Members receive unlimited access to the tool), I urged the audience to try the tool or something similar to it because I feel that it’s important to monitor your rankings regularly. Whether you use our tool, someone else’s tool, or manage the monitoring on your own, be sure to keep track of where your site’s at in the SERPs.

Regarding duplicate content, I shared ways to check and see if your site is experiencing a duplicate content problem. You can copy and paste text from your site into Google and see if other pages are popping up. Conversely, Copyscape.com has a duplicate content detector that is free in limited use. To check for dupe content within your own site, I recommended searching for “example text” site:example.com (put the content you’re searching for in quotation marks, and type your site after site:).

If you’re using licensed content and want to avoid duplicate content problems, there are a few different options. If you are the licenser, you can require that your licensees noindex, nofollow those pages so that they won’t be indexed but so that the links will will still carry value. If you are the licensee, you can embed the licensed content in iframes or you can encourage users to write original product reviews or content unique to your site.

Lastly, I touched on what to do with duplicate content/keyword cannibalization within your own site. It’s a good idea to 301-redirect any duplicate pages to the canonical source–that is, whichever page you absolutely, definitively want to rank for a specific term. You can also opt to have duplicate pages focus on unique variations of your main term (for example, you can have a “snowboards” page and a “women’s snowboards” page), but ensure that these variation pages link back to the original/main term. This tactic aids search engines into determining that the page is the best result to display for that search term. For example, if you have a Children’s Snowboards page, a Women’s Snowboards page, a Custom Snowboards page, and a Discount Snowboards page, you’d want them all to link back to whichever page you want to rank for “snowboards.”