Search engines never disregarded them completely. It just meant the crawl allocated time Google assigns each website was not spent on following no followed links. Essentially they were still followed but the juice/importance passed onto those links/pages was ZERO.

Unless you were CNN which Google adopted the “no matter how long” mentality to crawl all pages regardless of the time needed, made no following pointless to do internally for CNN. It spent the time anyway.

Because Google spends certain amount of time on most websites, no follows was very handy as you made sure search engines only crawled the keyword rich pages as the #1 priority.

Now Google started to ignore no follows altogether as smart seo’s started to page sculpt which is a direct manipulation of how search engines crawl and spend time on your website. It’s starting to become one of those extinct once upon a time search engine techniques like keyword stuffing meta keywords.

It’s one thing to create a website, get attractive graphics, and input great content. It’s quite another to get your page ranked well on major search engines, such as Google and Yahoo. Here are 5 great SEO tips which will help you get that high ranking, and ultimately get the traffic.

SEO Tip #1 – Get Quality Backlinks

Getting quality backlinks or inbound links to your website is one of the key ingredients to search engine optimization. The more backlinks you have to your site from other reputable sites, the more Google will favor your website. Try to get as many links to as many pages to your site as possible. When other websites are linking to your site, it tells the search engines that your website is valuable. The higher the page rank from these other websites, the better.

SEO Tip #2 – Social Bookmarking

Social bookmarking has become a great way to gain exposure in the online world. Make it simple for readers to bookmark your pages by creating important links that major search engines value. In addition, you can submit your website to these social bookmarking sites to get some added exposure. Places such as digg.com or stumbleupon.com are a great start.

SEO Tip #3 – Article Directory Submissions

Submitting articles to article directories is one of the best ways to market your website, and gain valuable backlinks. Writing articles for these directories is useful in two ways. First of all, most of these directories allow you to include a link to your website in an author’s resource box at the end of your article. This will allow the reader to link to your site from high ranking article directories like EzineArticles.com.

Secondly, webmasters from other sites may publish your article on these sites, along with the link to your website. Not only will you get links from the original article directory, but you will get links from these other sites as well.

SEO Tip #4 – Website Directory Submissions

This is another way of gaining exposure, and getting linked from many sources, which is exactly what search engines are looking for. There are literally hundreds of website directories out there for you to post your website on. Many of them are free, while others charge a small fee. Try to stick to the directories with higher Google page ranks.

SEO Tip #5 – Create a Sitemap

Sitemaps are a great way of letting the search engines know about all the pages on your site. You simply create a sitemap (through various sitemap generators available online), upload it to your public HTML folder through your web host, then submit your sitemap to the search engines, such as Google. This will make it easier to let Google know that your site is out there, waiting to be crawled by its ‘spiders’.

Search engine optimization can take many forms. These are just some of the many ways in which to get your site ranked high, and gain valuable traffic. Be creative, put in the work, and eventually you should see your site crawl up the charts.

Lisa has been writing articles for many years. Come visit her latest website that reviews the best outdoor electric grills, the best stainless steel grills, and other info related to these and other types of grills.

Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Lisa_Simonelli_Rennie

Part 1 of article

The question must be asked at least once, does size really matter?

If I insert a H1 that is size 7px at the top of a page, will Google and other major search engines index this H1 as normal or will it devalue the H1 or even possibly penalise a websites rankings. When you think it about from a logical perspective, a H1 should be like a newspaper heading, whereby the title is the largest text on the page. You never see a newspaper heading that is smaller than the body content.  If Google has not caught up to this greyhat technique, they shall will eventually.

Read more…

• Install Plugins For WordPress
  You can get a lot of free plugins online and they will help a lot in optimising your blog.
• Optimise permalinks
  The default permalink is not SEO-friendly and should be changed via a mod rewrite. The idea rewritten URL is /%postname%/.html which will make something like this www.yourdomain.com.au/this-is-your-post.html . You can change your permalink by going to Settings >> Permalinks and choose custom structure and input /%postname%/.html .
• Optimise page titles
  Page titles are the most important in your single page and should be placed between h1 tags. Titles should be short but keyword-rich and define briefly what this is about, followed by H2s & H3s.
• Remove hyperlink of the Title of your single posts
  Single posts should no longer be link as it’s not needed since it will link on the same page. You can easily edit this format by a simple change in the  single.php file.
• Validate your code
  There are a lot of tools online that you can use to validate your code. By validating your code, it will help search engines to crawl your site easier. This requires knowledge in web design to fix these codes so if you can’t do it, you can hire a web developer to do it for you.
• Add Meta Description
  Always add a meta description to your blog pages because it will help the search engines to identify what kind of blog you have. Search engines such as Google will only use your meta description if it matches the query being searched by the user, otherwise it grab another snippet of text located on your web page. This is why you must strategically write your meta description around the keywords that will deliver the most qualified traffic.

• Deep contextual linking
  Deep contextual linking is where a blog post that is located deep in the URL is linking to another blog post which is deep in the URL and is being linked to enhance a users understanding of the content given. Choose the anchor text within the links wisely as this text is the most relevant to search engines and will help you to rank for the terms being targeted to that page.

Important website factors to consider when selling products online:

1. Product Information – Detailed explanation on each product in your website is extremely important than just simply displaying specs. Helps the customer to provide a crucial decision and not regret purchase which naturally increases in return visits, referrals and consistent cash flow.
2. Social Media – Communication at all venues: Twitter, Facebook, Friendfeed and your companies blog.
3. Site Structure – You have to make sure you build sites for users who have zero knowledge about your products and will be able to buy the right product for the user and not for the company.
4. Customer Testimonials – A web page dedicated to testimonials that is updated regularly. This gives a great impression for  users and potential customers.
5. About Your Company – The about us page allows users to get an insight into your company and helps them to touch base with you and your company on a personal level. Because an online shop has limitations with customer interaction, its imperative that you try to communicate with them on all avenues.

Building a website for users/customers that implements high amounts of usability and accessibility will naturally provide the basic ingredients to build an online success.

Do we need to come up with fresh new ideas about how we handle footer links since there has been talk in the past that footer links have dropped considerably in value. An article from SEOMoz explains further:

1. Footer links may be devalued by search engines automatically
   Check out the evidence – Yahoo! says they may devalue footer links, Bill Slawski uncovers patents suggesting the same and anecdotal evidence suggests Google might do this (or go further) as well. Needless to say, if you want to make sure your links are passing maximum value, it’s wise to avoid the footer (particularly the footer class itself).
2. Footer links are often not the first link on the page to a URL
   Since we know that the first link on a page is the one whose anchor text counts and footer links, while anchor text optimized, are often a second link to an already-linked-to target, they are likely not to have the desired impact.
3. Footer links get very low CTR
   Naturally, since they’re some of the least visible links on a webpage, they receive very little traffic. Thus, if algorithms like BrowseRank or other traffic metrics start to play a role in search rankings, footers are unlikely to have a positive impact.
4. Footer links often take a page beyond a healthy link total
   Many pages that already have 80-100 links on the page are going to lose out when they add a footer with another 30-50 links embedded. The link juice passed per link will go down and the value of each individual link is lowered.
5. Footer links can be a time suck
   The time you spend crafting the perfect link structure in the footers could be put towards more optimal link structures throughout the site’s navigation and cross-linking from content, serving both users and engines better.

I still believe however we should use footer links in a site walk like format . Many large websites such as Ninemsn will continue to use footer/site walk links as a resource for link placement but keep in mind the overall link juice that is carried over may fade. INTERNAL CONTEXTUAL LINKS strategies should be kept in mind when devising your internal linking strategies.

SEO Theory: Structuring Website Content

Have you wondered what is the best strategy in SEO to target an extremely competitive term and a locality based keyword to follow. For e.g. lets say you want to target “Used Cars” and then “Used Cars Sydney”. The old SEO 2.0 way was to keyword stuff the meta title; USED CARS – USED CARS SYDNEY – USED CARS MELBOURNE. Now in this new 5.0 world in which we are entering, how we structure content can get us effective rankings for each keyword.

Top Level Structure

Top level pages should contain the most competitive and keyword rich content available on your website. The most generic (keyword rich) and unique content should be within the top level pages with the basic SEO strategies applied such as H2′s, <strong> tags etc. and so forth. Once we have established multiple general top level sections on the website such as /used-cars/ and /new-cars/ for examnple, we then contextually link out to http://www.domainname.com.au/used-cars/used-cars-sydney.php from within the content to a locality based section. In this case Sydney.

Second Level Structure

After linking out to http://www.domainname.com.au/used-cars/used-cars-sydney.php, we optimise the accordingly, meta data optimisation, body content tweaks, footer links and so forth.

Third Level Structure

After linking out to http://www.domainname.com.au/used-cars/used-cars-sydney.php, we  then link out to a individual product pages to do with a used in Sydney. For e.g. /used-cars/sydney/used-car-corolla_22.php and list the product details, cost, make, model. The URL would like this in the third level state:
http://www.domainname.com.au/used-cars/sydney/used-car-corolla_22.php

The SEO power of contextual links may be up for debate but from theory, practice, and experience we know that a link in a context is much more powerful than an isolated (sitewide) link in a sidebar. It is logical to think that internal linking should also be done with the help of in text link rather than navigation menu.