Everyone jumped on the Flickr bandwagon hoping for some free SEO help, and we all got it until that day that Yahoo added ‘NoFollow’ to tags and comments. Boo, hiss. Wait, all is not lost. What you need to do is get right over to this blog post and take some notes:

http://www.bigoakinc.com/blog/flickr-is-not-useless-for-seo/ -
Flickr is NOT useless for SEO by Will Paoletto

1.) Flickr has not added nofollow to discussion boards. For those of you who liked to scout out high PageRank pages and just drop your link as a comment to the photo, which could be accomplished easily if you owned a link-laundering website, you can still do this in the Flickr group discussion boards. Flickr has not yet added nofollow tags to those, and given the preponderance of discussions that revolve around people sharing photos, you can just as easily drop relevant external links in the discussion and reap link juice benefits.

2.) Flickr has not added nofollow to personal profile pages. If you have a personal profile page, you can place targeted anchor text on it, point links at it, and receive full SEO benefit as it gains PageRank.

3.) Flickr has not added nofollow to group pages. If you own a Flickr group, you can still put as many links as you wish on the main group page without fear of them being turned into nofollow.

It’s tough to pick a side. A new site is generally hidden and need a bit of promotion, however like any PPC (Pay Per Click) campaign, it only works as long as the money lasts. A good SEO plan will start slow and snowball, so why not use PPC’s to fuel traffic in the early days? SEO is essential to give longterm results, once the site is established you can once again use PPC campaigns when necessary, such as you promotional times.

When you first launch your site you have no links, you have not been indexed by any search engines, you will not rank for any keywords, so PPC is essential to get noticed.

Once your first PPC campaign has completed you can then use the results to see which keywords converted best, pump the details back into your SEO plan and you should have a site that performs well and is more cost effective.

You will read a lot of SEO articles on content and most articles titles will start, “Content is King”. Yes, and no. Get ready for a huge pitfall.

It is great to have new, fresh content on a regular basis, everyone knows that, but write good copy and don’t over do the SEO.

I like reading blogs, but when confronted with copy that is deliberately loaded with keywords, buzzwords or Gobbleygook words, then I have to stop reading. SEO is for search engine ranking and usually doesn’t go well when you get a human to read your blog.

As Tim Jahn (@timjahn) put in (in Sunday’s #Blogchat) – “Don’t forget about quality of content. Telling tons of people about your shitty content helps no one.”

Copywriters can take your content and make it readable, enjoyable, entertaining, interesting, absorbing, engaging, gripping, enthralling, engrossing, stimulating; informal unputdownable (is that a word?) – so use their services. Don’t let SEO determine how you should write, but don’t forget to add some nice keywords or branding messages.

Suggested reading – Mack Collier’s Blog – The idea that ‘content is king’ in blogging is total bullshit

Site Maps, don’t have one? Then get one.

Search engines love sitemaps – not necessarily for ranking, but for finding links on your site.

Search engines prefer XML site maps, human like HTML site maps. Use both, put them in the root folder of your webserver.

Your CMS may automatically create a site map, but if it doesn’t, then…

Free Tool for Site Maps

Google – http://code.google.com/p/googlesitemapgenerator

What is a ALT tag?

Yahoo Slurp, Googlebot, MSNbot, etc. are automated programs send out by search engines to catalog and index your site. As they are basically computer programs, you can guess that they love text & code. They will not grade you on your lovely images as they really can’t see them. So what to do?

Easy, add some code to describe your image so that the ‘bot’ or ‘spider’ can easily catalog the image. Enter the ALT tag.

A quick example of an image with an ALT tag:

	This is a tree. You know that because you can see it. The ‘bots’ will pick this up partly because I have correctly named the file – ‘tree.jpg’, but in order to help out a little more I am going to add an ALT tag.
Tree	This is the same image with an ALT tag and description

And the code for this is:

alt=”tree” being the part of the code needed for the search engines to ‘see’ this image.

Before you go overboard adding ALT tags to every single image, have a plan. Don’t use the same tags for everything, you have 255 characters to play with, and no need to label spacer.gifs

H1 tags

If you wrote this HTML Code on your page:

H Tags

you would see the following:

This is heading 1

This is heading 2

This is heading 3

This is heading 4

This is heading 5

This is heading 6

H1 tags are one of the most important part of SEO which is the header tag situated in body of a website. It can be termed as the most simple form of header found on a web page. Through h1 tags search engines come to know about the site content details. If its used in proper co-ordination with anchor text and title tag then you can even expect increased density of website traffic from major search engines like Yahoo, Bing and Google.

Although the feature of h1 tags is not new and has present for many years, only in the last few years has its significance grown due to increased demand by Google. It carries much more importance than keyword meta tag and description meta tag. The best position to place these H1 tags is at the header situated above the content.

h2 tags can be used for subtitles, and carry less importance than h1. Only 1 h1 tag should appear on a site.