SEO News - Google sitelinks has been subject of conversation among many SEOs as Google has not mentioned how they come up with the site links. There has been many theories about how to achieve them but all of them were nothing but theories.
Now ready to hear how you can really get your sitelink? When Google recgonize the user’s entry as a known brand, then it gives that site sitelinks.
For example if you type in free credit report or freecreditreport, you will see a bunch of sites that come up none of them will have sitelinks. But if you type in freecreditreport.com then Google agonizes the brand and brings up FreeCreditReport.com in its search results will associate sitelinks to it.
A better example is Startbucks Coffee. If you go in Google and type in coffee, Startbucks usually comes out on first page sometimes second. But if you type in Starbucks Coffee, Google will automatically recognizes that user is searching for the Starbucks coffee brand and this time will assign Startbucks sitelinks.
This Google service is designed to help their users to find the exact website and the page they are looking for.
So promote Your Brand!
More to come as I learn more about sitelinks…see you soon.
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
SEM - LOL…I was researching for some PPC keywords and I came across this rap song made just for PPC. Some PPC specialist raps his away about Pay Per Click and I found it very interesting and I thought I share with you.
I originally found the video on SEO Religion Blog.
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.
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.
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.
