What used to be a way to keep page rank (how important Google thinks your site is) from draining to the sites that you link to, appears to no longer work the same way as when it was announced in 2005.
This has apparently been in effect for some time, but has only come to light in the last few months. While I can see the benefit of the ‘nofollow’ tag for limiting the benefit of spam posts to blogs, I can only guess that this will increase the amount of spam links to sites. It also has the effect of making ‘page rank sculpting’ a thing of the past. I suspect that this might be a good thing in that its tough to justify the cost and effort of that technique. In the end… content is king and that’s the best bang for the buck focus for websites.
My tin foil hat theory is that if spammers are posting links to sites, then those sites are paying advertisers and Google caters to paying advertisers.
I guess I shouldn’t have been surprised by this, but our ‘just completed’ 2009 study of manufacturing websites showed that 65% did not include any of the most basic search optimization techniques.
We looked at
- Title Tags
- Descriptions
- Keywords
- Header/Formatting Tags
- Text Navigation
and were rather ‘liberal’ in marking them as being correctly implemented. Amazingly, 96% were not using Description tags effectively. We’ll dig into the numbers a little more and do a more formal writeup, breakdown and analysis in the near future.
Whether its its an SEO service for a client or I’m just doing a quick check of a client’s site to get an understanding of their business, one of the first things I observe in a review are the website page title tags. The formula is simple, but the execution is often lacking.
Lets keep it simple to start as the following items will get you 90% of the effectiveness of the title tag:
- Every page should have a unique title.
- Figure six to twelve words totaling less than 80 characters.
- Utilize your keywords in your page title.
- Keep search engine results in mind.
Your title is going to be in bold listing on the search results. While you want to think about the search engine understanding what the page is about, it wont matter if you are high in the search results but the listing doesn’t make sent to the user. They will be less likely to click through to your site.
Want to put maximize the results of your website? Click here for your Chicago based search engine optimization consultant.