Tag your Blogs and Company Sites for Users and SEO

Tagging isn’t just a tool for usability (even though it’s typically mostly thought of in those terms), it’s also a powerful weapon for search engine optimization. That’s because tagging allows you to rejig your internal hierarchical linking structure, flowing the link juice more strategically throughout your site. And because those links are textual and keyword-rich, a tag cloud is far superior in terms of SEO to the traditional graphical navigation bar.
When tagging is applied to a website, such as a blog, it can significantly increase the site’s traffic by achieving visibility for a much larger array of search terms.

The above quote is from my recent Search Engine land article entitled, “Effective Tagging For Both Usability & SEO.” I go into a lot of details how strategic tagging can help you. Here is a tip about tag clouds that I’d like to share with you:

Tag Clouds: When you tag your blog or website, the items are then put into an organized, keyword catalog. By taking those tags, you can organize them into a “tag cloud,” which shows keyword topic popularity by the size and sometimes color of the font. Tag clouds enable you to force a new navigation styles for your site or blog based on keyword popularity, and also help your website look up-to-date with enhanced, Web 2.0 functionality. (For an example of a tag cloud, you can see one at the end of my blog.)

For other, more specific tagging techniques, I hope you visit my article.

Tools, Tools and Production Tool Supply

In an article hosted at Practical eCommerce, Amy Africa and I co-author an in-depth website critique on industrial tool supplier Product Tool Supply. Through my critique, I found a number of things that were affecting their overall SEO.

Only 20 pages exist in Google of the site PTS-Tools.com (according to a search for “site: pts-tools.com”), and of those 20, only one has a title or snippet with it. A lack of title and snippet in a Google listing indicates that the page content has not been indexed; Googlebot knows of that page’s URL through links, but for whatever reason has decided not to spider and index that page.

PTS fares even worse in Yahoo, with only one page indexed. What of the hundreds of thousands of product pages, you may ask? Unfortunately, the online catalog is comprised of print catalog pages converted into PDF documents. Thus, there are no product pages available in HTML.

For more about this industrial tool supplier, visit my co-authored article entitled, “Tooling Around on PTS.”

Critique of Red Envelope’s Site

In an article I had co-authored for Multichannel Merchant entitled, “Red Envelope’s Website Critique,” I had gone into detail about the site’s functionality and came across this interesting discovery at the time I looked at their site.

The category and subcollection pages are not making it into the search engines at all — not because of their spider unfriendly URLs, but because they are being specifically blocked through “disallow” directives in the site’s robots.txt file. Robots.txt is the place where you can give commands to Googlebot and the other spiders, such as “stay away from this directory” or “stay away from this file type.”

For more interesting details on this site critique co-written with Amy Africa, just follow the link above.

Web Developer Extension Works for SEO

By using a few toolbars, widgets, or other add-ons, you can enhance your understanding of a website’s SEO health. The Web Developer Extension from Chris Pederick is a great tool that can help Web developers, designers, and SEO enthusiasts.

In my article entitled, “A don’t-leave-home-without SEO tool,” I talk about some of the ways this tool can enhance your understanding of a site’s SEO health, and how useful it is beyond SEO. At a quick glance, the tool allows you to check your JavaScript, view Alt text, meta descriptions, and link information, linearize the page to re-order content in the order the search engines read it, and much, much more! From screen captures to an in-depth explanation, I hope you’ll try out this useful tool.

Printer-Friendly vs. Search Engine-Friendly

We’ve all experienced frustration trying to print out an important web page or form. Some web designers have felt our pain, creating duplicate pages that are “print-friendly.” Unfortunately, these duplicates aren’t great for SEO, as the search engines get confused trying to determine which version of your content to serve up to searchers in their results. There are other negative effects as well, depending upon the size of your site and how you’ve structured it. For example, in my article at CNET I highlight this scenario:

For example, let’s say that you have a Web site that has 1,000 pages, a small to moderate-size site, depending on your perspective. Now, because you’ve taken advantage of your CMS’ ability to automatically create a “print this” link on each page to a printer-friendly version, for all practical purposes, your site just doubled to 2,000 pages. But what if your PageRank isn’t high enough to warrant very rapid spidering? It could take a lot longer for all your pages to get indexed.

For more about this unique situation, and solutions on how to avoid potential duplicate content issues, read my blog post on CNet: Searchlight.

Manage Your Reputation the Do-It-Yourself Way

Reputation monitoring and management have become hot topics and will only continue to grow. These are becoming important areas for all businesses, large and small, to focus on as more and more people turn to the Web to communicate through blogs, their own Web sites, as well as the ever-growing opportunities for online consumer reviews and ratings.

The above quote was written in a CNet: Searchlight post about DIY Reputation Management. In that post, I take an in-depth look at this popular topic for businesses and professionals, and offer a ton of tips like: places to monitor your online reputation, what to do, what not to do, and some friendly reminders. I’d like to share with you one of my tips: set up Google and Yahoo! alerts for keywords, your brand name, or other things that relate to your reputation. By doing so, you can easily keep up with what kinds of content the search engines are serving up.

Get Closer to the Search Engine Spiders

One of the things I covered in my CNet: Searchlight blog, was the tools for how website owners, webmasters/mistresses, and other professionals can get a little closer to the search engine spiders.

Along with providing more detailed information and answering more and more questions publicly, the greatest advancement they (the Search Engines) have made has been in creating tools to actually give site owners (who have validated their sites) more information about their sites than they’ve ever experienced before.

Whether you use Google Webmaster Central or Yahoo!’s Site Explorer, this article goes into the pros and cons of each tool and how it relates to SEO.

Take your Business to the Local Search Level

One of the areas that I’m starting to see a rapid growth in, is local search. It’s important that business owners start taking advantage of this growth in popularity, so that they claim a stake in this soon-to-be competitive market. Believe it or not, there are a number of free tools where you can list your business locally through the major search engines. I talk about those tools and the importance of taking advantage of them in my article on CNET: Searchlight my SEO blog. One example of the tools I discuss is Google’s local.google.com. By following a few, easy instructions, you are well on your way into the local listings.

Refresh Your SEO with these Great Tips

From creating great title tags to crafting specialized, keyword-rich content, there is a lot out there that you can do to implement some great SEO on your website or blog. In this article I wrote for my CNET: Searchlight blog, I cover ten things that should be at the forefront of every SEO’s mind. Some topics for discussion include: ensuring each of your websites or blogs are unique, writing compelling meta descriptions, and building a strong, internal linking structure. Be sure to read my post for more details about what you can do to improve or maintain your SEO health.

Preserve PageRank with an Easy Fix

Big name companies often miss out on one of the basic concepts of SEO: Canonicalization, which means “identifying and consolidating to one, definitive source.” How are they missing out? Grab a handful of your favorite companies and see whether or not they have a http://www.yourdomain.com and a http://yourdomain.com that leads to the same page. You’d be surprised how many “culprits” there are out there that don’t have a 301 permanent redirect in place to preserve their home page’s Page Rank. By having two sets of pages out there, it creates duplicate content because the search engines see pages based on their URLs. So instead of splitting your Page Rank between two, identical URLs, take control over your traffic and make sure you have a 301 permanent redirect in place.

For more on this topic, read my full post on my CNet: Searchlight blog.