Omar Kattan

Archive for the ‘SEO Best Practices’ Category

If your brand is mentioned on the web its very natural to want to tell your users about it. However doing so by linking to the stories that link to you might devalue these links that you’ve worked so hard to acquire.

In the video below, Matt Cutts sets the record straight on linking to press releases and brand mentions on the web.  Matt compares it to reciprocal linking (link exchange) which is frowned upon by search engines.

Here is what Matt says…

YouTube Direkt

While it’s very tempting to boast to your users about all the mentions of your brand on the net, don’t do it by linking to them! Alternatives to linking to press releases to show your users where your brand is mentiond include:

1) Scan/take screenshots of the press releases mentioning your brand
2) Link to the Google/Bing/Yahoo urls mentioning your brand (e.g. http://news.google.co.uk/news/search?aq=f&pz=1&cf=all&ned=uk&hl=en&q=%22dell%22 new)
3) Link to the Google search results of press releases mentioning your brand (e.g. http://www.google.co.uk/search?hl=en&rlz=1R2SNYK_en-GB&q=site%3Aprwebdirect.com+%22dell%22&meta=&aq=f&oq=)

The above are alternatives to linking to press releases mentioning your brand.

Can you think of other ways to tell your users about your brand’s mention in the press without actually linking to the press releases?

Ever since Google dropped a bombshell on webmasters attempting to sculpt pagerank (control link juice flow using the nofollow attribute),  SEOs have been trying to figure out ways to achieve the same results via other means.

 Some of the percieved successful methods to sculpt pagerank include:

• Hiding/Redirecting links in Javascript (Potentially excludes up to 4% of search engine users)
• Embedding links in Flash (Google can now find links in Flash and you can potentially exclude up to 7% of users)
• Cloaking Links (against search engine guidelines)

The above methods are more risky and far more labour intensive than URL consolidation which I will discuss below:

The idea behind URL consolidation is to consolidate all pages on your site that are unimportant for driving traffic into one.

An example of such pages are  ”utility pages” such as T&C’s, Privacy Policy, etc under one URL instead of each having it’s own. 

In order to allow users to link to specific sections of the newly combined Utilities page, you can use the hashtag “#” to create seperate links to each of the sections of the page.

The same idea can be implemented for other pages on your site including the about us section, the advertising section and even blog comments and paginated pages.

Using URL consolidation has officially become the new pagerank sculpting, jump on the bandwagon, if you haven’t already!

On July 1st 2009 Google’s new algorithm kicked in much to the confusion of webmasters around the world.   Some even compared it to the now infamous Big Daddy Algo change back in 2006.  In this post I’ll summarise the different factors that could have changed and analyse their impact on rankings.

1) Internal Links and the “Nofollow” attribute.

Internal links are any links found within a website such as navigational links, breadcrumb trails and contextual links.  Internal links have always been used by Google to determine the importance of all pages within a site.  Internal links also played a major  role in funnelling pagerank throughout a site and using the “nofollow” attribute, savvy webmasters were even able to tell Google which pages to channel pagerank to and which pages not.

On July 1st, this is officially no longer the case. Google’s has made the nofollow attribute redundant (for pagerank sculpting at least) by allowing pagerank to flow to internal pages with nofollow links. 

2) External Links

Following on from  the point above, prior to July 1st webmasters rarely linked to external websites for fear that these links would leak much needed pagerank to external sites.  When they did link to external sites, they added a nofollow.  Again, July 1st saw a change in this and it now seems that linking to external sites has risen up the agenda for Google.  Google now looks more favourably upon sites that link to relevant authoritative sites and rewards them for this.

3) Link Popularity vs Authority

Last but not least, link popularity.  Google has always valued link popularity (the amount and relevancy of links pointing to a site) however with the July 1st algo change, it seems that Google has decreased the importance of the quantity of links and is now focusing soley on quality.  Examples of non-quality links include forum links, social links and blog comment  links.

In a nutshell, Google is now increasing the importance it places on editorial links from authoritative sources such as major online publications, newspapers and niche bloggers, very much how it is in the offline world.

In summary, Google’s July 1st algo change has decreased the importance of traditional onsite SEO and is placing much more focus on external factors.

One of the SEO arguments out there is the detrimental effect of outbound links on “link juice” and PageRank dilution. While not completely inaccurate this is somewhat of a myth that requires further explaination.

Outbound links are links pointing from your website to external sites. Over time, as your website becomes more popular (more and more sites linking to it) this popularity embodies itself in a term we call “Link Juice”.  How you distribute that juice within your site is crucial to the overall success of your ranking efforts.

Logic says, if you’ve worked hard to increase your link popularity (Link Juice) then why would you want to distribute your hard earned work to other sites for free?  The answer…You don’t unless…the sites you’re linking to are authoritative ones that add value to your user’s search needs.

One solution to stop leakage of  link juice to external sites is to add the “nofollow” attribute to your outbound link, however here is why I don’t recommend doing so for external sites relevant to your niche.

1) By adding nofollow to a relevant external link, you’re telling search engines that the page you’re referencing is not important and therefore do not follow it, this is in complete contradiction to what you should be telling search engines, and that is, I’m an authority on my niche and the links to external sites I reference on my site are important enough for me to link to and pass on my popularity.

2) Google’s algorythm (based around the concept of “PageRank”) was concieved around the idea that sites with more authoritative links pointing to them recieve more “PageRank” so by adding “nofollow” to authoritative sites related to your niche, you’re actually tampering with Google’s formula of ranking sites according to popularity and authority, do you really want to tamper?

3) If your site gets known for using nofollows on all it’s links, other sites will be less likely to link back to you. No one wants that, unless you’re the Wikipedia

Examples of links you should “nofollow”:

• a link to the analytics company embedded within your code and shows up across the entire site. 

• a link found in the footer of your site that shows up across the whole site (such as a link to a sister site)

• an internal  link to your t&c’s page or similar pages found in the footer and linked to from every page on your site. 

To sum up, and in a nutshell.. using the “nofollow” attribute on outbound links should be exercised with caution, and the basic rule of thumb, only nofollow links that are irrelevant to your niche.

Lets get the new year started on the right SEO footing.  I’ve summarised below a laundry list of critical SEO items to check for the new year.    

1. Meta Data
   Check all your site’s meta data and ensure that it conforms to SEO best practices incuding length (60 characters for title, 150 characters for description), keyword optimised (for density, and proximity) and most importantly ensure that meta include an appropriate call to action.

2. Internal Links
   Ensure that your site is contains keyword rich internal links (think wikipedia).   The links should support your site’s keyword targeting strategy (ie internal links should point to urls with strategic keywords (eg. blue widget instead of click here). 

3. Content
   Is your content optimised for your keywords?  Ensure it is by testing it with content optimisation tools such as code to content ratio, and other with this great keyword density tool found at ranks.nl.

4. Images & Video Content
   Optimising your site’s images and video content is critical in 2009.  Google and other search engines such as Yahoo and MSN are displaying more and more non-text based content in their search results (the concept is call Universal or blended search) and there ffore it is very important to ensure that your site’s images and videos (if you have any) are optimised according to SEO best practices including alt tags, file names, snippets and size.

5. Javascript
   Search engines cannot read javascript.  Ensure that none of your critical content is displayed using this language and more importantly, ensure that your navigation is not displayed using javascript.

6. Webmaser Tools
   Have you created a Google Webmaster toolsaccount for your site?   Google has created  the webmaster tools interface to help site owners identify issues with their site and fix them in line with SEO best practices.  Creatng a webmaster tools account is very simple.  Ensure that you also verify your site and upload an xml sitemap. 

7. Link Popularity
   Most importantly, in 2009, create a link building strategy and implement it!  Your strategy should be based around the competitive landscape of your niche market.  Analyse the links of your main competitors (the ones ranking for your target keywords) and ensure that your strategy includes a practical solution to acquire similar/better links.  Link building is very time consuming, tedious and results are not immediate but don’t let that discourage you.  If you acquire the right links (from authoritative relevant sites with the optimised anchor text)  you will be rewarded!

8. Analytics
   Do you have an analytics account? Without one you’re flying blind. If you don’t have a budget for a commercial Analytics program such as Omniture, Google Analytics is a great free one. Ensure you get the most out of Analytics by tagging up your site for KPI goals.

The above is a top level SEO checklist.  There is much more to SEO but if you start with the above, at least you’ve covered the basics.  If you’re interested in Google’s view on SEO, read this SEO best practice guide from Google.

Good luck and have a very prosperous New Year!