Renegade Search

A friend of mine sent me a cool new link today - the new Google Agency Toolkit can be found here. Nothing on here is new, but the convenience of having every major AdWords tool I use found at a central hub is a great improvement. Now I can consolidate 6 of my bookmarks into just one.

Some features include trend tools, placement tools, keyword tools and more.

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Big news in the SEO world folks....Google, Yahoo and MSN have recently announced that they will be respecting and following what's known as the "Canonical URL Tag".  This new tag  (if it works) allows you to avoid duplicate content issues by letting the search engines know which pages are duplicate and which are the preferred versions.  This is actually a very big deal for SEO's since it sort of makes our lives a lot easier...we hope. Until now, we've had to play the role of duplicate content evangelists. Part of our job was to create complex webs of 301 redirects and noindex pages to handle duplicate URL's.  We have been plagued by pagination, "sort by" features like sort by price, test landing pages, and other similar devices that have been helpful for site visitors but create multiple URL's for the same or similar content.  Now all we have to do is use this tag to avoid a giant duplicate content mess all over the place.

Here's the technical explanation of how it works quoted directly from Google's blog:

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In Google AdWords there are many options and settings which you can tweak for different effects and for different purposes. One such feature is found in Edit Campaign Settings under Scheduling and Serving: Ad Serving. This allows the user to choose from 1 of 2 options - Optimize (which Google recommends), and Rotate.

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I know I am late to the Twitter game, but I've started to play and I will say this - Twitter can be great!

First - we here at Digital Third Coast started using Twitter about a month ago as an experimental way to communicate easily between all of our employees. As George and I started exploring the options we started following some users... but wait....

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Google Analytics is without question one of the best free tools available for any website owner. I'm in there every day taking a look at search visitors, goal conversions, funnels, and everything else that can give an insight on the overall trends of traffic and search visibility. There are many times that I've tried using my iPhone to browse reports while in the car or on the go, but Google Analytics (GA) uses too much AJAX and Flash for things to come out in the desired manner, let alone be able to look at any date range other than the default past 30 days.

Now enters a new application called Analytics App that allows you to view all of your GA reports quickly and easily from your phone and at a mere $5.99 this is going to only take your yearly analytics budget from $0 to $5.99 for most small businesses.

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