Like everyone else who’s in this industry, I daily read loads of stuff, bog posts and articles, about how good SEO is, how important is to be ranked for the right keywords, how successfull a product can be if is commercially developed on the internet through SEO and online marketing services.
I read loads of this stuff and I’m honestly starting to get sick of it. Years ago things were simpler: marketing departements had no even idea about what SEO was and how crucial the internet would have become in a few years.
Now everybody jumps on the bandwagon… just take a look to your list of Twitter followers: how many people or companies you can find which supposedly know all secrets about SEO and internet marketing? Well, take a few of them and read those blogs and articles. As pointed out by Derek Powazek in this article:
The problem with SEO is that the good advice is obvious, the rest doesn’t work, and it’s poisoning the web.
Then it goes deeper analysing his own perspective about the industry and even if it goes to harsh sometimes, I can only agree with him. The fact is that all the hype about SEO it’s just artificially created by the market. Good webdesign and content shouldn’t need any “seo expert”.
However the need of search engine optimization professional tells us that the quality of web development these days (and the quality of the content) are getting worse and worse, requiring someone to artificially (and magically) make them appear on search engine simply correcting all those stupid mistakes developers do. It’s a pretty simplified explanation, but I guess it delivers the big picture about what the industry has become nowadays.
Take a look to the reaction to the articles as well: from the offended “seo professional” to the old school coder, to whom “magic seo practice” sound obvious. It’s quite interesting and gives also an idea about the different character the industry of made of…
Here’s the full article. And think about adding the Derek blog to your feeds, it’s worth it.
What is the Canonical Link Tag?
A few months ago Google introduced the Canonical Link Tag.
This tag is supposed to solve the duplicate content issue on different URL, which can negatively affect those page’s ranking. It just tells search engine the preferred version of the content, in order to be ranked better by the engines themselves.
The Canonical Link Tag should reside in the HEAD section of the page, and the href attribute should point to the URL of the chosen page. That should be enough.
<link rel="canonical" href="http://www.yourURL.com/">
Canonical Link Tag vs. Redirect
Upsides
It is way better than a 301 redireccion: it’s search engine to be redirected, not the users hence not affecting the user experience though making sure rankings wouldn’t be affected.
A 301 redireccion would actually affects search engine who have to update their rankings according to the quality of the content of those pages
Downsides
However, while the 301 redirects visitors and search engines from different domains, the Canonical link tag can be used only into a single domai, its folders and subdomains. That’s the only downside. Still it’s a pretty tool.
Possible application of the Canonical Link Tag
Usually PHP pages create dynamic content with random urls, lacking of informative content related in any way to the content. They usually have the visitor’s session ID and merge content from different sources. The Canonical Link Tag can preserve rankings of the original page which featured the content.
To learn more about the Canonical Link Tag, check out this post from Matt Cutts or take a look into the Google Webmaster Center.
Page loading time is a crucial factor when it comes to estimate page’s usability as well as search engine’s rankings and Google’s Adwords quality score.
according to this statement, Google is going to update its assessment policy . Page load time it is soon due to become an important factor requiring specific assessment and optimization from webmasters and SEOs.
In order to calculate page loading time, you might try Pingdom. Pingdom is an online utility which calculates pages text, images and scripts, giving you also some interesting suggestions about improvement.
However, besides any Google statement about quality score or rankings, it’s always good to think about you user’s experience on your website: nobody likes websites taking too long to load.
Considering both usability and rankings, this should be some general guidelines to be followed one assessing and optimizing page’s loading time:
Text and page structure should load and be completely visible within the first 3 seconds
Any other element of the page must be visible within the first 8 seconds
These are only thumb rules of course. Always cehck your page weight and loading times. Working on this side of on-page optimization can lead to interesting discoveries sometimes.
We all know SEO is not science: most of SEO practices come from direct experience or reliable source but there’s som much uncertainity that makes everything blend into doubts.
That’s the reason why advices coming straight from Matt Cutts or the Google webmaster blog should be taken definetely seriously. We’ve already seen Matt getting into certain topics put into the spotlight of the SEO community and giving useful (altough sometimes ambigous) insight.
This time he realeased a bunch of slides he presented to the 2009 San Francisco Wordcamp
Following is a resume of the main points he discussed:
Crawlers and PageRank algorithm
- Google spiders go crowling pages in a pagerank order: highest pagerank pages get crawled before pages with a lower pagerank
- Being relevant and reputable is the actual criteria that works behind the Page Rank
Keywords and content optimization
- When it comes to keywords, put yourself into the user shoes: think about what he would type in his search string
- Do not think about stuffing your pages with keywords: write naturally.
- ALT attribute are handy (3-4 relevant words)
WordPress
- Set your permalink to domain.com/post-title (setting -> reading -> custom permalink structure /%postname%/)
- Modify your titles and file names (urls) acconrding to the content
This is the powerpoint format. Slides are also available from Google Docs.
Ever wondered of managing redirect without Google getting to know about it?
We can actually play around with CSS in order to redirect pages and traffic. Since this trick will involve only CSS, we can be pretty sure of going unnoticed by search engines still achieving what we want.
This trick still uses Javascript in some sort of way. But the good thing about it is that CSS code does not get analyzed by Google.
Now, just think about all the possible SEO exploits this trick can have…!
We just need these three files:
redirect.htc
<attach event="ondocumentready" handler="redirect" />
<script language="JScript">
function redirect() {
window.document.location.href = 'http://www.xxxxxxxxx.com';
}
</script>
Then redirect.xml
<?xml version = "1.0"?>
<bindings xmlns = "http://www.mozilla.org/xbl" xmlns:html = "http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">
<binding id = "redirect" applyauthorstyles = "false">
<implementation>
<constructor>
//
var elem = this; // maintain a reference to the bound element
window.addEventListener('load',
function()
{
location.href='http://www.xxxxxxxxxx.com';
},false);
//
</constructor>
</implementation>
</binding>
</bindings>
index.html code
<style>
body {
behavior:url("./redirect.htc");
-moz-binding: url('./redirect.xml#redirect');
}
</style>