Archive for January, 2008
published by Dan in SEO
Spam has been a major problem and continues to be a big one. The thing about spam is that whenever a solution is found to combat it spam itself evolves so that it continues to become a nuisance. Link spamming became a really big problem and still is. However, back in 2005 Google’s webspam team came up with the nofollow attribute with intentions of using it to help combat spam. To discourage spammers from littering your site you can use this nofollow attribute. However, keep in mind that this doesn’t neccesarily stop spam and moderating your comment section and using an anti-spam software works way better.
To use the no follow attribute all that is needed to be done is insert rel=”nofollow” within the anchor tag of a link. For example:
<a href=”http://www.doublespark-seo.co.uk” rel=”nofollow”>DoubleSpark Site</a>
So what does this have to do with SEO? On my next post I will discuss how the existence of the nofollow attribute can affect your link building efforts.
Popularity: 13% [?]
published by Dan in SEO Basics
As a web designer or web master before actually checking to make sure the links on the website your are maintaining are optimised the very first thing you ought to do is check whether all the links are working. Do a regular check to see whether there are links pointing to incorrect pages, dead pages (404 Errors), and other possible errors. In short check for the most basic link errors.
Next, if you weren’t the one to build and design the original site check whether the links comply with W3C standards. If you are not very familiar with W3C standards as a web designer/SEO specialist you should start educating yourself regarding correct practices. You can find the the complete syntax compendium of the A and LINK elements for HTML and XHTML on the W3C site.
For those who want an in depth tutorial on the Anatomy and Deployment of Links you would do well to start reading this online resource. Note though that the guide hasn’t been updated since Septmeber of 2005. However, the linking basics are still the same and the guide is still very useful indeed.
Remember in SEO, you always start with the very basic. If you do not have the basics covered then you are prone to overlook seemingly trivial but potentially important factors that will affect your optimisation efforts.
Popularity: 14% [?]
published by Dan in SEO Basics
Before I continue my series of posts on link optimisation let me discuss something I overlooked during series on search engine basics. In my post entitled “Back to Search Engine Basics: Determining Relevance and Popularity” I explained how search engines use keywords to determine the relevance of a website’s content and how inbound links are used to determine the popularity of the site. Another factor search engines use to choose the results displayed in SERPs I neglected to mention is authority.
Authority is the bridge that connects the other two factors - relevance and popularity. The authority of a page is determined by looking at the keywords used in the anchor text as well as the actual content of the pages that those links lead to. The authority of a webpage is analysed with both inbound and outgoing links considered. What this means is that if two different webpage both have a lot of inbound links by analysing the relevance of the contents of the webpages linking to each page, the page that has more pages relevant to its own theme/topic linking back to it will be seen as having greater authority and so will rank better in SERPs.
For example, if a website on SEO has only 10 incoming links but all from other reputable SEO websites these 10 links will be more valuable than 20 inbound links from sites with topics like gardening or beauty. The page with more links is more popular but the one with lots of relevant links will be more authoritative.
Popularity: 11% [?]
published by Dan in SEO Basics
The importance of links in SEO has been discussed over and over again. Just last year, on my post entitled “Back to Search Engine Basics: Determining Relevance and Popularity“, I explained how the number of links pointing to a website determines the popularity of a website. Of course the more inbound links to a site the more popular it is and thus the more credit search engines give to that site. What many do not realise though is that it isn’t only the number of links that affect how search engines rate a website. Link optimisation will benefit your website and the sites you link to in several ways including:
- ensuring that all relevant links work (are crawlable by search engines). Errors in syntax will lead to errors in crawling.
- helping determine the relevance of a page. The use of proper anchor text will help humans and bots alike know what the link is actually pointing to (gives context) and thus helps it determine relevance of the page to a specific search term in the end.
- inform bots of the contents images and other embedded media. The use of Alt-tags will let the bots know what the pictures contain so that the images will be indexed.
Note though that while I emphasise the importance of proper linking I can never stress enough the importance of good content. Content is still king, however, “properly linked” content is even better.
Popularity: 10% [?]
published by Dan in SEO Basics
Due to the commercial nature of many websites in existence today search engines are continuously challenged to keep their search results relevant and spam-free. SEO, though it may be a good thing for many websites has and is still used by more unscrupulous sites to bloat their rank and thus place well in SERPs despite having little or no valuable content at all. On the other hand, many commercial sites though not really spammers really do need to get a good placement in SERPs in order to make a real profit from the website. Search engines know this for a fact and has given an alternative to commercial sites so that they need not resort to spamming in order to be indexed and place well for important keywords. The alternative, as we all know, are paid ads.
In SERPs, paid ads are usually placed on top of organic search results so that the prime placement earns the advertisers a significant number of clicks. However, due to the number of advertisers search engine optimisation is still a must. Only the high performing advertisers for the specified search terms appear on the top while those that do not perform as well usually appear on the side of the SERP. This form of SEO is often referred to as search engine marketing (SEM) optimisation and though it depends on SEO basics also makes use of SEO strategies specific to SEM.
Popularity: 9% [?]
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