Duplicate content can come in many shapes and sizes. For instance, there can be duplicate pages, duplicate domains and lack of canonicalization. What most people often don’t realize is that one of the most common and easiest to fix forms of duplicate content can be the meta titles and descriptions. It has been said that by simply tweaking ones title tags, a site can gain significant positions in the search engines.

Titles tags are probably the most important of the meta tags for two reasons: search engines weigh them very highly and users can actually see them as they appear in the browser window and in the search engine results pages. Making these unique, at least on the top level pages, can make a world of difference to a website’s ranking possibilities. People need to understand that the search engines can actually choose to display a different title tag to the one that’s on the website if they feel the one they choose is more appropriate. Constructing title tags so that they are at an appropriate length (70 characters or less), and making sure they are unique, relevant and have the primary keyphrase for the page will ensure that you choose what content is displayed in the SERPs, not the search engines.

When I speak with clients about keyword research and content optimization, they often ask me what tools I use to gather the data or make recommendations. Here I will give you a little insight to some of the tools I use regularly.

One of the best places to start with keyword research is Google.  Google offers a suite of free tools that you can use to insights about the keywords you are researching.  One that can be used by aspiring SEO’s and paid campaign managers alike is the keyword tool.  This tool will give you some approximate statistics and other recommendations for your keywords.  You can get additional data about your keywords with Google Insights and Google Trends.

Another component of page optimization is keyword density. We recommend that your pages each consist of at least 200 words of text and have approximately a 4% keyword density.  To check what keyword has the highest keyword density, you can use the MoreVisibility keyword density checker.  If you need to check the density of copy you are writing for new or revised pages, you can use the live keyword analysis tool.  It allows you to copy content and past it into the provided fields to get the statistics.

Another set of tools I use to checks PageRank, backlinks and cache date.  These items are good to monitor so you can see how the search engines are viewing your site. Downloading the Google Toolbar is what you need if you are using Firefox or Internet Explorer as your browser. If you use Google Chrome, I have found that the Chrome SEO Extension works pretty well.

While there are many other tools out there, some paid and some free, the few that are mentioned above will give you a good start to researching and analyzing your SEO efforts.

Here is a no-lose suggestion for improving your website. Before I tell you what it is, I want to go a step further and actually guarantee that what I am about to share with you will work.

The idea is brilliant in it’s simplicity, yet deceivingly difficult to execute. Carrying out the idea to it’s fullest potential requires discipline, persistence and a willingness to adjust your daily routine. In all likelihood, you are not currently doing what I am going to recommend that you do.

What I am proposing… assuring you will yield favorable results is to spend time each day reading through all sections of your company’s website. It doesn’t have to be a lot of time on a daily basis, and any time is better than no time, but I have never seen a site that is un-tweakable.

Areas of potential improvement include: content that could be more effectively written, organization of content that could be more intuitive, better calls to action than currently exist and let’s not forget, trying to stamp out those broken links.

I am as remiss as anybody in this regard. If we as an organization spent more time looking at MoreVisibility.com, somehow our site would incrementally improve at a faster rate.

There is, however one minor catch to this concept…as a result to the guarantee: it’s not enough to simply identify things that need to be fixed, but you need to actually fix them right away, so that you can move on to the next improvement. The more intelligent the original structure of the site and the more flexible the CMS that powers the site, the better the chance that you will be able to rapidly (and painlessly) implement changes and boost site performance.