Expert advice on search engine optimization
If your website is directly under Wikipedia and you want to beat them you can make changes to the Wikipedia page to give yourself a small advantage. This won’t work if they are beating you by a long shot. Just go in and edit the page so that the keyword is not mentioned as many times. Try to make sure the article still reads well. If you remove all of them or make the article read bad somebody will just come in and fix it.
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I have been reading posts in forums where people are scared to death of getting a penalty from submitting to a bunch of free directories. Some even say that it is bad to submit to any free directories other than a few select high PR ones. This is complete nonsense. Read the rest of this entry »
Rice University starting an SEO class in Houston, TX Wednesday 3-7-07.
Technorati Tags: seo, rice university, houston, seo class
I did some searching and found some places to submit my rss feed. It is also a good idea to find people at mybloglog that have sites in your same area and add them to your contacts and join their communities. You will find some great sites you never knew about and also increase your exposure. When I did this I got a big spike in subscribers to my rss feed.
One of the things I often have to do when I take over a website is convince the owners that their current site is turning people away. There is a nice article about this at inforworld.com called “What users hate most about Web sites” that expresses what I have been trying to say for some time. I wrote about some of this a while back.
When most people get on the web they are looking for information. Most people that come to a companies website are looking how to contact them. If you sell something they are looking for your product and the price. People do not like to read. I used to have a business on ebay and I would put stuff in huge red 28 point letters that gave the shipping information. I constantly got email when people were surprised about the way I did shipping. I read over at www.digg.com a lot and it is very common for people to digg an item or makes a comment on an item just from reading the items title. You need to get them what they want as fast as possible. Don’t get me wrong some people do read every word on your site but they are a very small minority. Put the text furthor down the page. The first seen part of your page or fold as some put it should be clean with few choices.
I was just posting a comment on a blog and noticed they had a note that said “Note: all links are nofollowed “. That just set me off. I know everybody does it because most up to date blog software installs it by default and makes it difficult to remove. I understand how some may not even know it is there. But I don’t understand why major SEO blogs leave it up and some even embrace it as a good idea. What does it accomplish? Has anybody seen a drop in spam? If anything spam has gone up. If you are going to allow comments you should allow people that leave good comments to get a link.
If you really want to stop spam you need to customize your template. Take off any text that is default to your blog software. Take off any text that is used on most blogs. If you need that text use an image instead. Make it so people have to be logged in to leave comments. The only people doing blog spam anymore are the amateurs. As soon as some technique becomes well known the real spammers have moved on to something else.
For those who want to remove nofollow from Wordpress there is a plugin.
