BKSEO’s SEO Blog

SEO Posts - Ok many people think by adding rel=”nofollow” to your links, all potential SEO advantages of that link goes away. I say wrong here is why.

True that Google, Yahoo, Live may not follow that link or rank it, but guess who does? Yes the people. The blog readers and site visitors.

The entire goal of SEO is to bring more natural traffic to our websites and ranking high in SERP is one way but a direct link is another. Make sure those links are visible, attractive, and targeted so users click on it and visit your website.

Important to see the word targeted I mentioned because if you bring targeted audience to your website, chances are higher for them to like your website or blog, and subscribe to it or its produces or services.

So go ahead and leave comments in blogs, put a link to your website in those comments BUT make sure those comments don’t look like a spam. Because bloggers and website owners hate spam. I do too.

I don’t usually accept the unrelated spam comments on this blog for example. However if someone leaves a nice comment on one of my posts and also puts a link to his or her blog or website, I may like that comment more and approve it.

Anyway I hope you see how you can get no follow links to work for you.

Goodluck nofollowing

SEO Posts - Best links are the text links that are the most important incoming links you can have to your website. Those flashy banner ads may grab attention of the visitors and drive some traffic to your website but they are considered less valuable for search engines.

Search Engines don’t like paid links and they certainly consider banner and flash ads as form of advertising and rank those links less. But they came more about text links as they consider text links as “votes for your site”. For example if you have a Soccer store website and you sell a unique product such as Beach Soccer Socks, you can get better ranking in search SERP by linking Beach Soccer Socks including those words in the title tag of the anchor.

You can use CSS to change the look of your link so it can grab attention of your visitors. For example Sand Socks.

Or you can use your banner ad as a background color, and roll your text on it. That way you get advantage of grabbing your visitors attention and advantage of directing search engines to your site and get ranked better.

I am super busy these days so it is hard and tt is getting harder and harder for me to blog here. So I am posting less here and more on my blog at Sefati.net. I will post some SEO posts here from time to time but if you like to see more posts from me, make sure you visit Sefati.net.

SEO Posts - Ok this post may seem a bit strange. Usually search engine specialists such as myself take advise from Google by reading Google SEO Blog or read Google engineers’ blog such as Matt Cutts blog or other Google related blogs.

But I am not feeling as usual today, a bit frustrated to be honest with you so I am going to give an advise to Google. Hopefully someone from their search improvement department reads this and does something about this.

Here it goes Big G; Please crawl new and low PR websites more often. Just because a site is new or its page ranking is low doesn’t mean that site is not worth visiting often. When I do side work, many of my clients have some good and useful contents on their website that can be very beneficial to Google’s searchers but since they are smaller websites or newer websites, the Google crawler doesn’t visit their website as often as possible therefore new contents aren’t being indexed fast enough.

Smaller companies can’t afford to hire a full time SEO to keep optimizing their websites and increase, build links, and increase their PR. But with today’s content management systems and blogging software availability, many of them are able to update their website content on daily basis.

For example one of my clients has a nice website about identity theft and how people can protect themselves. There are some valuable information on there that Google’s searchers can significantly benefit from. The content and news are updated on it a few times a week but since it is a newer website, Google has not visited the website for almost two weeks! Therefore most of these contents are not indexed to be found when a Google user is searching the web using Google.

Live.com, Microsoft’s search engine seems to do a better job in visiting the smaller websites. Even Yahoo.com seems to be visiting that site more often. The very same website was visited by both search engines two days ago and before then it was visited a couple days before that.

Google has been very slow and hesitant towards website with low or no PR or new websites. That philosophy worked for them well in late 90s and early 2000 but the internet has changed since then. Thanks for advances in the technology, contents on websites and blogs are updated more often. There are more useful contents are available everyday and if Google doesn’t visit smaller sites more often, Google users can’t find these valuable contents.

So for its own sake, Google needs to keep up and step up their efforts in visiting smaller websites and blogs more often.

And there you have it Big Gt. I hope you don’t take this personal. =)

Trust me its for your own good

SEO Posts - As you may already know, search engines can’t read images so they often look at image attributes for their search results. The most important image attribute, in my openion, is still the Alt attribute also referred to as Alt Tag.

When it comes to the Alt Tags, webmasters often come up with two questions:

1. Which images should have an all tag?

2. What should be the Alt attribute for that image?

And here are my answers based on my findings and experience. Some SEO specialist may disagree with me but I find many that agree with me on this:

Answer 1: Two types of images should have Alt Tags;

a) Action images which are buttons, images in the navigation, and your logo.
b) Informational images which are those images that include important message or slogan on your website.

Answer 2: Alt Tag of the image should describe the image in less than 57 words. For example if you are getting a free credit report, the Alt Tag of the order now button should say Order free credit report now. Keep in mind you should be able to describe the image and Google likes short attributes. Per Matt Cutts, no more than 5 7 words. Any thing more than that may raise a flag that you are trying to stuff your keywords.

SEO Posts - Many novice SEOs often either focus too much into building too many little links with little or no juice or make a few good quality links in a short period of time.

Both approaches are wrong and no one could have done it better than Gary Wolf to explain this concept.

By the way I love the following quote from him:

You want to build as many quality links, from as many trusted sources as possible, with as much differentiating anchor text, to as many different pages, over a prolonged period of time. While concise that was probably about as helpful as Sams “How to Build a Nuclear Reactor in 24 Hours” book, so here are some slightly more instructional links

Be sure to check out one of his latest SEO posts:

Link Building and Development Mistakes - Treetrunks and Houses on Stilts

SEO Methods - Last time I added a new blog to Google, it took less than two hours for the blog to get listed in Google. No more waiting days, weeks, or months for Google to add your site. This method works. It is like forcing Google to add you ASAP.

Here is what I did:

• Add your URL to Google
• Send a text link to your new site from a high ranking website or blog with the name of your website.
• Make sure the link is a text link
• Make sure this text link contains a title tag with your domain name and\or your in it
• Make sure the anchor text also contains the keywords and\or your domain name
• Make sure this link does not contain a re=”nofollow” tag in it
• Make sure your new website has contents with your keywords and is SEO friendly
• Ping Google from webmaster tool to visit the high ranking website or the blog

And that’s it. You are done. I want to emphasize that this link should be coming from a high ranking website or blog. Prefer with a pagerank of 3 or more but I have seen page ranking 1 sometimes do too.

Here is the logic behind it. When Google crawler visits the web page with a page rank, it will follow all (or at least most) of the links without the nofollow tag. And if the keywords of the text links are related to the destination website (in this case your new website), it saves the content of the destination website  into it’s database since the content is so relevant to the link and will ultimately will list you.

There are other ways where you can get your site listed in Google fast. For example setting up a webmaster account can help too but again you are leaving it up to Google. The key is to force Google to capture your new website content and in order to do that, you need to make sure you follow the steps I explained in this post..

Matt Cutts is Google’s face to public. He is the head of software engineering team in the Webspam department of Google trying to fight the spammers. In Vegas during the Pubcon, some people got a chance to interview him about SEO and here is one about what SEOs should focus on in 2008 that I came across in Youtube.

According to this interview, as I suspected, content is still king. I have had a couple of posts about that. Then the personalization about your website (for example business addresses for your website and etc), and Mobile search optimization.

Google sometimes relies on open directory to show your website title or description in their search result.  The reasons for that can many. One of them is that when Google first visited your website, perhaps you didn’t have anything in your title tag and the crawler somehow didn’t find any relevant content to your website.

To solve this issue, first make sure you you have a title tag and a description meta tag and and your website contents are fully relevant to your website and there are no HTML no errors.  Then add the following code to your meta tags which tells robot not to use the open directory content for your website. This way the robot will only crawl your website’s contents and will eventually modify your websites search result display based on your website’s contents.

<meta name=”robots” content=”noodp”>

It may take a few weeks for this to take affect to be patient with this process.

Just came out of weekly SEO meeting at work. Our group consists of representatives from different part of the department including product mangers, marketing managers, project managers, finance department, business justification department, creative team, compliance, and of course web department.

I am the representative of the web department. Where I work SEO is not handled by one department but it’s a committee that handles and is responsible for SEO. My employer has way too many websites, products, and legal and business issues so I can’t just get in front of computer and bust out some SEO.

They also need justification for the time spent because time is money. Traffic, page ranking, and keyword ranking are not enough! They need numbers in terms of dollar. They need to see increase in orders and increase in conversion. But they are not the only company that is so demanding.

Today goal of SEO is not only to drive traffic to your website, but it is increase online orders or leads and increase company revenue by increasing conversion. In order to do those, SEO specialists need to focus on driving targeted and quality traffic to their websites rather than just any traffic because conversion is what your employer or client is looking for. They are in it to make money and get ahead of competition NOW not tomorrow. Of course SEO takes time and it’s an ongoing effort but it needs to translate to numbers in particular into $ so the investment in it is justifiable. Of course it needs cooperation with the usability and design departments, because you can drive the targeted traffic to your site, but if your site is not user friendly, your visitor will leave your site and your effort can get wasted.

That is why an SEO specialist is not a typical geek any more, but it is an important business minded geek who communicates professionally with different members of different departments with conversion in mind as SEO yesterday was all about ranking, SEO today is all about conversion.