Posts by gardnerw

You must have been living under a rock for the past year if you haven’t heard of the credit crunch as it is one of the most hyped media topics in the past decade, and deservedly so. The credit crunch is affecting businesses all around, from small to large, from corporate to independent. For your business to survive the credit crunch punch, you need to think smart about using the internet as your key marketing tool and take advantage of something that other businesses won’t – Search engine optimisation.

Your company website is likely to either sell products, promote products, or market your business. If your site is not well optimised for search engines then your website could be missing out on a lot of it’s potential. In these hard financial times, employing an SEO agency to optimise your site is likely to be the best investment you could make.

Making your website perform well and attract more traffic could massively lower your physical marketing overheads. Consumers are being more frugal than ever and are increasingly more likely to be looking for the best priced deal on the internet, rather than trudging down the high street. If your site is well optimised, then you will have done the hard part – getting people to look at your website , now all you need to do is make sure your prices are competitive, and your business is giving off the right impression.

Experts predict that the credit crunch and the economic slowdown is going to be around for about the next couple of years, so now is the time to get smart and use SEO to your advantage.

When a link is posted on a website, you can add an attribute called ‘nofollow’ which will instruct Google not to follow this link, and for Google not to pass on any pagerank (or ‘link-juice’) from the site that is linking to another site.  So if a page on a website has a pagerank of 2, and you are linking to an external site using the nofollow attribute, then in theory, your pagerank will stay as it is and will not be associated with the site you are linking with.

If the nofollow attribute is not used, then by default a link is ‘dofollow’, giving Google an instruction to follow it and associate the linked page with the site that is giving the link, and in theory, passing some of the pagerank on.  The term link-juice is used to illustrate how it’s like allowing to juice to pass through a set of links, as the links go on, the juice continues to flow as trickle down.  If a nofollow attiribute is used, the juice stops flowing and will remain at the current site.

So why on earth would you not use nofollow if it ‘dilutes’ your pagerank?  Well, if you have a blog which allows comments, and on those comments allows commentors to post a link to a website, then you may see a serge in traffic and activity.

If a blog post has dofollow links to a website activated in the comment section, then savy web users are likely to post a comment on the post, which is great for the post, and blog in general.d The same users are then likley to return to the blog knowing that they can get a link-juice link, and will continue to contribute to the discussion of the blog post.  The more discussion in a post means the more chance of appearing in long-tail searches, and the more traffic that will come to the blog.

The downside to having dofollow links on a blog means that it’s possible that the associated pagerank could drop.  However, just because a site’s pagerank drops, does not necessarily mean that the site’s postion in the SERP’s drops.

Try experimenting for six months – open up the dofollow floodgates and watch your traffic soar.  Put a banner on your blog saying that your comments are dofollow to target ‘dofollow divers’.  See what happens at the next pagerank update, and evaluate whether having a PR 4 rather than a PR 5 is really that much of an issue when you have healthy, user-generated discussions happening on your blog on a daily basis.  Having useful or entertaining discussion on your blog posts could lead your blog to becoming an authority in it’s topic field.

William Gardner – SEO Programmer