Carrie Hill just published a summary of directories that should be on every one’s link building list. These are credible sources that the search engines use to help determine the relevancy of your site for things like products, services, or locality.
See Carrie’s list of Must Have List of Directories
Related:
I have written before about never deleting or renaming a page, but there are times when it is unavoidable. Restructuring a site, removing obsolete products and changing scripting languages (moving to shtml from php, or php from html) make this a common problem.
I am in the middle of two large projects that will involve changing the names of many pages. These are both Joomla-based sites, so I am mitigating some of the problems by using sh404sef. It does a great job of helping you control page names, maintain legacy extensions, etc. But there are still pathing and page name changes that will need to be addressed, for these mod-rewrite is the tool.
Stephan Spencer has recently posted an excellent two-part article on the subject, see:
Past articles on the subject include:
There is a new Canonical tag that is supported by Google, Yahoo, and Microsoft. This is important news, especially as people are working more and more with CMS systems and database driven websites (such as Joomla, WordPress, etc).
The issue is that people can arrive at your content in a variety of ways. The simplest variation being www. versus non www. version of your site. What’s that, you say they are the same? Au contraire mon fraire, to a search engine www is a separate sub-domain. There are some easy programmatic ways to address the www versus non www issue, however the problem starts to get sticky in when you mix in the wide range of variables such as dates, tags, and categories that can be included in the URL structure.
The search engine spider may find variations like these all pointing to the same content:
Worst still are session ids (used on larger sites) which can cause a single page of content to be indexed hundreds of times:
Add to this that you can’t control how others link to your content and you begin to understand why duplicate content is such a large issue.
Why should you care? From and SEO perspective 1 page with 100 incoming links has far more relavency than 100 pages with identical content having one incoming link each.
To address these concerns, Google, Microsoft and Yahoo have agreed to take the content of the Canonical Link Tag as the preferred name for a page.
So adding a tag such as:
<link rel=”canonical” href=”http://www.mywebsite.com/serach-engine-optimization“/>
will indicate that the page should be indexed as www.mywebsite.com/serach-engine-optimization, regardless of how the spider found the page.
Here’s a link to more information on this topic by Vanessa Fox at Search Engine Land:
http://searchengineland.com/canonical-tag-16537
Google’s Matt Cutts posted this video on the Canonical Link tag.
http://google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=139394
The discussion begins hitting of some of the finer points of this topic starting in at about 12:05.
One of the cornerstones of improving any business is referrals. Nothing promotes a product or service better than positive comments from someone you know and respect or from an authority in the field. The same is true for your website.
To explain the importance of incoming links to grow traffic to your website, I often use a metaphor of selecting a roofer. You don’t know a roofer, but you have a friend that builds houses, so you ask who he would use. The answer provides not only who to call, but provides immediate credibility for that roofer. If you asked another contractor, and he recommended the same roofer, it increases the credibility of that roofer ten fold. However, if some anonymous bystander overheard you asking about a roofer and said “hey I know this guy”, it probably wouldn’t carry a lot of carry a lot of weight in your selection process.
The message here is that both the quality and the quality of the referral matter.
Likewise, one of the cornerstones for improving Search Engine traffic is by growing referral links from credible websites. The larger and more credible the referring website, the better. Likewise, the greater the number of referring websites the better. However, this can be overdone and, like the anonymous guy who overheard your conversation and offered a name, if the referring websites have little or no credibility in the Search Engine, they will have little or no influence on your traffic.
You may remember or have heard about “link exchanges”, essentially an “I’ll link to yours if you link to mine” strategy. These use to be very popular and were a good way to grow incoming links. However, the Search Engines algorithms have evolved making it doubtful that sites of equal rank linking to each other would provide any benefit. Paying people to post in blogs has also become popular in recent years, but just like finding an ad for “loans” posted in a Laundromat, would make you question the credibility of the loan company, links sprinkled in unrelated blogs across the web can cause the Search Engine Algorithm to question the credibility of those links.
So how do you grow links? My answer would be slowly my friend, one at a time.
There is an interesting discussion the Search Engine Land website that asks the question “Who Owns Link Building” and my earlier discussion on Directories and Incoming Links that may be of interest.
Google has a number of good resources for webmasters, but that have just released an Search Engine Optimization Starter Guide. So, if you ever wondered if all that stuff you have heard about optimizing your website for Google is hooey or not… this is a great place to find out.
Whether launching a new website or changing an existing one it is important to do a little upfront work. I have had a couple of clients come to me recently either wanting to toss out their old site and start over or who have sadly, already made wholesale changes to page names or content only to find that their website can no longer be found in search results.
Things to consider when launching a new Website or changing an existing one:
I was recently asked to speak to the North Alabama Web Developers group. I created a slide presentation that discusses organic versus paid search results and some of the elements that come into play when improving Search Engine Rank.
Here is a link to that presentation. Marketing Overview for Web Developers.
Matt Cutts addresses the German Webmaster community in this video, but he hits essential points that can benefit anyone who wants to improve their search engine rank (10 minutes).
