Joe Hayes {dot} Org

As you may already know, placing a re=”nofollow” attribute on a link will tell search engines, like Google, to not follow the link – or give credit as a vote when it comes to search rankings. This is a pretty popular thing to do to control the links in user generated content like forums and blogs – since you are who you link to, so to speak. This also helps to discourage spammers from targetting your web pages, though not always.

Recently, I had a website successfully reincluded back into MSN/Live’s web search. As one of the first websites I built – way back in 2005 - there were several (dare I say more) questionable methods of promotion and link building as I learned the in’s/out’s of being a webmaster. Throughout it’s life, this site has been penalized/banned in all three major search engines at one point or another – in fact it’s still banned in Yahoo.

Where have I been? Well, extremely busy with local projects and folks breathing down my neck to get things done. Eh, good problem to have I guess. Been so busy actually I just now got a chance to read through some of my favorite blogs, namely Matt Cutts (head of the spam team at Google) – and I came accross a post late last month about Google Trends.

SEO, an acronym for one of the most misunderstood concepts for a webmaster. Optimizing your websites for search engines isn’t voodoo, in fact 90% of it is basic stuff almost anyone can do without any prior experience. While some of the more advanced methods like link building and link baiting deserve an article all to themselves, the stuff covered here get to the core of what we’re after – to  get your pages in the search indexes and have them rank for the key terms you deserve.

Simply put, a meta tag is information located between your head tags giving search engines more information about your web page. This isn’t viewable to a websurfer, however most web pages have at least some meta information and this can be seen by viewing a pages source code (right click, view source with internet explorer). When search engine bots (sometimes called spiders) come to your website, they use this meta information to help build their index of your web page. Typically, meta data looks like this: