This is the second part of a two-part series on what we can do to improve our onsite SEO, based on Google's recent SEO Report Card of some of its own sites. In this part, you'll learn the remaining three onsite SEO factors that can help your site achieve higher rankings.
In the first part, you learned about the following important factors included in the Google SEO Report Card:
1. Title tag format and length
2. Showing related snippets in search results
3. Effective use of sitelinks
4. Duplicate content check: clear main page result
In this second part, we will cover the remaining important onsite SEO factors included in the Google SEO Report Card:
5. Importance of URL canonicalization
6. Effective use of the Header tag
7. Use of logo image alt text
All in all, there are seven important onsite items checked by Google in its SEO Report Card.
Importance of URL Canonicalization
Google strongly emphasizes the importance of URL canonicalization in their SEO Report Card. There is a lot of important information pertaining to URL canonicalization to keep in mind.
For example, if the same content will be accessible to different URLs, their “Reputation” is being split, which affects the ranking of the canonical URL.
A classic example pf this occurs when you have a website home page URL, for example http;//www.yourdomain.com. Say you have engaged in some link building efforts which help this URL earn some reputation. Time passes by, and eventually there are a total of 45 organic links pointing to that URL alone (remember, this is just an example).
And then, there comes a time when you decided to make some improvements on your home page URL, like updating its design to make it more trendy and attractive. After the design has been completed, you have to upload a new home page file; for example home.html, so your home page URL will now become:
http://www.yourdomain.com/home.html
You also update all of your website's internal links to point to http://www.yourdomain.com/home.html instead of the previous home page URL. And then, since your home page URL is new, you decide to promote it by getting some links; thus, the new home page URL earns another 20 new organic links from your effort.
And now, here comes the main problem: you notice that your rankings drop, even though your website is earning some new organic links.
From an SEO point of view, your site is facing serious canonical issues because you have two home page URLs that are crawlable and indexable by Google: http://www.youromain.com/home.html and http://www.yourdomain.com/, and both are earning links.
See the screen shot below for the canonical issues:
What if you later decide that http://www.yourdomain.com/ is your canonical URL? Of course, there will be issues because http://www.yourdomain.com/home.html has the same content as http://www.yourdomain.com/. You will face some challenges with pushing the rankings up for your canonical URL, since it lacks the organic links caused by the split in reputation (with /home.html)
Google recommended in their SEO Report Card that problems like this can be fixed by implementing or copying the design change from /home.html to /, then once that is completed, you should do a “301 redirect” from http://www.yourdomain.com/home.html to http://www.yourdomain.com/.
If you are in an Apache server with .htaccess enabled, you can accomplish this task by using these lines:
According to Google's report, 301 redirecting other URLs to the canonical URLs will combine all split-up reputations into one (all links earned will be combined to a single URL), making the canonical URL stronger. This means it will rank better in Google. So the above screen shot will now become (after 301 redirection):
Those 20 links will now be added to the canonical URL, increasing the number of links, and canonicalization of URLs will translate to better rankings.
The second point you should keep in mind is that you need to be careful of other common canonical issues. Even Google experiences a problem with those, as stated in their Google SEO Report Card.
Google's recommendation to itself is to 301 redirect http://www.google.com/books/ to http://www.google.com/books, to avoid splitting reputation. This has the effect of combining two URLs into one, like the case mentioned previously.
Google Optimization 
