Dashes Are Better Than Underscores for Separating Keywords in the URL

So, you already know that including your keywords in your URL is an SEO best-practice and a very strong driver of good search engine rankings. But what if you have more than one keyword in your URL? How do you separate them? Should you push them together, use dashes, underscores, or other delimiters?

The short answer is to use dashes to separate keywords. Matt Cutts, Google's head of web spam and SEO king, has come out and said this explicitly so I'll leave it at that. Plus, I agree that it's more readable from a user perspective as well.

Roll Out Big Changes Slowly to Avoid the Sandbox

It pays to think about SEO when first building your site so as to avoid the pain of having to fix things later. However, none of us ever get things 100% right from the get-go and optimization changes are always in the cards. What's important to keep in mind is that if you're going to be changing a large number of pages or changing important elements of pages (e.g., title tags or URLs), is to roll out the changes slowly if possible. Search engines will often notice large-scale changes, and raise red flags if they think you're over-optimizing. As a rule of thumb, if you're changing more than 10,000 pages, try to roll things out in smaller chunks (perhaps 10-20% chunks) and give the engines time to digest things and adjust rankings. That way you can see what the expected outcome might be and continue with the changes if things look ok.

Some time ago I changed around 100,000 pages at once - both the title tags and meta descriptions only to see a fairly rapid drop in the search traffic they drew. The changes were all for the better, but the magnitude of pages changed at once probably drew attention from the search engines. After 6 weeks the traffic bounced back (and higher than before as we had hoped), most likely as the engines noticed that the pages had stabilized and indexed them properly again. In all likelihood had I changed the pages in 10k page chunks, that would have avoided the temporary search engine penalty / sandboxing (and a whole lot of grief and nervousness hoping that the traffic would bounce back!).

Finding Links to Your Web Page and Those of Your Competitors

We've talked all about the importance of link-building and how fostering many, high-quality, and diverse inbound links is probably the singlemost powerful thing you can do to improve your page's search engine rankings. But how do you track who is linking to your page? Also, what if you want to find out who is linking to your competitors? Here are two quick-and-easy tips:

The first and simplest way to get a read on links is by using Google's "link:" operator. Search for "link:yourwebsite.com" and Google will return pages that are linking to the page you include. Even though this is not a complete list you can use it as a good representative sample.

Second, if you're using Google Webmaster Tools (more on that in a later post) it'll give you a fairly comprehensive analysis of the links your site is receiving. Drawback here is that you can only do this for sites you have control over, and not those of your competitors.

A lot of SEO sites out there have their own backlink analysis tools but at the end of the day I find that many of them are based on the Google link: operator and it's equivalents in Yahoo and MSN and just using one of those is good enough for 90% of use cases.

SEOBook's Rank Checker - A Great SEO Tool

If you're wondering how to quickly track how your website ranks for multiple keywords across multiple search engines, look no further than SEOBook's Rank Checker tool.

This Firefox plugin allows you to input various keywords you want to track and then automatically checks in what place you rank for those words. Here's a video that shows you how it works:

Hopefully this saves you time and allows you to track your performance over time (the export to .csv functionality helps you store this data over time).

Use Google Toolbar to View PageRank - SEO Tools

We've talked about the concept of PageRank before - the numerical measure that Google assigns for how important a given page is in the context of the overall web. PageRank is a critical determining factor in how search results are ranked by Google, and therefore a critical component of SEO.

We know how important PageRank is, but how do we know what PageRank is assigned to a given web page? There are a number of tools out there, but one that I find to be useful and convenient is the Google search toolbar. Not only can you easily search from the toolbar, but, among other things, it also shows you what the PageRank is for the page you're currently on.









This is a great way to quickly estimate how valuable a link is that you're receiving by knowing how reputable Google thinks a given page is. That said, pagerank in the toolbar is not always the most up-to-date, and it also doesn't speak to how relevant a specific page might be for a given topic (a page might have a lot of authority but only for a single topic and that might be understated in the single measure of PageRank).

Hope you can add Google Toolbar to your SEO toolbox as yet another valuable SEO tool that makes your analysis quick and effective.

Site Speed and SEO - Does a Slow Site Get Penalized or a Fast Site Rewarded?

Folks often ask me whether site load time affects their SEO, and the short answers is: Yes!

The importance of having a site that loads fast (or at least adequately fast) can be imputed from the fact that search engines want to point users towards reputable and high-quality sites that match their search queries. A slow site that hangs forever is not a good experience for the user, and by extension, for the search engine that led that user there.

The fact that Google's webmaster tools reports on crawl speed (time spent downloading a page), shows that they're watching (aren't they always?). Also, I've noticed a direct correlation between the faster load times translating to more pages crawled per day (which should mean better indexing of your content).

More recently though, Google's top SEO oracle (technically the head of it's web spam team), Matt Cutts, laid it out for us (covered here by SEO Moz): Although slow load times will NOT adversely affect your rankings, fast load times may have a positive effect. So there you have it, straight from the horse's mouth. So, keep those sites scaling and those pages loading as fast as you can!

Robots.txt and SEO - How to Use Robots.txt

Tonight I ran into my same friend who had previously asked me about hiding text using the same text and background colors, and this time he had another very pertinent question: How is robots.txt to be used for SEO?

Honestly, I have always thought of robots.txt as a way to tell search engines which pages on a website not to index, but hadn't thought about it more broadly than that. So, I figured I'd do some quick web research and let you all know what I learned about using robots.txt for SEO.

First of all, the robots.txt file is used to provide cooperating web robots with instructions on how to crawl the site. If the file is not present, the robot will assume no specific instructions are being given. Also, you need to include a robots.txt file for each subdomain (i.e., subdomain.domain.com/robots.txt).

The main instruction is the "Disallow: /directory/page" command which tells the robot not to crawl those pages. You can also specify that instruction to all robots (with a *) or mention specific robots (or user-agents) (check out this example from CNN).

Another common instruction is to point the robot in the direction of the sitemap file. This is done through the "sitemap: URL location of sitemap" instruction. This is helpful in making sure the robot finds all the pages on your site (more on sitemaps in a later post), but again, not necessary to include.

Hiding Text and Keywords for SEO: A Big No-No

I want to do a series of posts on some commonly-known "black hat" tactics (black hat refers to practices that are deceptive and try to game search algorithms). Many folks that are starting out with SEO (and also some experienced SEOs) mistakenly assume that they can trick search engine algorithms and get their sites ranked higher.

I had lunch with a friend today that was referring to the practice of hiding keywords on a page by making the text the same color as the background color. This once-common way of tricking the search engines was quickly detected and added to search engines' ever-growing list of spam tactics they look for. Those attempting the practice are usually punished by being pushed down in the rankings or the ultimate punishment of all - getting removed from the index altogether.

And if you think you can get around this by using similar (but not exact) shades of color, or hiding the text off the page, or any other thing of that sort -- think again, the engines will catch on to you pretty quickly.

Meta Description Length - What Should the Maximum Length Be For SEO?

The meta description tag is an interesting one from an SEO standpoint. It is a very important tag given it's potential impact on clickthrough rates in the SERPs as well as it's (albeit limited and unclear) impact on your site's relevancy (and ranking) for targeted keywords. However, search engines choose whether or not to show what you include in the meta description tag, versus some another snippet it may deem better for the user. This fact can be frustrating at times, and we'll deal with it more in-depth in a later (and more advanced) post.

Today's post seeks to answer the question: "Now that I'm going to go through the trouble of creating quality meta descriptions, what should their target length and maximum length be?"

Again, the answer is not easy (at least not as easy as with the maximum length for title tags), but I'll go ahead and say that you should target 150 characters (which is also the maximum length that Google will show), and do your best to stay within 250 characters as a maximum (I've heard the 255 and 260 figures thrown around a lot). Google says publicly that there is no max length, but guidelines are always good to have and these are the ones I go by.

Keep Titles to 65 Characters - Maximum Length for a Title Tag

As you think about your title tags, making sure that you get your point across in the first 65 characters is a pretty good target. That's roughly what Google will display in search engine results pages (Yahoo is about twice as long).

Since the titles you pick are what users see in SERPs and drives clickthrough rates, make sure your title tag -- with all it's relevant keywords in it -- is within that 65 character limit.

Titles and Meta Descriptions Drive Clickthrough Rate on Search Engine Results Page

When a user searches for a keyword, the search engine displays the results on the Search Engine Results Page (SERP). The information that is displayed on that page is generally formatted to include a title and a description for each of the results (among other things). The title is underlined as the actual link to the indexed page and the description is right below it to provide the user with some more context as to the contents of that page. Also, the search engine shows the keyword bolded whenever it appears in the title and/or description.

The search engine decides which title to show for a page by looking at the title tag for that page and displaying that. The description below that is generally what's included in the meta description tag (meta name="description" content=...). The search engine may not show the description if it finds that to be inadequate in some fashion (e.g., if it's too short).

For this reason, what you define as the title and description of a page is not only important for SEO, but it's also important in driving clickthrough rates from the SERP. A title and description that is written for a search engine (e.g., non-sensical string of keywords) may help you rank better, but it oftentimes may reduce the potential clickthrough rate as users are unable to understand what a page is about and skip over it. Make sure to keep that potential tradeoff in mind as you craft those two fields.

Intermediate SEO Tips

Here are all the tips under the intermediate category