Tag Archives: seo

FAQ: What are follow and nofollow links?

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Follow and nofollow links refer to a tag that can be placed in the linking (anchor) code of your website.  It usually comes in the form of the “rel” attribute.  It looks something like this:

<a href=”http://www.jtgraphic.net” rel=”nofollow”>jtGraphicn.net</a>

Why are these attributes on links important?  They help organize the internet and give relevancy to websites that deserve it and don’t give relevancy to websites that don’t.  Google and other search engines use this information in the “rel” attribute to tabulate the score, or authority, that one website gives to another.

Getting a large number of follow links increases the relevancy of your website for the keywords relevant to the link.  Usually the “anchor text” or text between the <a>…</a> tags is what most directly contributes to keyword relevancy.  When websites build in areas where users can submit their own information, they tend to use nofollow links to reduce spam related link follows.  Simply neglecting to include a “rel” attribute makes a link a “follow” link.

You can get follow links many places, including top comments areas on blogs, guest posting, press coverage, and article submission sites.  There are a ton of other places to get follow links as well.  What do you find is the best way to get follow links?

How to Build and Drive Website Traffic

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Probably the single biggest question about building websites I get is how to drive traffic. I’m not saying it’s the most important part, but it’s definitely key. Content is king, sure, but if you don’t have traffic, you could be pouring your heart out to a wall. Really what every website wants is quality, converting, long-lasting traffic in high volumes.

There are essentially four ways to drive to your website, which are: search engines, direct traffic, referral links, and your ‘list’. I’m going to teach you how each of those things work on an intermediate level and what their value is compared to the others. I’ll be covering some of the more detailed finer points of these traffic sources in the future. This is basically a primer for what is to come.

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Series: 7 Weeks to a Successful Blog: Week 4

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Spread the word. Build links.

Now that you’re interacting with the community, you need to get out to other sources of information and spread the word. What will happen is you will increase your relevancy in SEO and generate some buzz about your blog project while you’re at it.

There are some shortcuts too, but they really detract from the authenticity of your venture. If you’re purely business minded, you can’t argue with the results though. One of the big lessons we learn in this post is that money and paying for advertising are great ways to accelerate the growth of your blog.

Commitment

15 hours or more and/or article creation/submission fees.

Produce Fresh Types of Content

This is no different than last week or the week before. I’m only going to mention it this less and less, but I don’t want to undermine how important it is. This is why people come to visit you and it’s why they’ll come back. Don’t disappoint them.

Always be creative with your content and do new things. Try a series like this one, make lists, solicit guest posts, or do interviews. Remember to always be changing things up and keeping things new for your users. When you’re developing your plan for posts each month, before choosing your topics, try determining the types of posts you’ll do.

Writing and Submitting Articles

The best way to do attract attention is to write for other people and get websites to talk about you. Write articles for article directories and do guest posting. Spend all of your time writing articles, but not for your own blog. Submit those articles to article submission sites and other blogs for guest posts.

You’ll have the most success writing 500+ word articles and pounding the pavement. That should cover most of the article directories out there in terms of minimum requirements and is a decent enough sized post for most blogs to accept it as a guest post. Make sure each article is unique, but about similar or the same topics. Link back to your websites main page or specific posts in every article.

If you’re not a great writer (you should probably reconsider doing something like a blog, but that’s for a different day), you can pay copy writing services to write for you. If you’re looking to go the even cheaper route, you can pay a service to build links for you. I’ve had amazing results with seolinkwheelers.com. I don’t really feel like link building services and copy writers are authentic to a real product, but one really must argue for their effectiveness and they do have their place.

I’ll hopefully be doing a post on link building later this week, so keep an eye out for that.

Problems I Had Last Week

My biggest problem last week was staying on track. I had a lot of business and life things happen, and the week just flew by. Life can be tough sometimes and it will catch up with you, but you need to push through! Be committed and don’t fall behind and you’ll be successful.

Last week, did you have any problems? successes? failures? Let me know.

Automated Way to Find Google Pagerank

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I was looking for an automated way to get Google Pagerank for a few hours and came up with quite a few things, but not many of them were very elegant.  Essentially, Google doesn’t provide an API and it’s against their terms of service to hit them up in an automated way.  I found quite a few places that have come up with close algorithms and calculate PR for sites, but that’s just not accurate enough for me.  The other option is to hit their PR URL that the toolbar uses.  For example:

http://toolbarqueries.google.com/search?client=navclient-auto&hl=en&ch=61470319184&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&features=Rank&q=info:http%3A%2F%2Fforums.digitalpoint.com%2Fshowthread.php%3Ft%3D164713

That returns the PR of Digital Point Forums, where I found that information, but you can’t change the reference URL, because of a checksum.  That’s the &ch= variable in the URL.  I’m working on a project that needs to look up PR on the fly though, so that just won’t work.  I ended up finding a script that I could use, but the guy didn’t put his URL in the comments, and I since can’t find it – oops.  I think he deserves a pat on the back though.  If this belongs to you, or you know who’s it is, let me know.

I tweaked the script and installed it on my Toolerific.com website.  Now you can go there and check the PR of any site without a captcha, which is nice.  The tool is here.

Now, the best automated way to check pagerank is to hit that site with cURL and take out the value of the HTML tag with the id “value”.  The reason that is the best automated way to do it is because Google may change their checksum rules and that will break the source code that I used to generate it, but that site will always be laid out like that, so you don’t have to worry about changing anything.  If you want the code I used, you can view it here.

Update: This doesn’t seem to work ALL of the time.  I suspect it has something to do with the checksum, but can’t figure it out.  Seems to be about 27% of the time, which isn’t great odds, but it works MOST of the time.  I’ll keep you posted if I find out more.