Many large companies, franchisees and multi level marketers choose to set up their websites using standard business templates.

Dictating templates is mostly done by businesses or marketers to make life easier for the franchisee or other departments. A uniform design can be presented to the market place and the corporate image can be protected and controlled.

A lot of work goes into designing the business templates and the text that should be chosen to align with the corporate image and profile. After having spent a considerable amount on a template that will protect the corporate image as well as give e.g. franchisees a simple tool to work with, the complaints start to come in. The websites or pages are not converting any visitors or worse, are not even visible on the search engines.

Why is that?

Web Templates and SEO

If a standard business template would only provide a template for structure and design there would be no ranking issues. However, more often than not, the template also dictates content, which does not allow for unique and keyword rich content.

If all template pages were then also hosted on the same root domain, e.g. ;

• www.example.com/franchisee-one
• www.example.com/francihisee-two

etc etc. you become the perfect point in case for duplicate content.

Duplicate content

Having duplicate content is the best way to have your pages moved to the supplemental index which means you become very difficult to find on the search engines. Read more about duplicate content here.

SEO 101

What will get you rankings? SEO 101 list three very simple and irrefutable steps;

1. quality content
2. keyword rich content
3. unique content

Business templates dictating content

So if the content is prescribed by “the business” and ends up being very similar on every page… you are not meeting the above criteria to help the rankings of your own page.

So the best way to achieve rankings and visibility on the search engine is to;

1. have your own domain name (read more about choosing the right domain name)
2. create your own KEYWORD RICH content

Good luck!

What are “nofollow” Links and are they important for your SEO Strategy?

Lets start with links and their importance.

“Backlinks” are incoming links to your website and they are an important component of achieving visibility of your website on the search engines.

Search engines have algorithms that measure the number of backlinks a website or web page has, and ranks those web pages with more and relevant backlinks in a higher position.

The more quality backlinks a page has, the more value it will have in the eyes of the search engines. Quality backlinks are one of the most important factors for SEO success. A spider will follow a link on one page to visit the next page, and will therefore pass on credibility and influence from one page to the next.

What is the Nofollow attribute?

Nofollow is an html attribute value that tells search engines not to pass on any credibility or influence to an outbound link. In other words, you are telling the search engines ‘don’t follow this link”

The nofollow tag looks like this:

<a href=”http://www.example.com/”rel=”nofollow”>your text here</a>

The nofollow tag was originally designed to prevent blog spam. If you have a blog you may know lots of people leave pointless messages with links to their own sites. They do that in the hope they get a benefit from their links on your blog.

Why would you use the no follow tag?

You would use the nofollow tag if for example, if you do not trust (or cannot vouch for) the content of an outbound link.

Or if you have a blog, the nofollow tag makes it less interesting to “spam” your site with comments and links.

Remember that a link ‘leaks” PageRank from the page the link is on. The nofollow attribute will prevent your site from passing valuable PageRank to bad neighborhoods on the web, and prevents “leakage” therefore holding on to your hard earned PageRank.

In turn, if your link is on a site with a nofollow tag on it, you will not benefit from the PageRank of the linking site. When you build links to your website you should keep in mind that the web page where your link has been placed should not have the “nofollow” attribute.

What is PageRank sculpting and does it make sense?

It is your homepage that normally has the highest PageRank and from there is gets distributed to your internal pages. But not all your pages need to have PageRank so a nofollow tag reserves the PageRank where it matters.

Many people have resorted to trying to influence how PageRank is distributed on their site. This is often referred as PageRank sculpting.

For example, you may have an RSS feed on your site so people can easily subscribe to your content. There is no reason for this feed to appear in search results and hence it does not need PageRank. To avoid sharing the link juice you could opt to put a nofollow tag on that link.

However, Google’s Matt Cutss explains in his own blog that nofollow links do NOT help sites rank higher in Google search results.

Should you use a Nofollow tag? Is it all worth it?

There are some instances where placing nofollow links make sense. If you have a blog you simply could not vouch for the links people place in their comments. Or if you had a page that did not have to appear in any search results ever, you could use the nofollow tag (in conjunction with the No Follow Meta Tag).

Nonetheless, I would recommend you focus on writing simply great content that people are keen to link to. That is what its all about.

What About SEO in Personalized Google Search Results?

Have you heard the news yet?

Your Google Search Results Will Now Show Personalized Results.

How will this affect the rankings of your website?

How Personalized Search works

Google’s Web History allows you to view all the pages you have visited, including your Google Searches. Over time Google will deliver a more personalized search result as it can now draw from your search behaviour. Google takes note of the sites you have clicked on so your favourite sites will get a higher ranking on your next search.

For all of you who already had a google account, this has been happening since 2006. But now, Google has made this available for all users.  So no more need to be signed in.

Your search engine results Page (SERP) will only be affected for searches that relate to you web history of course of the last 180 days!!

Great! So the most relevant pages will achieve better rankings.

But how will this affect Search Engine Optimisation? Do you Still Need it?

Some concerns;

• Will a customer no longer be able to see your site if it already favours a competitor’s site?
• You may think you have excellent ranking whereas in fact, your search results page is skewed towards your own preferences…

SO, the rules of the games have just been changed a little

• You will no longer be able to see a consistent ranking
• For competitive keywords on-page optimisation and link building will become less important
• If you have a NEW website in a competitive industry, ranking will become exceptionally hard

Great Opportunities

• Most people will not be clicking on lousy websites anymore and they will slowly be pushed out. So good websites with great, relevant content will slowly move up the search results pages.
• In a personalized search result page, it is easier to stand out when a ‘new’ snippet appears. So new and fresh content from blogs, Twitter and Facebook will become more important.
• The relevancy of your snippets and meta descriptions in the Google Search Results Page will become even more important.
• You must now focus on the long-tail keywords as generic and single word keywords will be even more difficult to rank for.
• If you have regular repeat visitors you may actually find yourself get better rankings.

SEO- More than rankings

SEO is not just about achieving top 10 rankings.

SEO is also about the structure of your website and the user experience, its about getting ‘better’ traffic to your site, getting that traffic to ‘convert’.

Other elements like keyword research and selection are still very important and when ‘relevancy’ has just been given a new boost, the right keyword selection is seven more paramount.

….Of course, if you don’t like it you can always switch to BING or turn it off…

Click on the links below to see the screen shots of how to do that…