The Maine SEO Blog

Flyte recently launched a website for Reduce My College Costs, which I’m happy to say has finally been fully crawled and indexed!  We worked with Marc Hill, a Certified College Planner, to both develop and optimize his site.

One of the most important things you can do, and I must pride Marc on this, is to do your SEO upfront.  It’s been my experience that optimizing a site during development will be much easier and more cost effective than “SEO’ing” it later.

For example, we are now converting many of our table-based sites onto CSS platforms (namely, WordPress).  While this particular problem is usually due to the age of a site; had SEO been performed at an earlier stage, it would have increased those sites’ search visibility earlier and saved them money (and who doesn’t want to save some dough these days?!).

Anyway - to get back on track, in this case, optimizing before launch should help Marc in the long run!  Admittedly, I wish I had known how quickly mistakes can make a difference to the price you pay for school.  If I’d only known people like Marc exist before I went to college!

So if you are in the midst of planning to send your child to college, start the process with RMCC’s free college savings tip sheet. Then, work with Marc in order to save on your son or daughter’s education expenses!

Nicki Hicks
Maine SEO

Javascript, Flash, and (God forbid) tables may look cool.  You might even get them to work the same in every browser.  Admittedly, that is half the battle - making your site appealing to people, that is.  But the other half is building a website for search engines.

One way to see exactly what the search engines see is by looking at your code (or viewing the page source).  If you can’t read HTML, then checking out Google’s cache is your next best option.

There’s a few ways to do it.  One of my apps (SEO for Firefox) gives an option to look at the cached version of the page.  Or, when making a search, you can see the option next to each result; in this case, a holiday appropriate search:

Then, when selecting “Cached”, you see exactly what Google sees.  Be sure to choose the text only version:

As you can see, Google will highlight the keyword you searched for.  This way, if pressed, you can make a decision: be it a really cool flash intro or just some great content.

Nicki Hicks
Happy Halloween!

That is the question…

First of all, what is a nofollow tag? I think the best way to wrap your mind around it is by using pictures.  Think of all of the link/SEO juice your website has being held in a bucket.  Creating links pokes holes in that bucket and passes the juice to sub-pages within your site and to external sites.  Nofollow tags essentially plugs those holes.  So while search engines can continue to follow those links and index them, they do not pass link juice to them.  This visual should help:

(Picture credit: eVisibility)

To nofollow

So, nofollows are a way to control the way link juice flows through your site.  In other words, think of those pages which don’t necessarily need to rank well on SERPs.  By controlling the flow of link juice, you can concentrate it on the important pages - and hopefully increase PageRank by doing so.

Pages typically nofollowed are those like:

• Privacy Policy
• Contact
• Search
• Shipping information/Shopping Cart pages
• Affiliates

Not to nofollow

Like every positive, there are also negatives for nofollow tags.  However, you’ll see this article is somewhat dated and talks mainly about nofollowing blog comment links (a default setting for most blogs these days, in an effort to control blog spam).

Also, SEO experts argue why should you link to someone if you’re just going to nofollow that link?  I would say that links are meant to bring added value to the user’s experience, and while the link may be helpful, you don’t want to pass along link juice.

In the end, maybe nofollows are a passing fad, then again maybe not.  Although in SEO, experimentation is often the best way to find out what works.

Nicki Hicks
Nofollow-er

I made a post when I first started blogging with an SEO Checklist for Web Developers.  I recently reviewed the list, noticing that while all those things are great to remember, sometimes it’s the simple parts of SEO we forget.

I also decided to write this post after thinking about office alignment.  Ahh, alignment, a term I grew sick of all through college (and one of my professors in particular, I’m sure, would be ecstatic to know I noticed it in the real world).  I realized that even though I work in an office of only eight people and our work constantly overlaps, we sometimes forget the effects our roles have on others’ work.

I, for example, forget that even though I have knowledge about so-called “easy” SEO best practices, not everyone I work with knows them.  So here are some major points to remember (and I apologize for any repeats from other posts):

• Use hyphens (-) NOT underscores (_).  It seems to have been handed down from the old school programming and web developing generation to tech gurus today that underscores should be used.  Don’t use them!
  Search engines see hyphens as a space (example-page is example page) and underscores as no space (example_page is examplepage).
• Keyword rich domain name.  There is debate about this - some say a domain name doesn’t matter as long as you can say it out loud and someone can easily spell it back to you (which is very true).  But I say - why not make it keyword rich while you’re at it?!  (While also remembering other domain rules: short, sweet, and memorable.)
• Title URLs intuitively.  When creating secondary and tertiary pages, make sure they make sense!  For example, NOT category2/animal12.html, BUT marsupials/kangaroo.html.
• Titles/Headers/Meta-descriptions.  These should all be keyword rich, unique, and accurate portrayals of what is on each individual page.  However, I caution you: these become difficult to create when a keyword analysis has not been done.
• Links. Links should be those important points web users will want to click on.  Links should have keyword rich anchor text, not a simple “click here”.  Also, try to use as many text-based links as you can; if images are necessary, use keyword rich alt tags.
• To have a site map or not to have a site map? I wrote in the original Web Developer’s Checklist that yes, you do need a site map.  This is another SEO conundrum.  What I’ve heard most recently is that site maps are important for large sites (retail, especially - with a ton of products).
• Directories…do I submit? Every SEO has his/her own opinion about this one too.  In my mind, you should absolutely submit a client to niche directories for their specific industries - especially a free directory.  Also, submitting to a well known directory like DMOZ never hurts either - it’s free!  I’ve heard it’s also good for new sites, especially, to buy a $299 for a Yahoo! directory listing.  Since you have to pay this fee every year, why not have the link for the first year for getting started??
• Most importantly…(drum roll, please)…design sites for web users AND search engines.  Site design and development is an art, and should be treated as one.  However, try not to get caught up in the fever that is making a website beautiful instead of the web user’s pleasure of a site being functional.

I’d like to add that SEO is most successful when done before and during a website’s existence.  Therefore, this list should really only be necessary when a site is built without optimization being done simultaneously.

Nicki Hicks
Advocate for Alignment

We’ve had a busy few weeks of finishing up SEO Projects here at flyte!  Just yesterday we finished another big project: for Maine Heart Surgical Associates.  As the Cardiac and Vascular organization just recently moved their Vascular & Vein Center to the new location in Falmouth, Maine, the marketing department wanted to optimize for that portion of their site.

So, that’s exactly what we did!  We optimized specifically for their Vascular & Vein Center - starting by cleaning up and consolidating several of the pages, as that was our biggest concern.

Then we hit the ground running with keyword research and other onpage optimization.  The second half of SEO (link building) started with Maine Heart’s intrasite linking, followed by a plan to increase backlinks.  With MHSA’s enormous untapped potential sitting in the writing hand of their surgeons, we suggested they start their own blog.  With the big move to Falmouth, however, that was nearly impossible.  But in the future, you very well may see a blog from Maine Heart!

If you have concerns about varicose veins, PAD, carotid disease, aneurysms, or venous disorders; be sure to check out Maine Heart Surgical Associates and their Vascular & Vein Center.

Nicki Hicks
I can now pronounce ‘Ambulatory Phlebectomy’