Duplicate Content is one of the biggest threats to your search engine rankings and there are hidden places where duplicate contents can lurk unseen – except by the search engine spiders. I have been putting into practice some of the lessons from an article in Site Pro News by T J O’ Donnell, ‘Search Engine Positioning for the Weary‘.

“Do you want to get your site from page five to page one in Google? Here are a few tips to boost you on your way.”

I did not realise that common terms used by content management systems on thousands of unrelated websites could be flagged as duplicate content when your site is crawled. Even blank spaces can attract a duplicate content penalty. As he explains it, the programs are written by techies whose objective is to write great code: they are not considering the impact of their programming language on your SEO efforts.

There are some good tips on building inbound links to your site or blog, as well as a warning not to spend out money on worthless paid directory submissions. Very few online directories are particlularly valuable, and many are created simply to boost the directory owner’s link popularity.

Finally there is some straight talk on creating your site and products to meet demand: the big danger in an online business is to market a product that you rave about, rather than one that people desire. Read what he has to say on basic human needs – it’s quite direct …