What’s the message?

Some may interpret the absence of the PR bar as a hidden (not!) message from Google’s development team about the insignificance of this measure in their search algorithm. I have come across people saying that the browser’s creators were so concentrated on timely release of the product, that they had to sacrifice some of the planned features, including the PR bar. There is been enough time since the moment Chrome was released to the public for this feature to show up among other tools. However, it has not happened in spite of the simplicity with which such feature could be added to Chrome.

For those who misses PR bar

If I were Google, I would include this feature no matter what kind of role it played in my ranking process. You know, just for the sake of healthy reviews of the browser from the fans of this feature. But it is up to the marketing department to make such a decision (who knows, maybe they will). But for those who like the simple, i-pod like interface, but who -totally misses the PR bar, I’ll say this - there is a great number of websites that offer easy to add scripts that will give you a means of checking PageRank status within Chrome. Just Google this thing out (since we do not want to endorse any of’em at this point) and you’ll find quite a few solutions in no time.

If you know of one that you think is worth mentioning here, let us know and we will review it here, at BlogSEO.

For those who would like to download Google’s Search Engine Optimization
Starter Guide.

Some of the points covered in Google’s Optimization Guide were:
- Page Titles
- Description Meta Tags
- Improved Structure of URLs
- Site Navigation & Anchor Text
- Heading Tags
and more.

As I went through a number of different designs that look “clean” and “usable”, I found that most of them did not have the best HTML foundation for optimized presentation of your content. There is no doubt that the designers spent a lot of time creating these templates, considering the details that they have incorporated in their designs. However, as I scanned the code I could tell that there were things that are just not SEO. This article uncovers some of the common mistakes made by pro and not so pro web designers that create free downloadable blog templates.

1. Headers

When one creates a page he or she would have a <h1> header (in most cases used once per page) to emphasize the topic covered on a given page. Search engines are aware of such practices and use them in their algorithms to, perhaps, define keywords for the page. So, headers are valuable for stating your keyword/phrases as well as giving your visitors a general idea about a page’s content. Therefore <h1> header should vary from page to page and describe the rest of the page right to the point. However, I have found that many designers use <h1> in the headers of their templates and include only the name of the blog, which will stay the same from page to page. Such a waste!

2. Page Titles

It’s always nice to have a page title that looks something like this:

Page Topic – Website Name

or simply

Page Topic

But you will see that a bunch of templates will have the site’s name in front of the page topic. You want your visitors to see what this page is about before they read the name of the website. Plus it works much better with SE’s and their keyword assigning algorithms.

3. Archive Links

I suggest that you take off any references to archive pages for your blog, especially if you have just a few categories and rarely make your posts. It may duplicate contents of the root page of your blog and that is not cool! Although Google seems to go nicely about dupes these days, I still wouldn’t risk it.

4. Rel=”Nofollow”

If some of the pages to which you link from your blog pages are not important for your commercial purposes (About us, Contact, blah-blah page, etc), make sure they include rel=”nofollow” attribute and don’t suck out the PR from the important pages.

So, ok these are some of the basic and frequently appearing problems you should be aware of. Take your time to investigate the SEO level of your favorite design by, of course, looking up the source of the page. If you don’t know much about HTML get a friend or a professional to look into this matter. It is very important to be set up the right way from the beginning.

As it turns out such practice will be considered cloaking by Google and co. One of my colleagues tried to oppose this fact by saying that it is not fair to tell webmasters what to do with their websites. But the fact will remain and there is not much you can do about it. Nobody is telling you to show your content to everyone, but these are the rules one shall abide to be included in SE indexes.

This interview covers benefits of blogs in promoting businesses online. Quite a few interesting questions were asked and just as many interesting answers were given. Some of the topics touched up in the interview included:

Meta tags – Are they used by Google?

Title tag – How useful is it?

Heading tags (H1, H2…) – Does it help to have them on your page?

Keyword density – SPAM or not?

And more … ALT and TITLES, Anchor text, XML SiteMaps, Sub-domains vs. sub-directories , Links and page ranks, YouTube, SEO for video content, Video SiteMaps, Back links (incoming links), .edu links

For those who lean toward graphical presentation of information at their sites should take advantage of excessive “titling” of images and links. It should be understood that if graphics is turned off, then description of your images will help visitors to understand better what your pages are all about. However it will not be the only benefit of well described page elements. Web bots, as well, will be acknowledged of those descriptions and will put them in the row with other useful keywords found there. But do not get carried away with writing lengthy and SPAMy “titles” or “alt” arguments, they will be treated by crawlers accordingly. Just try to be useful to your users and you will be useful to yourself not less!

We would like to hear from our readers what they think about this, what problems or benefits of such changes they expect to have, or any other ideas they had in their heads as they read this post.

To protect ourselves from spammers we have to make sure that any link that can be posted by our visitors through comments or any other way is accompanied by a special argument within the <a> tag – rel=”nofollow”. This argument is interpreted by crawlers’ algorithms something close to “this site is not related, I do not advice following this link”. It will ensure that the websites linked with the hyperlinks that include such an argument do not get credits from the search engines as they rank these sites.

Example of use: <a rel=”nofollow” href=”spammy-url” mce_href=”spammy-url” >Blah blah</a>

According to Matt Cutts (a link for those who is not familiar with this name) this will not affect your page ranking. The popularity of the directory-style structure for page URLs has made it a standard case for most SE algorithms. If the file extension is missing or can’t be recognized, the file will be downloaded and the bots will try to recognize them by headers. So, picking directory-style URLs over extensions will not hurt your website. Google seems to be indifferent as for the number of slashes in a URL. However if your main traffic source is Yahoo, MSN or some other search engine you should investigate this matter more closely and be more careful with how deep the URL structure is.

Added 03/10/08

A bit more on Google bot and file handling

If you want to learn more about 7 must read Webmaster Central blog posts follow the link. This is the list of the topics covered and reminded of:

1. Google can’t access my website
2. URL Blocked by robots.txt
3. Why was my URL removal request denied
4. Flash best practices
5. The supplemental index
6. Duplicate content
7. Sitemaps FAQs