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Footer SEO Tactics & Practices

David — Tue, 11 Nov 2008 19:58:02 +0000

Lately I’ve been concentrating on putting high quality content and links in very beautiful, well designed footers. Once the designers and development team is done with the creation of the footers, then I make sure that all the SEO elements are present in the footers. There is no doubt that a unique footer with a beautiful design and will not only attract the attention of the human visitors, but also through proper SEO practices the search engines will give the entire site more authority due to the number of keywords, relevant content and links in the footer.

Examples of some of our footer designs:

Beautiful Footer

Greenopolis Footer

SEO Footer

Google and other search engines are quickly moving away from just reading the code of a website, and trying to determine what really makes a site aesthetic, easy to use and relevant. By picking apart your footer, the search engines will notice that your site is not just one of a million other sites that are doing the same thing. The search engine will see your background graphics, keywords, anchor text and other elements and rate your site accordingly within the Search Engine Result Pages.

One great tip when considering how to optimize your footer would be to use footer links for some of your more important, or hard to find information. Within the anchor text and the title attributes of your links, you might have more success using alternate text or longtail keywords instead of your top anchor text and alt texts. A good way to determine what types of anchor text and longtail keywords to use would be to research and think about what types of “phrases” people use when searching for your product or service. These phrases should always be relevant to the link (if you are using search engine friendly urls (SEF’s)) and the content on the page. So in other words, don’t make your title attribute and/or anchor text something arbitrary because you want to rank well for it, make the text a phrase that describes what the page is about, but in a fashion that will use a phrase that people might search for.

I have used footer links extensively through most of my sites, especially the larger ones. One thing I do however is not use the same anchor text links in my footer as I do in my main menu. I also do not link to each page of the site in my footer. What I have found to be effective is to create “anchor phrases” to the top six or seven pages and use them in the footer.

Another thing to avoid is overloading your footer with to many links. It is believed that the most important content and links on your site should be in the very beginning and the very end, so use this space sparingly. I would suggest limiting the footer menu to under a dozen links. I would also stay away from repeating links, as it will look spammy if you put 5 links to the same page in your footer.

New scripts are able to see if a visitor came from a search engine, and what keyword they searched for. These scripts are quickly becoming the future of SEO, and are very valuable in determining the anchor text that displays in the footer. An example of this could be if someone searches for “big round blue widgets” and you have a widget store so your site comes up in the listings, all the anchor text in the footer will be related to “big round blue widgets”. There are scripts that do this such as the Drupal module keyhavior, but I have not seen any that work perfectly without some custom coding.

The best way to think about footers when considering SEO is to provide the best resource for them in your footer, and provide them with info that will help your visitors the most. This way even if these links aren’t given as much weight as all the others on your site, at least your site is gaining value from those links by providing good quality information that will keep your visitors on your website.

Ben to Speak at SIPA Next Month in Las Vegas

Harry — Wed, 05 Nov 2008 19:36:54 +0000

Our CEO Ben Bassi is slated to appear as a panelist at the Specialized Information Publishers Association’s (SIPA) Mid-Year Marketing Conference in Las Vegas next month. The Conference runs from December 8 - 10, and is being held at the Planet Hollywood Resort and Casino on the Las Vegas Strip.

Ben is scheduled to appear on a panel of three for the presentation “How You Can Leverage Online Tools To Create Some Serious Marketing Buzz,” scheduled for the morning of December 10th. The session’s description from the SIPA site:

“The Internet has created an ‘information marketplace’ with constantly evolving delivery methods and marketing strategies. With a variety of resources available, publishers face the challenge of getting information in front of the right audience at the right time—when they are ready to act. With the rise of user-generated content, search options and social networks on the web, there are seemingly limitless and often overwhelming opportunities for you to engage your audience.”

Ben’s specific topic is “to show you how to leverage social media to drive traffic and conversions, build an online following and even convert your visitors into evangelists who will promote your content for you.” Ben will be appearing at this session with Andy Black, Marketing Director of Convera, and RD Whitney, CEO of Caroo Media USA.

If you would like to attend this and other great learning sessions on the topic of Internet Marketing, register today. Those who sign up before November 10th will receive special early bird pricing.

CommonPlaces a Platinum Sponsor of DrupalCon DC 2009

Harry — Tue, 21 Oct 2008 17:07:13 +0000

CommonPlaces is very proud to be a Platinum Sponsor of DrupalCon DC 2009 in Washington, DC. Drupal benefits from a large and vibrant community of contributors, and DrupalCon is a twice annual gathering of this community to learn and make improvements upon an already capable, robust, and increasingly popular Web Content Management System. You can read more about the event here, or visit the Official DrupalCon Twitter Feed

As a leader in the Drupal field, CommonPlaces takes a great interest in DrupalCon, and places a great value on attending the gathering. “DrupalCon gives people the opportunity to not only improve their knowledge through valuable learning sessions, but to participate in the community and improve Drupal itself,” said Erich Beyrent, VP of Engineering at CommonPlaces.

If you would like to attend DrupalCon DC, click here for more information on tickets.

Drupal Enthusiasts to Converge in Washington DC in March 2009

Harry — Tue, 21 Oct 2008 17:00:50 +0000

From dc2009.drupalcon.org:

Washington (October 22, 2008) – Registration opens today for Drupalcon DC 2009. DrupalCon is the bi-annual conference/unconference for developers, users and enthusiasts of the popular open source platform Drupal, used by tens of thousands sites worldwide including Universal Music, Lifetime Television, France 24, Popular Science,The Onion, Harvard Medical School, and NASA. Drawing participants from around the globe. DrupalCons provide a forum for Drupalers to learn about, discuss and advance Drupal,

The conference will take place at the Washington Convention Center March 4 – 7, 2009. Organizers expect more than one thousand attendees. To register for the conference or for more information go to http://dc2009.drupalcon.org.

Drupal is a popular social publishing system that blends web content management and social software capabilities with a massive library of powerful extensions - all supported by a thriving open source community. More information can be found here: http://drupal.org/. The last Drupalcon in Szeged, Hungary in August, 2008 had over 500 participants and featured keynotes by industry thought-leaders including Drupal project founder, Dries Buytaert.

Building on Drupalcon’s tradition of excellence, Drupalcon DC will feature panels on important technology trends and in the latest advances in web development, as well as address Drupal-related design, strategy, and business topics. In addition, there will be hands-on code-sprints, a job fair, an exhibit hall, Birds of a Feather gatherings and plenty of time for networking with peers.

The Washington DC metro area is one of the largest technology hubs in the United States. The unique blend of government, media, non-profits and associations make it a natural for a rapidly growing open-source community. Drupal’s ease of use and extensive content management capabilities make for enormous popularity in many of the area’s major industries.

“DrupalCon is about bringing people together. The local Drupal community is incredibly active and engaged and is leading up efforts to organize it. This will also be great exposure for the many international development organizations, nonprofits, and media groups based in the city that use Drupal,” said Eric Gundersen, Drupalcon DC organizer and President of Development Seed, a DC-based strategy firm that focuses on technology solutions for progressive organizations.

Also announced today are Drupalcon DC platinum sponsors including Acquia, Trellon and Commonplace.

“Acquia is proud to be a platinum sponsor of Drupalcon DC 2009,” said Jay Batson, CEO of Acquia, a commercial open source provider of technical support and network services for Drupal. “Drupalcon is the premier event on the Drupal calendar and we are excited to assist the organizing team as they put together what will be an outstanding event for the community in Washington DC.”

Trellon is an Internet strategy and development firm specializing in web portals, integrated CRM systems, widgets, social networking applications, and strategy and strategic consulting services for a variety of clients.

CommonPlaces e-Solutions is a full-service web firm offering custom Drupal development and theming, and specializes in seamlessly combining strategy, design and technology into one successful package.

CommonPlaces Wins a WebAward

Harry — Sat, 27 Sep 2008 13:24:32 +0000

CommonPlaces recently won a 2008 WebAward for “Outstanding Achievement in Website Development.” Here at CP we’re really excited about this award. Each year the Web Marketing Association hands out WebAwards to the best sites of the Web. To receive this award really validates all the work that we have done, and we’re very proud of this accomplishment.

How To Sculpt Your Google PR Using NoFollow

David — Fri, 26 Sep 2008 20:41:32 +0000

Here is a quick informational article about how any site owner can use the rel=”nofollow” attribute to sculpt their Google Page Rank so that they don’t waste their valuable juice on pages that are only there for legal or functional purposes.

The nofollow attribute makes it so Google doesn’t pass your site’s authority and Google Juice through these links. It was created for stopping blog spamming years ago and now that most blog comments treat links as nofollow, it has discouraged spammers from submitting to these places for valuable backlinks. Links that are not nofollows not only pass your Google Juice along to the site you’re linking to, but also tell Google you’re vouching for that site. This means that if you are linking to a site, and not using the nofollow attribute, you are saying you vouch for that site, so if they are doing things that Google does not approve of, or penalizes for, your site might also be penalized or devalued because of this linking association.

So now that you know what it does here’s how you use it. All you do is put rel=”nofollow” inside the link tag:

a href=”link.com” rel=”nofollow”

The best pages on your website to use the nofollow on include a number of internal links like your:

Privacy statements
Terms of use
Forms such as contact pages
Legal Jargon Pages

Some external sites you might want to use the nofollow on include:

Sites you can’t vouch for
Sites that don’t relate to your site’s industry
Sites you don’t own

If you have an external link to a site that is related to your site’s industry, I would recommend leaving it a follow link and not using the nofollow attribute, whether they do or do not have a link back to your site (obviously try to get them to link back to you though). I say this because I feel that Google likes to see these organic linking relationships with related sites. This does not apply to link farms, directories or any other sites that are completely unrelated to your site.

By using the nofollow on pages that you don’t care about, you’re sculpting your Google Page Rank by not diverting any of it (no matter how small of an amount), to these pages. This way you are in complete control of the pages you value most, and aren’t allowing your precious page rank to go to other sites, or places not of importance.

There are a lot of tools out there that will show you what other people are doing with nofollow links, and I suggest downloading them and taking a look to see what people are doing. I personally use the “ChromeEdit Plus” plugin for Firefox, so all my nofollows show up in a red box all of the time:

Ebay's Nofollows

I learned to use this scrip years ago from Matt Cutts’ blog, so go there and learn how to do it: http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/2005/08/

Today there are much easier ways to do this, but I still like my Chrome Edit gadget . Check out these plugins for Firefox if you don’t like Chrome Edit:

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/321

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/5687

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/5887

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/7505

Pictures from Szeged

Harry — Tue, 23 Sep 2008 20:53:16 +0000

We’re back from Drupalcon Szeged! We learned a lot, met a lot of great people, and had a lot of fun! While there, CommonPlaces gave away three 8GB iPod Nanos and one 80GB iPod Classic at our informational sessions. Here are the winners:

Wednesday, August 27, 2008
Cross-Site Request Forgery: The Sleeping Giant of Website Vulnerabilities
Our winner was Nicholas Thompson from Electric Word PLC

Thursday, August 28, 2008
Hack-Proof Your Drupal App - Key Habits of Secure Drupal Coding
Our winner was Tom Yuval

Friday, August 29, 2008
Web Application Canonicalization, Encoding and Transcoding Attacks
Our winner was Simon Hobbs from EM Space

…And the winner of the 80GB iPod, announced during the Closing Session, was Michael Chik from Amnesty International.

Congratulations to all of our winners!

Drupal Haikus

Harry — Tue, 23 Sep 2008 20:46:47 +0000

Here at CommonPlaces, we love talking Drupal. We love Drupal so much, we even write poetry about it. We held a Drupal Haiku contest recently, and here are some of the best entries:

Creating a world
To bring people together
In Drupal we trust
-Michelle

What’s Drupal about
It’s community plumbing
Dries has the best hair
-Chris

Content management
Drupal has CAPTCHA my heart
Foot print very small
-Susan

CommonPlaces needs
Drupal Development Pros.
Must surf, nerf, and whiff.
-Seth

Sing about Drupal
Drupal Drupal is my life
No more [Drupal competitor deleted] yay!
-Mike

Like the willow tree
Drupal’s flexibility
can bend with your needs

Modules and templates
Harness your inner coder
Drupal is the way
-Erich

Why SEO Firms May Someday Be Obsolete

David — Fri, 15 Aug 2008 19:32:10 +0000

Search Engine Optimization and SEO firms are great…

…don’t get me wrong. They provide business and site owners with an excellent service of allowing people who are searching for their content, find them. The reason these SEO Firms will be all gone some day lies completely in the way that the search engine Google has been changing.

Google is changing…

… more and more every day and we see it in the search results. It wasn’t that long ago that everyone was consumed with their keyword density percentage, was 5% to high, was 7% to low and so on. These days kw density is a non factor. There is no magic number and it is beginning to look like it doesn’t matter at all, besides the fact that you actually have to have the keyword somewhere in the content you are trying to rank well for. I have personally done tests this year and gotten better results by boosting up my kw density for one client specifically. I spent hours and hours editing content, putting more keywords, alt tags, title attributes and so on in throughout their entire site. Then I realized that it wasn’t because of kw density that I was getting better results, but because the content had been updated, it was more RELATED to the the actual keywords, and that the links and images were being tagged (& attributed) to the RELEVANT keywords.

So what does this have to do with SEO firms becoming obsolete?

Google is changing more and more to make it so that the only thing that really matters when dealing with onsite SEO is the content. This takes all the optimizing out of SEO and makes it more important to just write good content. If you write good content that:

a. Attracts readers

b. Keeps them entertained

c. Keeps them coming back

You’ll end up being better off in the long run than if you completely optimize all your on-site factors.

This new evolution of Google…

… doesn’t end with the content either. You could write the best content in the world, but if you site is not attractive, doesn’t entice the reader or keep them coming back, then you’ll be out of luck when it comes to the popularity of your site as well as with your search engine rankings. The way things are moving today, is away from just “Search Engine Optimizing” your site. Instead they’re moving to a place where you need to have a “Search Engine Strategy” or an entire “Website Strategy”. This strategy is where SEO as we know it is evolving. This evolution looks at every factor from the sitemap, to the wireframe, navigation and even color scheme to ultimately determine where you rank in the search engines.

The more popular your site gets…

… the better rankings it will get, and all of the things discussed above (design elements, content, navigation etc) will ultimately determine how successful your website is. The lower your bounce rates are, the longer your readers and visitors spend on your site, the more you update your site and the more they come back are quickly turning into the most important factors of ranking well in the Search Engines. Although SEO firms are far from being extinct, keep in mind that a greater overall “Strategy” will be needed in the long term if you plan to be successful in the Search Engines.

And stop adding links to directories! Google started devaluing those earlier this year!

We’re Going to Drupalcon

Harry — Tue, 05 Aug 2008 15:23:59 +0000

Here at CommonPlaces we’re proud to be a Silver Sponsor of Drupalcon Szeged 2008, located in Szeged, Hungary.

The last Drupalcon was hosted in Boston, Massachusetts, which was a bit closer to our office (4,211 miles closer, to be exact). Nevertheless, we can’t imagine a Drupalcon without CommonPlaces. That’s why we’re sending Ben Bassi, our CEO, and Erich Beyrent, our VP of Engineering, to Szeged. They’re both really excited about visiting Hungary, as well as meeting and interacting with some of the talented individuals who are working as pioneers in the Drupal field. “DrupalCon gives people the opportunity to not only improve their knowledge through valuable learning sessions, but to participate in the community and improve Drupal itself,” Erich said.

Beyrent will also be presenting at Drupalcon! His presentation, “Hack-Proof Your Drupal App – Key Habits of Secure Drupal Coding,” will be a part of the Code development track of the conference.

Drupalcon is an international conference centered on Drupal, an open source, Web Content Management System. We love to talk Drupal, so feel free to call us for a free quote for your next project. Our number is (603) 362-8227.