WebRev Blog

Today, we're wrapping up our series on rookie mistakes in social networking, blogging, and now search engine optimization (SEO).  Shortly after becoming active online, either in social networking or blogging, most people realize they need to attract traffic from the search engines.  Unfortunately, most of the advice available online about this is either hype, spam, or out-dated.

Unless you're trying to make a living from people clicking ads on your blog (good luck with that), your SEO needs are pretty simple. If you're a small local business, when people search for your brand on the search engines, you want positive or neutral information on the first two search engine results pages (SERPs), and ideally, you want to attract more and more traffic over time when people search for the key words associate with your site (e.g. "good fried chicken in Poteau, OK" or "rental properties in Mount Pleasant, TX").  You don't want to attract a lot of people who are Googling odd stuff that has nothing to do with your business, and you want them clicking around to the links within your blog - not out to the advertisers' sites.

So, here are some rookie SEO mistakes to avoid.

Spend too much time worrying about the search engines.  If your online presence is more about establishing and protecting your online reputation, and developing a relationship with your local customers, your primary focus does not need to be on attracting search engine traffic.

Underestimate the importantce of SEO. While it's important not to obsess about search engine traffic, it is important to make sure that people looking for you online can find you, and they'll usually do this by Googling your name or the name of your business, so you want to make sure to have a profile on sites that rank high in the search engines, like Facebook, Twitter, and Linked-IN, as well as any networks within your market niche.

Assume that entering your "keywords" in your website header is enough.  Actually, this is a very outdated technique that really makes no difference in the search engines in their newer algorithms, so if you haven't done it yet, I wouldn't worry about it.  A good sitemap is important, as is using categories and tags appropriately.

Fail to understand the importance of inbound and outbound links.  We've written extensively here at WebRev about how to maximize your page rank and links, and within those archives, you'll find some great info about strategically using linkage.  In a nutshell, you need to link to reputable sites wihin your industry, and you need to get them to link to you.

Jennifer Pointer (e-mail) is in Tulsa, OK. She promotes a simple, a low-tech approach to effective online profile management, search engine optimization and social networking. 
 

I received a request over the weekend from a new blogger, to add one of my clients' blogs to a mutual "blogroll."  I hadn't received a request like that in a long time, and was amazed that bloggers are still doing that, and that a new blogger would even know about it.  I don't know if he was a blogger during the time these things were popular, and was just re-entering the blogging world after a long absense, or if he had just been given some bad advice.

Either way, I've decided to take this opportunity to remind our WebRev readers to just say "no!" to blogrolls, and ditch the sidebar flair.

For those who aren't familiar with the plague of yesteryear (circa 2005) known as "the blogroll," the purpose of this invention was to help blogs get page rank in the search engines.  The theory was that search engines liked sites with more links, and this was a good way to get that badly needed page rank, and build a community of like-minded bloggers.  So, bloggers with similar interests would e-mail each other and ask to be added to other bloggers blogrolls, wiht the promise of a mutual add to their own blog rolls.  Then, every few months, the bloggers would have to go through their blog rolls, and cull the blogs that had become inactive, disappeared, or were no longer linking back.  These blogrolls were usually kept in the sidebar, and became miles long.

Soon, bloggers were spending more time maintaining the blog roll than they were blogging.  At the same time, the search engines changed their algorithms to discount these links, and make them counterproductive.  But by now, the bloggers were addicted to blogrolls.  They had spent hours decorating them, and adding fancy scripts to make them scroll in their sidebars.  Even the ones that understood that the links were hurting, rather than helping their page rank began adding code to the blogrolls so that those links would be ignored by the search engines, and their (less informed or more stubborn) fellow blogrollers would not blacklist them. 

Eventually, most moved their blogrolls to a post or page of their websites, then slowly phased them out.  But every once in a while, as a webmaster or blogger, you'll get a request for a "link exchange" or to be "added to your blogroll."  Just say, "No!"

Jennifer Pointer (e-mail) is in Tulsa, OK. She promotes a simple, a low-tech approach to effective online profile management, search engine optimization and social networking. 
 

Previously, we've talked about how to build page rank, about why it's important, about how to evaluate your own page rank and that of others, and why ditching the sidebar flair might be a good idea.

There is a little bit of code that can be selectively inserted in outgoing links, which tells the search engines not to "count" that link.:  rel="nofollow" Typically, this code is used on links to websites or blogs which may be considered "spammy," or sites which are not (and never will be) in your network and would never link back to you.  Here's an example of where to put the code, in HTML view:

It is considered bad etiquette to use the "nofollow" code when linking to other sites within your network and/or which have linked to you.  It is also inappropriate to use the code if you are using content (quotes, photos, videos, etc.) from another site.

Along with knowing how to properly use this feature, it is helpful to know how to tell if other websites and blogs are using this feature when linking to you.  this can be easily done by clicking the source code of the page.  This is usually done by clicking on "view" in your browser, then "source," on the drop-down menu.  On the screen that appears, use the "edit" feature to "find" your domain, then see if the webmaster of that site has inserted this code on the link to your site. Some sites automatically insert this code on all outgoing links.  When this is the case, you are wise to use the code whenever linking back to them.

Also see:

• About rel="nofollow" on Google's Webmaster Tools Help
• 13 Reasons Why NoFollow Tags Suck
• Linktutorial: Attribute 'rel=nofollow' (Tutorial)
• Using (and Abusing?) rel="nofollow to Preserve Page Rank

Jennifer Pointer (e-mail) is a trainer and tech writer in Tulsa, OK. She promotes a simple, a low-tech approach to effective online profile management, search engine optimization and social networking. Her weakness is the mocha frappuccino.

When I first started blogging, I thought my sidebars were a place for "flair," similar to that worn by "Joanna," in the movie Office Space (played by Jennifer Anniston, pictured, right).  I figured the more the better.  Soon I learned that all of those nifty little badges, buttons, widgets, scrollbars, and links were causing my blog to "leak page rank." All of that "flair," can slow down the download speed of your blog, which can also affect your page rank in Google's new "caffeine" algorithm.  

Bottom line:  The links in your sidebar appear on every post and page of your blog or website.  That means they are helping the page rank of the sites you are linking to, but they are most likely hurting your page rank, and slowing you down. 

All of these gizmos also give your blog a very amateurish and "dated," look. 

So, I encourage you to bite the bullet and ditch the flair.  Can't bear to part with your flair?  Try first moving it all to a page or post, called something like, "Blogroll," or  "Sites we Recommend," or "Blogs that have Linked Here" (assuming that's true). 

B-b-but...I'll lose all of my blogger friends, you might be thinking. Chances are, your blogger friends have already figure this out, and are not linking to you, but if you want to be safe, you can always e-mail those friends to explain what you're doing and why.  You can also put a link to your new blogroll/flair page in your sidebar, for anyone who might be wondering what happened to a specific link. 

The space in your sidebars should be reserved for internal links (links to your own blog), and for PAID advertisers. 

Jennifer Pointer (e-mail) is a trainer and tech writer in Tulsa, OK. She promotes a simple, a low-tech approach to effective online profile management, search engine optimization and social networking. Her weakness is the mocha frappuccino.

As we discussed yesterday, Backlinks, along with feed subscriptions, traffic, Alexa ratings, and page rank are some industry standards for evaluating blogs.  Today, lets talk about Rankings - Alexa Ratings and Google Page Rank.

Alexa

Alexa is a very popular rating system used by advertisers to decide if they want to pay to advertise on a particular site.  To find your Alexa rating, go to Alexa.com/siteinfo, and enter the URL, then "Get Details."  This will show you your traffic rank, which is:

A measure of a website's popularity. 

 

The rank is calculated using a combination of average daily visitors and pageviews over the past 3 months. The site with the highest combination of visitors and pageviews is ranked #1.

So, the lower your traffic rank, the better.  Clicking on "search analytics," will also tell you which search engine queries sent the most traffic to a website.

Google Page Rank

Google Page Rank is explained by Google as:

PageRank reflects our view of the importance of web pages by considering more than 500 million variables and 2 billion terms. Pages that we believe are important pages receive a higher PageRank and are more likely to appear at the top of the search results.

PageRank also considers the importance of each page that casts a vote, as votes from some pages are considered to have greater value, thus giving the linked page greater value. We have always taken a pragmatic approach to help improve search quality and create useful products, and our technology uses the collective intelligence of the web to determine a page's importance.

The actual effect of a website's page rank on the amount of traffic driven to the site by Google is somewhat disputed, but the page rank is still looked at as a factor, industry wide, in determining how popular a site is compared to other sites (e.g. Top 100 Church Blogs).

Tomorrow, we'll talk about feed subscriptions.

Jennifer Pointer (e-mail) is a trainer and tech writer in Tulsa, OK. She promotes a simple, a low-tech approach to effective online profile management, search engine optimization and social networking. Her weakness is the mocha frappuccino.

How do you determine if a blog or website is "successful"?  Well, if it's your blog or website, you largely get to set the goals, and determine for yourself if those goals have been met.  However, if you think you might eventually want to attract advertisers, you'll at least need to be aware of what standards and measures are used in the industry to rank and evaluate blogs.  These include backlinks, Alexa ratings, feed subscriptions, traffic, and page rank.

One of those standards is the number of "backlinks," which include the number of times other bloggers or webmasters have linked to your site, as well as the number internal links (links from one post or article to another within the same site) there are on your site.

There are a number of tools online for seeing how many people are linking to you.  Your own stats program should provide you with information about which websites are sending traffic to yours  (also see What You Can Learn from Your Stats).  Two free tools online are the iWebTool backlink Checker, and the Yahoo Inlinks Site Explorer.  The iWebTool will check only sites from external sources.  Yahoo gives you a choice of whether you want to include links "from all pages," or "except this domain." 

So, what can you do with this information? 

It's always a good idea to know who is linking to you.  Checking your backlinks will help you to know who is driving traffic to your site, and who is writing about your site.  Following those backlinks, then commenting on the linking blogs (perhaps also linking to those blogs, if appropriate) is a great way to build a network.  Increasing the number of backlinks to your site will improve your page rank - a topic we will discuss later in this series. 

Jennifer Pointer (e-mail) is a trainer and tech writer in Tulsa, OK. She promotes a simple, a low-tech approach to effective online profile management, search engine optimization and social networking. Her weakness is the mocha frappuccino.