Link Love Friday with Cory B.
Link: Best Practices for Product Search
Love: optimizing your universal search presence. The natural search results aren’t the only results that deserve optimization attention. Universal search requires a holistic approach to SEO where you need to also focus on optimizing for local, blogs, videos, images, and if you have an e-commerce website, product search which makes an appearance in the search results as shopping results. Check out the Product Search for Webmasters video from Google on how you can go about optimizing for shopping results. Also, you’ll need a Google Base account in order to get started with the optimization.
Link: Pagerank Sculpting
Love: focusing your efforts on more important things…I kid (sort of), the news from Google that Pagerank sculpting does not work as SEO’ers thought is important. The Google man himself Matt Cutts explains it on his blog. The basics:
- Your page has a Pagerank score of 8
- It has 4 outgoing links
- Left as is, each link passes along 2 points of Pagerank, 8 divided by 4
- Previously, if 2 of those links pointed at less important pages, “Contact Us” and “About Us” for example, some SEOs would nofollow those links
- In doing so, it was believed this allowed the other 2 links to pass along 4 points of Pagerank rather than 2
- Pagerank sculpted
- Now, nofollowing those important links does not pass Pagerank points in this simple way and requires Pagerank sculpting using a number of other techniques
Here is a SEOmoz post of the topic that also provides pros and cons from the SEO perspective.
Link: SocialMention
Love: simple and reliable tools that allow you to track your company and its keywords across multiple channels – blogs, microblogs (Twitter, FriendFeed), social bookmarks, comments (blog, forum or otherwise), news, video and more. It’s extremely easy to get bogged down with tools just as it is with too much data. Personally, I tend to stick with those that are simple, efficient and reliable and do not often switch unless the tools will allow me to provide even more actionable insight – Occam wins. SocialMention is simple and reliable. Not only are you provided with links to blogs, blog comments, Q&A sites, social bookmarks, and more, that mention your company or keywords, but SocialMention also provides data on sentiment (positive to negative mentions), reach (number of unique authors mentioning the entered keyword) and other metrics.
Link: 10 Ways to Make Your Site Accessible Using Web Standards
Love: making your website not only able to be found, but actually accessible to everyone. Think of the user. Remain outwardly focused (just like phenomenal non-profits). Not everyone uses the same setup for surfing the internet, so you should ensure nearly all users are able to actually find information on your site once they’ve found you on the search engines. There are a few pointers in this post that play a role in SEO:
- Supply proper meta tags – small piece of the pie, but a piece of the pie nonetheless
- Use accesible navigation – descriptive title and header tags provide keyword relevancy and help structure your site, which can help improve the ability of Google to provide Site InLinks
- Supply alternative content for images
Link: Bing Whitepaper for Webmasters and Publishers
Love: when you get information about search from the mouths of the leviathans. This whiteapaper, distributed by Microsoft, details features of Bing, the layout of the search results page, the structure and details of the search results page and much more information.
BONUS Link Love Laughter Section: The Year The Media Died
