For those of you, like me, who spend a good deal of time learning and implementing SEO techniques, the time might be coming when you can focus on other things. The evidence is mounting that SEO is something that may not be required for too much longer.
To qualify that – “too much longer” might still be years, but it might be months. Let’s face it, if Google et al could eradicate the need for it then it makes sense. The mere name “Search Engine Optimisation” goes against what search engines want to achieve and that is a set of search results that gives the user what they want based on the information on the site.
I’ve seen a fair bit of discussion about the effects of internal linking on a website and it’s effects on SEO recently. Some refer to this as “Link sculpting” which is a techie way of saying getting clever with your site navigation. Whatever you call it, there are some interesting theories that have supposedly been put to the test and delivered results for people. The one that interested me the most was the use of the “nofollow” tag on HREF anchors to “sculpt” PageRank. Let me explain. Read the rest of this entry »
Quite often I’ve seen questions on SEO forums asking which is better from an SEO perspective – using a subdomain or using a directory for a specific category of content. Up until now I’d have always said a directory is easier to rank and from my experience, it seems Google wants a subdomain to bed in before it shows it any love. Possibly a trust factor, although it struck me as odd if a domain was already ranking.
Anyway, I’ve revised my opinion a little recently. I still reckon a directory is better for most content, however Read the rest of this entry »
If you run a website, you’re probably keeping an eye on where you rank in Google. A frustrating task made even harder by the fact that Google now use a lot of geo-targetting to determine search results. The upshot being a search from the UK on google.com will show a different set of results to one from the USA on google.com. Grrr.
For example, I have a non-commercial package holiday website that I host over the pond in the USA and obviously I am targetting the term “package holiday” or “package holidays”. It’s relatively new and I’ve been keeping an eye on Google to see Read the rest of this entry »
As a webmaster, something’s been bugging me for a long time. The concept of SEO – Search Engine Optimisation. Why is it, why should it, be necessary? I follow SEO closely because I have to, not necessarily because I want to although I do find it interesting. But I wonder why Google, Yahoo and MSN (as examples) put so much ranking weight on factors that can clearly be manipulated.
We’re in the 21st century, and I’d have thought technology would be at a stage now where it would be possible to determine relevance based on behaviour, if not entirely, certainly predominantly. Yes yes, I know a lot of people have this privacy issue and count me among them, but anonymous tracking of my online search habits – anonymous being the key word here – doesn’t unduly worry me. And targetting advertising to my tastes? I’m fine with that – advertising is part of everyday life Read the rest of this entry »
moreA lot of sites are designed with the navigation menus either on the left hand side or at the top of the page. While this has logic from a user perspective, it’s not great from an SEO perspective as the search engine “spiders” dump all your HTML and read the text. That text includes link anchors, alt tags on images and title tags etc etc. So clearly if your links come before the page content itself, chances are it’s going to mark down your content relevance a little.
However there are a couple of tricks that allow you to keep your site navigation at the top or to the left, yet make sure it appears to the search engines after all your much more relevant text.
Let’s assume that you want to keep your navigation where it is, and deal firstly with links at the top of the page. The trick here is to use “absolute positioning”. This is slightly easier if you use a fixed-width site but can be achieved with fluid designs. More often than not, you will be able to easily work out how far from the top of the screen your links should be, so that’s one problem made easier. For “left positioning”, this will depend on your design. The key is to put your links Read the rest of this entry »
I’ve played with a few SEO plugins for Wordpress, and up until I installed Wordpess 2.61 I was using “SEO Title Tag” and “SEO Post Link” to do my dirty work, and they did it pretty well. These plugins added fields to each post, allowed you to reword the slugs to be more search engine friendly, and redefine the META tags for posts and pages, but stopped short of doing categories and archives.
However, when I installed 2.61, I discovered a plugin called “Headspace” which not only did what SEO Title Tag does, but provided a much better GUI in so much as that apart from including the extra fields in each post, it also provides a “quick edit” function for categories, archives, tags, the homepage and the generic parts of the blog. And it’s superb.
There are a couple of minor drawbacks to this Headspace plugin however. Firstly, the quick edit GUI Read the rest of this entry »
One of the things you have to be careful about with Wordpress is picking a theme that doesn’t damage your search engine rankings. There’s a couple of things in particular to watch for.
Firstly, many free themes are provided with the condition that you leave the footer links intact. Trouble is, a lot of these link to sites in “bad neighbourhoods” – that is, sites that Google has banned, penalise or regard as junk. If you want to rank well and quickly, you don’t want a theme with shite links all over it. It’s worth paying for a premium theme or offering to pay the author for removal of the links. Some themes have “malicious” code embedded that add links or do stuff you don’t want. Be careful!
The second thing that is a problem is the way the header is constructed. Quite often developers embed an H1 and H2 tag in the header which is quite legitimate – usually for Read the rest of this entry »
One thing I don’t get about Google is their reliance on inbound links in the algorithms to affect rankings. I mean, back in the 90’s when the web was less commercial and people linked because the links were useful, fair enough. But today, it’s all about commerce, traffic, money…and linking is easily gamed. Consequently every forum, blog, directory and contributions page on the web is bombarded by useless morons trying to get their crappy little sites to the top of Google.
Google, whether knowingly or not, is responsible for so much web spam because of an antiquated algorithm that is trying to fill the gap before the algo gets intelligent enough to read a page and determine if it deserves to be ranked on the merits of it’s content.
Content is King! That’s the cry you hear all over the SEO forums, and God willing, that will be the future. But for now, it’s who can spam the most successfully gets the rewards. Poor show IMO. And surprising to me that Google don’t do away with the whole link-juice crap.