Using Pagemodo to Build a Facebook Page

May 17, 2011 / Social Media / by Kathy Alice

You’ve probably (or maybe seen their Facebook ads) heard of pagemodo, a service to help you build your Facebook page. Today I decided to take it for a test drive.

First a clarification, a Facebook Fan page is actually a number of pages (or tabs), the most familiar being your Wall, so what pagemodo will build for you is a new “tab” for your Facebook page. For example you might want to create a landing page to welcome new fans to your Facebook page, this is a good candidate for a pagemodo created page. You will still need to create your actual page in Facebook before pagemodo installs the “page” you built, however pagemodo detects this and directs you over to Facebook to do this prior to installation.

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Avoid the Duplicate Content Penalty from Google

April 28, 2011 / Search Engine Optimization / by Kathy Alice

Here’s a question I got today…

I want to submit my recipes to yummly.com. I’ve noticed that the big, well known recipes sites have submitted their recipes to this site as well. Wouldn’t this cause duplicate content issues?

Well yes, any content that is duplicated across domains would fall into the duplicate content definition and would present to Google and the other search engine with a duplicate content issue (see below for the definition of duplicate content). But the real question being asked here is: Will it adversely affect my site?

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WordPress SEO plugins to improve bounce rate

April 26, 2011 / Search Engine Optimization, WordPress / by Kathy Alice

One of my goals has been to address my high bounce rate on this blog, which has been above 80%. To do that I’ve been working on features that increase my website stickiness.

Bounce Rate is a SEO factor

Bounce RateWhy would I want to do this? Let’s put the SEO factor aside for a moment. As a blogger you of course want people to get value from your blog, read several posts and return. A high bounce rate means that most of your visitors just visited the single page they originally landed on and then left your blog. Of course if the article answered their question completely that would be a good thing, even if they left without browsing further. This is more difficult to measure, but you can look at time spent on the site as another clue.

Most SEOs would agree that Google and the other search engines are taking bounce rate into account. Google might be looking at Google Analytics for the bounce rate, but even if you don’t have Google Analytics installed, Google and Bing can collect bounce rate data by looking at how quickly the user returns back to the search engine results page and clicks on the next result. A quick return and click on the next website on the list means the user didn’t find what they are looking for on your website.

So from both the SEO and user engagement / conversion perspective you should care about your bounce rate and website stickiness.

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The rel nofollow tag and page rank sculpting

April 19, 2011 / Search Engine Optimization, WordPress / by Kathy Alice

Updated: May 25, 2012
I see a lot of outdated information about the rel nofollow tag. Particularly a lot of advice to use it in page rank sculpting. That might have been useful at one point, but it hasn’t been for over a year now.

What is the nofollow tag?

The nofollow tag is a tag you can add to a href link to tell Google not to pass page rank to the link. It is typically used for comments on a blog (to discourage comment spam) and for sponsored links. By adding this tag to your href HTML code you are telling Google, I’m not sure I trust this site and I don’t want to pass my link juice over to it.

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Check Backlinks with Google link Command?

April 14, 2011 / Search Engine Optimization / by Kathy Alice

One of the things you often need to do as a SEO is look at the backlink profile of websites. This can be useful to see how your competitors have acquired backlinks – which, as we all know, quality backlinks are important for your website to rank well. Yahoo search explorer’s linkdomain command has been a way to do this in the past, but it has grown unreliable and misleading. Alternatives are available, for example SEOMoz provides opensiteexplorer.org and there is also Majestic SEO, but you need a paid account to get the full benefits.

So I was excited to hear Matt Cutts mention on a recent video, that although Google had historically limited the number of backlinks the link: returned due to storage issues that now it was possible to get the full set of backlinks.

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Getting Your Website Logo to Appear as a Favicon

April 6, 2011 / WordPress / by Kathy Alice

What’s that logo in the browser tab?

Webenso LogoWith many of the websites you visit today, you’ve probably noticed that a little image or logo shows next to the URL and in the browser tab. The question is how to get that an icon showing up for your website? That little image is called a favicon and it dates below to early Internet Explorer days when it was used in the IE “favorites” menu. Fast forward to today, and now most modern browsers support it and it, in my humble opinion, has become a “must have”. Having your logo show up as browser tab image and next to your website’s URL reinforces the branding of your website. In fact I get annoyed these days when I can’t instantly identify a browser tab I have open by the picture or the page title, so it was high time I installed one for this site.

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