Geared specifically at Google, today we are talking about the NOFOLLOW tag. There are dozens upon dozens of articles written on “should we use nofollow?” or “shouldn’t be we using nofollow?” among other questions as well. Today I am tackling the issue myself. NOFOLLOW is a tag that Google created as a means to fight back against spam on blogs. As of today, Google is the only search engine actively using the tag as an integral part of their algorithm. The NOFOLLOW tag simply tells Googlebot to not follow — aka don’t give any link love — to the link you have on your site with that tag. Yahoo! and MSN do not care whether a link has nofollow or not, they will follow the link you provide them. WordPress has, by default — and for a long time now — nofollow’ed all links to authors in comments. I finally […]

This is part three of the Link Building series here on WeblogToolsCollection. I will be touching on some final thoughts of actually how to build links to your site. The initial first two posts were some background notes for everyone to learn about how linking works and how outbound linking works. I will touch on two major areas. What you should be doing and what you shouldn’t be doing. Link Building and what you should be doing Link building takes finesse, creativity, and social engineering. Why do I say social engineering? I say that because it takes networking and talking with new people. Be a friend, be a co-worker, be an associate. These are some of my secrets of how I’ve built my network of websites.

This is part II of the Link Building series. (view Part I) Outbound Linking This article is going to briefly overview outbound linking and why it can be both good and bad. Don’t fret though, the third and last part of this series will conclude with how to actually manufacturer links to your site — the first two parts are preliminary background articles for those that are new to the industry of link building. Outbound linking is something some, even very good and amazing, SEOs overlook. When a search engine looks at your site, it looks at what sites are linking to you. But in that process of evaluating where to rank you, it also looks at what sites you are linking to. To throw out an example, let’s use Google Inside. It’s a site that talks about Google and touches on search engine news and other industry related news. […]

This will be a three part series on link building for your blog. The first question we must ask is: Why do links coming to my site matter? The short version of it is that links pointing at your site do matter. For Google, those links mean PageRank. For Yahoo! and MSN, they mean value and search placement. PageRank is an extensive algorithm that calculates how your site (and pages) should be ranked in the search results. The higher PageRank you have, more often than not, the higher your site will be in the results. This is not always entirely true because of how the algorithm actually works, but that is the general idea behind it. But again, why do I care about this PageRank? You are reading this because you want to learn more about how to optimize your site for search engines. That is exactly the purpose of […]

This article will be focused on how SEO should be a focus when designing a theme (for those that really care about the search engine traffic). Why should I design with SEO in mind? Think of a robot as the same thing as a human visitor. What’s the first thing it’s going to see? This article is going to be a little shorter and to the point. When you’re designing a theme, put the key links and elements you want a search engine to see, up in the top part of the theme. Here are two examples of good usage of header space (in the HTML, not in the actual design): http://cutline.tubetorial.com/ | view-source http://www.ginside.com/200..yword-search/ | view-source So what do these two examples do well? Exactly that. Both of these examples put the head links in the portion of the HTML which tells the search engines “hey, these are some […]

Today we are talking about the actual code of the page. We will be touching on two points. Header Tags Meta Tags Header Tags First, lets give a little background to what are tags and why they are important. Think about it when you’re ready a book or a magazine. When you see a small excerpt, your eyes will almost always glance there first to see what it’s saying. Maybe in a newspaper there is a head line title that really catches your eye and draws in your interest. This is exactly what Header Tags (H tags) are meant for. When a search engine bot is looking at your page, it looks for the H tags (<H1>, <H2>, <H3>, <H4>, etc, up to H6) to find out what exactly is important about that page. So what can you do to emphasize these tags on your pages? I use some PHP […]

Permalinks are an important key for search engine optimization. Bots such as Googlebot have gotten a lot smarter where they can index links even if they’re using a query, such as example.com/?p=535, but that’s not search engine friendly at all. There are really two angles you can look at when setting up your permalinks. The first angle to look at it is from the Bot’s point of view (“POV”). The bot is looking at the permalink and it first tries to recognize what that page is about by what the permalink says. If a permalink just has domain.com/article/798724, the bot knows that it’s an article and…well, that’s about it really. But let’s say that you had something like what WLTC uses here: http://weblogtoolsc…gle-subscribers/. The bot knows that it’s about feedburner, google, subscribers, and that it’s an archived page on that site. Not to forget it also knows the date of […]

WordPress by nature has a strong SEO (search engine optimization) platform which helps tremendously with Google, Yahoo!, and MSN — to name a few of the large players in the search industry. As part of society, people use search engines to search for things and more often than not, they end up on someone’s blog — maybe even yours. But, as a Google user myself, I know that I don’t just use the web search feature. I also use the Google Images search feature to find things that are relevant for what I’m searching for. This is where “names have meaning” comes into play. When I’m writing an article for my blog, I usually have an image included somewhere in the article. I try to average an image in an article at least once every two or three articles. We’ll be using Google in all these examples because that’s what […]