SEO 102
A little more advanced SEO Information
What about those sites above mine in the rankings that
use spam techniques?
Yes it's true that you will see sites above yours in the search
engine results pages that have used questionable techniques to get
there. This is a short term phenomenon! Those sites
are usually crushed by the search engines at the next update. You
can afford to be smug if you see those sorts of sites above yours
- because when they get kicked out of the index for doing the wrong
thing, your site will be there ready to move up a few more places!
Remember, our watchword when doing SEO is patience, we can
afford to smile because we know our sites will eventually prevail.
Linking out from your site
Who you link to tells a search engine alot about your site. Outgoing
links are very important because they can help you recommend your
visitors to more resources. Visitors appreciate being helped, so
this is a good strategy to have on your website. The only problem
is that search engines don't like you linking to 'bad neighborhoods'.
'Bad neighborhoods' are low quality sites which may tarnish your
website. Avoid these like the plague. Try and link to only good
quality sites which are relevant to your site. The better the sites
you link to, the more favourably search engines look upon your site.
Paid links
From an SEO point of view these are bad news. Paid links should
only be used to get traffic. Search engines don't like paid links
that pretend to be a 'vote' for your website. If you pay for a link,
ask the linking site to add rel="nofollow" to
the link which tells the search engines not to count it as a 'vote'.
Duplicate Pages
Some people will tell you there is some sort of penalty if you have
2 pages the same on your website. Duplicate pages are where the
URL is different but the content on the pages is too similar or
exactly the same. For instance, http://www.google.com
and http://www.google.com.au
are nearly identical, even though they have different URLs. Typically
a search engine will look at those two pages and decide they are
both similar, and display only one. There is no penalty as the searcher
finds what they are looking for anyway. The problem comes when there
are links (or 'votes') to both pages. That means the 'votes' are
split and the information is seen as less important than it really
is. For this reason it is usually best to avoid duplicate pages
from the start. If you already have duplicate pages, it is best
to do a 301
redirect back to one.
What is PR? Is it important?
PR stands for PageRank, Google's system of rating webpages. You
can check PR of pages but the tools available show outdated information
and are not really relevant. PR plays less of a role in search engine
placement these days and you really shouldn't worry about it. Far
more important is making good content and getting good incoming
links to your site.
www vs. no www
Some search engines have a problem with www and non www. What this
basically means is that they think there is one website at http://example.com
and another website at http://www.example.com. Of course this is
a silly concept for humans but a challenge for automated search
robots. Always point internal links to either one or the other for
your site. Of course there are people who will link to you the opposite
way. If you think it is a problem, you will need to do a 301
redirect .
Dynamic URLs
Do you have a dynamic site? Dynamic URLs have a ?
in them with a few parameters after the ?. Check
to see if dynamic URLs are generated for your site by using a spider
simulator on your site. If so, you will need to get rid of those
session URLs for spiders! This can be quite complicated and depends
on what type of server and software you are using, but you can start
your research here
and here.
Once you get rid of session ID's, dynamic URL's are indexed and
ranked on Google quite well. MSN and Yahoo still have problems indexing
those pages. Overall, if you have the skill or you can find someone
to help you do it, it is better to convert dynamic URLs to static
URLs. This gives you a better chance of being indexed by all search
engines.
Photos and Images
For all photos and images on your pages, make sure they are not
too large. It is best to resize them in an imaging program to their
finished size before inserting them in your webpage and uploading
them to your site. Make sure all images have an <alt> tag
which accurately describes the photo or image.
The robots.txt file
A good robots.txt file is like an invitation for search engine crawlers
to check out your site. It is also useful for stopping some crawlers.
For example, I used to despair because I was using way too much
bandwith on my webserver account for one of my sites. The main reason
too much bandwith was being used was because the Google Image crawler
was visiting my site a couple of times a month and downloading the
thousands of product images we had. Now, there is no reason for
my thousands of product images to be on Google search, these are
well known products and people were just looking for images to steal
to put on their own websites anyway. The solution? I blocked the
Google Imagebot from my site using the robots.txt file. This saves
many gigabytes of bandwith every month. The robots.txt file is useful
for several SEO purposes - for example stopping search engines from
indexing irrelevant content . A good robots.txt tutorial is here.
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