There’s a great article on MarketingProfs about sculpting your sites page rank to improve your search engine ranking.
The act of optimizing your site for better results and higher ranks in search engines is commonly referred to as Search Engine O optimization. Working some SEO into your blog certainly has its benefits.
Before I go further, let me say I am still in the process of learning all this SEO jazz. Really, it works out well, because it allows me to pass the information on to you all. But I say that to let you know that while what I say may work, I have no reference as to how well, and so forth. So you all get to learn with me ;)
Now, there are 2 things to take away from the Marketing Profs’ link.
- Every site has Google juice
- Google juice allows you to place a higher importance on relevant links
Your site has a certain amount of Google juice, as defined by Google (the juice is raspberry, by the way). This “juice” makes up your Google PageRank. You can direct this juice or disperse this juice all across your site, causing more important pages to have more juice, and thus rank better in Google’s search results. One way to direct the Google juice is by using the “nofollow” indicator when creating a hyperlink.
It looks something like this:
< href="yoururl.com" rel="nofollow" >
Just like it sounds, the rel tag tells Google not to go to that page (follow the link) preventing your Google juice from being distributed to pages that otherwise would not benefit as much from it.
When having multiple links to a single page, you can use Google juice to control which link receives the largest flow, or no flow at all, focusing the flow of the juice.
How do I apply this?
The pages to apply the rel=”nofollow” tag are those pages of lesser importance for showing up in a search result. Here are a few: Copyright, Privacy Policy, and Comment Policy. Depending on whether you want your about page to show up in searches, that could be another. I have also applied them to my links that are outgoing to social networks like del.icio.us.
When applying the notion from takeaway #2 above, you can also focus your Google juice to each blog post by adding the rel=”nofollow” to multiple links that point to the same post that aren’t your permanent link (the link that’s in the title of the post).
For example:
The post you’re reading now has 2 links to the actual single page of this post. Those two links are the posts title (which is the permanent link), and the “Click to Comment” link at the bottom of this post. I can focus Google juice to this post by applying the rel=”nofollow” tag to the “Click to Comment” link, forcing all of the flow to go straight through the permanent link.
Hope this post benefited you all. If you haven’t read the MarketingProfs post above, I would encourage you to do so!