About 20 years ago I learned a very important lesson about quality. A mentor of mine sat a bunch of us young execs in a room and asked each one of us to give him our definition of quality. Well, to put it bluntly the “philosophy” was flowing thick and fast that day with all these young Whippersnappers thinking they knew so much more than the boss (who happened to be a highly experienced Harvard Grad). After letting us hang ourselves for a while he defined it in 4 words:
Quality is: conformance to customer requirements
To say we all felt pretty stupid after hearing such a simple four word definition is the understatement of the year, but the lesson never left me and I am very grateful to have been able to work for that old boss of mine and to have learned such a valuable lesson. I have since had the opportunity to put that definition into practice countless times (thanks Andy).
Quite some time ago I had a client come to me and tell me he wanted to be #1 in Google for (no I’m not going to tell you what keyword it was). I knew from my own research that almost no one ever searched using that Keyword phrase and his site traffic would be zero. I respectfully told him that I would be very happy to optimize his site for whatever keyword he wanted, as long as he understood his site would get almost zero traffic for that keyword. He said “that’s fine – just optimize the site for me”. So off I went and his site did end up in the top spot in Google for that phrase.
In this particular case it was a matter of personal pride in his industry to be #1 for that specific phrase. I’ll make one up just as an example. Maybe for Keebler™ or Nabisco™ it would be a matter of pride to be #1 for “chocolate chip cookies” even if the amount of people searching for that term may be minimal. Such was the case with this client.
We don’t always understand the driving force behind what is pushing a client in a specific direction, in SEO or in any business endeavor. Why is a client insisting on doing something a specific way? The reasons behind the requests are where quality can be found and the answers will help you deliver a much better product.
Do you have an interesting story about what quality really is? Please share it by commenting.






OK – you’ve built a web site and according to popular SEO theory it’s time to go out there and
A friend of mine VanGogh(1) (yup the famous one-eared artist and renowned web developer at
What are Canonical Links?
A lot has been written and this is a subject that may be hard to understand for the novice so let’s break it down into some simple steps and provide a few extra resources for those who want to dig deeper.
I am going to plagiarize a bit here because, quite frankly, others have done a great job of simplifying what canonical links are. I prefer they get the credit and you get the knowledge.
What is a Canonical URL?
The best short answer I found was given by Matt Cutts: Canonicalization is the process of picking the best url when there are several choices (that is several links that take you to the same information).
Matt goes on to recommend we read more about it on Greg Grothaus Blog and we get a nice real life type example. The following links are set up perfect for the user but not so nice for SEO.
Here is a specific example:
* http://blahblahdomain.com/breadcrumbs/tents/bags/red/tent_bag.html
* http://blahblahdomain.com/breadcrumbs/bags/tents/red/tent_bag.html
* http://blahblahdomain.com/breadcrumbs/bags/tents/red/tent_bag.html?view=print
All three of the above pages are likely to have redundant information and duplicate content issues.
Canonical Link Solution:
The relatively new rel=canonical suggestion is simply to add to all 3 of these pages one single tag:
<link rel=”canonical” href=”http://blahblahdomain.com/breadcrumbs/bags/tents/red/tent_bag.html”>
You add this tag into the <head> section of the similar or identical web pages so search engines understand you have a preferred single page you want indexed in place of several that may be the same or similar in content.
This is very important for sites with a lot of varied data wherein there may be several ways to get to the exact same information at different URLs. The canonical link tag helps Google sort out the duplicate content issue and bring the preferred page to the forefront.