Entries Tagged as 'SEO'

24 DoFollow Social Bookmarking Sites

DoFollow Social Bookmarking Sites

The following are Social Bookmarking Sites that provide dofollow backlinks to your site. As always, it is important to provide good content to these sites, as well as being relevant content to yours. Most importantly, we should not abuse or misuse these Social Bookmarking sites.

Are these really “DoFollow”? Read this to see other ways of blocking the spiders.

Ok, as I add new ones (or take away bad ones), then the number changes.

NoFollow – How the attribute is being interpreted differs between the search engines. While some take it literally and do not follow the link to the page being linked to, others still “follow” the link to find new web pages for indexing. In the latter case rel=”nofollow” actually tells a search engine “Don’t score this link” rather than “Don’t follow this link.” This differs from the meaning of nofollow as used within a robots meta tag, which does tell a search engine: “Do not follow any of the hyperlinks in the body of this document”.

What is a good way to check if a link is Nofollow? Download Firefox

Install the Firefox SEOQuake Plugin from the tools page.

You may also like the DoFollow Forums List
*If you notice any changes or possible additions, please post a comment.

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What is URL Canonicalization?

First of all, what is canonicalization? Canonicalization (abbreviated c14n) is a process for converting data that has more than one possible representation into a “standard” canonical representation.

Example:

[[Egg_salad]]

[[egg salad]]

[[  egg_salad  ]]

As you will notice, each of these are slightly different from one another.

In terms of the URL it is the interpretation of variations of the same url, as seen below. The concern is that Google sees the different variants of the same url in the same way. It’s important to create consistency across your website URLs so you

From Matt Cutt’s Page

Q: What is a canonical url? Do you have to use such a weird word, anyway?
A: Sorry that it’s a strange word; that’s what we call it around Google. Canonicalization is the process of picking the best url when there are several choices, and it usually refers to home pages. For example, most people would consider these the same urls:

  • www.example.com
  • example.com/
  • www.example.com/index.html
  • example.com/home.asp

But technically all of these urls are different. A web server could return completely different content for all the urls above. When Google “canonicalizes” a url, we try to pick the url that seems like the best representative from that set.

Q: So how do I make sure that Google picks the url that I want?
A: One thing that helps is to pick the url that you want and use that url consistently across your entire site. For example, don’t make half of your links go to http://example.com/ and the other half go to http://www.example.com/ . Instead, pick the url you prefer and always use that format for your internal links.

Q: Is there anything else I can do?
A: Yes. Suppose you want your default url to be http://www.example.com/ . You can make your webserver so that if someone requests http://example.com/, it does a 301 (permanent) redirect to http://www.example.com/ . That helps Google know which url you prefer to be canonical. Adding a 301 redirect can be an especially good idea if your site changes often (e.g. dynamic content, a blog, etc.).

Essentially, you would want to canonicalize the following situations:

  • Canonicalize the domain (e.g. redirect non-www and IP address to www)
  • Canonicalize my index pages (redirect “/index.html” to “/”)
  • Remove spurious query strings (e.g. example.com/1234? to a static html page)
  • Correct any typos in type-in URLs
  • Correct outdated or otherwise incorrect query strings
  • Correct invalid inbound links
  • Suppress the fix-up redirect if the resulting URL does not resolve to an existing file
  • Adjust capitalization of the URL to all lowercase. In some cases, this matters.

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The BIGGEST Search Engine Optimization Mistakes

There are arguably many, many mistakes that could be made as far as Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is concerned, however I am listing some of the biggest and most common mistakes.

  • Poor website linking structure
    • It is very important to have complete (or almost complete) internal linking between the pages within your site. They are almost as important as having relevant external backlinks.
  • Wrong Keywords
    • Try to avoid poorly chosen keywords for your pages. Especially ones that people would not use in their search.
  • Wrong Page Title
  • Not using a sitemap to direct the search engines to the preferred pages
  • No ‘H Tags’
  • No ‘Alt Tags’
  • Poor URL Format
    • Too long of a url
    • Too many numbers
    • Irrelevant keywords
    • Canonical url’s
  • Not enough original content
    • Emphasis on original
  • Lack of Content Keywords
  • No Text Navigation
  • No deep linking
  • Wrong Meta Description
  • Wrong Meta Keywords
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The Power of Google

Google seems to be growing exponentially. During the month of August alone they were reported to have had 31 billion queries throughout the world. In total more than 37 billion searches were carried out across all Google sites. Second on the list was Yahoo!, which had a paltry 8.5 billion searches recorded during the month. Yahoo!, Ask, and MSN Search do not come anywhere near being as used or have the level of usage. Although there was a poll conducted recently showing that Yahoo! had a slight lead for users in terms of being a favored search engine. These users still seem to be using Google anyway.

The Asia-Pacific region, including China, Japan and India, contained the greatest number of unique searchers, with 258 million conducting over 20 billion searches during the month.

Since Google has such dominance, as far as search engines are go, they also can greatly influence the way websites are designed, how people market their sites, and to that end, which websites people visit. They can also pretty much dictate the cost of advertising as well. This level of control over something so pervasive, being the internet itself, makes one think that they have more influence now than Microsoft ever had during its hayday.

I believe they are bordering on monopoly control of the internet. I wonder if they will be eventually targeted for regulation or some sort of government instituted penalties, such as being broken up.

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SERP Rank – The alternative to Page Rank

Most of us know or suspect that PageRank has little meaning these days.

Here’s my idea:

Someone (not necessarily Google) creates a toolbar and/or small site banners showing the current SERP for specific terms for that page.

1. Roll your mouse over the top of the banner and you then see the terms or key words (the banner could also show a numerical value, such as “page 1, pos 3″ or just “P1,p3″ for the page showing up on the first page at position 3 on the page.

2. The toolbar could show the search terms and the “SERP rank“.

3. There could be a site that could show graphs of SERP changes and notify the user when there are sudden drops or increases in the SERP.  Perhaps this could be a paid for service to cover costs.

I want to know your thoughts on this. :)

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Improving Search Engine Results Page (SERP) Rank

Wikopedia describes the Search Engine Results Page (SERP) as “the listing of web pages returned by a search engine in response to a keyword query. The results normally include a list of web pages with titles, a link to the page, and a short description showing where the keywords have matched content within the page. A SERP may refer to a single page of links returned, or to the set of all links returned for a search query.”

The SERPs are the single most important thing with respect to search engines and optimizing your website, and in particular, the individual pages. The SERPs are the “free” way of getting targetted traffic to your site. The usual alternative is paid advertising, which is anything but free. Search Engine Optimization is the science (or art) of optimizing a website for the best SERP results possible for range of potential search terms that the webmaster is trying to improve upon for the SERPs. The higher the position on the page, preferably the first page, of the SERP the better. Most search engine users only look at the top choices on the first page.

Each search term, such as “reviewer” or “reviewer of sites“, will have different results for the respective search engine. You will even notice that the results may change from day to day for the exact same search term on the specific search engine. There are many variables to consider when optimizing your site and pages, including how and what your competition is doing on their end for the given search terms. In my opinion, the best methods for improving your SERPs for the specific search terms is to do the following:

  • Use the Firefox plugins SEOQuake and Niche Watch to analyze your (and your competition’s) keyword density for a specific page, determine the amount of backlinks (preferably from pages with related content), number of indexed pages, keyword occurrences on the page, page rank, all in anchor, all in title and all in text rank for both domain and webpage information.
  • Continue to add original content on your site, especially articles relating to the specific keywords.
  • Give descriptive titles to the content and web pages relating to the keywords.
  • If possible, use search engine friendly url’s, such as “http://www.example.com/seo/all-about-seo.html”.

It does take time to work your way toward the top of the SERPs, especially if the keywords have a lot of competition, so you will need to be patient. The important thing is to not do anything that could get you penalized by Google, since it is usually the SERPs for your site that takes the hit.

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The Best Free SEO, Marketing, PPC Tools

Below is a list of the best tools on the internet for SEO, internet marketing, PPC (pay-per-click) and webmaster related needs.

Backlinks (who is linking to you):

Domain Pop Backlink Checker – This is probably the best backlink tool out there. It sorts by site, so if you have sitewide backlinks, you won’t have to look at pages and pages of backlinks from the same site. Fantastic!

iWebTool’s Backlink Checker

Backlink Watch

Key Words (helpful for PPC – Adsense, YPN, etc):

Google Key Word Tool – You can’t beat Google’s own keyword tool!

SEO Key Word Tool

Assortment of Web-based Tools

SEOChat – On left side

Smart PageRank

WebConf

Browser based tools:

–Firefox Plugins–

Smart Pages plugin – Very handy tool!

SEOQuake – shows nofollow links, along with much more

Niche Watch Tool – Excellent tool for studying keywords. As it states, “This wonderful SEO extension provides you the technical information required to beat your competitor websites in serps.”

SearchStatus – Also shows nofollow links, plus much more

Alexa Sparky – Official tool for Alexa. Displays a nice graph along your bottom task bar. Also, helps to boost your Alexa rank (not very relevant unless you sell blog posts)

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