Marketing, Advertising and Web Design Tips by Jeff Swanson

Adding rel="nofollow"’s to appropriate links on your site is a helpful way to optimize your site for the search engines and maximizes the link juice that you have. Got it? If not, here’s a brief definition of what I’m speaking to:

rel="nofollow" is an attribute that you can add to links on a web page. It goes inside of an "a tag." Example - <a href="http://www.yoursite.com" rel="nofollow">Name of link</a>. What the rel="nofollow" does is tell crawlers, like google, not to follow this link. When that happens, you aren’t passing any of the popularity of your page to that link. This is very helpful for links to contact pages or other pages that you are not trying to rank in the search engines. In other words, you might as well pass the value of your page to other pages that you feel are important - and want to optimize for search engines.

Link juice or popularity is basically how powerful your page is according to the search engines. If Google thinks your page is very important, then it has quite a bit of link juice. You can pass that link juice to other pages on your site, or out to other sites. You want to point that link juice to places where it can help you, therefore, adding a rel="nofollow" to pages like About Us and Contact Us makes sense. Why waste any juice on those pages when you can increase the juice that goes to more valuable interior pages. 

An education is not enough to get you by in the fast-paced marketing world. You need to know the history of the industry and keep up on trends that are forming. Because I love you all, I’ve constructed a list of the five best books I own that teach essential skills and strategies.

5. Hey Whipple, Squeeze This

3. The Brand Gap

4. Made to Stick 

2. Copywriters Handbook

1. Ogilvy on Advertising

Happy reading. Please leave comments with other useful books. I’d love to hear some suggestions.