Follow us on Twitter
Grab the RSS feed
8 Lesser-Known SEO Techniques - Part 2
Anyone who’s spent time administering a website has probably heard a few things about how to optimize your site for search engines (search engine optimization, SEO). The most commonly recommended (and effective) techniques include sprucing up your text or [innocently] squeezing in a few more keywords to raise your ranking in search engines. And while there’s no substitute for a well-written title and a strategically positioned headline, there are several more things you can do to boost your SEO mojo.
This is Part Two in this series about less popular SEO techniques for your landing pages. If you’re looking to catch up, check out Part One first.
5. Follow or NoFollow? Know the Difference!
Don’t be fooled: posting links on sites like Twitter helps drive traffic, but it doesn’t directly help your SEO. The site that made “following” a buzzword actually tells search engines NOT to follow links on its domain.
This is done by adding the rel="nofollow" attribute to the link, which explicitly tells search engines not to give the linked site any credit. So when doing your link-building, you can ignore sites that don’t follow your links. As I mentioned in Part One of this series, putting links in Wikipedia is a quick and easy way to get some extra link juice. If you do, double check to make sure their links are rel="follow". We’ve seen cases where they are and aren’t.
Wikipedia has a great article on the rel="nofollow" attribute for those looking to know a bit more.
6. Specify Your Canonical
Sites that produce dynamic content have to be particularly conscious of what their URLs are saying to search engines. Query strings—the stuff that comes after the question mark in a URL—can sometimes spit back the same content despite having different query parameters. There’s a great blog article by the Google Team that really goes into detail.
Basically, on pages like this:
http://www.mycoolsite.com/overview
http://www.mycoolsite.com/overview?type=quick&cool=yes
http://www.mycoolsite.com/overview?page_id=3243284&awesome=definitely
You should put this in the
section:
That’ll tell the search engine to forgive the current page and treat the canonical as the true version. This ties nicely into the next tip, which is:
7. Watch out for Duplicate Content
Search engines can give you a sizable penalty for displaying duplicate content. Obviously you don’t want to copy and paste chunks of text from other websites, but there are a few other things to keep in mind:
- Use the
tag when quoting from another website
- Make links to “printable” and “mobile” versions of your page “nofollow”
- Avoid boiler plates, such as a long copyright notice in your footer
There’s no need to be paranoid about duplicate content, but definitely keep it in mind. According to Google, duplicate content is
“…not grounds for action on that site unless it appears that the intent of the duplicate content is to be deceptive and manipulate search engine results.”
You can read more about what they have to say or check out more tips from this great blog article.
8. Check What’s Popular
If you’re looking to add some SEO mojo to your website and don’t already focus on a particular topic, check out what’s trending and write about it! Here are a few great places to find out what’s hot:
- Google Search Trends
- Twitter’s “Trending” Feed (they don’t have a dedicated page for this yet)
- Digg’s Weekly (or Daily) Trending List
A couple other useful, lesser-known tips:
9. Consolidate Your Identity
Combine microformats (discussed in Part One) and the rel attribute for HTML links to get a cool way to establish your identity on the web. Use rel="me" when inter-linking sites that you own. For instance,
Having mutual rel="me" links signals to search engines that you’re the owner, although it’s still unclear on exactly how search engines are treating this in their rankings.
10. Implement a Breadcrumb Navigation
While it probably doesn’t help with your rankings, displaying your search results in a reader-friendly manner could help your click-through rate: http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2009/11/new-site-hierarchies-display-in-search.html
11. Get into the Creative Commons Search Directories
Content creators are always looking for free, commercial-use media to use on their own websites. Many turn to places like Wikimedia Commons, or Creative Commons to find them and can be required to put a link back to your material or website. Creative Commons has a few examples of how to specify your work as CC licensed and start getting credit for it.
Thank Pasukaru76 for the awesome images!
