SEM/SEO Tips

When adding links on your Blogroll in Wordpress, you will probably see options for your relationship to the website you are linking to.

Now if you think this is just some random thing, this inserts values to the rel attribute of an anchor tag of the link you are linking to. Choosing any of these can trigger it one or any combination of these rel attribute values. (more…)

I made the color changing theme, which is mainly a design by a former co-worker of mine, Stephen Reinhardt who made the Light theme. and I decided to use the same theme with a color changing twist. So that it is quite unique to get more people interested in downloading this theme to generally increase the popularity on the site. The color changing theme uses body ID’s as a type of conditional statement and on every clicked color a cookie is stored on what color the site should be and this is read and placed in the body ID. But in order for it to display, a preliminary page is displayed to store the cookie, and returns to the referring page by a 301 redirect to avoid any issue of duplicate content for SEO, which I believe is fine. But this website is also doing it’s own experiments in the Isulong SEOph SEO Keyword Ranking Contest. And in this contest, time is already an issue since the Isulong SEOph contest ends on September 30, 2006. And I did notice, that Googlebot was crawling each and every color of my site. Although there should not be a problem SEOwise since they all 301 redirect to the pages to avoid duplicate content, there is a time-factor involved in giving Googlebot more pages to crawl that are not really necessary. Spending more time to checking each color just to be redirected to the same content. Thus only in this specific case, I have removed the clickable color changing of this theme on the upper right, but instead, I still made it cool by having each color change depending on the day of the week. That gives you a reason to check out my site everyday. Better yet, why not link to me, bookmark me, digg me, whatever and check my theme color change everyday.

Search engines crawl the web. You can submit sites to be included in search engines but even if you don’t, if your site is linked from other websites, most probably you will get added even without submitting your website. Search engines have programs that follow the links of websites from one website to another and they call these scripts robots, spiders or crawlers. Sometimes the robots are simply refered to as bots. And whatever a search engine runs over it will be considered to be added into the large database of indexed websites.

Although some parts of a website can be excluded by setting up rules in your robots.txt file, which I will explain in another article, but robots.txt can only exclude pages within your website. But for pages going away from your site, you can use the rel=”nofollow” attribute of your link tags.

<a rel="nofollow" xhref="http://www.wherever.com/path/file.html">
Link Text
</a>
But please note that not all search engines will follow this rule, although Google strickly follows the rule. If ever for some reason you want to disallow bots to continue crawling. It may sound like a selfish act no avoid other sites from getting crawled by spiders, but it is a good way to prevent crawling of websites that resort to spamming guestbooks and blog comments.