If you’re an SEO, you might walk right by a nofollow linking opportunity as if you were the Googlebot yourself. Hold up! Have you forgotten the fundamental value of a link? A link is more than a ranking factor; It can be good exposure, a traffic source, and something valuable even if it doesn’t pass PageRank.
Most social networking site links are nofollow, but I’d doubt you would scoff at the thought of your content being shared by an authoritative user on Twitter or Facebook. Why? Because you know that a tweet from Robert Scoble endorsing your startup will drive traffic to your site, will bring in revenue, will put you in front of your target audience, and that you may pick up some regular followed links as a result.
It is no surprise that the SEO industry often relies on tools intended for our paid search brethren, especially when it comes to keyword research. One particular paid search tool that can assist with SEO keyword research is Bing Ads Intelligence (BAI). Although it less well known than its Google counterpart, The Google Keyword Planner, Bing Ads Intelligence (BAI) provides an excellent toolset for keyword research right within Excel. Continue reading →
Google specifies three scenarios for which rel=”alternate” hreflang=”x” is recommended:
You translate only the template of your page, such as the navigation and footer, and keep the main content in a single language. This is common on pages that feature user-generated content, like a forum post.
Your pages have broadly similar content within a single language, but the content has small regional variations. For example, you might have English-language content targeted at readers in the US, GB, and Ireland.
Your site content is fully translated. For example, you have both German and English versions of each page.
Similarly, there are three means for which hreflang can be implemented. It can be tagged with the element within the
section of each page, expressed through the http header for non-html files, or within your XML sitemap. There is an obvious advantage to applying it within an xml sitemap for enterprise level sites, like the ones I tend to work on. Typically, it is much easier to get an updated xml sitemap uploaded than to apply new tagging to a myriad of pages. However, even when applied within an XML sitemap, it can a be tedious process for large websites. I created a quick python script to help make that process a little bit easier.
This is script is designed for a website where the alternate language site has an equal number of pages to the primary language. For example, there are the same number of pages for en-uk and en-ca as there are for en-us. Continue reading →
I’d like to direct my readers’ attention to a recent of post of mine published on Search Engine Journal, detailing the benefits of using Google+ as platform for conducting outreach and building links.
Infographics are an excellent part of a well-diversified content marketing arsenal, and although it should not be the sole reason for their creation, offer a great many SEO benefits to your website. In a 2012 interview with Eric Enge, Matt Cutts, Google’s head of webspam, went on foray about infographics:
“There are ways that infographics can be created and that represent an OK form of promotion […] I would not be surprised if at some point in the future we did not start to discount these infographic-type links to a degree. The link is often embedded in the infographic in a way that people don’t realize, vs. a true endorsement of your site.”
Needless to say, the interview made people second guess the SEO value of infographics. Matt Cutts’ statement however, isn’t all that bad and shouldn’t be perceived as an omen that spells the imminent demise of clever data visualization. It can also be interpreted as an affirmation that a correctly managed (non-spammy) infographic campaign will continue to be effective in the future, even if only with a slightly discounted link value. Continue reading →
