Category Archives for SEO
April 8, 2012 / Digital Marketing, Rockstar Blogging, Search Engine Optimization / by Kathy Alice
For choosing your blog titles, here’s the advice I’m sure you’ve heard:
February 20, 2012 / Search Engine Optimization / by Kathy Alice
If you research SEO, you will find that one recommendation is to build backlinks with relevant keyword rich anchor text. This touches on the topic of linkbuilding which is the activity of getting other websites to link to yours. Anchor text in the links with keywords gives Google another signal that your page is relevant to those keywords and should rank for search queries containing those keywords. Or so the story goes.
February 3, 2012 / Search Engine Optimization / by Kathy Alice
Fair warning, this one is for the SEO geeks out there.
Checking indexation and for duplicate content issues on Bing is sometimes overlooked with all the focus on Google. But it’s always good to check once in a while to see how your site’s SEO is doing on Bing. Check out my basic overview of Bing Webmaster Tools if it is new for you.
In this case, I had a client that had a number of very similar pages that did not fully have the rel canonical tag fully applied as a solution. Based on Eric Enge’s interview with Duane Forrester, where Duane stated “If we are finding your pages, but not keeping them in the index, there is a reason for that.” I decided to see what Bing Webmaster’s Index Explorer had indexed as “quality content” as a data point.
August 17, 2011 / Search Engine Optimization / by Kathy Alice
Slow website? Webenso has never had great performance, but adding the social media buttons has really slowed things down. Addressing my website performance has been on my to-do list for a while, so it was perhaps serendipitous that I caught a short presentation from Michelle Zatlyn from CloudFlare last night on improving blog performance.
You do need to care about your website speed. Not only because your users aren’t going to stick around for a website that takes 10 seconds or more to load, but it’s bad for SEO as well. Over a year ago, Google announced they would be taking page load time into account for their ranking algorithms.
CloudFlare originally was conceived as a way to block hacker and spam bot traffic to make your website more secure. Michelle quickly got the feedback that any solution they came up with needed to avoid slowing things down. So CloudFlare now has a dual purpose, it looks for “bad” traffic and filters that away from your website, and it speeds up your website’s performance as well. The CloudFlare approach is a little different than the standard remedies for slow websites, it’s not about changing your javascript to load asynchronously or hosting social media button images or installing caching on WordPress (which are all things you should still consider). What CloudFlare does is become a proxy for your website, it caches your pages and can serve your site from it’s datacenters around the world. So instead of someone from Hong Kong requesting your site from its hosting location in the USA, they will get it from the CloudFlare’s Asian datacenter much quicker. Your website — served from distributed locations from around the world — for free. Cool huh?
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.
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.
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.
