Hot answers tagged seo
86
Yes, putting important keywords closer to the beginning of a title does help SEO. SEOmoz's ranking factors survey agrees, as do other sources.
Keyword Use Anywhere in the Title Tag
66% very high importance
Keyword Use as the First Word(s) of the Title Tag
63% high importance
Keyword Use in the Root Domain Name
60% high importance
...
61
The short version is that that the various tags and CSS have different purposes.
<h1>Whatever</h1>, for example, carries a certain amount of meaning along with its use: "This is a header, an important–first-level one" and so on. Some parsers also use the hx tags(and others) to create an outline of the document's structure which can be used for ...
59
Although there seems to be less difference now than there was in the past, hyphens are recommended if you want each of the terms in your URL recognized as an individual word.
The reason for this is that search engines find it easier to treat hyphens as word separators, just as they are in the English language. Underscores, however, are not normally used in ...
45
Check out Google's guide to moving a site:
Use a 301 Redirect to permanently redirect all pages on your old site to your new site.
Check both external and internal links to pages on your site and make sure they are updated to point to the new domain (obviously, for external links this is difficult)
Use the Change of Address tool in Webmaster ...
40
Markup and presentation are different
This is a bit like asking "why should we have walls when we have paint?" :)
HTML tags denote what your content is - this is a headline, this is a list, etc.
CSS denotes what your content should look like - headlines should be blue, lists should be indented this much, the menu should be on the left, etc.
Javsascript ...
31
This won't do what you hope it will do. The redirect will effectively tell Google that URL no longer exists and has moved to your new URL. Plus since the new domain also won't have any links pointing to it it won't transfer any link love over either. The only positive it will have is you can use it as a shorter and more recognizable domain name which is good ...
30
In these days of jQuery (and other JavaScript frameworks) heavy websites then I can't see how it can be a problem, since it's used extensively when you use things like jQuery sliders, transitions, galleries, tickers etc. These are now commonplace and search-engines are clever enough not to blindly penalise their use.
A user states this in the Google ...
29
There is no SEO benefit as self-links are ignored by the PageRank algorithm. However, this is often done (on other sites and blog posts too) for a couple of reasons:
It allows you to refresh the page quickly, and in some instances without the warning that you are resubmitting postdata.
Similarly you can re-request the page from scratch, useful if you for ...
28
There's no circularity implied by having <link rel='canonical' href='http://www.example.com/product/foo' /> appear as http://www.example.com/product/foo.
That's the intent. You're saying "the best URL" for this page is http://www.example.com/product/foo, so when the search engines hit http://www.example.com/product/foo?id=1, or ...
25
I usually don't put the logo or site title in an H1. The way I like to look at it is that each page is a document. That document is about a particular subject, as reflected in the page title and also the main heading. The website itself is just the publisher of the document. So, semantically, it's incorrect to use the site logo or name as the main heading of ...
24
John Conde's answer, which is currently voted #1, is wrong because of an overly pedantic emphasis on PageRank, which is both a) a formula which is detailed in a publicly accessible research paper and b) Internet shorthand for "the sum of all algorithms Google uses to rank pages", which is a far wider topic than PageRank proper.
In the sense intended by a ...
24
(I had to stop writing at some point. I'll probably continually revise this. Keep in mind, this isn't meant to be a comprehensive lesson in SEO. It's meant to help demonstrate how simple SEO is and how to spot the people who have strayed from that reality.)
I actually don't like any of the websites recommended by the above users for the following reasons:
...
24
I highly recommend Google's SEO page, especially their Search Engine Optimization Starter Guide.
Content is king with SEO. Build something interesting and they will come.
21
I would avoid hyphens in the domain name. While they are useful in the path for a file or post, they add unneeded noise to the domain itself. Imagine having to spell it out for someone..."stack dash overflow dot com" just doesn't sound right.
On the other hand, there are likely some domains where a well-placed hyphen would be beneficial. For example: ...
21
Read the full blog post by Google here, http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2010/04/to-slash-or-not-to-slash.html, it covers this exact topic.
Long story short Google does not care if you have a trailing slash. However, it will treat the below 2 paths as separate pages.
http://www.domain.com/some/slug/paths/
http://www.domain.com/some/slug/paths
...
20
According to SEOmoz's article Link Title Attribute and its SEO Benefit:
The title attribute can be used to describe almost any HTML element. A beneficial way to use the title attribute for SEO purposes would be to use it in the link element to provide descriptive text within an anchor tag (which gives you more real estate for your targeted keyword phrases). ...
20
The problem about "click here" links is that they are not meaningful, as obviously a link is there to be clicked! You should try to link something that describes what you are linking.
For instance, instead of using:
There are several books about cooking:
link1
link2
link3
You could write
There are several books about cooking:
The art of cooking
500 ...
19
You will need to have quite a bit of traffic to your site to get those. Keep creating great content. Google will not give those out easy.
Be sure that you have your navigation marked up with semantic HTML and include an id of nav or navigation on your menu. This will help Google know what links are your navigation. (as opposed to a list of links).
Also, ...
19
What are the consequences if a site has the same <title> tag on all the pages, reporting only the site name?
You run the risk of having your pages flagged as duplicate content. The title of a web page is very important for SEO and if all of your pages have the same title you dramatically increase the chances they will be considered duplicate ...
19
Google wants to provide its user base with the best experience possible when browsing the web - this is what retains their customers. A poor page load speed can have a serious effect on user experience, that is arguably the main reason Google sometimes ranks these sites less favorably.
It is also an indication that the site isn't perhaps maintained to a ...
18
It's not just the length, it's being meaningful enough so that tabs in any given browser can be easily differentiated (usability), as well as SEO.
I never go over 80 characters in length, and I assume that it's likely that some indexes will truncate at 60 characters or so. That isn't as big as a concern as it used to be. But, be aware that Google isn't the ...
18
See Page #37 of Google's SEO Report Card document:
Most product main pages have an
opportunity to use one <h1> tag, like
the example above, but they're
currently only using other heading
tags (<h3> in this case) or larger
font styling. While styling your text
so it appears larger might achieve the
same visual presentation, it ...
18
CSS sprites should only be used for decorative elements for this reason - use <img> for elements which are specific to a page and use sprites for decorative elements which are not contextually relevant to the content presented.
If you need a button image for your navigation items it makes much more sense to add that image as a background on the ...
18
Mobile internet use is widely predicted to exceed desktop usage within a couple of years from now, so some sort of mobile optimisation should be a serious consideration for any business.
In many ways, this is especially true for small, localised businesses: predictably enough, a lot of mobile searches tend to be focused on finding things nearby - think of ...
17
From Vanessa Fox, an ex-Google employee:
Google is no longer treating subdomains (blog.widgets.com versus widgets.com) independently, instead attaching some association between them. The ranking algorithms have been tweaked so that pages from multiple subdomains have a much higher relevance bar to clear in order to be shown.
It’s not that the “two ...
17
John Conde is 100% correct in everything he said.
There are two other considerations for purchasing the extra domain.
First is it easy for people to remember the extra domain? Will they possibly type it in on a guess/hope that it is relevant. bn.com is a good example of the first and usedcards.com is a good example of the second. If that is the case and ...
17
There's a great roundup of the factors, and how important they are thought to be, at SEOMoz
http://www.seomoz.org/article/search-ranking-factors#ranking-factors
On-Page (Keyword-Specific) Ranking Factors
Keyword Use Anywhere in the Title Tag
Keyword Use as the First Word(s) of the Title Tag
Keyword Use in the Root Domain Name (e.g. keyword.com)
Keyword ...
17
If you are using HTML5, just pick one; they're equivalent.
HTML5 does allow block-level links, but in your case there's no particular reason to do it, since there's only one block-level element. Personally, I wouldn't do it here, because having the h1 tag on the outside would make it easier to scan for in source code.
Anything else(XHTML, HTML 4, etc) and ...
Only top voted, non community-wiki answers of a minimum length are eligible
