Freelance Web Designer » SEO

Pagination: Best Practices for SEO & User Experience

Vel — Sat, 06 Mar 2010 09:47:53 +0000

We’ve been getting a lot of questions in Q+A and on the road at events like last week’s Miva Merchant conference, Online Marketing Summit and the YCombinator conference about how to properly paginate results for search engines. In this post, we’ll cover the dangers, opportunities and optimization tactics that can best ensure success. The best part? These practices aren’t just good for SEO, they’re great for usability and user experience too!

Why is Pagination an SEO Issue?

Pagination, the practice of segmenting links to content on multiple pages, affects two critical elements of search engine accessibility.

Crawl Depth: Best practices demand that the search engine spiders reach content-rich pages in as few “clicks” as possible (turns out, users like this, too). This also impacts calculations like Google’s PageRank (or Bing’s StaticRank), which determine the raw popularity of a URL and are an element of the overall algorithmic ranking system.
Duplicate Content: Search engines take duplication very seriously and attempt to show only a single URL that contains any given piece of content. When pagination is implemented improperly, it can cause duplicate content problems, both for individual articles and the landing pages that allow browsing access to them.

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Keyword Targeting: How to Employ Multiple Keywords for SEO & Conversions | SEOmoz

Vel — Sat, 23 Jan 2010 14:28:12 +0000

At some point during your University’s SEO 201: Advanced Keyword Research & Targeting class, they probably gave a few lectures and case studies on how to effectively split up your keyword research list across multiple pages and use those terms/phrases to maximum benefit. But, for those who might have missed that lesson (which would be, umm, all of us, since no formal education in SEO exists), a handy refresher might be in order.

Many SEOs struggle to answer questions like:

How many keywords can I target on a page?
Should I try to target all of my most important terms on my homepage (since it gets the most link juice)?
When I should try to target similar phrases together vs. splitting them up?

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8 Predictions for SEO in 2010 | seomoz

Vel — Sat, 19 Dec 2009 12:43:51 +0000

“#1 – This Real-Time Search Thing is Outta Here

Microsoft initially beat Google to the punch in announcing their integration with Twitter data in their SERPs. And in response, last Monday, Google released what is, in my opinion, an early test version of Twitter integration that’s nowhere near ready for prime-time. Google has a history of jumping the gun to prevent other companies from stealing the press narrative, but in this case, I think it’s seriously damaging (and nearly everyone, consumer or search enthusiast, agrees) their usability and relevance.”

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5 Simple Tips for Better SEO Value from Your Feeds | Seomoz

Vel — Sat, 21 Nov 2009 15:14:49 +0000

“I’ve been connecting with a lot of site owners who are re-entering or ramping up their efforts in the blogosphere. I suspect this has something to do with the focus on content creation + linkbait in the SEO world’s dialogue as well as the potential new traffic streams bloggers are feeling from the surge of linking via Twitter. Whatever the case, there’s a few critical pieces that can help make for greater SEO value from blogging and feeds in general (and most of these haven’t been covered in my previous posts on blog optimization).”

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Link Building Has Changed | seomoz.org

Vel — Sat, 14 Nov 2009 18:06:56 +0000

“When I first started in SEO, link acquisition was almost always a manual process. I’d search the engines for links that pointed to the competition, find relevant directories and link lists, email relevant sites and beg, borrow or bribe (aka buy advertising) to get a link. I tried reciprocal link building (and did some pretty dumb stuff). Then, as I got more intertwined in the SEO community, I found vendors who built large networks of sites, spammed blogs/forums/guestbooks and ran text link sales operations. I leveraged these services to help clients rank better, almost always with great success. Then I met Matt Cutts, found out more about Google’s webspam team, saw penalties and their impact (remember Florida?) and even found some sites we worked on in the Sandbox.”

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SEO Cheat Sheet: Anatomy of A URL

Vel — Sun, 11 Oct 2009 14:16:16 +0000

Many SEO topics are like good games – you can learn the basics in a few hours, but really mastering them can take years. One topic that seems simple but that generates a ton of questions here on SEOmoz is URLs: How to construct them, how to optimize them, what the pieces are, etc. In the spirit of great SEOmoz cheat sheets like Danny’s web developer cheat sheet, I’ve decided to put together a 1-page guide to all things URL. You can click on the image below for a larger image or download the PDF (105KB).

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Design Trends: The Single Purpose Homepage

Vel — Sat, 03 Oct 2009 10:28:19 +0000

This post focuses on a design style that’s both retro (it’s been around a long time) and emerging (the popularity, at least to me, feels like it’s on the rise) – the single-purpose homepage.

Is It Good for SEO?

It depends… If you have the type of site that’s very product focused and single-purpose in nature, this can be an ideal page type. Even if you run a blog, promote articles, or have other types of secondary content, you can always embed links to them in smaller, more background-style fonts and retain crawlability and good information architecture.

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Case Study: How Much Do Rankings Matter?

Vel — Sat, 15 Aug 2009 09:01:19 +0000

We’ve heard a lot of speculation lately about the future of rankings – the SERPs are clearly evolving, and what was once a simple list of 10 results has gradually become personalized, localized, and wikified. It begs the question: As the SERPs diversify, do rankings matter as much as they used to? Recently, I had an opportunity to collect some data on this question. Earlier this year, a client suffered a ranking drop for their primary keyword (likely connected to Google’s alleged brand-related changes), which has recently recovered. So, I decided to run some numbers to see how that ranking drop and subsequent recovery affected search traffic.

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