BKSEO’s SEO Blog

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.

 

According to both Google and Matt Cutts from Google, if there is a NoFollow in a link, Google will simply ignore that link. So the following page won’t get indexed through that link.  This way you can legitimize your link buying for sake of traffic not for sake of tricking Google with their ranking. There are also other reason you may use NoFollow on your links.

Some SEO experts suggest that the crawler indeed follows the link but does not transfer any rank to it and I have also have had my doubts so I ran a little test to see how this actually work. I had a site that I had not submitted to Google so I sent a NoFollow link to it from one of my high ranking websites and sure enough after about a few weeks my site was listed in Google.

Now this test does not necessarily mean that my site was added through the NoFollow. As far as I know, someone else could have added it to Google (no idea why, the site didn’t have any good info on it).  However this little expermint raised my doubts even more on NoFollow to the point that I want to believe that despite what Mr. Cutts and Google are saying,  there is  possibility that the crawler actually does follow the NoFollow links but it does not count them toward ranking the destination page.

However I could be wrong so I need to do more research, reading, and experiments on NoFollow links. But for now this is what I know and have experiance. Feel free to share your experience and comments on this issue I would love to read them.

Google finally has a Google Sitemap FAQ. Webmasters and SEO specialists can often encounter questions regarding Google Sitemap so this FAQ is a good place to start.

There hasn’t much changed in the business model of today’s websites in compare to .com era back in late 90s and today’s internet world. All big websites put a huge concentration and efforts on building traffic to their website, and that way they get to offer their products or services. And many big websites such as myspace, youtube, or facebook, still rely on old school advertising business model to make their billions.

However the concept of traffic building and advertising has evolved into gaining more targeted traffic and website audience. Companies have learned that just spending millions and millions to create banner ads on random websites do not exactly translate into business. So they like to invest their advertising budget into those solutions that can justify the dollar spent.

As a SEO specialist, you must understand how important it is to get targeted traffic to your websites. And the best way to do that is to improve the relevancy of your websites with your SEO and SEM campaigns. Work on link building and community building with relevant websites. You can spend hours to build links with irrelevant websites just to improve your ranking a little and at the end still will be disappointed because the website traffic is not turning into sales or leads. At the end you have wasted both time and money (or your clients money).

For example, let’s pick a Soccer ecommerce website that sells soccer products. A link from this blog to to that site will not do as well as a link from a relevant soccer blog, lets say Soccer Nation blog. Because the audience of that blog are interested more into playing, coaching, or following soccer where the audience of this blog, are interested into learning about internet marketing and SEO.

It is simiple logic and it seems Google and other major search engines are also following this simple logic and giving a lot of value on relevancy of your contents and links. Most of your page ranking and keyword ranking within your website comes from relevancy of your contents in your websites and relevancy of your inbound links.

So it is important to think targeted and improve relevancy when you think about search engine optimization or online marketing. Because not only that imrpoves SEO, it also translates into revenue or leads to your website which is the main reason for SEO to begin with.

Today I left my first comment in Matt Cutts blog. Knowing he probably puts a nofollow tag on my comment link, I discovered he uses another attribute called “external nofollow”. I did a little research and realized that this is really another form of nofollow tag that wordpress it.

Now there are a bunch of theories out there calling “external nofollow” better than nofollow but if you are not using wordpress, then you don’t have much to worry about. If you are using wordpress, then you can choose between the two, although they have recommended “external nofollow” over simple “nofollow” tag for better spam fighting.

The interesting find is that Matt Cutts, works for Google, and uses wordpress considering Google owns Blogger and you would think Google wants his top engineers use that instead?

Oh well.

I was reading Dan’s Dan Thies blog earlier today and his new post Stop Words Are Dead! Did I Miss Another Memo? I came to realize how indifferent I am to this news. It is not news really, I have noticed this for a while now.

If you don’t know what Stop Words are, they are words such as “and”, “is”, “or” that were often ignored by major search engines. They often did not get indxes or returned in the SERPs becasue they were considered too common and so unique.

So SEO and content specialists often treid to avoid those as much as possible and write contents with fewer Stop Words. They would try to stay away from using those in their h1-h5 tags, title tags, article titles, and etc.

Why Should You Not Care?
If you are a legitimate website owner with a legitimate commercial or non commercial purpose, you should not care at all. It is the black hat SEO and content specialists who often updated their website to increase fake traffic to their website should worry about this. If you are online for long term, I say careless about such development and focus on natural content writing and build linking to improve your websites SEO.

If you have read my previous post, “Links are like votes for four site” and my other posts on this blog, then you should by now realize how important incoming links are to your website. The more targeted and relevant they are the better will they rank your site.

Now the question is that how to get those incoming links. I found a very nice thread that “Link Building 101” on seochat.com. It is well put and detailed enough to get you started. GaryTheScubaGuy, a moderator on that site is the author of this post who has done a great job explaining all the basics and Do’s and Don’ts well in detail. Please note that all credits should go to him.

Ok this is going to be the last post for the year 2007. I have learned many SEO lessons in that year and looking forward applying them in the upcoming 2008.

I am going to call 2008 year of SEO. Why? Because of lessons learned in 2007 from all the successes and failures. SEO is a must in today’s competitive internet. There are so many similar and competitive websites out there, and SEO remains the most cost effective solution for all specially for small businesses.

My 2008 SEO resolution is to better understand Google and its direction and keep up with all the SEO news and methods. So that is why I call this year, year of SEO. It is going to be a fun but challenging year ahead as far as SEO concerned but meanwhile I am going to enjoy rest of the holiday so I can relax and refresh.

Happy new Year

They truly are. I really like that quote. The first time I read it was when I reading Phrase Rank, Trust Rank and Linking Outside the Box post.

To search engines links are like votes. When a website links to you, to search engines it means they are voting for you. But search engines do more than just counting votes. They want to ensure these votes (these links) are legitimate, so they weight the source and relevancy of the links coming to your site. If the links are coming from a website with high ranking that is somehow relevant to your site, then those links count toward your ranking and will help significantly in your website ranking.

So as a good SEO specialist, you should go beyond traditional link exchange and think of yourself more like a campaign managers for your website(s). The more presentable and resourceful your website is, and more people know about it, the higher chance of other websites linking to you with relevant contents. The point is to bait for links. This method is called “link baiting” in the SEO world. I suggest you do not go out of your way to buy or exchange links because search engines treat those paid or exchange links just as voting officials treat an dishonest politician trying to buy or exchange votes. You should try to earn your votes (your links), by making your website the website to visit for your field.