The kind folks at Jtree.net have served up a holiday platter of 3 delicious SEO posts for you to feast on in preparation of 2010.

Does Your Site Go … Too Slow?

Mighty Google is going to be taking a closer look at how fast your site loads in 2010. If it’s too slow, expect rankings to slip… more

Google is Getting Personal With Your Search Results

Starting Dec. 4, Google has been returning personalized search results regardless if you are signed-in to your Google Account. What that means is instead of returning results that are relevant to the average person, Google will instead return results based on their relevancy to – YOU… more

Find Out Who Links to Your Site with the SEO Backlink Checker Tool

Backlinks represent links from other websites that point to your site, and are very important in regard to how well your website or blog ranks in the search engines… more

PPC Tool : Google AdWords Bid Simulator

Have you ever wondered about the potential benefits a bid increase would bring to your Google AdWords PPC campaign? End the wonderment…

Google’s AdWords PPC Bid Simulator can help answer important campaign-related questions like:

• How many more ad impressions and clicks could potentially be received if I up my Max Cost Per Click (CPC) bid?
• What is the potential CPC of the new clicks received from upping my Max CPC?

PPC Tool : SEMRush

SEMRush allows you to quickly generate 6 reports that are split between organic SEO and PPC. Punch-in a competitor URL, domain or keywords to find out which organic and paid keyphrases are being targeted, and how much it is costing them. SEMRush is a great tool for gauging the value of both organic and paid traffic.

Click here to utilize this valuable PPC resource >

As search engine algorithms improve, as does the need for you to have quality incoming links to your website. Google and the other two are becoming more attune with giving link juice to links placed in quality locations that are related to your website’s content.

This tools searches for websites of the theme you specify that contain keyphrases like “Add link”, “Add site”, “Add URL”, “Add URL”, “Submit URL”, “Add Article” etc. Most of the results could be quality potential backlinks.

Not only can duplicated content make it difficult for search engines to index your web pages properly, but it can lead to penalties that could dramatically effect a website’s ability to rank well for targeted keyphrases in the major search engines.

As websites grow-up, the potential for duplicate content increases. Sites that contain a lot of content might have a variety of different URLs that all reference the same location. This issue can often impact smaller websites that show up in search engine results with and without the ‘www’ in front of the corresponding URL.

An Open Standard Solution Supported by Google – Yahoo! – and Microsoft

Even though Google Webmaster Tools has an option to select the ‘www’ preference for the URLs of your website, a tactic with more control that is acceptable for other search engines was needed. The canonical link element was developed to help search engines determine the preferred URL to be used for your website.

When linking to pages of your site or blog, utilize the canonical link element in the header portion of your links.

Here’s the canonical link element in action:

<link rel="canonical" href="http://example.com/page.html"/>

This tells the search engines that the prefferred URL is http://example.com/page.html (note: without the ‘www’). Where canonical = preferred.

Additional Information

Video clip of Google’s Matt Cutts explaining the link element…