If your site has links away to either affiliate pages or even affiliate accounting pages be very careful to apply rel=no follow tags. I have seen it affect many pages recently as they immediately move from number 2 to number 32.
Essentially, a link away from a page assumes that you are linking to this page because you are vouching for it’s content. If you are not voting for the amazing content on the page you are linking to, be sure to install the rel=no follow tag. This means that … yes, I am linking but I am not voting for this link.
The other issue is that you need to install the no follow so that your page rank doesn’t bleed off to these sites.
(The affiliate accounting pages I mentioned above are sites that help you calculate affiliate commissions. These generally go to the accounting site then redirect to the target site. This is the worst, as you are vouching for a redirect and Google will kill your site for it as you look like a thin affiliate site and remember they like thick non affiliate looking sites.)
Localized optimization is very important as well. If you optimized loacal pages for Kansas City SEO, St. Louis SEO, Denver SEO you might be amazed at the bump your site may receive. The difference between optimizing for an entire state like Kansas or Missouri probably would be ineffective as the searcher will probably not type in SEO Kansas as much as SEO Kansas City or something similar.
Make sure you link to your interior pages, as well and just not the home page.
Hey Gang,
I am a huge fan of off page SEO or optimization. Things like this Blog, Feedburner, Flickr, You Tube, MySpace, Facebook etc. There is an amazing amount of interlinking and blazing fast indexing that can take your site straight out of the sandbox.
Try this, then thank me by commenting here and giving me some link love.
Open a blog here call it whateveryouwant.wordpress.com but make sure that your sitename and or products are represented in the title URL. So if your selling baby bottles have it be something like babybottles.wordpress.com. Then post a story about your product or something interesting, then link a couple times to “interior” pages on your site, not just your home page. With me so far? Good…
Now take the pictures that you would normally upload to your blog and go to Flickr and set up a similar account over there. Upload your pictures and add descriptions like baby bottle from baby bottles.com
Then go back to wordpress and go into widgets and ad the Flickr widget. Hold down your control key and click on it then fill in the info from Flickr. Guess what? Now your Flickr images are showing up in the right nav of you wordpress homepage. 
Now go back to widgets and add the RSS option. Go back to your wordpress homepage and go to the bottom and click your new RSS feed icon and copy the RSS Feed URL.
Go to Feedburner and tell them about your new blog and subscribe your feed to them.
You’re going global baby.
Tomorrow, see if your new blog is getting traffic in wordpress blog stats and you’ll be amazed that traffic will be coming from Google, Feedburner, Wordpress etc.
Then just keep it interesting and rolling. Oh, one other thing remember the Link Love.
When rebuilding or changing websites, I often want to eliminate some pages or change the page names for existing pages.
Examples might be:
New content, bad page names that aren’t specific, algo changes or just a change in the theme concept for the site. In the past I have had page names like internet_marketing.html that due to current algo concepts I wanted to change to internet-marketing.html. Maybe you had a poll up at one time that was indexed and people are still landing on the poll and bouncing away.
It’s so easy to forget to go into your .htaccess file and drop in a redirect.
******
Redirect /olddirectory/oldfile.html http://yoursite.com/newdirectory/newfile.html
******
Many, Many companies and individuals will roll out a new site redesign only to have their page rank flushed away on the first re-cache of their site. This also has a huge impact if you have inbound links to the old pages.
“Friends don’t let friends forget 301 redirects”
The move to Universal Search sticks a fork in organic search.
I shall explain:
Up until now good old SEO would give you a fighting chance at ranking on Google’s search result pages and your site could be 1 out of 10 sites listed on that coveted 1st page.
With the introduction of Google Video (YOU TUBE), Google Books, Google Products, Google Scholar into the search result mix. Your chance of showing up on the first page just moved to 1 in 5 or less.
For the non believers, open a new tab right now and do a Google search for “Foo Fighters”
Do you see the changes? Google News, Google(YOUTUBE), etc……….. Spooky
Anyway, what’s going on is a monetizing of the organic search results. Normally offlimits to all the search engines this center area is now fair game as Google will sell ads on the youtube search results. Now I can buy an ad on the foo fighters video that will run a crawl line along while the video is playing.
Mom and Pop web sites will be relegated to the second or third pages.
Two things need to happen, either users will get used to clicking to the second or third pages to start looking. Or, web sites will need to estabilsh themselves in Googles parallel programs. Get some original video content in YOUTUBE, create an E-Book, Hotlink to your images on Flickr etc.
Think Multimedia………. then find a location on the web thats NOT your website for your multimedia then link to it and it to you.
I read an article yesterday that indicated that the code obfusctaor (above) would be a great addition for any site that has an affiliate realtionship and wants to bypass the “thin site” rules for Google.
The tool will work beautifully for it’s intended purpose……..but…….
I don’t see how it’s white hat for starters and secondly it violates the human/robots visibility rules. (If the robot see’s anything different than what a visitor will see it penalizes the site).
This stems from flash swap rules and general SEO rule bending. The most generalized versions of this happen when a web builder lists the same keyword in the background of a site then blends it in with the background color.
Similar, but different ideas here. If it will work to hide excessive javascript and css in the main site files then it’s a great tool. It would be just as easy to move to side files and include scripts but thats another article, I was just reaching for a legitimate use…
TNT
Scott White
