SEO thoughts of the day

Posted on August 4th, 2010 by thiswayup.
Categories: dev.

Today at work at we had a someone from Spring Digital do a basic introduction to SEO. At my work we have been working a bit in this space and always trying to gain SEO advantages over other sites but I thought it could be good to check out any possible new nuggets. As it stands I learnt some new things and reinforced some interesting points which have been floating around:

• Twitter links like a "NOFOLLOW" - One of the things which I thought gave a little bit of weight was the fact that links appearing in twitter apparently hold no seo weight. I had obviously drawn an incorrect conclusion given that twitter started appearing on google searches.
   
• Concept of "link baiting" - To follow on from the above point of twitter linking and focusing back on the idea that back linking is important, advertising yourself with interesting content obviously starts people talking. With a bit of luck, all that chatter of your site will hopefully spawn a few backlinks on other sites. Basic idea of marketing through social media I know but hey it stuck out.
   
• PPC vs SEO - I find it interesting that SEO and PPC can sometimes both work together and against. But the majority of the time they complement each other. PPC generally is seen as the short term traffic driver with SEO requiring alot more strategic and medium/long term commitment before a good ROI.
   

Finally I have been reading a bit from The Art of SEO. As a developer I wonder about the process of our site builds and whether we are doing the correct "thing", reading this book had definitely given me some more insight. One of the points which sticks out is the advice to not use pagination. There are a few points he makes for it being bad :

• Provides no topical relevance - since pagination results in a page of just links with no focus on seo this is bad.
• Content between different pages can create dupe content - Duplicate content is a factor of the amount of SEO juice google gives.
• Can create spider traps - Spiders generally can only dig so deep and if it catches the spider in a infinite spider trap then there is less chance of the page you want the spider to find, is found.

This pagination point sticks out as it goes to show that there is a site usability opportunity cost of choosing to not to use pagination. The book does concede though that it takes a seriously alot of planning to try build a certain large sites without pagination.

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