Archives for March 2011

LinkedIn Ads and Pandora’s Checkbox – How To Share New Ads With Connections, or Hide Them From The Competition

March 22, 2011 By Glenn Gabe

In January of 2011, LinkedIn finally released its revamped ad platform titled LinkedIn Ads. Since January, I’ve been helping several clients build and launch campaigns that leverage the unique targeting capabilities that LinkedIn provides. For example, you can target by geography, industry, company, job title, LinkedIn group, etc. Based on this level of targeting, I’ve run some extremely successful campaigns for my clients. Actually, I’ve seen the performance of some campaigns compare to their equivalent Search-based campaigns (run via AdWords and adCenter). And, when you think about the intent differences between Search and a platform like LinkedIn, having comparable conversion rates for certain campaigns is impressive.

When launching LinkedIn campaigns for clients, I find some clients immediately fire up Google Analytics to check when traffic begins hitting the site. This is the point when some confusion can set in, based on a feature that LinkedIn provides in its Ads platform. The feature isn’t so obvious to find, and it can be easily overlooked, so I understand why there’s confusion. And, overlooking this feature can lead to an awkward situation, depending on the nature of the campaign being launched. I cover this feature in detail below, along with how to adjust this setting.

Here Come The Clicks, But From Where?
When new LinkedIn campaigns started driving traffic, the resulting visits sometime hit so quickly that I was a little skeptical. For example, seeing the first set of visits only minutes after the ads were approved. So I quickly drilled into the reporting and dimensioned that campaign traffic by Service Provider. This will often show you the companies that are visiting your site (depending on where the visitor is accessing LinkedIn from).

Once I did this and presented the data to my clients, they immediately noticed a link between the companies initially hitting the site and their own connections on LinkedIn (the people they are professionally connected with on LinkedIn). Targeting-wise, the options we chose for the specific campaigns would not have included most of those connections, so we knew something was off. By the way, this also happened to me with my own campaigns. I was running some LinkedIn campaigns recently for my own business where I saw people clicking through that ended up being connections of mine. Again, this prompted me to dig deeper.

How Were LinkedIn Connections Seeing The Ads?
So, how were LinkedIn connections viewing and then clicking through new ads? Well, the answer lies in a small piece of functionality that’s located in a tab in LinkedIn Ads. It ends up connections were seeing each new LinkedIn campaign as network updates (which are broadcast to LinkedIn connections upon campaign approval). This would be similar to you posting an update from your LinkedIn homepage. It hits your news stream, which is pushed to your connections.

When I helped my clients access their own network updates on LinkedIn (which is also not the easiest thing to find), we saw their ads sitting there as updates. For example, the update would read:

John Smith started a new advertising campaign with LinkedIn Ads.
Targeting 158 professionals by Company, Geography, and Group.

That’s right, it not only shows your ad, displays your name, and a link to LinkedIn Ads, but it also shows the targeting you chose! Great, tell everyone how you structured your campaigns. :) Again, this is not cool from my standpoint…

Here’s a screenshot of an update from one of my connections who recently launched a LinkedIn ad:

Should This Information Be Broadcast?
When this happens, your connections on LinkedIn can freely view your new ad and then click that ad to check out your landing page (or wherever you were sending LinkedIn campaign traffic.) Note, you are not charged for these clicks, and I’ll explain more about this shortly. But even if you aren’t charged, is this ok to do? Do you want to broadcast your new ads, along with the targeting you chose, to all of your connections? How well do you know all of your connections, and are some actually competitors? These are exactly the types of questions that started coming up as I understood what was happening.

Why This Could be a Problem, And Why LinkedIn Wants You To Do This
Some clients had no problem with broadcasting their new ads, while others were upset that it was happening. The reaction I witnessed completely depended on the nature of the campaign. For example, if you were selling your core products or services, then getting extra impressions and clicks for free was fine. Actually, it could help a company gain more exposure (and quickly). But, if you were launching a new service that you would rather not broadcast to your connections (some of whom may be in the same industry), then you might not be thrilled to know they were seeing your ads (and targeting) and then clicking through to your landing page… Let’s face it, many people have connections on LinkedIn that might actually be competitors. They might be friendly competitors, but they are still the competition.

The LinkedIn Ads Help Center To The Rescue, Or Not
As of today, if you check out the help section of LinkedIn Ads, you won’t find any reference to this functionality (at least I couldn’t). That includes information about what it is, how to turn it off, or even what it’s called. So, why would LinkedIn be broadcasting your new ads to your connections as network updates, while not referencing the option directly in their help area? Was this simply overlooked by the Ads Team at LinkedIn? I don’t think so.

I think it comes down to exposure and revenue… The more exposure LinkedIn Ads get, the more people might try those ads. The more people that try those ads, the more money LinkedIn makes. And believe me, I get it, but I’m not sure LinkedIn should simply be running your ads in front of your connections without explicit approval. Instead, you are opted in by default when you launch a campaign, and must turn off the functionality yourself (if you find the option). I think that’s the wrong approach. To clarify, if this was documented the way it should be, then I think it’s a smart way to drive more awareness about LinkedIn Ads. For example, I see my connection John is running ads, I like the idea of trying that, let me find out more about those ads, and then I might spend money on running a campaign. That’s smart, but people shouldn’t be forced into doing this… LinkedIn benefits greatly from broadcasting your ads, while some advertisers don’t benefit at all. Actually, some of them can be hurt when this happens (again, since some connections might be competitors).

How to Enable or Disable Sharing of Ads With Your Connections
Based on this happening, and not initially understanding how to adjust the settings, I contacted LinkedIn Ads support about the problem. To its credit, LinkedIn got back to me the same day and explained how to turn off that feature. Again, this is not documented in the help section of LinkedIn Ads, and my hope is that it is included at some point soon… To me, advertisers should know that their ads are automatically going to be broadcast to their connections (along with the targeting options they choose), and they should have the option of turning off the feature. Again, I actually think this feature should be turned off by default.

Based on what I explained so far in this post, I thought it would be a good idea to show you how to find this feature, and then how to turn it off (if needed). It’s straight-forward, and would actually be better off as part of the campaign building process (as a checkbox before you submit your ads). Unfortunately, it’s not, which is why I’m writing this post.

So without further ado, follow the simple instructions below to either broadcast your ads to, or hide them from, your LinkedIn connections:

1. Log in to LinkedIn and click the link for LinkedIn Ads at the top of the screen:

2. The default view will display your campaigns. Click the Settings Tab to access your campaign settings:

3. On this page, near the bottom, you will see a checkbox titled “Network Updates”. The message below it says, “Send network updates to my connections or company followers (and get free clicks) when I create a new campaign”. You can uncheck this box to stop this from happening:

4. Click Submit and You’re All Set.

Good for Some, Bad For Others – LinkedIn Should Revisit The Opt-In Process
That’s it. You can now launch LinkedIn campaigns without letting all of your connections know what you are up to. It’s a simple, but powerful option when you are running LinkedIn campaigns. Again, whether you choose to broadcast your new ads, or not, completely depends on the nature of your campaign. The good news is that LinkedIn does provide control over this feature. The bad news is that you are opted-in automatically without much information about how to turn it off. I don’t think that’s the right approach, but hopefully this post cleared up any confusion. :)

Google Grants and Grantspro, How Non-Profits Can Increase AdWords Traffic and Performance

March 15, 2011 By Glenn Gabe

How Non-Profits Can Manage a Google Grants Account

I’ve had the opportunity to work extensively on several Google Grants, both from a strategy and execution standpoint. Google Grants can be a great asset for non-profits, as they provide $10K per month in free advertising from Google. In addition, non-profits that meet a certain performance level can apply for Grantspro, which offers up to $40K per month. Although offering non-profits a certain dollar amount in free advertising is extremely generous of Google, there are some inherent limitations with Grant accounts that can make it hard to gain traction. I’ve been contacted by quite a few non-profits that have a hard time generating clicks, based on some of these challenges. I’ll cover the core limitations below, including some of the common situations I’ve come across. Let’s start with a quick introduction to the Google Grants program.

Introduction to Google Grants and Grantspro
As explained above, Google set up the Grants program to help non-profits by offering up to $10K per month in free AdWords advertising. In order to be eligible for a Grants account, you must have current 501(c)(3) status, and be headquartered in a country where Google Grants operates. In addition, there are several rules and restrictions your organization needs to comply with in order to stay within the guidelines of a Grant account. For example, there are restrictions related to commercial advertising, ads that focus on specific categories like financial products, and how your ads are written (mission-based ads). You can read more about the requirements and regulations on the Grants website. If you are new to Google Grants, I highly recommend reading the details of the program thoroughly before moving forward. If you feel as if your organization meets the program requirements, then you can complete an application.

If you apply for a Google Grant and are approved, then you’ll be able to run your ads on Google.com for the site specifically listed in the application. Note, the website and specific URL’s you include in your application are important, and you shouldn’t radically change this down the line (as you are managing the account). For example, you can’t suddenly change your ads to point to a completely new website (even if owned by your organization). If you have any drastic changes to your ads, destination URL’s, website, etc., then you should contact the Google Grants team to ensure you remain within the program guidelines.

Grantspro – Increasing From $10K to $40K
While you are managing a Grants account, if you reach your maximum monthly budget for any two months within the last 12 months, then you can be eligible for an upgrade to Grantspro. This can provide your organization a monthly budget of $40K. Actually, you only have to hit $9500 per month for two months, and not $10K exactly. This is due to fluctuations in ad spend during a month based on your maximum daily budget ($329/day). So, the good news is that if you do your job well, and drive a lot of traffic via your standard Grants Account, then you can possibly get up to $40K per month. Notice I said “a lot of traffic”, and not “a lot of high quality traffic”. There’s a difference between the two and I’ll cover more about that soon. Your goal will obviously to be to drive a lot of high quality traffic, which can mean different things to different organizations. I typically help non-profits develop a strong analytics strategy so the can analyze their campaigns based on performance. You can read my post about tracking performance via conversion goals and events in a previous post of mine.

The Two Most Common Situations Non-Profits Experience
When non-profits contact me about their Google Grants account, there are usually two scenarios I’m presented with. Note, the first is the more common scenario, but the second does happen too.

1. Very Little Traffic, Can’t Gain Traction
Based on the complexity of AdWords, combined with the inherent limitations of Grant accounts, many non-profits have a hard time gaining traction with regard to traffic and performance. I’ll cover the specific challenges that non-profits face below, but this scenario is the most common. It’s not unusual for a non-profit that’s new to AdWords to have very little traffic leading to their site each month. After completing paid search audits of those specific AdWords accounts, I can usually identify the core issues pretty quickly. At that point, I develop a remediation plan in order to get the account on track. Needless to say, it can be extremely frustrating for non-profits to know they have up to $10K per month in free advertising, but they are only seeing a handful of visitors per month. This doesn’t have to be the case…

2. A Lot of Traffic, But Extremely Low Performance
This scenario is definitely not the norm, but I have seen it several times. If an organization ended up targeting a wide range of broad keywords (some untargeted based on their own mission), they could experience a surge in traffic. But, I’ve consistently seen this scenario lead to low performance numbers. The reason is because the strategy focused on “clicks” and “hitting budget” versus driving high quality visitors. As I mentioned earlier, there’s a big difference between the two.

Again, when I’m completing an audit, it’s easy to see why this would be happening. For example, an organization might be running ads that would attract clicks, however, driving visitors to landing pages that cannot live up to the ad’s message. This leads to a high bounce rate, low conversion, and a waste of AdWords advertising dollars. In paid search (in general), it’s extremely important to match visitor intent with targeted content. It’s one of the reasons that landing pages strategy and optimization is a core service of mine for SEM.

Let’s take a look at some of the inherent limitations with a Google Grants account, how they can impact your AdWords campaigns, and how to deal with the limitations.

1. A Tough and Challenging $1.00 Max CPC
The most important limitation with Google Grants is the limit on your maximum cost per click (CPC). If you’re not familiar with AdWords, your max CPC is the highest you are willing to bid on a keyword. Some keywords are inexpensive in paid search (if you are lucky), and some are very expensive. For example, I have some clients that pay up to $25/click for competitive keywords in a hyper-competitive market. Needless to say, a $1.00 max CPC is tough to work with if you don’t understand the inner workings of AdWords. You will inherently have problems triggering your ads with such a low CPC (for some keywords).

This is typically the top reason why non-profits experience low activity in their Grant accounts. For example, while analyzing some Grant accounts, there are times I only see a handful of keywords in their ad groups, and each has a first page bid that’s clearly higher than $1.00. This doesn’t mean their ads will never show, but they will only show a limited amount of the time. This leads to low impression share, low click-through, and low visits from their AdWords campaigns. This is why a thorough account structure that targets the long tail is critically important (covered below).

2. Mapping Out A Robust Account Structure
When mapping out any paid search account, it’s critically important to map out a solid structure from the start. I explain more about this in my post about SEM Audits, but it’s almost impossible to recover from a poorly structured paid search account. For Google Grants, you want to be thorough, granular, and cover a wide range of keyword possibilities. You definitely don’t want just a handful of ad groups with a few hundred keywords in total. Instead, you should perform extensive keyword research and map out a robust account structure. This might include several core campaigns with many ad groups within each campaign. Doing this will ensure you cover a wide range of categories, subcategories, and keywords within those groupings.

Mapping out a thorough account structure takes time, but can pay huge dividends. Don’t rush into running a small set of keywords with your Grant Account. If you do, I can almost guarantee that you won’t see positive results, both traffic and performance-wise.

3. The Long Tail is Extremely Important
Based on what I explained above about mapping out a thorough account structure, the long tail of Search becomes extremely important for Google Grants. If you’re not familiar with the concept of the long tail, it encompasses keywords that are 3 or more words in length, and aren’t as popular as head terms (and don’t have as much query volume). I’ve included a graph below that represents the long tail in Search. Although each long tail keyword doesn’t have the query volume of a head term, many long tail keywords in aggregate can eclipse head terms traffic-wise.

The Long Tail of Search and Google Grants

For example, a head keyword might be “homeless shelters” where a long tail keyword might be “how to help homeless shelters in Manhattan New York”. The second query contains 5+ words, where the head term contains just two. If you think about this concept across all of the categories and subcategories that your organization targets, you could end up with many targeted keywords in your account (thousands or tens of thousands). Don’t underestimate the power of the long tail. And that’s especially true for organizations with a $1.00 max CPC limitation. :)

4. Quality Score and Its Impact on Ad Rank
I won’t go into great detail about Quality Score in this post, but it’s an extremely important concept for any paid search marketer to understand. Quality Score (QS) impacts both your Ad Rank and your Actual CPC (the amount you actually pay per click). The higher your Quality Score, the higher your paid search ad can rank, and the lower you will pay per click. Based on this, it’s always a good idea to analyze your QS and look for ways to increase it.

Although there are many factors that go into Quality Score, click through rate (CTR) is one of the most important. One way to increase your CTR is by continually looking for ways to improve your ads. If your ad is more relevant to the keywords triggering that ad, then you have a greater chance of someone clicking through. As you increase your click through rate, you can positively impact your Quality Score. As you positively impact your Quality Score, you can increase your ad’s rank, while also lowering your CPC. As a Google Grant owner, the more you can lower your CPC, the more you can fall within that tough, $1.00 max CPC limit.

5. The Impact of Not Being Able to Raise Your Bid Over $1.00
For Google Grants, what I explained above about Quality Score is a critically important concept, as you cannot impact your Ad Rank by simply increasing your max CPC. Ad Rank is the formula used to determine the position of your paid search ads. The formula for AdRank is Quality Score * Max CPC, which means that most advertisers can impact their Ad Rank by increasing their max CPC’s. The problem for Grant Account owners is that they can’t increase their bid beyond $1.00. This can be a serious limiting factor for Grant Account owners trying to trigger their ads more for competitive keywords.

Ad Rank = Quality Score * CPC Bid

For example, you can’t simply jump your bid to $5.00 per click in order to show up higher in the paid search rankings (like some advertisers can do). Therefore, Quality Score is your path to more impressions, which can lead to more click through and visits. As a Grant Account owner, you can impact one side of the equation, Quality Score, but you cannot impact max CPC (beyond $1.00). I find many of the non-profits contacting me about Google Grants don’t address Quality Score, and therefore, don’t give themselves a shot at high performance in AdWords.

6. Ads Will Only Show on Google.com
The last limitation I’m going to cover in this post relates to where your ads will show up. I find many people running Grant accounts falsely believe their ads will show up on Search Partner sites and on the Display Network. That’s not the case, and Google explains this in the Help Center for Google Grants. Instead, your ads will only show on Google.com. This can obviously still get your ads in front of a lot of people, but your ads will not show across Google’s Display Network which provides a huge opportunity for advertisers. In addition, Search Partners like AOL, Ask.com, etc. are not part of the Grants program.

If you want to run your ads across Search Partners or the Display Network, then you should set up a second, paid AdWords account. If you do this, just make sure your ads in the second account don’t compete with your ads in the Grant Account. Mapping out a strong account structure will enable you to effectively use both accounts without running into issues with overlapping campaigns.

Improve the Performance of Your Google Grants Account
I hope this post shed some light on Google Grants and Grantspro, how they can be used effectively by non-profits, as well as some of the inherent limitations involved with managing those accounts. Unfortunately, $10K in free advertising is what everyone hears, but the execution doesn’t always translate into that dollar amount. Planning, research, and ongoing management of the account can pay huge dividends for non-profits with regard to Google Grant performance. If you experience success, you can even bump up to $40K per month with Grantspro. But you’ll need to take a methodical approach to building the account, driving quality traffic, and documenting your results.

If you have any additional questions about managing a Google Grants account, don’t hesitate to contact me. The good news is that you can start refining your account today. Good luck.

Successfully Revealing the Iceberg – Avoid These Common Pitfalls When Opening Up New Content for SEO

March 2, 2011 By Glenn Gabe

How to open up new content for SEO.

When I’m helping clients with SEO, I often look for opportunities to expand the amount of optimized content they provide on their sites by leveraging information they already own (or that they already have developed). I see opportunities to do this often, since it’s easy to overlook data that’s right under your nose (if you aren’t looking at the situation from an SEO standpoint). This can sometimes be low hanging fruit for companies SEO-wise, and can greatly expand the amount of content indexed by the search engines.

For example, if you had a database full of information relevant to a specific topic, category, or industry vertical, but it’s only used as part of an application (and isn’t accessible to the search engine bots). Or maybe you find content that’s only used for print material or for training purposes. SEO-wise, I consider this “low hanging fruit” because the content is already there, but you might just have it in a form that’s not crawlable or search engine friendly. Once this data is revealed and a plan developed, it might only take a short amount of time to open up that content and have indexation boom on the site. And if mapped out the right way, all of that content can be optimized based on keyword research. I’ve seen this approach work extremely well for my clients.

They Beat Us To The Punch, Or Did They?
Beating competitors to the punch in SEO.
I’ve been helping a client develop a plan to open up thousands of pages of content on their site, based on data that’s currently only used in applications. Based on my estimates, the new content can increase indexation by a factor of 20, which is a huge jump in the amount of content on the site. The plan is to roll out the new content over time, and ensure each page is optimized based on keyword research (and SEM intelligence). This could be a huge win for them, to say the least.

As the project was being developed and nearing completion, I received an email from my client that read, “They beat us to the punch!” with a link to a competitor that made a similar move. It looked like they opened up a lot of content for Search (ahead of my client), which put a damper on things. So I decided to check out their solution in detail. About an hour later, I sent an email back to my client that read, “Don’t worry. None of their new content can be crawled, and to add insult to injury, even if it could, it’s not optimized. Full steam ahead.”

When analyzing the new content on the competitor’s site, it didn’t take me long to realize that they structured a solution that simply couldn’t be crawled easily. All of the links to their new content were in JavaScript, the implementation included some AJAX that wasn’t crawlable, the content wasn’t optimized, and there was a serious lack of drilldown into the content (even if they used straight text links). Needless to say, I was happy for my client. The competitor obviously didn’t have an SEO involved when mapping out the project, which is unfortunately a common occurrence when developing websites or web applications.

How To Open Content Up The Right Way, and Avoid The Madness
So, if you’re ready to leverage content you already own and have stored away, how do you ensure that new content benefits your SEO efforts? You definitely don’t want to waste time, resources, budget, etc. on a solution that does nothing for you in organic search (especially if SEO is an important reason for opening that content in the first place). Below, I’ve listed some key points to consider while opening up your content for Search. By no means is this the full list, but the following points can definitely help you have a greater chance of success, and avoid the potential madness of what I saw in the example above.

1. Make It Clean and Crawlable
If you’ve read previous posts of mine about SEO technical audits, then you know how important I believe a clean and crawlable structure is. When you look to open up a lot of content on your site that’s currently databased, you need to make sure the bots can easily crawl and index that content. This sounds simple, but I can’t tell you how many times I’ve seen solutions that throw serious barriers up to the search engine bots. The result is a lot of new content that never finds its way into Google’s index. The worst part is that the companies implementing the new content don’t know that it’s not crawlable until nothing changes SEO-wise. The answer usually comes out during an audit, months down the line (or longer).

In order to accomplish what you need with the new content, you should develop a strong information architecture to ensure that new content is organized logically. For example, depending on the content, you might organize it by category, subcategory, location, vertical, or other dimensions that make sense. Then you can use a robust internal linking structure to ensure the bots get to your content using descriptive text links. Then depending on the content at hand, you can provide relevant links from deeper pages to other pages you are opening up. The goal is to ensure both your users and the search engine bots can find all of the new content, while also influencing that new content via other pages on your site (more on that below).

2. XML Sitemaps Will Help, But They Won’t Save You
If you think that simply providing all the new URL’s in an xml sitemap will instantly give you SEO power, think again. XML sitemaps are important, but they are a supplement to a traditional web crawl. You should definitely use them, but you shouldn’t rely on them in the same way you rely on traditional links from other pages on your site. You can’t influence your new pages via an xml sitemap. For example, you won’t be passing any PageRank to the new pages by simply adding them to an xml sitemap. But you can pass PageRank by linking to your pages via a strong internal linking structure. I find a lot of people don’t realize how you can influence other pages on your site via smart linking. And by the way, this typically helps both users and SEO. I’m definitely not saying to add a bunch of links to the new content just for SEO. A smart internal linking structure is good for usability and natural search performance.

3. Avoid JavaScript-based Links, and Make Sure Your AJAX is Crawlable
If you take my advice and map out a robust internal linking structure for your new content, do not use JavaScript-based links to drill into that content. Use direct text links whenever possible. The reason is because you cannot guarantee that those JavaScript-based links will be crawled effectively. Worst case scenario, all of the links to your new content won’t be crawled at all. And that could leave most of that new content with no way of ranking. To clarify, if it can’t be crawled, it won’t be indexed. If it can’t be indexed, you have no way of ranking. If it can’t rank, you can’t drive targeted traffic via SEO.

Also, in order to create powerful ways to access new content, some companies utilize AJAX in their implementation. That’s fine, but you need to ensure your AJAX is crawlable. If not, you can run into a similar situation like what I listed above with JavaScript-based links. Your content simply won’t be crawled. To overcome situations like this, Google developed a method for ensuring your AJAX gets crawled. The problem is that many companies don’t know that it’s possible, how to implement it, etc. If you choose to use AJAX for usability purposes when opening up new content, make sure you follow Google’s guidelines. If not, you might end up with a lot of new content in theory, when in reality, none of it gets crawled, which of course means it can’t rank.

4. Dynamic Optimization – Optimize Your New Content Programmatically
If you are taking the time to open up thousands of pages (or more) of new content, make sure you take the time to optimize that content. The solution I mentioned earlier (my client’s competitor) implemented the same exact metadata for each new page (across thousands of pages). Needless to say, that isn’t going to help them at all. When you open up a lot of content, you can work with your development team to create a formula for dynamic optimization. You can analyze the database structure and utilize those fields to help optimize the title tag, meta description, heading tags, internal links, etc. If you come up the right formula, then you can optimize all of your new content programmatically. That’s an awesome way to go for database-driven content. Think about it, are you ready to optimize 12K new pages of content manually? Instead, have a developer write code that can leverage the information you have already databased to uniquely optimize each piece of content. Awesome.

5. Avoid (Creating) Duplicate Content
If you don’t map out a sound structure and navigation for your new content, you can run into duplicate content problems. I won’t go into great detail about duplicate content in this post, but it’s not a good thing for SEO. Duplicate content is when you have the same content resolve at more than one URL. As you can guess, this usually isn’t intended. For example, imagine you had one product that’s part of six different categories. When opening up this content, you could very easily have six different product pages versus one canonical product page. Each page holds the same exact content, but resolves at six different URL’s. That’s a good example of duplicate content. If possible, you definitely want to ensure each piece of content resolves at one canonical URL. Using the example from above, it would be smart to have each of the category pages link to one product page.

Bonus: Watch Out For Session ID’s
One issue I’ve seen pop up in projects involving application-driven content is the dreaded session ID. Make sure you are not appending session ID’s to your URL’s when implementing new content. If you do, then you will certainly be creating a lot of duplicate content on your site, which based on what I explained earlier, can be a bad thing SEO-wise. You should never have session ID’s resolve in the URL, and instead, you should use a cookie-based approach to maintaining state. If session ID’s end up in your URL’s, you can end up with thousands of pages of duplicate content (since you might have many URL’s for each piece of content.) In a nutshell, the planning stage is critically important to ensuring you don’t run into a canonicalization problem.

Open New Content, Don’t Bottle It
I hope this post provided some guidelines for ensuring you don’t waste your time when opening up new content on your site. If you find data that’s not being utilized, and choose to implement new content based on that data, then make sure it can help you SEO-wise. Don’t make what could be a boom of new content turn into a squeak of SEO technical issues. Make it crawlable, avoid duplicate content, map out a robust internal linking structure, and make sure your AJAX is crawlable. If you do, you can reap great rewards SEO-wise. If you don’t, you’ll keep the iceberg of great content underneath the water, where nobody can find it.