ProStores Tips and Tutorials - One Take Media

Good interview with Google’s Matt Cutts (head of web spam) by Web Pro News.

I’d strongly suggest you all watch it, its only 10 minutes long.

A recent article at SEOmoz, http://www.seomoz.org/blog/footer-link-optimization has me thinking about footer links and their value to your site and its rankings.

Most people have a footer with links in their site. Some use it to list pages that they don’t deem as important as the links at the top of their site but don’t want to just not link to them. Some people use footer links to try to manipulate their rankings buy using highly target keyphrases or keywords linking to their own or other’s content. (I fall into the latter).

But as the article suggests, as does a couple the comments, this method may be falling under more scrutiny by the search engines. Rand Fishkin, President of SEOmoz lays out a good article showing examples of that he would consider good and poor Footer link structure.

Tom_C points out that he tries to encourage his clients, at best, not depend on footer links for helping with ranking. He even cites an incident where Yahoo Site Submit even rejected a client site until he removed the footer links.

Long and the short of it? Read Rand’s article, make a well thought out decision, maybe answer the question, “Will these footer links really benefit the people who visit my site?”.

I know I’ll be thinking about it long and hard.

Tracking your backlinks is very important. Here are a couple methods to do so.

Sign up for google webmaster tools, it will show you a list of some of your backlinks. good article on finding your links from Google. http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2007/02/discover-your-links.html

You can go to www.yahoo.com and put linkdomain:yoursite.com -domain:yoursite.com into the search bar.

I also recommend you sign up for Yahoo Site explorer and you can view a large portion of those who link back to you that yahoo has in its database.

http://siteexplorer.search.yahoo.com
type in the search bar site:www.website.com

Click the Inlinks button > click the first drop down and choose “except from this domain” then once that loads again move to the second drop down and choose “Entire Site”. This site has a few tools that are very beneficial. Get the SEO Link Analysis plug in by Yoast, it gives you on page analysis of the backlinks and is very useful. While your at it sign up for Yoast’sRSS feed. Sign up for our ProStores Tips and Tricks Feed as well.

There a lot of third party tools as well. http://www.seomoz.org/toolbox/backlinks is one i use a lot, it will also show you a historical list of your backlinks. It uses siteexplorer but like I mentioned before it will show you how many you used to have. So it provides a good basis for comparison.

Learn 10 easy tips to create seo and customer friendly Title Tags.

http://www.conversationmarketing.com/2008/09/10-seo-and-marketing-friendly.htm

Read this, then check out my post about creating custom page titles in ProStores.
http://www.onetakemedia.net/blog/prostores-tip-creating-custom-page-titles/

What is duplicate content? Duplicate content is exactly what is sounds like, multiple pages in which the bulk of the content is similar.

Two issues (of several) with this:
1. When google crawls your site it compares your content against other sites, if your site has copy that is a duplicate of another site typically the site that is older will get the credit, so by not creating your own unique content your effectively hamstringing yourself.
2. If you do this to often you may find your pages falling out of the index altogether by not providing unique content.

A great article about Duplicate Content and how Google handles it.
http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2008/09/demystifying-duplicate-content-penalty.html

Knowing how search engines see your site will enable you to better write content for your site.

Here is a link to a great tool that will show you how Search Engines see your site. http://www.seo-browser.com/

Ian Lurie of Portent Interactive and Conversation marketing.com, an internet marketing blog, gives a presentation discussing how to pick keywords that will help grow your business. Read more »

Keywords, what are they? Simply put keywords or keyword phrases are the words or phrases people use to find your site with. They are words that may be used by viewers searching for information.

“A keyword is a single word or multi-word phrase that relates to both the product or service you want to advertise and the way people search for that product or service. When potential customers search for information related to your keywords, your ads or website may be displayed.” http://help.yahoo.com/l/us/yahoo/ysm/sps/faqs/camaccstruc/keywords.html

If you have any questions feel free to e-mail me at matt@onetakemedia.net

From the Prostores Knowledgebase

Adding Default and Custom Meta Descriptions and Keywords to Additional Pages

Currently, ProStores only displays Meta content (keywords and descriptions) on product pages. Meta content can be added to other store pages with the addition of some SSML code.
Read more »

Welcome!

I’m glad you’ve taken a moment to read our blog. The whole point of this blog is to provide tips, tutorials and articles relating to web design. Now we do specialize in work in the ProStores E-commerce system but I will be talking about general design principles as well as SEO (search engine optimization) tips and concepts.

We will update at least twice a week with a new tip, tutorial or article.

So pull up a chair and grab some coffee, or another drink of your choice, and enjoy the read!

Matthew Montgomery
President - One Take Media

I’d love to hear from you, please feel free to e-mail me any time at matt@onetakemedia.net