Omar Kattan » SEO Best Practices

Three URL SEO Tips the Big Boys Won’t Tell You

Omar Kattan — Sat, 22 Jan 2011 11:40:00 +0000

The URL address of your website is one of the most important factors in search engine optimization. It is important that you choose a URL that is search engine friendly. This will ensure that search engine crawlers will be able to read your URL without any problems and helps get your site to the top of the search engine results pages (SERPs). Here are three tips that will help you make your URL more SEO friendly. Read more..

Linking to Press Releases

Omar Kattan — Sat, 31 Oct 2009 14:28:48 +0000

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 b... Read more..

URL Consolidation the New PageRank Sculpting

Omar Kattan — Sun, 12 Jul 2009 11:24:01 +0000

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. Read more..

Google’s July 09 Algo Change – Big Daddy 2?

Omar Kattan — Sun, 05 Jul 2009 11:42:06 +0000

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 navi... Read more..

Outbound Links, Nofollows & Link Juice Dilution

Omar Kattan — Fri, 06 Mar 2009 08:09:24 +0000

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.

SEO Checklist for the New Year

Omar Kattan — Fri, 02 Jan 2009 10:20:14 +0000

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.

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.

Internal Links Ensure that your s... Read more..

SEO Site Audit Checklist

Omar Kattan — Fri, 04 Jul 2008 07:48:41 +0000

Here's a quick guide to audit your site for SEO best practices:

Robots.txt file

First ensure that it exists. If it doesn't, create one. Its a simple text file called "robots.txt". Once you create your robots.txt file you can add to it your Google XML sitemap and use it to give instructions to search engines about which folders on your site to index and which ones to stay away from.

Meta Tags for E-tail Sites

Omar Kattan — Fri, 07 Mar 2008 12:21:59 +0000

I recently conducted a competitive analysis for one of my etail clients and to my astomishment, I found that out of the 13 competitors I tracked, none utilised the meta description tag on their site. This prompted me to write a post on this discussing meta tags and best practices for using them on your site ...

Firstly...What is meta data? In a nutshell, meta data is the information that is placed in the ... Read more..

Canonicalisation – simpler than it sounds

Omar Kattan — Wed, 30 Jan 2008 06:54:59 +0000

Have you dealt with the canonical challenge on your site? In other words, have you made sure that all of the urls below are redirected to a single page?

http://yoursite.com

http://www.yoursite.com

http://www.yoursite.com/index.html

The Wikipedia definition of canonicalisation (spelt canonicalization in the US) i... Read more..

Title and Meta Tag Best Practice

Omar Kattan — Mon, 30 Jul 2007 19:35:03 +0000

Placing keywords in your site's title and meta tags is an SEO no brainer but its not sufficient to have search engine users click on them.

In order to entice search users to click on your listing you need to follow the following basic SEO best practices steps:

Your title tag should not exceed 60 charachters (including spaces)

Your description meta tag should not exceed 160 characters (including spaces)

Include one instance of your target keyowrd a... Read more..