Tonight John Reese asked some SEO questions regarding blogging and Beers Design founder Lisa Beers commented her answers. Below is a synopsis, but click here to read John’s original post and all the comments he got.

–Lisa’s Answers–

I think there are other SEO issues that are more critical to bloggers than these, in terms of title and meta tags and avoiding duplicate content primarily. I actually don’t use plugins for these issues, as I’ve never found any that were totally satisfactory. We do some code adjustments that work much better.

1. My opinion is that URL structure is a non-issue. Google will waif about on this type of thing. One thing is best, then another. Filenames containing keywords used to be very helpful. Now not so much, in blogs or otherwise. It’s not worth spinning around on. All other factors being 100% the same, it will help. But that really never happens. And if all else where the indeed the same, I wouldn’t try to beat them on URLs…2. Shorter URLs are best. Back in the day with Alta Vista and then Yahoo, now with Google. Closer to root has always been best. But bots are smarter now, so you can have a reasonable 3+ level site if the architecture is good and see no detriment. IF the architecture is good….

3. Tags… ah…. tags. They’re wonderful in the blogosphere, not that important out of it. They’re a “blogosphere” child and will help bring traffic through Technorati and other such sites, but not all that valuable elsewhere. I know many will disagree on this, but it’s the cold data of dozens of sites we work on speaking here. We add on such an easy way to tag (that actually also helps client clarify their key phrases per post to help with other ‘layman’ SEO) that it’s totally worth doing for what benefit it brings.

4. He He, pagerank and nofollow - well, this is a BROAD and quite technical topic indeed! FIRST, you do need to be quite certain of what you’re doing in the overall sense of your site before trying to use “nofollow” in your site to push PR. Using nofollow can certain help a site with well thought out SEO architecture. As for blogs, there are loads of considerations with the way that content is dynamically generated that have to be addressed. Honestly, on a blog, I believe it’s more trouble than it’s worth to try to do extensive IA (information architecture) on them. I believe their power is in the ‘common man’ of the posts. And I think that’s part of why they are currently in favor with the engines.

You can certainly ‘nofollow’ certain blog pages, and even write the php to ‘nofollow’ more extensively, but my question is, why do that in the age of the long tail? I like to take a “traditional” website and do extensive IA on it with ‘nofollow’ and such, and then set up a blog for the “free for all long tail” factor and do traffic pushing.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, June 13th, 2007 at 5:20 am and is filed under Search Engine Optimization. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

Tonight John Reese asked some SEO questions regarding blogging and Beers Design founder Lisa Beers commented her answers. Below is a synopsis, but click here to read John’s original post and all the comments he got.

–Lisa’s Answers–

I think there are other SEO issues that are more critical to bloggers than these, in terms of title and meta tags and avoiding duplicate content primarily. I actually don’t use plugins for these issues, as I’ve never found any that were totally satisfactory. We do some code adjustments that work much better.

1. My opinion is that URL structure is a non-issue. Google will waif about on this type of thing. One thing is best, then another. Filenames containing keywords used to be very helpful. Now not so much, in blogs or otherwise. It’s not worth spinning around on. All other factors being 100% the same, it will help. But that really never happens. And if all else where the indeed the same, I wouldn’t try to beat them on URLs…2. Shorter URLs are best. Back in the day with Alta Vista and then Yahoo, now with Google. Closer to root has always been best. But bots are smarter now, so you can have a reasonable 3+ level site if the architecture is good and see no detriment. IF the architecture is good….

3. Tags… ah…. tags. They’re wonderful in the blogosphere, not that important out of it. They’re a “blogosphere” child and will help bring traffic through Technorati and other such sites, but not all that valuable elsewhere. I know many will disagree on this, but it’s the cold data of dozens of sites we work on speaking here. We add on such an easy way to tag (that actually also helps client clarify their key phrases per post to help with other ‘layman’ SEO) that it’s totally worth doing for what benefit it brings.

4. He He, pagerank and nofollow - well, this is a BROAD and quite technical topic indeed! FIRST, you do need to be quite certain of what you’re doing in the overall sense of your site before trying to use “nofollow” in your site to push PR. Using nofollow can certain help a site with well thought out SEO architecture. As for blogs, there are loads of considerations with the way that content is dynamically generated that have to be addressed. Honestly, on a blog, I believe it’s more trouble than it’s worth to try to do extensive IA (information architecture) on them. I believe their power is in the ‘common man’ of the posts. And I think that’s part of why they are currently in favor with the engines.

You can certainly ‘nofollow’ certain blog pages, and even write the php to ‘nofollow’ more extensively, but my question is, why do that in the age of the long tail? I like to take a “traditional” website and do extensive IA on it with ‘nofollow’ and such, and then set up a blog for the “free for all long tail” factor and do traffic pushing.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, June 13th, 2007 at 5:20 am and is filed under Search Engine Optimization. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.