The NoIndex and NoFollow tags are often used as part of a pages search engine optimization strategies. The reasons are many and varied and can be used either in the page header meta tags or within a page.

There is often disagreement as to how, when and where you should use these tags in your search engine optimization programs. Ultimately you need to understand what you doing and why. A NoFollow meta tag in the page header will tell the search engines not to follow any of the links on that page. Likewise the NoIndex meta tag in the page header will result in that page not being indexed by the search engines.

Those are the theories. However the search engines themselves are not perfect and, particularly with the NoFollow tag, have been known to follow links. This is one of the reasons why so many web owners comment spam sites, even when the NoFollow clearly in use.

SeoBook has published a good chart comparing the various uses of these tags. He points out that overuse of a NoFollow tag within pages may be frowned upon by search engines if they think they are being used to sculpt PageRank as part of the search engine optimization strategy.

For most website owners, using these tags where and when required will not present any problems. For many bloggers, their software automatically uses the NoFollow for comments and this does not draw disapproval from the search engines.

Used judiciously, NoFollow and NoIndex can help with a sites search engine optimization strategies. As with all things, abuse it and try to work the system and the search engines may penalize you.

There is one facet of search engine optimization that many web site owners, and in particular, bloggers, ignore. The general feeling is that once they have created a page of content (or a post) and optimized it for the search engines, they can leave it and move on to the next page.

SEO is a not a set and forget business. One of the most important components of any business model and that includes search engine optimization, is a process of review.

You may have pages that are months or even years old that at the time were optimized to gain high search engine results. If those pages are still appearing near the top of the search results then there is no need to play with them too much. You can however use them.

This older content has value simply by its existence. By mapping out what content you have, you can put together a reasonable linking program that links related articles. There is no harm at all in linking an older page to a fresher page, particularly if the fresher page has more up-to-date information. In fact, you are doing your readers (and yourself) a big favor. Arriving at a page with outdated data will see them disappear pretty quickly - point them to fresher data and they may follow.

Internal link building has always been a standard component in any well crafted SEO program. However I generally see most webmasters only using internal links in fresh content linking back to old content. The reverse process that is linking the older content to new can often improve overall rankings.

One of the most important ingredients in a good SEO campaign is link building. It can also be one of the toughest. Search engines can be a little tough on unethical link building strategies and if you add the growing use of ‘nofollow’ attributes to links, gaining quality links takes a lot of work. This list itemizes most of the link building opportunities available.

10: Link Farm: Link farms are outdated and generally result in search engine penalties. No longer worth thinking about.

09: Paid Reviews: There is an old saying in the IT world - GIGO - garbage in garbage out. Generally speaking paid reviews are poorly written articles on non-relevant sites. If you can get a good review on highly ranked relevant site then you may get value for your money - otherwise treat with caution.

08: Text Link Ads: There can be value in obtaining text link ads but these are generally from low ranking sites. As with the paid reviews, obtaining text link ads on high ranking related sites may be of value.

07: Link Solicitation: Obtaining links from related sites by solicitation can be difficult. You need to be able to prove to the site owner that there is a mutual benefit. The higher the site ranks the harder it can become. However this can provide a good cross section of related sites.

06: Hand Edited Directories: DMOZ and Yahoo are two of the major directories. DMOZ can take up to 12 months to get listed. Yahoo!, whilst a paid listing, remains reasonably good value. Directory links seem to have been reduced in value recently.

05: Article Directories: Article directories are hit and miss. You can spend hours putting together a series of articles only to find that most of them get scraped without any links back to your site. When the article is used legitimately you have no control as to the sites relevance or reliability.

04: Social Bookmarking: Having your site listed and voted on in some of the social bookmarking sites can provide some benefits to your link building campaign. Many social bookmarking sites incorporate ‘nofollow’ so don’t rely on them for masses of links. The traffic generated by lead to an increase in organic links.

03: Press Releases: Press releases can provide a quick lift in rankings. If the press release is well written and provides a little spark then you may find an increase in traffic along with an increase in organic links.

02: Edu and Gov sites: Obtaining links from these sites can be hard. The more important the link location the higher value. For example, a link in and Edu report or research paper is highly prized.

01: Blended Link Building: Blended link building incorporates a variety of strategies. The aim is to obtain links from a variety of sources, each with varying ranking factors but all from relevant web pages where possible.

Blended link building can be slow and tedious but it does produce great long term website rankings in the major search engines.

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If you visit any of the SEO forums, particularly WebmasterWorld and DigitalPoint you will have noticed one theme running through most of them over the last week and that is the turmoil created by Yahoo!’s latest search results update. Many sites that have ranked well for long periods (5 years for one site) now find themselves down to pages four or five.

It has certainly put a lot of site owners and search engine optimization experts in a spin wondering what on earth Yahoo! is up to. I think there are a couple of issues to think of.

There is some discussion that sites with keywords in the URL seem to be rating higher than prior to the update. The general consensus is that Yahoo! results are not as relevant to the search phrase now.

I have left off discussing this change to see if things would settle down, or perhaps see some communication from Yahoo! on the issue. So far, nothing has changed; the results are a little for many search terms although for some search terms, the results appear to be spot on.

Yahoo! has done a “Google” and kept very quiet about the whole change. I would not be surprised to learn that this is an experimental trial of a different algorithm. We may see over the next few weeks minor little tweaks before a final announcement from Yahoo!.

Achieving long term search engine rankings in the major search engines can be a volatile business at times with search engines changing the ballgame at will and without notice. This time the end results are less than desirable. One would have thought that, given the turmoil at Yahoo! in recent months, they would have tried to steady things. These changes have added more ammunition to Yahoo!’s detractor.

Over the last two years the one common ‘prediction’ for search engine optimization has been local search. It is often being hailed as the next ‘big’ thing in search engine development.

They may be right eventually. Whether or not it becomes the next ‘big’ thing in search marketing doesn’t matter. It is here now and should be used for all its value. This means you need to include local search in your search engine optimization programs.

One question that often arises is whether or not you should include your business address, telephone number and state in your pages. Certainly, on your contact and about pages it may help to include this information. From a professional point of view, including the information instills a level of trust within visitors to a site.

For all your other pages, it can simply be a matter of choice. Including this information will not hurt your search engine optimization program. Should you include the information on every page? Remembering that search engine index each page, if you need that page ranking highly in the local search results then including your address details may help.

If you have more than one offline presence, be wary of adding all sites. You can include the information in an about or contact page or perhaps even in ’store profile’ page. Having multiple sites listed on every page may confuse the search engines and se your site decrease in popularity.

Including your local business exposure within the local search relies on the patience of your search engine optimization program for success.

If your new to the internet, or at least new to the world of search engine optimization, you may be wondering what all these acronyms stand for. Here is a brief run down on each acronym with a Wikipedia reference for each one.

[source]Search engine optimization (SEO) is the process of improving the volume and quality of traffic to a web site from search engines via “natural” (”organic” or “algorithmic”) search results for targeted keywords. Usually, the earlier a site is presented in the search results or the higher it “ranks”, the more searchers will visit that site. SEO can also target different kinds of searches, including image search, local search, and industry-specific vertical search engines.

In a nutshell, by defining keywords and optimizing them for a website we tell the search engines what each site is all about. Each website that link to pages act as a ‘vote’ for that page. Search engines use a formula (algorithm) to rank pages based on the relevance to a search term and the number and quality of the ‘votes’ received.

[source]Search engine marketing, or SEM, is a form of Internet marketing that seeks to promote websites by increasing their visibility in search engine result pages (SERPs). According to the Search Engine Marketing Professional Organization, SEM methods include: search engine optimization (or SEO), paid placement, and paid inclusion. Other sources, including the New York Times, define SEM as the practice of buying paid search listings.

Search engine marketing is, as the name suggest, a marketing tactic to gain traffic through the search engines. The lines between SEO and SEM are always blurred with many SEO experts including PPC type advertising in their SEO strategies.

[source]Social media optimization (SMO) is a set of methods for generating publicity through social media, online communities and community websites. Methods of SMO include adding RSS feeds, adding a “Digg This” button, blogging and incorporating third party community functionalities like Flickr photo slides and galleries or YouTube videos. Social media optimization is related to search engine marketing, but differs in several ways, primarily the focus on driving traffic from sources other than search engines, though improved search ranking is also a benefit of successful SMO.

Where SEO and SEM concentrate on telling the search engines all about a website, SMO is all about telling the people about a website, its owners and its products.

SMM or social media marketing is often another term used to describe social media optimization. The major difference between the two is that social media marketing concentrates more on the interaction on social sites. In simpler terms, SMO uses the resources available from social media whilst SMM is a process of being involved with a community.

A careful combination of all of these strategies can see your web page traffic increase significantly. Many SEO consultants now incorporate many components from these strategies to provide sites with more rounded exposure to the various users on the internet.

Acronyms can be confusing; however this simple guide will hopefully clear the air in relation to those terms. In case you you’re still confused, you start with a little SEO before moving on to a little SEM all the while your dabbling in some SMO and SMM

Over the years I have come across many online businesses that have ranked reasonably well in the search results yet failed as online businesses. The traffic hasn’t been sufficient to create sales and the costs of developing their websites exceeds profits. So why do they fail?

There are of course many reasons why a business fails, whether it is online or offline. Poor page design, poor products, the list is endless. However, one of the biggest failures for online businesses is simply content.

We hear terms such as ‘content is king’, and while it sounds good, it doesn’t tell you much. What content? How much? On what topics? All simple questions, yet these questions are the very ones you should be asking yourself. SEO needs material to work with. Keywords are fine - if you have somewhere to use them.

As a business owner you need to think like a prospective or existing customer. What sort of information are they likely to be looking for. How should you present that information, through a blog or through web pages? Each option has their own search engine optimization strategies that can deliver traffic - if given the chance.

The biggest decision to make is what sort of content will you provide your customers. This is an individual decision. However fact sheets are always welcome as are ‘how to’ type articles. Product descriptions and upgrade options are also in demand by online users. This range of content has the scope to extend your range of keywords. With more keywords to choose from the more extensive your search engine optimization program can be. The more highly ranked keywords you have - the more traffic.

Having a single, or at most three or four web pages, generally is not going to develop into in a thriving online business. The scope for keyword optimization is narrow resulting in less traffic. Your search engine optimization programs will be easy to undertake, however the results will not be spectacular. Quality content on a range of topics associated with you business will lead to more visitors and potentially, more sales.

As the dust settles around Google’s knowledge base, Knol, it appears there may be a lot of value for online businesses. Knol’s are going to rate well in the search results, that is already apparent. Google’s content policy leaves the door open for businesses to publish Knol’s on commercial related material including links back to their own sites.

COMMERCIAL ACTIVITY: You may use Knol to create articles for your business or to promote your lawful products or services that are not otherwise prohibited by our Content Policy or Terms of Service, unless you are in Cuba, Iran, Burma (Myanmar), North Korea, Syria, or Sudan. There are some commercial uses we don’t allow. We don’t allow pages that have the primary purpose of redirecting visitors, acting as a bridge page, or driving traffic to another website. We also don’t allow Knol pages that have the primary purpose of profiting from displaying ads from any publisher network, such as pages created with little or no unique content that exist only to display ads.

This point from the policy is fairly self explanatory. Now may be an ideal time to consider writing ‘how to’ type articles or perhaps even publishing instruction manuals.

Since these Knol’s are likely to rank well, users may well visit these pages first. If you have promoted your site with links to the relevant pages within your Knol, you should see extra traffic.

For businesses with an online presence, it will be a case of letting others write Knol’s and capturing the traffic, or getting in early yourself and capitalizing.

When it comes to SEO, there are three kinds of people. There are those that know little and do little; then there are those that know everything, they drill down into analytics and search results and can tell you where a page ranks on any given day. Somewhere in the middle is your ordinary everyday website owner who is trying to deliver the best program on a learn as you go basis. For these individuals, PageRank can still be a valuable tool.

It has been common practice in the blog world to seek out pages with high PageRanks and to then leave comments, hoping the pages use a dofollow.

PageRank can be useful for website owners within their own pages. If you know the PageRank for each page you can fine tune your SEO strategies for those pages. Internal links can be quite powerful if they are undertaken with care.

If you have several pages ranking fairly highly and another page that you want to see rank highly then internal links can help. Using standard SEO strategies such as good anchor text in the links you can funnel some of that PageRank into that page.

Whilst a high PageRank will not guarantee a high placement in the search results, there is little doubt that it does have some effect in the overall algorithm. Your SEO strategies need to use every option available to increase the rankings of each page. Knowing your PageRank and using it to effect is just one of those options.

Search engines crawl the web reading pages, indexing them then following links to the next page where it goes through the same process. Along the way it tries to assess the appropriate connections between the search phrases entered by users and the content - it does this using what we call keywords and keyword phrases. Can you train the search engines to read and index your pages in certain ways?

The best way to answer this question is to look at the on page search engine optimization processes to see what, if any, effect they have on a search engine and your ability to ‘train’ them.

Content: writing good quality keyword optimized content is important when it comes to any relationship with a search engine. If you publish fresh content every day, or once per week, current theories suggest that search engines do ‘learn’ your publishing routine if it is regular. If they ‘learn’, you can ‘train’.

Keywords: using keywords in your titles, descriptions and throughout your content is the only way that a search engine can associate your pages with any given query. Is that training? It is one way of putting it.

Links - outbound: linking out to pages of authority is said to be good for your readers. If your content is relevant, well written and links to authority sites you are certainly telling your readers that you move in the right circles. Search engines like these links as well. You are telling them what other pages are relevant to your own.

Links - internal: internal links help visitors find content that is associated with the current page. They also help search engines find pages that are relevant.

Can you train a search engine? Search engine optimization is doing exactly that, training the search engine. You are training them in how often you publish content, what the content is about and how it should be associated to search terms, and what other pages are relevant to the content.

Whilst you may not have control over what the search engines do with this information, if users are finding your pages for the wrong reasons then perhaps you haven’t trained the search engines effectively.

Many website owners create their first site simply because ‘it was a good idea at the time’. The site is put together with little thought as to why, with little direction, and certainly with little or no thought of search engine optimization.

Trying to undo several years’ worth of aimless site building can be a nightmare from a search engine optimization view point. In fact at times the quickest option is to scrap the lot and start all over.

My first piece of advice to anyone looking to create an online presence is to treat it a like a new business. For any individual looking to commence a business, there are several steps you should take first and one of those is research. Researching your market, your competition and your location. Starting a website is no different.

Research Your Market: Who are your customers and where can they be found online? What sort of products/services are they buying and what prices are they prepared to pay. These are all standard questions when researching for a bricks and mortar business and they apply equally well to an online business.

Research Your Keywords: Once you know who your target audience is and what products/services they are likely to buy, you can start to research your keywords. Keywords are the lifeblood of any SEO program. Get them right and you have won half the battle.

Research Your Competitors: As with any bricks and mortar business, knowing who your competitors are, where they are and how they do business is equally important for your online business. You also need to research the range of keywords they are using in their optimization programs if you are going to be able to compete successfully.

Research is half the battle. Done thoroughly the data collected can help make the critical decisions required to succeed. Your SEO strategies will depend on this data to help bring in the prospective customers.

One of the first steps in the long and arduous search engine optimization plan is the research of keywords. Keywords are center of all SEO programs, your content is written around keywords, your titles should be keyword optimized and your link building program relies on keywords as anchor text.

Here are ten keyword research tips to help you get started:

Misspellings and Typos: use common misspellings or typos such as double strikes, letters close to each other on the keyboard for example yahpp instead of yahoo. The classic example has been John Cow for John Chow.

US spelling and UK spellings: labour/labor, colour/color, cheque/check - there are plenty to choose from. The ‘or’ and ‘our’ are common as is the use of a ‘z’ in place of an ’s’ - optimization/optimisation/

Plural and single: don’t forget the plurals - and I don’t necessarily mean the adding of an ’s’. alumnus/alumni.

Acronyms and abbreviations: our society is full of acronyms especially when it comes to the online and IT world. PC, PDA, MSN - there are a lot to choose from. Abbreviations are just as common. 1st/first, Dec/December.

Verbs: play with verbs. If you are selling shoes your options could include walk/walking, run/running, jog/jogging

Adjectives: descriptive words are often used by searchers. These could include new; used; old; free; cheap.

Hyphenated and merged words: the most common one these days is email/e-mail, pay per click/pay-per-click/PPC/payperclick.

Geographic: geographic data is particularly important if you want to rank well in local search. Town names, suburbs, states, counties. It may be useful to include local terminology as well.

Domain names: you would be surprised at how often users do a search on a domain name or part of it. Use variations including the www.

People’s names: people’s names are often used in search queries. Again, look at misspellings. My name is often used in a search engine with a variety of misspellings.

Once you have developed a set a keywords, go through the above list and see if any of these tips help to add variations. Keywords are the central key to any search engine optimization program. Don’t just concentrate on the obvious - everyone else is so they will be highly competitive.

Google is the dominant search engine and has been for many years. There has been a lot of hype surrounding the recent release of Cuil. The founders certainly have the credentials to develop a top search engine. There are two former employees of Google along with Tom Costello from IBM and Louis Monier, a founder of Altavista. Will they challenge Google and if so, will we need to rethink our search engine optimization strategies?

Cuil is different in four areas; web index, algorithm, results display and privacy. Privacy is possibly the one big selling point for Cuil given Google’s appetite for knowing what everyone is doing, where they are spending their money and how long they stay on various sites.

The results display is different. Three columns by three rows, a total of nine results per page. Each result has more information than most of the major search engines. Cuil boast that they have more pages indexed than any other search engine, a big claim given their brief existence.

Where SEO may be affected long term is the algorithms used to rank pages and return search results. Cuil is trying to rank pages based on content rather than popularity. It has been tried before with little success. Perhaps Cuil will be different. However, with the brief tests I ran today the results returned where less than favorable. Even searches based on website names tended to deliver sites that link in rather than the website itself.

If Cuil does take off then we may need to rethink some aspects of our search engine optimization strategies. At present, I am not rushing in to any changes. There are too many issues that will need to be addressed if Cuil is going to make any sort of impact on the search wars.

A question on WebmasterWorld has brought up a few interesting comments. As part of a search engine optimization program you may decide to include your own business blog - an activity I highly recommend. The question was, “What are the problems associated with getting
loads of blog links?”.

There were a wide range of views presented during the discussion. The general feeling was almost one of placing blogs as the second or perhaps even third class citizens of the online world. This can be an error in the thought processes as well constructed blogs can significantly improve the search engine positioning outcomes for any web site.

Links are an important component of any SEO program so a discussion such as this can be important to clarify some of the issues surrounding the topic. This discussion has not really addressed any of the real issues surrounding links from blogs. On the contrary, the general consensus was that blog links are fairly worthless, particularly once they ‘fall of the front page’.

Spam links can come from anywhere and blogs are certainly not the only source. A well constructed blog with good content and a sensible linking strategy adds just as much value to a sites search engine optimization program as does any other strategy.

Links from blogs certainly add authority to a website. They may not add as much value as .gov or .edu link, however is has long been assumed that they add more value than any other link.

Blogs are now part of the online world and they represent a good pathway for businesses to connect to their customers and interact with them. If your search engine optimization program is well prepared and conducted properly, blogs will not be only the only source of links. What is important is to develop a variety of authority links from a range of online entities. Having a balanced link building strategy will enhance your authority and search engine rankings so blogs, as just one of those entities, should not be seen as harming your long term search strategy.