SEO; There is More Than Meets the Eye

A misunderstanding that is prevalent in marketing is that SEO is all about getting leads. Even though this is a big part of it there are some things that need to be kept in mind when going the SEO route. The following are a few pointers.

The No-follow Tag

Whenever the need arises to hide pages from search results there are those who use the no-follow tags. The truth is that whenever Google is doing a search, it will still take into account pages marked with no-follow tags. The pages will still be indexed by search engines. When no-follow tags are used, the main thing that is happening is that the page loses PageRank. The only way to avoid page indexing is to use proper commands.

When to Use Outbound Links

When linking your website that is not relevant to your social media, then it may not be worth it. Looking at it from a PageRank point of view, external links take away the punch of the amount of traffic that should lead to your site. Things have changed a lot since the early days of search engines. The algorithms used these days are much more efficient and intelligent. The issue here is that outbound links run the risk of looking like spam, which discourages traffic.

Does this all mean outbound or external links should never be used? Off course not. There is a time and a place for everything. Studies have been done where websites were created using and not using outbound links. These were fake websites created strictly for experimental reasons. Interestingly, sites with external links did better from a PageRanking perspective. The bottom line? Linking to other good sites is a good idea.

URL Architecture

You must be careful fixing anything related to URL architecture. This is because it is easy to mess up anything connected to SEO while doing this. At the same time, bad URL structure is unacceptable and it is a very common problem. Having folders organized properly is also a necessity. If it isn’t then you can expect a few problems. When URL architecture is changed make sure that older web pages do a 301 to the newer ones. Also when the URL is listed as a folder there is the risk of users thinking that it is a working or operational page. Therefore, internal links leading to old pages should also be updated.

Frames

When it comes to frames there is one very important rule. And that is to not use them as tools to navigate around the website. This makes pages and content difficult to index and hurts the website's architecture and makes it hard for users to reference content using links.

Using Transcripts

Google has started to include videos, whenever possible when displaying search result pages. This is a relatively recent trend and has become very popular. Therefore using transcripts and captions has become very important for video material. In fact, Liveclicker did a study on this and they found that there is an approximately 16% increase in revenue whenever transcripts were used. If there is a lot of transcription to be added then there is always the option of using a scroll box.