I often get asked by clients to help them achieve better visibility on the web. Now, that is what I do, so its a fair question. But its not always easy to do.

Often I am presented with a website that has been built to please the CEO or some other highly paid person in the company. However, a website should be pleasing to the end user. One of those end users could be a search engine. So I find myself dealing with a website that has not got any of the groundwork in place to aid in getting better rankings.

How does your site get higher rankings?

Your site’s rankings are determined by a wide variety of factors. I like to split them up as follows;

1. on page factors (what you do to your own site)
2. off page factors (what happens on other websites that link to you)
3. technical factors (like domain name, hosting, coding etc)

By far the most important one to achieve rankings is the second, off page factors. Its often called “link building”. However, that is not to say the on page elements are not important.

Consider the on page elements to be your preparation to paint the walls of your house. Cleaning, taping and perhaps an undercoat. The off page elements can be compared to the actual painting.Just remember, paint won’t stick on walls that were poorly prepared. So,… what you do to your own site, is the groundwork that needs to be done, to build a successful link building campaign.

Yet this groundwork is often overlooked. A site may be looking swanky, but have no header tags, or page titles. I often see URLs that do not support the keywords of the brand or product on the site. Domain names that do not represent the locality of the business and cheap hosting plans overseas. The list goes on….

How to avoid SEO problems?

Simple. Don’t ring the SEO after the website  / upgrade / overhaul is finished.

As a matter of fact, several people need to come together to build a successful website.

Who should be involved when you consider a new website?

1. The Digital Marketer to set the website objectives and understand the target audience
2. The SEO to research what the target audience search for, which keywords and key phrases to incorporate in the site. The keywords can drive the website architecture and overall structure of the site.
3. The Web Usability Expert to make sure there is a good flow of information and the end user does not get lost in a muddle of information and bad navigation.
4. The Designer to create a good looking site that meets the needs of the target audience as well as the SEO
5. The Developer to write the code and make sure all request all built to spec.
6. The Security Person to ascertain what protection is needed to prevent hacking.
7. The Digital Marketer again to develop a marketing strategy that drives traffic to your site
8. The SEO again to set up a good link building campaign that ensures you have a site people can find on Google

An SEO is not just someone who helps you to get links. And an SEO is also your consultant in preparation for getting a website that has the ability to rank highly on Google.

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.