Category On-Page SEO

Should blog links from e-commerce site be nofollowed?

You are running a blog that helps to build your brand awareness and drive traffic to your e-commerce site. Should you use rel=”nofollow” on links going from the e-commerce site to the blog?

Adding more pages to e-commerce sites

How can you meaningfully increase the number of pages on your e-commerce site, when you sell only a limited number of products?

Is it safe to “nofollow” internal pages?

Using rel=”nofollow” is a great way to manipulate the flow of PageRank—on your site, or outside of it. When used internally, it can help channel more PageRank to pages that need it and turn it off—partially or completely—for those that don’t need it.

Meta keywords, description tags

The META keywords and META description tags used to be the holy grail of search engine optimization. All you had to do was to put a ton of keywords in them and you magically skyrocketed to the top of the SERPs.
Well, those times are long gone. Today, none of the tags have any measurable SEO […]

Keyword-stuffing footer links

Stuff your keywords into footer links and take advantage of additional PageRank and link reputation being pushed to those pages. Right?
Well yes, but less and less so. While footer links do pass PageRank and link reputation, Google (in particular) understands a web page’s structure and, quite logically, places different value on links from your main content area […]

iFrame content getting spidered?

You want to display content inside an IFRAME tag. Will the search engines find it?
Yes, the search engines will find the content via the URL referenced in the inline frame. However, the content that loads inside of the IFRAME tag will not be seen as part of your web page. So, it will do nothing for […]

Blogs: duplicate content vs. usability

Should you publish full posts or excerpts on your index pages—home page, category pages and archives? It seems users would prefer full posts, but having too much identical text on too many pages might cause you to suffer a duplicate content penalty in Google. How to get the best of both worlds? How to please […]

Contact Us, About: important for SEO?

Is it true that having a Contact Us and/or an About page earns you “trust points” with Google and helps your site to rank higher in the SERPs?
No, it isn’t. I haven’t seen any evidence that having (or not having) a contact or about page would have any effect on a site’s ability to rank.
By […]

Managing intentional duplicate content

For one reason or another, you need to place identical content on somebody else’s site or somebody else’s content on your site. Is this counted as duplicate content and can you be penalized for it? If yes, how do you make sure it won’t happen?
Yes, placing a copy of your content on another site is […]

Optimizing membership sites

What’s the best way to do search engine optimization for membership sites? You have basically three options:

Create an optimized section that is not password-protected. The advantage of this approach is that you can be very precise on what keywords you will be going for and optimize accordingly. The disadvantage is that you would be essentially […]

Can too many H1 tags hurt your rankings?

Your web designer put half a dozen of H1 and H2 tags in your web pages. Could too many of them harm you in the search engines? Or, would it help?
The answer is, it won’t help and likely won’t hurt (unless you really overdo it, which may prompt a competitor to report you for manipulating […]

.HTML extension better than .PHP or .ASP?

Your old site was a plain, static site with each page physically “sitting” on your server saved as .HTML. But now you are building a new, database-powered site and your webmaster is telling you that you need to use .PHP or .ASP (or whatever other) file extension. Does it matter from the search engine optimization […]

Keyword density or duplication in URLs

Should you need to be concerned about keyword duplication in your site’s URLs? For example, would having www.keyword.com/keyword.html help your chances to rank high in the search engines? Could you possibly be penalized for keyword duplication?
My take is that keyword duplication in URL neither helps, nor hurts (unless you really over do it). The URL […]

Article spinning: how unique?

Some say, you need to spin articles that are minimum 70-80% unique. Others claim that 30-40% is enough. Who is right?
The answer is, “it depends.” There are two main reasons why you’ve been reading different recommendations regarding uniqueness of spun articles:

People use spun articles for different purposes. If you are just building throw-away sites with […]

Does title=”keyword” help SEO?

What if you use the title=”keyword” attribute on your links (image or text links). Does it help the page to rank higher for those keywords?
The answer is “no”. While useful from usability point of view as it provides a “tool tip” text when visitors hover over the link, the title attribute does nothing for SEO. […]