The ever helpful WordPress uses the phrase “Read more” or “Continue reading” automatically at the end of post excerpts. This is useful since you want your readers to know that they have something more to read and that the post hasn’t ended. However, in terms of SEO this is actually not a good thing because you want search engines to only rank relevant links. Links with generic terms in the anchor text does you no good in terms of SEO, and in fact will somehow show that your WordPress blog is very much about “read” and “reading” due to the number of internal links containing these words as anchor text.’

To combat this problem I would suggest that you simply use nofollow link attribute. You can read more about the nofollow attribute and its uses in our recent DoubleSpark SEO blog entries entitled “Reintroducing the NOFOLLOW Attribute” and “What NOFOLLOW Means for Your SEO Campaign”.

Another way to combat this problem is by doing what we do here at netZtrack, adding the post title so that relevant keywords can be found on the anchor text.

Thanks to Mandar Kotkar for the heads up on this WordPress issue. If you have any post ideas feel free to contact us.

However much we might emphasize the importance of SEO the truth is that people are right when they say that content is still king.

Nowadays, with the advent of blogs, website content has become easier and easier to generate resulting in more and more pages out there about every conceivable topic on earth. It is true that though emphasis is still placed in content this makes it even harder to come up with content that will stand out above (or at list distinctly) from the others. This is a problem because as we all know for a website to be truly successful in its niche it has to have content that will make visitors keep on coming back and even refer the page, whether via links or spoken word, to others. Without great content no amount of SEO will seal you and your website’s reputation.

The funny thing is that right now the general tack people take in order to get their websites to have the content they want is usually by adding a blog to their site. Now there is nothing wrong with blogs. If there were I wouldn’t be writing this blog entry. ^_^ In fact blogs are great especially if you simply want to share your hobby or passion. Blogs are also very good for generating fresh content on a more regular basis. It would be sheer folly to change your homepage’s content daily (unless your website is a news aggregator or is based on some dynamic concept) because it is important for your visitors (especially if you have an online business) to become familiarised with your website in order to help them locate the information they need fast each time they visit the site. Blogs are a good solution for giving your visitors fresher and more updated content. However, you shouldn’t rely on the blog to set your site apart from others in your field. Ok so there are some people out there who are so good that their blogs have become meccas for people in their own field. In search we have Matt Cutts, randfish, William Slawski, etc. But the point is that not everyone churn out as many excellent posts as frequently as they could.

So what’s my point?

My point is simply this if you wish for your website to be known for offering great content do not rely on your blog at once to do that. Instead it is better to consolidate your knowledge into one great resource and then put that up as your main content. It will take a whole lot more effort to come out with such content but in the end if you are able to come out with something that can be considered as one of the classic contents in your field then that will seal the fate of both you and your site. Do continue blogging but take time to publish the really useful resource. In the end your site will rise because of that one single page (or it can be pages if it’s really long…and it will be long if you take on an exhaustive approach to whatever it is you plan to write about) but your blog will not become irrelevant since it will be where people will check for updates. If you lack the time to do this you can just keep on blogging but do not be surprised if even if your blog does well enough, you don’t end up among the ranks of gurus in your field.

It is very much clear that the climatic conditions and the ecological threat are increasing day by day. The environmental problems are increasing and the concepts of Global Warming and Pollution are already increased with a pace never experienced before. Being a SEO this are some of the suggestions which I can give so that we SEOs can contribute our inputs in stopping this hazards.

• Lessen the use of paper: Instead of printing everything out opt to digitize as much as you can. This is true for any business, whether SEO or not. As a good example apple has lessened the use of paper products by making the packaging as small as possible. The insert that came with my new iPod Nano (Thanks hubby!) is really small and asks customers to simply go online to get more information. Since we do not have products to ship out you can lessen the use of paper by corresponding through email, editing drafts before printing them out, lessening handouts during presentations, etc.

• Blog about the environment: It may be the most easy thing which we as Search Engine Optimizers can make blogs which can guide people to avoid doing things which leads to environmental degradation.
• Conserve energy: Since we all spend a huge amount of time in front of the computer I wouldn’t be surprised if many have the same bad habit that I do of leaving the PC on when going on a break. At the very least turn off your monitor or set it to hibernate when going on a long break. Turn off the lights whenever you leave the room and turn off the radio/tv if you are not really watching it and is simply used to having it on all the time.

• Link to conservation efforts: Once in a while link, even if off topic, link to noteworthy conservation efforts you find on the net. Not only will it help raise awareness but also give these worthy sites added link juice.
I’m sure there are lots of other things everyone can think off to help the environment. What are you going to do to help the environment today? Share it with us or you can share it on Google Maps.

Recently Google Acquired Feedburner – the RSS feed management tool preferred by many bloggers and other online content publishers. With Google being a search engine company and Feedburner having RSS subscriptions analytical data of almost a million of feed, what’s going to be the SEO implication of this acquisition?

There might be two reasons why Google acquired Feedburner.

• To sell ads through its AdSense program
• To use the feed data to rank websites

The second point is relevant from the SEO perspective. Currently Google heavily use the incoming links (other websites linking to your website) to rank websites. The more quality inbound links you have, the better ranking you get. But more and more webmasters are purchasing links to improve their rankings, and these defeats the entire purpose of Google’s ranking algorithm. According to Google, the incoming links should be voluntary, and should be only acquired by creating valuable content, and this makes sense. If you have money you can purchase incoming links despite having lousy content. This may give boost to your search engine ranking, but it diminishes the quality of the search results.

Some believe Google may use the Feedburner data to evaluate websites. A higher feed subscription indicates that your content is popular and this further proves that it is highly valuable. Now, Google has its own RSS feeds reader called Google Reader but compared to Feedburner, very few people use Google Reader so the data over there cannot be used for large scale analytical purposes.

Right now Google official blog says:

…we constantly aim to give AdWords advertisers broader distribution to an even wider audience of users. For these reasons, we’re very pleased to tell you that we’ve just acquired FeedBurner.

which means Google primarily purchased FeedBurner to get an additional platform for AdWords. But, given the immense quantity of demographic data FeedBurner has, Google won’t be able to resist using it in the ranking algorithms. So if you are not burning your RSS feeds yet, start doing it now.

Heads up SEOs. If you haven’t been factoring in Twitter in your client’s SEO campaign now is the time to stop and seriously consider upping your social media efforts.

Twitter has announced that it will be expanding its Twitter Search to include not only the text found in tweets in its index, which is what it currently does, but to crawl the links found in tweets and index the crawled pages. We all know how big Twitter is and how fast it’s getting even bigger so this is not the time to ignore this opportunity. You want your sites to be indexed in Twitter Search just as much as it is in Google right now. Of course this doesn’t mean that Twitter will be replacing Google anytime soon but Twitter Search’s power lies in having a real-time search engine that people CONSTANTLY use.

The only negative aspect I can see here is that we can expect spam to start flooding Twitter pretty soon, but then again that is inevitable and it’s Twitter’s problem. They’ll just have to find a way to minimise the noise. As for those who want to make the most of Twitter Search but don’t have any plans of spamming what you can do will be to:

• Start building your rep on Twitter – This is also very important because Twitter is planning on having a ranking system based on reputation soon.
• Widening your network – Of course this goes with building your rep.
• Link dropping – The key here as usual is to do it appropriately. Don’t spam! So start tweeting people and somehow steering the topic so you or they can drop desired link.
• Be current – Have something new on your site more regularly that is tweet worthy. You can link drop all you want but people won’t pass it on if there’s nothing new and noteworthy to pass on. Remember Twitter is all about the now.