Pagerank sculpting, which as defined by Matt Cutts is simply trying to change how PageRank flows within your site using different methods such as the “nofollow” tag, is still plausible, however, in his post “PageRank Sculpting” he tells us why he doesn’t think you should bother doing it. Here’s an excerpt of his post on pagerank sculpting.

I wouldn’t recommend it [pagerank sculpting], because it isn’t the most effective way to utilize your PageRank. In general, I would let PageRank flow freely within your site. The notion of “PageRank sculpting” has always been a second- or third-order recommendation for us. I would recommend the first-order things to pay attention to are 1) making great content that will attract links in the first place, and 2) choosing a site architecture that makes your site usable/crawlable for humans and search engines alike.

So when is pagerank sculpting useful? According to Matt Cutts it is useful to use the “nofollow” tag for some pages such as links to a shopping cart or links to log-in pages but only “because those pages are different for every user and they aren’t that helpful to show up in search engines.” Other than that it would pay more if you spent your time optimizing your site in other ways.

Again make sure you make the best use of your time by giving attention to your site architecture and to your site’s actual content. Make sure that users find the info they need just a few clicks away from the main page and make sure that all pages you want indexed are crawlable.

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Every single link counts. That’s my motto when it comes to link building. While it is true that some links pass more value than other in my opinion you still shouldn’t overlook opportunities to get a backlink, whether it’s just one or a couple or a whole load of links. This is also true whether the page rank of the linking page is zero or ten. A link is still a link.

However, when link building remember that while links always count it can count AGAINST you. We all know what I mean by this – those links that associate you to black hat methods that will get you penalized by the great Google and the other search engines. A clear example of such links is links that you got from link farms. Make sure you do not sabotage your efforts by joining link farms. Getting backlinks by paying websites to link to your page(s) is also a big no-no IF you do this to get link juice passed on to you. You can only solicit paid links if you make sure that those links don’t get to pass value to your pagerank. So I guess in SEO terms there’s absolutely no point in doing this. However if your motive is to simply generate traffic to your site or create awareness then there is no problem. Just make sure you specifically ask webmasters of the sites with paid links to your site to use the “no follow” tag.

Again, remember every link counts so make sure the back links you get count in the way you want them to.

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Google, Yahoo, and Microsoft all came together early this year to support the use of canonical tags. But what are canonical tags and what’s the use to us?

Canonical tags were created to help address the problem of duplicate content. We already know that there are already existing ways to address this problem such as 301 redirects and the use of sitemaps, however, in many instances these solutions are not enough. To make life easier for webmasters canonical tags were created. The tags help with duplicate content by telling search engines what URL you want them to index in place of a page’s uglier URL version. The syntax is also very simple and makes use of only one line that needs to be typed into the HEAD part of the page document. For example if you have a page with a URL like http://www.somepage.com/ example.html?sid=54321 you of course would prefer the search engine not to index that URL, especially if you have a nicer duplicate URL like http://www.somepage.com/example.html. So what do you do? All you need to do is type in:

<link rel="canonical" href="http://www.somepage.com/example.html"/>

And search engines will automatically honor your wishes. No sweat. Duplicate issues resolved. Now that’s one less problem you won’t need to worry about.

You can also watch Matt Cutts’ interview with WebProNews last February to learn more about canonical tags.

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We all know that stale content is not really good for your SEO efforts. An old domain is good but the content should be current. Fresh content is even more important nowadays thanks to Google’s new search options.

Search users can now filter results even better and opt to see only the most recently updated websites. Users can choose to show results from the past 24 hours, past week, and past year. Because of this you can bet that even with great content and a very high ranking site your site will NOT appear among the results if you do not have any new content that was put up within the time frame specified by the user. Of course unless you are maintaining a blog or has a website whose nature provides constant new posting material (e.g. new sites). In cases like that you will need to find a solution. The usual solutions, since they are the easiest to implement, are posting feeds and/or creating a blog. Even then it is near impossible in most cases to make sure that you have new content every 24 hours. What you need to keep in mind though is that if the reason for your site does not really require daily updates then you can be pretty sure that your target audience wouldn’t be using this new search feature to filter results. However, that doesn’t excuse having dated content on your site. Make sure you go over your site’s content from time to time and still update your content as much as possible.

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In my last post about images I gave some tips on how to optimise images. There is said that you should:

• Store images in a single directory;
• Use keywords in the file names; and
• Use Alt text.

These still hold true and are very sound ways to make sure that your images on your pages help your SEO efforts. Aside from these though here are more tips. They’re mostly common sense but like in most things the obvious once are the very things we overlook.

• Use relevant images only – Make sure each image you use is relevant to the content near it.
• Size matters – I’m talking about the actual size of the image and not the file size here. File size does matter but you want it to be smaller to make loading pages faster. On the other hand for the actual image size note that search engines think that the bigger the image is the more relevant it is to the site’s content. So do not go making a non-relevant decorative image larger than the important ones.
• Image quality is important – You want to choose good quality images over poor ones. The quality I’m referring to is the clarity, contrast, etc. Of course you have to compromise between quality and file size. Find the right compromise.
• Place important images at the top if possible – This affects not only SEO but also user-friendliness. However in cases where the images accompany a certain paragraph as illustration it is more important to place it near that paragraph since you want the image near the relevant text.

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Outsourcing your site’s SEO is a big decision that’s made harder by the fact that there are so many SEO companies to choose from. When deciding one of the most critical factors to consider is of course the companies’ approach to SEO. Though everyone knows the hazards of using black hat techniques there are still SEOs out there that continue to use them in order to get “fast results” whether the client knows about it or not. Do not fall prey to these SEOs!

If you find that the SEO company you are currently dealing with or is considering employs any of these techniques then run away as quickly as possible. The list below is from Google Webmasters Help pages. If Google says run then run!

* owns/uses shadow domains
* puts links to their other clients on doorway pages
* offers to sell keywords in the address bar
* doesn’t distinguish between actual search results and ads that appear on search results pages
* guarantees ranking, but only on obscure, long keyword phrases you would get anyway
* operates with multiple aliases or falsified WHOIS info
* gets traffic from “fake” search engines, spyware, or scumware
* has had domains removed from Google’s index or is not itself listed in Google
* requests your FTP account information or root access to your server

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SEO is great but once in a while you should pause to make sure you are not neglecting your non-SEO efforts done to promote your site. Some of the things you SHOULD definitely be doing if you are not already doing it now would include:

Using social media sites – There are tons of social media sites out there. If you are not a member of one you should at least consider joining the most popular ones like Facebook and MySpace. You should also look into industry specific social media sites and join those to develop contacts not only with prospective clients but also to keep touch with the latest developments in your industry.

Blog - Chances are you already have a blog but I can’t help but emphasise how much a blog can contribute to your site. It’s not only a way to get fresh content up frequently, which is the SEO aspect, but it is also a good venue for keeping your regular customers/visitors updated about anything you (and they) deem important.

Promote your site the old fashioned way – Do whatever you can to promote your site. Use bumper stickers, posters, give away your business card, sponsor a charity event, etc. Whenever you have an opportunity stamp your website URL to let people know they can find you online.

There are lots of other stuff you can do to promote your site. Feel free to give suggestions in the comment section!

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Just recently, one of my blogger friends asked me again about how to remove the no-follow attribute in her blog comments. She read about the “do follow” movement and wanted to be part of that. That got me to reading up on new developments with regard to no follow and do follow…

I found an interesting article at Econsultancy, which promotes the use of the no follow attribute as part of your SEO best practices. Naturally, being a do follow enthusiast, I had to read the whole article in an effort to understand the rationale behind the statement. This is what I found out:

While the concept of ‘PageRank leak’ – the idea that you can potentially ‘dilute’ your PageRank by linking out too much – has been widely debated for years, there’s no doubt that good linking practices are important to maintaining PageRank.

Linking to third party websites that Google thinks are ’spammy’ can harm you. As Google itself advises, “avoid links to web spammers or ‘bad neighborhoods’ on the web, as your own ranking may be affected adversely by those links.”

This is where using the ‘nofollow’ attribute on outbound links can be a valuable SEO tool.

One of my personal blogs has had no PR for months now – after having a halfway decent PR of 3. Perhaps I am leaking out PageRank because of not using the no follow attribute. I should take a look into this. Maybe you should, too.

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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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If you have been following various SEO blogs and web sites, then I am sure that you are familiar with the description meta tag. After all, it is one of the most basic (and important) considerations when optimizing your site. However, just in case you are not familiar with it, the description meta tag is basically what provides search engines (Google included) with the necessary information as to what a page is all about. You can call it a summary of sorts. In your HTML code, the meta tag is found within the tag.

So what should you bear in mind when using the description meta tag? Here are some tips, again from Google’s Search Engine Optimization Starter Guide.

Accurately summarize the page’s content – Write a description that would both inform and interest users if they saw your description meta tag as a snippet in a search result.

Avoid:
• writing a description meta tag that has no relation to the content on the page
• using generic descriptions like “This is a webpage” or “Page about baseball cards”
• filling the description with only keywords
• copy and pasting the entire content of the document into the description meta tag

Use unique descriptions for each page – Having a different description meta tag for each page helps both users and Google, especially in searches where users may bring up multiple pages on your domain (e.g. searches using the site: operator). If your site has thousands or even millions of pages, hand-crafting description meta tags probably isn’t feasible. In this case, you could automatically generate description meta tags based on each page’s content.

Avoid:
• using a single description meta tag across all of your site’s pages or a large
group of pages

The key here is in being as specific as possible. The idea is to provide Google AND your human readers with the necessary information they need to determine whether the page is relevant to their query or not. More than being specific, though, remember to give an accurate representation of the contents of the page. The last thing that a user would want is to think that a page contains certain information only to find out that they have been misled.

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