There are a lot of myths in the modern world and SEO is not exempt from this. I was reading a very interesting article by Joey de Villa wherein he detailed his notes from Search Engine Strategies 2008 Toronto. Take a look at some of them and see if you believe them OR if you can be a myth buster.

You have to submit URLs to search engines. Search engines will find you if people link to you. If people are linking to your site, you don’t have to go around submitting its URL to Google, Yahoo, Microsoft and so on.

I used to believe this – like eons ago. That was even before I started blogging. I guess I didn’t know anything after all.

You need to provide a Google site map. It’s nice, but it’s not really going to help. “Most sites are spiderable the way they are.” If you have a site with millions of pages that changes often and your system can auto-generate a map, then mmmmaybe…

I still see some blogs and articles which encourage site maps. What’s your take on this?

Frequent spidering helps rankings. If it’s already indexed, getting it spidered again isn’t going to do much.

This makes a lot of sense. Once a site is indexed, it probably wouldn’t really make much of a difference if it is spidered another time, within a short period of time, would it?

PPC ads will help organic rankings! PPC ads will hurt organic rankings. Google keeps its search engine and Adwords divisions separate and it appears that your ranking are not affected by whethe ror not you’ve bought pay per click ads.

Photo courtesy of manfry

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In the last post we took a look at some of the things that you should consider when making your web site accessible. Yet we did not really delve into the reasons you should make your web site accessible. Why is it important?

Search engines prefer accessible web sites.
It’s a simple fact. Search engines place a higher premium on accessible web sites over inaccessible web sites. How so? Spiders – or search engine crawlers – browse web sites much like people would. The easier access you provide, the easier it is for search engine spiders. This means that the fewer hindrances you have in your web site for browsing, the better the search engines can index your web site. This includes the proper use of tags and the like.

Accessible web sites makes for stronger branding.
One of the things that you want to do for your blog is to create a strong brand. It is much like that principle that business men employ in marketing their brand. The idea is to create an impact in the minds of their target clients and to maintain that impact. So how does making your web site accessible create a stronger branding?

I suppose the idea is to cater to your audience. Having an accessible web site, of course, gives you the image of wanting to deliver what your audience needs. you offer the image of making it easier for them. That makes for stronger and longer recall.

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Accessibility is one of the most important aspects of your web site or blog. The idea is to be able to cater to a wide range of readers. From those who are physically challenged to those who are technologically challenged – you should bear them in mind when working on your blog or web site. Why is this so?

With the Internet being as prevalent as it is today, practically everyone has access to it. Statistics would probably show that there is a huge percentage of Net users who are challenged in some way, supporting the idea that web site or blog owners should make sure that their site is accessible to as wide an audience as possible.

How do you make your web site accessible?

Consider the wide range of devices that are being used to access the Internet. Before, only computers were used to go online. Today, there is a host of other gadgets. Mobile phones are probably the second most common gadget used to go online. Then we have other things such as gaming consoles, both portable and otherwise, PDAs, and the like. You have to bear in mind these things as more and more people are accessing the Internet using gadgets other than computers and laptops.

In relation to the different devices, you should also bear in mind that these devices have different software - different operating systems, different Internet browsers. You should consider these things when designing your site.

(to be continued)

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Here is the second half of the list that Andy Beard came up with regarding the best plug ins to use to remove the no follow tag.

• Link Love - this is a brand new plugin that removes nofollow after a certain number of comments have been made - this rewards regular commenters - one thing I like is that the detection is based upon email address and not domain or URL, so it allows a commenter to spread the links how they like.
• GoodLinks - This plugin looks extremely useful for many people who have layout problems when people post long URLs - it also removes NoFollow as an option
• Blank Target Comments - Another multi-purpose comment link plugin - it removes nofollow from only the comment author links, and adds target=”_blank” - no link because it doesn’t seem to be available for download any more which is a shame.
• Remove Nofollow - Cristian Mezi from SeoPedia’s plugin - I am not sure of the history or features, but it is probably similar to the original DoFollow plugin.
• NoNofollow - Including this link for historical reasons - Bronski’s plugin doesn’t work with newer versions of Wordpress, but credit where credit is due.
• WP-Nofollow - Again included for historical reasons - one of the first plugins for WP 1.2 based on the original MT plugin code

Let us know which one works best for you!

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It seems that we are attracting quite a bit of interest because of the posts on no follow and do follow tags.  I was actually surprised to find out that not many people are yet that aware of the existence of the no follow tag, especially as a default for most blogging platforms.  One of our readers actually tried getting rid of the no follow tag and said that he seems to be getting more visitors because of this.

So do you want to get rid of the no follow tags as well?  There are a lot of resources online which can help you do so.  I think that one of my favorite posts on this topic is by Andy Beard.  He has “the ultimate list” of do follow and no follow plugins.  Here is his take on removing the no follow attribute:

•    Lucia’s Linky Love Plugin - I was going to liken this plugin to a Ferrari, because it is built to be fast, but it is probably more like a Subaru, not just fast but designed for rugged terrain and can handle the twists and turns of comment spammers without slowing down.
•    DoFollow - many look on this as the granddaddy of NoFollow plugins - you just switch it on and it works, all nofollows are removed from comments and trackbacks.
•    Dofollow (WP Plugin) - Sometimes I wish this one has been given a better more descriptive name. It includes the ability (optional) to remove nofollow from comments after a period of time.

These are only the first three on his list.  Let’s take a look at the others in the next post.  In the meantime, why don’t you try looking at these plugins and see how they can work for you?

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If you remember, I posted an entry on the do follow and no follow tags for comments.  We received a comment from one of readers which goes (thanks for commenting, btw):

I am new to dofollow, nofollow. I understand that no-follow means no backlink, do follow means you can get a backlink, but how do you tell if a site is do follow or not? BTW, nice blog, I found you from Cour’ts D-List
Medic

So indeed, how do you know if a blog is a do follow or a no follow?  One easy “trick” to do so is this:

-Use Firefox to do your browsing.
-Click on the comments section of the blog in question.
-Right click on any link from a comment.
-Click Properties.
-Look for the value corresponding to Relation.
-If it says External, then it is a do follow blog.  If the value is External nofollow then it is a no follow blog.

I am not sure but I think the default for most blogging templates is to have a no follow tag.  So, if you want to have do follow blog, there are some things that you can do to change that.  We’ll talk about this in another post.

On the subject of finding do follow blogs, however, you can look for the I Follow logo.  Other than these things, I do not know how to find out if a blog is do follow or no follow.  Any ideas?

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One of the first things that you should consider when choosing your images for your blog posts is the size. We talked about that in the previous post. Now let us look at some more considerations that can assist in generating more traffic with the help of images.

More than the image itself, you should also consider its relationship to the text. Of course, merely scattering images in your site will not do. You have to choose images that are relevant to your content. In addition to this, take note of the location of your images. As much as possible, place them close to the text which is the most relevant. Though some bloggers make it a practice to place images at the beginning of their posts, it may be good to change this practice if the most relevant text, with regard to the image, is nearest the image itself.

Linking related images could be a good practice as well. One important thing when it comes to images is their relevance – as mentioned in the preceding paragraph. If you have related images, you may want to consider linking them together in order to increase their relevance. Just make sure that the text associated with the images are also related.

Really important images – such as logos – would recur in your web site or blog. Make sure you tag these and highlight them. They will definitely score high in terms of relevance.

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When it comes to SEO techniques and their implementation, many people tend to focus on the goal of having their URL come out at the top of the SERPs. And why not? We all want our sites to come up when someone types in a keyword or key phrase that is relevant to our site. This will definitely increase traffic – which is what we want.

One thing that many overlook, however, is the optimization of their sites for image searching. As you know, Google and other search engines have a function for searching images on the Web. If you pay some attention to the images on your site, you have more chances of coming out at the top of image search results. You just might be surprised at how much traffic you can generate from optimizing your images.

So how do you start working on this? Here are some considerations you would want to take note of.

Size of the image. The general rule is that the higher the resolution (the bigger the size), the better chances of coming out on top. This is due to the fact that many users want to see higher resolution pictures – mainly for aesthetic purposes. Just a word of caution, though – the bigger the image size, the more bandwidth and storage space it will take up. So try to achieve a balance between the quality and the storage space available to you.

Let us look at some other considerations in the next post.

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