At any rate, you may have reasons to quickly and easily find the nofollowed links on a page, to see if your tags are done right or to easily detect where and what is getting the nofollow tag on a page. We won’t go into all of the uses, though you can use your imagination. At any rate:

Internet Explorer Detection

Paste this code into your url bar on the page you’re wanting to check, or do what I do and make it a link favorite so you can check the page with one click. I link this better than the FireFox method because maybe I don’t want every nofollow link highlighted on every page I view…

javascript: var anchors;anchors = document.getElementsByTagName("a");var anchorIndex;for(anchorIndex = 0;anchorIndex < anchors.length;anchorIndex++) { if(anchors[anchorIndex].getAttribute("rel") && anchors[anchorIndex].getAttribute("rel")=="nofollow") anchors[anchorIndex].style.backgroundColor="red";} void(0);

Firefox Nofollow Detection

You could install the SeoQuake extension and turn the nofollow highlight on in the options, or search for userContent.css and add this anywhere inside of it… (Windows XP users can find it at C:\Documents and Settings\[User Name]\Application Data\Mozilla\Firefox\Profiles\yad55ash.default(varies)\chrome\userContent.css)

a[rel~="nofollow"] { border: thin dashed firebrick! important; background-color: rgb(255, 200, 200)! important; }

Google Chrome Nofollow Detection

Drag this into your bookmarks…

Safari Nofollow Detection

This is pretty much the same as Internet Explorer (IE6 or IE7), again I’d suggest making a bookmark of any page then editing the url location with this javascript…

javascript:var%20a=document.getElementsByTagName('a');for(var%20z=0;z%3Ca.length;%20z++){if(a[z].rel==’nofollow’){a[z].style.border=’1px%20solid%20%23F00';}}

© mdvaldosta for Joe Hayes {dot} Org, 2009. | Permalink | 5 comments | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags:

Feed enhanced by Better Feed from Ozh

At any rate, this post is about MSN/Live (whatever they prefer to be called now). For the past two years I’ve been trying to get the website back into Live, during which the website in question has been on the straight and narrow. I have submitted several reinclusion requests, fired off emails, etc. – all to no avail. Recently MSN has been turning it’s attention to webmasters with their new tools system, and with a new webmaster forum. After verifying the website wasn’t “banned” through MSN’s webmaster tools, I asked for help in their forum.

A quick response was posted by Brent Young, verifying the website was being penalized and offered to help. A couple weeks later, the website is ranking for most of the keywords it used to. Success! So, essentially I want to inform other webmasters what they should do in the even they believe their website is being penalized by MSN/Live Search – taken from a advice posted by Brent:

Please review our Guidelines for successful indexing to ensure that you are not doing anything that would get your site blocked in the future.

In the webmaster tools there is a link to submit your site for reinclusion if it is blocked or if you suspect that your website was incorrectly identified as spam, please do the following:

1. Open the Live Search Site Owner support form.
2. In the boxes provided, type your name and e-mail address.
3. In the What type of problem do you have? list, select Other.
4. In the box provided, describe the issue, including the following information:
   • The search words that you use
   • The URL
   • Request re-inclusion

So there you have it, a new (and very helpful) way to get feedback from MSN. I think it’s great they have offered such an intuitive way to interact with the Live Search staff. If only Google and Yahoo would take note, and be more involved with answering questions and working with webmasters to correct potential issues so that both parties can improve.

© mdvaldosta for Joe Hayes {dot} Org, 2008. | Permalink | 9 comments | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags:

Feed enhanced by Better Feed from Ozh

Basically, it offers a free service similar to that of Alexa,  Quantcast or Compete - of which the latter has been my primary indicator of competitor’s traffic. Neither one, however, including Google Trends is going to give you an accurate measure of traffic but for the most part they’d all give you a good comparison. Note that I’m referring to trends on “websites” not “searches” – which is also useful in it’s own regards.

I personally am going to prefer the use of Google Trends now, over Compete for traffic analysis, mainly because Google is the main source of traffic for most websites and would be a great way to measure the potential of websites you’re doing SEO work for.

One of the drawbacks of the new Google Trends service, unfortunately, leave new or low traffic websites drawing a blank with no data showed. Apparently there is some sort of threshold a website must reach before the allmighty “G” will spend resources to track it. Another is that you don’t really get much data, like search terms etc. for your competitors as with some of the other services, but again in my opinion it’s the most valuable indicator of search traffic – at least from Google.

One thing I really like is the “Also searched for” and “Also visited” data… once again this is very simple and very limited – but very accurate information based on the traffic levels Google delivers.  And something important to point out is that, if you sign into Google, you’ll see estimated traffic numbers on the Y axis of the graph… which seems to be about 70% of the actual unique visitors the handful of sites I checked actually receive.

One question that keeps coming to mind is… where does Google get this information? It’s no secret they track clickthroughs on their search results (the redirect link gives that away), but do they also get data from their famous Toolbar?

Overall, I like the tool very much. While the data is not as comprehensive as it’s competitors (discussed earlier), I believe what little is shown is very accurate (at least for comparisons) and a very valuable SEO tool if you know how to use it. I suppose it’s at least good for determining the traffic potential for niches you’re working on.

© mdvaldosta for Joe Hayes {dot} Org, 2008. | Permalink | 4 comments | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags:

Feed enhanced by Better Feed from Ozh

First thing’s first, on page optimization (then we’ll finish with link building). While many SEO’s delve into a bunch of meta information (keywords, index and follow, etc.) and keyword density, we’re not going to worry with that. Not  that I’m saying it’s unecessary or unimportant, only that there is little (if any) benefit to worrying about that. Let’s just make sure the pages on your website are crawlable and able to be fully indexed. There are a few factors here that are quite important:

Page Title – in my experience this is the most important part of your web page. The page title (found in your head tags and is visible in your browser bar) and should briefly describe exactly what your page is about. Less is more here, keep it short and sweet. My advice is to avoid using your site’s domain name in the title unless it contains your main keyword, or you’re concerned with branding. Regardless of what you decide, at least place you page’s actual title in front of anything else.

For example, this page’s title would display as “Basic Search Engine Optimization Anyone Can Do” or if I wanted to I could append “- Joe hayes {dot} Org” to the end of that or maybe even the category the post was placed in.

Another important thing is to ensure all pages titles are different. Duplicate page titles will likely land you’re pages deep into the supplemental index – and alot of sites do this. Every page on their site will be “DomainName.com” or whatever. Really bad, fix this quick.

Heading Tags – When at all possible, include your page title somewhere on the page in a heading tag, preferably H1 though H2 will do if you’re using that for you’re site name (common for blogs). Don’t repeat your site’s domain name here though, your visitors already know where they are. If you have sub-sections for longer posts, feel free to use H3 or H4 tags there as well. It’s good practice for copywriting.

Your Content – Yea that’s important too. When writing it’s important to use the keywords your wanting to rank for in your content, preferably starting early (in your first paragraph). Nothing spammy here, just make it a point to ensure the key phrases can be found on your page.

Interlink Where Possible – When referencing things that can be found other places on your website, link to them when possible. In content links are perhaps the most important links you can have. Not only that, it helps your readers with references to things you’re talking about. Also, don’t be afraid to link to other sources of information – even your competition.

Site Map - Good idea to have one of these as well, especially helpful in a portal or blog type platform where articles or posts can get lost deep in an archive. Notice I’m referring to a physical site-map here, not an xml machine readable format. Also good for visitors who may be looking for something in particular, in absense of a search tool. And on xml sitemaps while we’re on the subject, I’ve found they’re great for getting pages indexed fast but doesn’t seem to make a difference when it comes to rankings.

Friendly URLs – Not quite as important as it used to be but still a good idea if you can. While both www.example.com/topic.php?=123 and www.example.com/the-topic.html should both be indexed equally (used to be having multiple parameters in the url would prevent the page from being indexed, now it doesn’t seem to be a problem as long as it’s not excessive), having keywords in the url does seem to have some weight when comes to serps. It’s not a dramatic difference, which is why it’s near the bottom of the list.

Build Relevant Backlinks – While this is posted last, it’s certainly not last when it comes to ranking well and is is one of the more misunderstood concepts. All links, quite simply, are not the same. Now, let me be clear – you don’t have to buy links to be successful – in this day and age the social media sites out there are a great avenue for getting exposure and building natural backlinks to compelling content. With that said, however, getting powerful websites in your niche linking back to you is a great way to bolster search rankings and drive targetted traffic to your website. For many, this means purchasing advertising or trading reciprocal links.

Some basic backlink strategies include submitting to web directories (free and paid), Submitting articles to article sites, exchanging links with other sites in your niche (this is important, don’t link spam with unrelated websites), purchase links on related websites (please don’t be one of those page rank huggers that blindly go after after any website just because of PR and also know that Google doesn’t like link buying), leaving valuable comments on blogs related to your niche – especially if they dofollow (blogs that don’t use a rel=”nofollow” on outgoing links), participate in forums related to your niche (most allow a link back in your signature), along with many other ways to get people linking to your website – be creative!

In Summary, remember that any search engines goal is to return the most relevant results for the user’s query. Your site must be more relevant for that particular search than any of your competition. Once your site is crawlable or otherwise search engine friendly, it pretty much comes down to backlinks. All things being equal, the site with the most (relevant, powerful, and in quantity)  backlinks will win. Things like the age of the backlinks, sudden surges in recent backlinks, relevancy (have I mentioned relevancy?), and strength of the backlinks among the things that play a part in how your website ranks today. Once you get top 10 exposure, writing the best content should get you to the top eventually.

Hopefully these tips can help get you on a level playing field with your compeition. Remember to have patience and don’t expect results overnight. It can often take months to bring a site from zero to hero in the serps – depending on site age, competition, and many other factors. Build a website of value for your visitors, make sure it’s crawlable, and gain exposure from other websites – then rankings will come.

© mdvaldosta for Joe Hayes {dot} Org, 2007. | Permalink | 47 comments | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags:

Feed enhanced by Better Feed from Ozh

Title Tag
The title tag is the most important tag of all. Not really a meta tag, but it goes hand in hand with them. The title tag is what appears at the top of your browser bar. This is also one of the key determining factors for search engines to determine the relevancy of your page in respect to the term being searched for. Make sure your title tag is unique for each page of your website, and accurately describes what you will find on your web page. Avoid “stop” words such as “the”, “and”, etc. as much as possible in the title. Less is more and keywords here are essential for good rankings.

Meta Description
The meta description tag, if the search engine supports it, allows you to influence the description shown under the search results. If a meta description is not used, often the search engine will just use the first text it finds in your source code (which might be your navigation links, not ideal). Even though not all search engines obey the meta description, it’s good practice to use it.

Meta Keywords
Meta keywords are outdated and not supported by most search engines. Years ago this was important, but because it was easy to manipulate rankings with this meta, it was devalued and in many cases not valued at all. Nevetheless, as long as it’s used responsibly it can only help. Choose keywords that you want your page found for, and be sure that these keywords can be found on that page.

Meta Robots
Meta robots tag controls the behavior of search engine spiders. The content=”all” is really unnecessary because they do this already, but I use it anyway for good practice. You may want to use keys such as “nofollow” or other tags to control their behavior. For example, the “nofollow” tag will instruct the bots to not follow any of the links on the entire page. The “follow”, in retrospect, will instruct them to follow all the links. “Index” would recommend the spiders to cache, or save, the web page into the search results, and “noindex” would instruct them not to. Some web designers only use the meta robots command if they want to prevent indexing or following the links on the page.

Other Meta Tags
There are many other meta tags available, but the above listed are the most common and most important. Some tags are supported by only certain search engines, and some aren’t supported at all. Nevertheless, while meta tags are not required it is still good coding practice to use them.

© mdvaldosta for Joe Hayes {dot} Org, 2007. | Permalink | 4 comments | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags:

Feed enhanced by Better Feed from Ozh