CMG Pharma Website 2009

The Customer Management Group Inc. (CMG) has served the promotional needs of the international pharmaceutical industry since 1986. CMG’s mission is to create an operational framework for Closed-loop Marketing investmenst to be successful and deliver the maximum return on these investments.

CMG had a need to create a new marketing site to promote their products and services with the intention of increasing leads while providing visitors with information on CMG and Closed-loop marketing through product demos and whitepapers.

More information about cmg-pharma.com or go directly to the new CMG Pharma site here!

For many businesses, pay-per-click campaigns make good sense. The core concept is simple: pay top dollar to get top ranking, and the more you pay the more traffic you receive (I realize I’m over-simplifying here). On the other hand, organic search optimization (a.k.a. SEO) is more abstract and technical (not to mention time-consuming), and because of this many marketers opt to ignore SEO and focus only on PPC.

In this two part blog post I’ll share some thoughts on how PPC and SEO can work together to better optimize your search strategies and improve the success of both streams.

Choose the right keywords

Technical aspects of search engine optimization aside, the biggest stumbling blocks for businesses starting SEO efforts are:

a) it often takes a lot of time to actually see results for SEO

b) you need to wait a long time to determine if you are targeting the right keywords or not, and if you chose wrong – more waiting.

An easy way to avoid choosing the wrong keywords is simply to test the value of your keywords before you heavily commit to your organic search strategy. To test keywords, buy PPC ads from Google to see which ones are driving traffic to your site. PPC ads are a reliable and usable way of forecasting how a particular keyword might direct qualified traffic and conversions if optimized on a regular page for the organic results. So wherever a natural search optimization (NSO) forecast is needed, paid search can act as a reliable predictor.

There are also a number of great conversion tracking tools that show you which of your keywords will convert well. Bid on a variety of keywords tightly related to your business, and use keyword suggestion tools to see what you have missed. Odds are you will miss obvious keyword phrases – especially juicy long-tail terms. Find out which keywords perform well, and set up your initial SEO keyword strategy based on the top performing terms.

Blend Web analytics reports

Having organic and paid search results reported in the same place helps us to better understand the relationship between the two and think about a searcher’s complete journey, rather than paid or organic in isolation. Use your Web analytics tool to segment traffic by source (PPC and Organic Search) side-by-side for particular keywords.

Reporting PPC and SEO in tandem is advantageous in a number of ways, even for determining keywords that aren’t performing for either stream which most likely means your prospects just aren’t searching for those terms.

Blended reporting helps you identify the keywords for which you should be optimizing your Web site. Optimized pages will rank high on the search engine results pages, eliminating the need to buy those keywords (although there are advantages to showing up everywhere as well – see “Blanket Branding” in part 2 of this post coming soon).

Optimize Web content with PPC ad copy

Use the successful copy in your paid search marketing campaigns to your advantage. If it works in PPC, it’s likely that it can be transferred to your organic content optimization to help boost natural Web page rankings as well. It’s easy to change PPC ad titles, links and content on the fly, and analyze the results of these changes more quickly than waiting for the results of SEO efforts. Does a particular keyword/phrase used in the title increase clicks? Does the ad text compel readers to click? The winning content and keywords found from playing around with PPC ad content can then be applied more confidently to your Web site content optimization efforts for SEO purposes.

Stay tuned for part 2 of this blog post in which I’ll discuss more abstract, yet equally important ways PPC and SEO can work together in regards to landing pages, blanket branding, and the long-tail search.

Online marketers are often overly concerned with running into duplicate content issues on their Web sites. Concerns range from duplicate page titles and meta descriptions to having full articles duplicated through syndication, and even the dreaded URL parameter.

Ok – first things first, technically speaking there is no such thing as a “duplicate content penalty” imposed by any of the major search engines. That said, there are definite ways that you can damage your reputation with the search engines, but ultimately these instances are rare and you probably aren’t doing them.

To help dissuade some fears, I’ll clarify four common types of duplicate content that people are often concerned about, what affect they have and if you should be worried. I’ll also conclude with a quick description of the new (game changing) canonical URL tag which should make everyone’s lives much easier in the future.

Types of Duplicate Content

1. Meta Content

• What is it? This is a number of HTML tags that sit in the “head” of a Web page. It includes items such as your page title (the one that displays at the top of your browser bar), meta keywords and description tags.
• Should I be worried? Not about being penalized, but definitely about diluting your keyword ranking potential. You won’t be penalized by the search engines for duplicating of any of these items on your site (and of course meta keywords are essentially useless). That said, it’s crucial that you create unique and appropriate titles and meta descriptions for each page on your Web site. As most of you know, titles and descriptions are your Web pages’ primary exposure to visitors in the SERPs – if your content in these areas isn’t compelling to potential visitors then they’re not going to click, plain and simple.

2. Page Content

• What is it? This is anything in the “body” of your Web page – headings, paragraphs, lists etc. Concerns usually arise when there are news items or articles that are duplicated in multiple areas on the same Web site, or syndicated to external sources (i.e. via RSS).
• Should I be worried? Again, not about being penalized, but definitely about diluting your keyword ranking potential. The more duplicate content you have on a site, the more you compete with yourself for keywords, potentially diluting your ability to rank higher with specifically targeted page content. Unless you’re doing something like recreating entire Web sites under different domains and claiming the content as unique, you will likely never be penalized for duplicate page content. Again, your visitors and usability should prevail and page content should only be duplicated if absolutely necessary for your visitors.

3. Page URLs

• What is it? This is usually when one Web page can be accessed via multiple URLs, and is most commonly found when using dynamic pages within a Web CMS. For example, a single destination page may be accessible from different URL formats such as www.example.com/page/index.php, www.example.com/page/, and www.example.com/page/?id=1.
• Should I be worried? Not about being penalized, but definitely about diluting your keyword ranking potential. Are you seeing a pattern yet? This type of situation is very similar to that of page content – it is very likely that all three versions of the URL will get indexed and as a result the rank of the page content will be diluted between three competing versions when there should only be one.

4. Domain Level

• What is it? This is the most overlooked type of duplicate content that we find. It includes having multiple domain names pointing to the same Web site, as well as using the www and non-www versions of your domain. Any domain (including www vs. non) pointing to your site could be mistaken for duplicating another full version of your site if the domains aren’t properly redirected.
• Should I be worried? I’m sure you can guess what I’m going to say here – these elements have the same pitfalls for page rank as page URLs above. The easy fix for this is to always make sure that all versions of domains (www and non-www versions) pointing to your Web site are properly 301 redirected to the primary domain so that all traffic will land on your primary domain, and the only pages that will get ranked by the search engines are those on your primary domain.

The Canonical URL Tag

Recently Google, Yahoo! and MSN Live announced that they will be supporting a new “canonical URL tag” to help Web site owners control and eliminate self-created duplicate content in the search engines. The tag is part of the head of a Web page, in the same section you’d find the title attribute and meta description tag. It uses a meta link format to tell search engine robots where the location of the original version resides.

For example, if a bot finds the tag:
[<link rel="canonical" href=http://www.example.com/article1/ />]

on a the page: http://www.example.com/latestarticle/

the tag tells the search engines that the page in question (http://www.example.com/latestarticle/) is to be treated as a copy of the URL http://www.example.com/article1/, and that all of the page rank and authority belongs to the original Web page, not to the “duplicate” version. As a result, the canonical URL tag gives Web content managers more control over managing duplicate content, making our lives easier.

Active Diversions Website 2009

Orangeville, Ontario had a requirement for additional Co-Ed Adult recreational sports leagues for the Spring and Summer.  Darryn Stevenson and Katrina Lawson decided to take this need and turn it into a business and have started Active Diversions.  Active Diversions offers Ultimate Frisbee, Flag Football and Beach Volleyball leagues currently to any Orangeville and Surrounding area residents interested in some fun, active outdoor activity.

More information about activediversions.com or go directly to the new activediversions site here!

Google is constantly adding features and enhancements to all of their applications, and the search engine results pages are no exception. Most recently, or not so recently depending on who you talk to, Google has been experimenting with “enhancing” their SERPs to improve the speed of the results and performance in general. This enhancement uses Asynchronous Javascript and XML (AJAX – don’t worry if you don’t know what that is) to serve this content dynamically.

Should I be excited or worried?

Both…
By using AJAX, Google can provide results much faster by placing more load on the user’s browser and less on Google servers, requesting only the search results and nothing else (like reloading surrounding page elements). Using AJAX will decrease bandwidth and speed up all aspects of search from loading the results, to making search suggestions, or even loading paginated results (i.e. Page 2 of the results) or cached pages. Of course, this is only going to work well for modern browsers that support AJAX fully (and properly); users with legacy browsers might actually experience impeded performance.

The scary part for many is the fact that, since Google is loading content via AJAX, the URL created for the search is appended by a hash (#), rather than a question mark (?) which is standard parameter query syntax. This means that it is not actually changing the URL, and it is not triggering any of the analytics tracking that you would normally pick up with a standard parameter-based query in Google. In lay terms, this means that you might actually lose the ability to track items such as search terms (keywords), number of results and maybe even source (i.e. google.ca vs google.com). If this is the case, there is going to be a huge amount of actionable data missing from analytics in the near future.

How do I tell if I’m experiencing the AJAX enhanced Google search?

Look at the address bar after you’ve completed a search query. Normally you’ll see the URL for google.com appended at the end with a query parameter that begins something like “search?q=KEYWORD”:

i.e. [http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=seo&btnG=Search]

If you are seeing a URL that has a hash “#” instead of the “search?”, then you are definitely seeing the new AJAX interface:

i.e. [http://www.google.com/#hl=en&q=seo&btnG=Search]

Bottom Line:

Google claims that this is strictly experimental and affecting a small number of users, but from the buzz I’ve heard, there are many people who have experienced the new interface.

As stated by Matt Cutts in the comments of Rebecca Kelley’s SEOmoz article, AJAX: Great for Scrubbing Analytics Clean!, “We’re continually testing new interfaces and features to enhance the user experience. We are currently experimenting with a javascript enhanced result page because we believe that it may ultimately provide a faster experience for our users. At this time only a small percentage of users will see this experiment. It is not our intention to disrupt referrer tracking, and we are continuing to iterate on this project. For more information on the experiments that we run on Google search, please see: http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2006/04/this-is-test-this-is-only-test.html.”

Some are worried that this means that Google is trying to inadvertently force everyone to switch to Google Analytics so that they can still access search query data, but the reality is that Google is not going to handicap their user-base by implementing this across the board without an alternative that will actually pass the vital data required by the numerous analytics vendors out there. The likely solution will be something along the lines of URL rewrites (actually changing or masking the final URL to match the query after AJAX has completed the search), or some sort of redirect URL when a user clicks on a link to visit your site (again changing the URL to pass the appropriate query data) – which is what Yahoo! currently uses with great success.

As a new industry begins to grow, the need arises for a base set of standards to guide it’s growth in the right direction. Without them, an industry can grow wildly out of control making it hard for companies to be effective, and impossible for consumers to choose the best solution for their needs. Standards ensure that the industry follows a set of rules –

– that meets the needs both of consumers and of the industry itself.

The topic of Web standards has actually been around for quite a while, and the standards to be discussed here have been used by many designers and developers for years. That said, we still see non-standards compliant sites over and over, and businesses seem to continuously fall into the same traps when deploying new sites or redesigning old sites. We see it so often that I was compelled to write this article to remind people of the real advantages of using Web standards.

What are Web Standards?

When a Web site or Web page is described as complying with Web standards, it means that the site or page has valid or nearly valid HTML (XHTML), CSS and JavaScript while also meeting accessibility and semantic guidelines. Having a set criteria of Web standards ensures that sites which follow them enable the highest number of different users (human and artificial alike) to effectively use the sites, while also making them easier to update, maintain and grow. Web standards also make it much easier to produce Web applications, providing a benchmark from which applications can be developed and a set of rules to adhere to.

The driving force behind all of the current Web standards initiatives is the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), a collective that has been working for years to establish and maintain Web standards.

The Basics

While trying not to get too technical, the basics of what makes a site “standards compliant” translates to the following key elements (with some examples):

1. Use valid (X)HTML

Using valid HTML (and preferably XHTML) is the first huge step towards compatibility with current (and future) browsers along with better rendering in the old ones, essentially future-proofing your site. XHTML requires that you use proper tag structures and hierarchy which not only make it easier for search engines to read and index, but also provides a much better user experience for visitors (see #3 below). To assess your Web pages for valid (X)HTML, use the W3C HTML Validator.

2. Use semantic Web techniques

It’s important to separate presentational elements from code and content because it provides a clean and clear page for both spiders and text-readers to parse through. Other benefits include reducing the physical size of pages so that they load faster, maintaining a consistent look and feel throughout the site, and making style and content changes easier to manage. Semantic Web techniques include:

• Using semantic code organization to keep your page structure in order.
• Using proper headings and paragraphs to organize Web page content. Do not use tables for anything more than representing tabular data. There are still many sites using tables to control the layout of content within a site. Not only does this make a page non-standards-compliant, but it also makes it near impossible for non-visual visitors (i.e. visually impaired via text-readers or search engine spiders) or non-computer browser visitors (i.e. mobile visitors) to determine the flow of your content.
• Avoiding the use of presentational markup, that is, any style information in the code of your page (i.e. old-school font-tags). Instead, link to the layout and presentation information in well-defined CSS files. Linked style sheets allow the presentation to be removed completely from the page structure of your site, and allow much quicker application of global changes to the site. Having the XHTML only reflect the structure and function also makes it much easier for non-visual visitors to read through the page content based on the use of proper XHTML hierarchy. It also guarantees that everybody can adjust the rendering to their needs and preferences including providing separate style sheets for different rendering engines (i.e. mobile, monitor, text reader, etc.). The CSS Validator by W3C detects any non-compliant use of the CSS technologies.
• If there is an absolute need to add style information in the markup itself, ensure that you are using proper CSS in the head of the page, or proper inline style format in the XHTML tags.

3. Make your site and content accessible

An accessible site benefits all of your users and broadens your current audience by allowing text-readers, and by default search engine spiders, to accurately “read” and follow your site. These days, another advantage of meeting accessibility requirements is that your site will also be usable on the many mobile devices available to consumers.

Web accessibility is normally based upon the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines[1] published by the W3C’s Web Accessibility Initiative. Although there are 3 Priority levels, a site should at the very least always meet Priority 1. Some of the basic guidelines include:

• Use HTML tag attributes and text equivalents for all non-text elements on a page such as images (i.e. alts and longdesc), and media components such as Flash.
• Use a proper semantic hierarchy in your XHTML and separate your content from your site structure (see #2 above). This standard is required by law in some countries and is also required by many individual businesses and government agencies.
• Use appropriate text for elements such as links and image alts as much as possible. For example, naming an image “image1.jpg” does nothing to explain the content of the image, just as naming a link “Click here” does nothing to explain the function of the link or where it is going.

Although not standard accessibility requirements, adding these simple tools can provide great benefits to your users:

• Text-zoom – enlarges Web site text on the fly for those with visual deficits
• Color Switchers – provide a higher contrast for people with visual deficits, or monochrome for those who are color-blind
• “skip-nav” – allows text-readers and mobile users to skip your navigation and go directly to the page content.

To recap, here are the top reasons why you should be using Web Standards:

• Increasing site accessibility will result in a larger target audience.
• Improved user experience for all potential visitors.
• Cross-browser and cross-platform compatibility (mobile devices included) will also result in a larger target audience. Compatibility with the widest range of browsers and platforms results in a future-proof implementation of your site.
• More accurate crawling and indexing by search engines – as long as you target standards and accessibility you’ll automatically also be optimizing your site structure.
• Removing presentational markup from your pages and using properly structured XHTML will result in reduced page weight (physical size) and as a result your pages will load faster.
• Placing all of your design and layout information into external CSS files allows for centralization and quick adjusting of site look and feel – thus allowing you to make global changes quickly and easily while maintaining a consistent look and feel for the site. Easy-to-maintain Web pages will also result in huge management cost savings.

Additional resources

When Web standards are discussed, the following publications are considered to be foundational:

• W3C recommendations for markup languages, such as HTML, XHTML, SVG, and XForms
• W3C recommendations for style sheets, especially CSS
• Ecma International standards for ECMAScript, most commonly JavaScript
• W3C recommendations for Document Object Models

Introducing the Leatherwork site of Doug Nave “Leatherdreamweaver.com”!!

Doug Nave creates custom handmade Leatherwork and Fine Art. He decided that he wanted to create a site that showed both his creative and spiritual side. Doug wanted to be able to show his Leather creations primarily and also some of his Fine Art work from the past.

The result is his new site “LeatherDreamWeaver.com“.

Each year, many in the blogging community post together to increase awareness for a common cause. This year the cause is Poverty. Since I love lists and don’t have a bunch of time to actually research and write an article of my own, I figured I’d provide a list of some articles worth reading related to fighting Poverty (and promoting Conservation, Sustainabilty etc. in the process):

• Building A Sustainable Economy
• Promoting Global Conservation
• Worldvision stories
• How to Fight Poverty: 8 Programs That Work
• One International – not an article but a cool site

I’m a huge fan of top 10 lists of all types from the classic Letterman to the modern Digg meme posts. So today I’ve compiled a list of some of the key points to consider when promoting link building for your site. The interesting “Art Imitating Life (or SEO)” bit here is that lists tend to be one of the more successful viral techniques for link building…which brings me to my Link Building List – and just to be different it’s a Top 11:

1. Create lists

Create an interesting list to produce viral link-bait – content that is interesting enough to “bait” many people to either link to it or bookmark it via social bookmarking sites like Digg. The fun thing about lists is that they can be completely unrelated to your site or industry and still be a valid format for a linking strategy. From an SEO context perspective, however, the list content should be somewhat related.

2. Develop authority

This one is a bit intangible, but if you can prove that you are an authority on a topic, people will link to you and the search engines might even like you better.

3. Serialize content & syndication

Produce compelling serial content and push this content out into the inter-blog-cyber-sphere. The more people read your content, the more likely they will send it to others or link directly to it and ultimately this will increase both your authority and your links. Alternately, pull in compelling serial content to your site (with permission of course) from external sources and feeds. Nobody says the content on your site needs to be 100% proprietary (ok your compliance dept. might). Examples of Serial content: RSS feeds, Articles, News feeds, FAQs, Press Releases, Newsletters.

4. Use directories

Submit your site to directories – simple enough as long as you stick to the legitimate ones like DMOZ and Yahoo. Get yourself on a few of the old-school “link-farms” and this strategy starts to work against you really quick. Generally speaking, stick to the directories you know and make sure that you are only getting placed into appropriate “contextual” categories (vs grouped with many unrelated sites with unrelated categories). When in doubt, you could always create a legitimate directory of your own – perhaps with affiliate industry sites or relevant complementary sites.

5. Leverage social bookmarking

Encourage visitors to use a social bookmarking site (or meme trackers such as Digg) to promote your site content. This is as simple as placing the social bookmarking icons and/or links as close to your content as possible. Submit interesting content to these sites directly and encourage everybody you know to do the same. For most sites, hitting the first page of Digg for even a short time will send more traffic to your site then you could imagine. Of course, nothing says that all of this traffic will be qualified but it might lead to further linking which is always a good thing.

6. Get involved locally and “industrially”

If your target audience is local, sign up for as many local business directories and associations as possible (Better Business Bureau, Chamber of Commerce, Local Listings, News sites etc.). Also sign up for any associations, affiliate sites or industry specific sites for your business or product. Definitely find ways to be associated (and linked) with educational and government sites. Generally speaking, links from .edu and .gov (also .org) will automatically provide higher link authority than any .com.

7. Promote interaction and constructive criticism

This one is a little tricky, but people really like to read what others think and then add their two cents as well. These days, allowing people to review your product or comment on an article, along with proper moderation (not full on policing) can be an extremely successful means of producing traffic and linking. Although there is always a fine line between constructive criticism and all out product bashing, the public is much more savvy and is much more likely to trust a company that allows conversation and external reviewing of products or services. And once conversations start they often grow a life of their own and draw traffic.

8. Blog and be blogged

This might be obvious but a huge source of links and authority on the internet these days comes from the blogging community (aka the blogosphere). Having bloggers (especially industry specific or high profile bloggers) blog about you or your product or service can often cause a great deal of buzz in the blogging community and as such result in many links back to your site. On the other hand, having a corporate blog or industry expert blogs produced by your company or staff can also be very effective. Not only does it show that your company is progressive and current, it might also position you and your staff as experts (or not, depending on the quality of the content in the posts) for your industry and related topics. At the very least, blogging will allow a dialogue between your company and your visitors. Of course, forums can act in much the same way but traditionally are much more involved to maintain and moderate.

9. Trade and buy links, PPC & advertisements

There really is nothing wrong with good old fashioned advertising and there’s certainly nothing wrong with soliciting the right sites for the right links back to yours (reciprocal or otherwise). As always, be careful how you do this and definitely be diligent if you are buying links (i.e. signing up for an ad service or Pay-Per-Click.) to ensure that you are paying for a service that is white-hat and won’t be detrimental to your rankings.

10. Give stuff away

Everyone likes a good deal, especially just about anything free. There are always opportunities to promote your site by offering incentives on the cheap. Promoting these offers around to meme trackers, blogging sites, even forums will often become a viral link juggernaut (especially if the deal is a great one) quicker than you can say “free t-shirt”.

11. Be social

This has been touched on in some of the items above, but the bottom line is to get out there (metaphorically and literally) to interact with those who could become visitors, linkers and maybe even converters. Comment on blogs, interact on forums, get involved with social media and social networking communities and even physically get out and go to industry tradeshows, have your staff speak as experts at conferences, join local committees and networks that allow every opportunity for people to get to know who you are and what you do.

There are a lot of myths surrounding search engine optimization (SEO). I don’t mean to gripe about it, but I just have to set the record straight – it’s time to dispel these myths and get to the bottom of what’s really going to improve your SEO. The five myths that bug me the most pertain to Meta Tags, Keyword Density, Redirects, Duplicate Content, and Dynamic URLs. (and don’t even get me started on Alt Attributes!)

SEO Myth #1: Meta Tags don’t matter.

Even though Meta Keywords have been essentially useless for years now (yet still considered best practice to include – and there is a very real chance of running into problems if you don’t use them…) and Meta Robots are of questionable value (robots.txt is a much better choice), there are a number of extremely important Meta Tags that should still be considered, and may even become more relevant in years to come as Web taxonomy, findability and Web standards in general mature.

• Meta Description is still required and of high importance as it is the window to the topic of every Web page via the search engine results pages (SERPs).
• Dublin Core meta standards should be applied whenever possible; this may one day be mandated by many industries.
• There are other Meta Tags that can be extremely helpful (such as NOODP), but that’s a topic for a whole other article.

SEO Myth #2: Keyword Density does matter.

• Although there are no hard-set rules for how often keywords should appear on a page, you will definitely be penalized for keyword “stuffing”.
• Repeating a specific keyword phrase in every “key” area (e.g. URL, title, headings, paragraphs, links etc….) is no longer a “best practice” and in fact might also take a hit in the SERPs depending on how obvious it is.

The best way to optimize for a keyword phrase is to include it in a few key spots (e.g. in the title and referenced in the content), but you should also incorporate content that is related to the keyword phrase (use synonyms, related terms etc.) and focus on one topic per page – the days of keyword repetition are gone.

Search algorithms are now able to determine the relevance of a page for a keyword phrase not only by the phrase itself, but by the related terms and topics that are included in other areas of your Web page or site as a whole. Areas such as headings, text surrounding links and actual anchor text are still extremely important, but you are wiser to keep your content relevant rather than repetitive. For example, surrounding a link to “widget a” with terms related to or describing “widget a” would be more effective in the current search algorithms than placing the term “widget a” all over the page.

SEO Myth #3: Redirects are bad.

Redirects are not bad and they will not destroy your position in the search engines – but using redirects incorrectly will definitely destroy your position in the search engines.

The only correct redirect is a 301 which tells the robots that the page that used to exist in one location now resides somewhere else – end of story. All “Link Juice”, authority and page rank from the old URL will be passed onto the new URL.

301’s are completed on the server side usually identified by a “.htaccess” file in Unix based systems, or absolute redirect in Internet Information Services (IIS) on Windows-based servers.

SEO Myth #4: Duplicate content is always bad.

Duplicate content can be bad – sometimes.

With the proliferation of RSS and other syndication mechanisms on the internet these days, content duplication is becoming more and more common (and less and less a function of spamming) and the search algorithms are changing as a result.

The real issues arise when you have multiple domain names pointing to one or more copies of the same site with pages and pages of exactly the same content. If you are hosting multiple sites under multiple domains with exactly the same content then you are definitely going to be penalized. On the other hand, if you only have a few articles or important pages duplicated on one or more sites you are generally going to be alright.

If you must have multiple domains, they need to be redirected appropriately to one primary domain, or even better, eliminated altogether (e.g. by using subdomains for segmenting).

SEO Myth #5: Dynamic URLs are bad.

Dynamic URLs – Web page addresses with parameters instead of or in addition to page names (e.g. www.example.com/?page=1234abc) – are still very common on many dynamic Web sites and the search algorithms do take this into account when indexing such sites.

If you use dynamic URLs, the search engine spiders can still crawl your site, however, two or three parameters are as many as a robot will tend to read. Having relevant text in the URLs will obviously be much better for the robots and your visitors, but parameter-based dynamic URLs can (and do) still perform very well in SERPs.

Bonus Gripe: Alt Attributes in Images are for Search Engines

I just want to clear up one other small item that keeps coming up and is a pet-peeve of mine. Besides people always referring to Alts in images as “Tags” (they are an attribute of a tag rather than a tag themselves), many individuals think that Alts are just for search engines and should be optimized that way. This is not the case.

Alt attributes were created to describe an image for anyone using a non-graphical interface to access a Web page. Generally speaking, Alts are for visually impaired individuals using text-readers and should always be targeted to those visitors, not the search engine spiders.

The nice side-effect of using Alts this way is that they generally allow the image to work much better in Universal Search type applications (read: image search) indirectly pushing qualified traffic to your site.