Making The Most Of Your Website’s Seo Using Canonicalisation

(OfficialWire) — When designing a website many people do not take into consideration how it will be indexed by search engines such as Google. However, this is central to the internal Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) of a website.

SEO is an online marketing technique that can be utilised both internally as part of a websites code and externally in the form of press releases, articles, link building and social networking. It works towards increasing traffic to a website and boosting its rankings in search engines such as, Google, Yahoo, Bing and MSN.

The Creare Group are specialists in Website Design and Search Engine Optimisation (SEO), through their latest video blog Nick Rinylo, SEO Consultant, and James Bavington, Web Designer, will address the subject of canonicalisation, to ensure that web designers everywhere understand how they can improve their SEO.

The basic principle of canonicalisation is that it is designed to prevent websites having the same content on more than one URL, preventing dynamic URLS containing items such as question marks from being indexed by Google. This means that one set of content will belong to just one URL. This can improve the SEO of a website, but it also allows designers to gain more control over how their websites URLS appear in the search results.

During the video blog, Nick will explain the three ways that website designers can indicate their preferred URLs to search engines such as Google.

Firstly, Nick will discuss how this can be done by indicating a preferred domain, using Google webmaster tools. Secondly, he will describe how it is possible to specify a canonical link element for each version of a page. Finally, Nick will explain how to improve SEO by indicating a preferred URL in a sitemap.

As well as being experts in SEO, The Creare Group also specialise in website design. Canonicalisation is particularly useful for designers creating CMS (content management system) and ecommerce web design, where large numbers of products / pages are incorporated into a site.

‘With thousands of different ways to develop and design websites it’s understandable that Google would provide advice and guidelines for webmasters. Not only does this allow webmasters and optimisers to ensure their canonical or ‘preferred’ content lists first, it also directs their crawl robots to the best result for the user.’ Nick Rinylo, SEO Consultant.

For more in-depth information about how to improve the SEO of a website take a look at the latest video blog from Nick and James on YouTube. Also, this week Web Designer, James Bavington explains how to produce a fully-functional website prototype and get it live on the web.