The SEO community has known for a long time that links using the rel=”no follow” attribute do not pass pagerank. Most marketers ignore these links as part of their SEO mix and see no value here. While Google has acknowledged that these links do not pass pagerank, they have never said that these links “provide no value to webmasters”.
When someone Google’s your company name you want to own that first page of results and control the content that shows up. The first and best way to do this is to build the reputation and raking of your social media properties.
This includes your Facebook and Twitter pages, Linkedin profile, Youtube account, Pinterest account, and any other social media/business profile pages that you control. This will increase the SEO strength of these pages and make it more likely that these pages will show up in the #2, #3, #4, #5 spots in the search engine results when someone searches for your name.
This can give your brand name some protection from people who may be writing negative things about you on the internet. When someone searches for your brand name, they will see your main website in the top-ranking spot, followed by all of your social media accounts and profile pages. This is a wonderful result compared to a scenario where someone searches for your brand name, and they see a wide range of people writing negative things about you on sites like Ripoffreport.com, Yelp, Tripadvisor, or perhaps in their own blog articles or news postings.
For some nightmare stories about Negative Yelp Reviews, follow the link to another blog post about this very subject.
You can see this concept at work in the screen shot below. The green arrows represent websites where we are in control of the content. The red arrow is shown next to Yelp – a website where we do not have the ability to control the content. Ideally, you would want Yelp to be completely off of the first page of the results or at least below the fold.
Are you the owner of a small business and are pissed off that Yelp won’t publish your customer’s positive reviews? Join the group. A growing list of small business owners are up in arms since they’ve realized that Yelp is filtering out their positive reviews yet publishing every bad review.
Why Should You Care?
With over 90% of people using search engines as their 1st step to research your company and products, online ratings and review websites like Yelp are becoming more and more critical to your success; whether you know it or not.
A rich text snippet is a segment of HTML code that is placed on web pages that ‘marks up’ the page and tells Google and other search engines explicit pieces of information about that page. A picture tells a thousand words. See the screen capture below of a typical Google search results page that includes a rich text snippet:
Why do we care about rich text snippets? The answer is easy to understand. The reason we care about rich text snippets is that they show up as visually appealing additions to the Google search result listing. Let’s take a look at a Google SERP and it quickly becomes clear that links that have a visually appealing picture or image are far more likely to be click on.
In a post-Penguin Google world, there is nothing more important than writing your content naturally like a conversation. Normally you think of your web content as pages of your site, but from a user perspective, great content should be pervasive in all your communications materials. That includes web pages, instruction manuals, press releases, sales materials, FAQs and for E-Commerce sites, category page descriptions and product descriptions.
In this post, I have a few simple tips that will help you create the type of rich content that consumers will eat up and Googl’e Penguin won’t spit out like chum. At the end of the day, its all about getting people to buy your product or sign up for your newsletter, or download your software or complete the lead form. So speak to them like you would if they came in your place of business.
Even if you hate Google+ and are avoiding it like the plague, the reality is that millions of users are logged into their Google accounts while searching for your product or service. That means their search results are highly personalized for them, including the social extensions +1 numeric counts. Bigger is better, so in this article you’ll find out how to aggregate your +1 counts so that when a user sees any page of your site in the search results or in an ad, the total number of +1′s will show up in the count!
IRCE has now come and gone. It was bigger and broader than ever. With so many vendors and presentations to sift through, I thought I’d save you some time and give my top 10 takeaways from the conference. If you want an in depth play by play of the sessions I attended, you can find those notes on my seo4anyone Twitter account.
Thanks to the infographic below, we can take a look at the different ranking signals that Google uses to determine your ranking position in their search results.
In this basic SEO Infographic, it boils down the complexity of search engine optimization into 3 simple steps. Check it out and scroll down to the bottom to read my commentary.
On November 3, Google posted a blog update on their Official blog site talking about how they have updated their ranking signals to escalate the importance of fresh and timely content in the search results. As a result of this … Read More
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