Marketing, Advertising and Web Design Tips by Jeff Swanson

For those of you looking for marketing and advertising tips, please check out my new blog. I’ll still be posting to this blog, but it’ll be a wider range of topics, not just marketing.

Remember when you’re trying to optimize a page not to over-do it. Let’s take a retail site for example. The problem that many sites I’ve seen face is that they try to stuff tons of keywords into the title tag of the homepage hoping to rank for all of these words. So, if this person had a DVD store, for example, would place every genre in the title tag and maybe even some popular movie titles.

It’s true that your homepage is usually the most powerful page on your site, but try to keep focused on one or two keywords. By adding additional keywords, you are diluting the actual theme of that page and may not rank for any of the keywords you’re trying for anyway.

Instead, use interior pages as focused, relevant landing pages. So, instead of placing Drama DVD’s in the title of the homepage, save it for www.nameofyoursite.com/drama-dvds. Of course, this is just a rule of thumb. It’s not necessarily wrong to add DVD genres to your title tag, but just be careful. Feel free to go nuts with the meta-keywords tag. This is a great place to add some of these keywords that you don’t necessarily want in the title tag.

This makes sense in the search engines if you think about it. If I’m specifically looking for Drama DVD’s, I would rather be taken to the Drama DVD page versus your homepage, in which I would have to click to get to the content I want to see.
 

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.