SEO Mentor

There has been a lot of questions about how Social Media is affecting the SEO industry. The question I would like to ask is how can it help the SEO industry and how will affect the SEO for my clients sites and my own. The major issue with Social Media sites and how they play a role in your SEO these days is a majority of them (especially the big boys e.g. Twitter) use the Nofollow link. “Well your asking what does this mean and why do I need to worry about it.” First of all don’t worry about it, this is not the end of the world but what it means is that going to all these major social media and networking sites and linking back to your website will for the most part have no affect on your search engine results.

The NoFollow link (e.g. <a href=”url” rel=”nofollow”>) was originally created to block search engines from following links in blog comments, this was due to the very high amount of blog comment spamming. The wonderful Wikipedia definition says, “nofollow is an HTML attribute value used to instruct some search engines that a hyperlink should not influence the link target’s ranking in the search engine’s index. It is intended to reduce the effectiveness of certain types of search engine spam, thereby improving the quality of search engine results and preventing spamdexing from occurring in the first place.”

With Social Media sites popping up daily and with them being very easy to place user generated content and links spammers began the same old routine and therefore we suffer from their actions. The top social media and networking sites quickly found that they too needed to use the nofollow attribute to help reduce the amount of spam submitted. So for the most part placing a link on Social Media sites will not directly help your search engine optimization efforts. That doesn’t mean Social Media can not help in gaining valuable links to your sites here are a couple of ways Social Media and Networking help:

• Ask for links to your site from those people you are networking with
• Social Media is a great Link Baiting tool
• Create instant awareness of your website or blog posts making it easier for people to find and therefore link to

So these are just a few tips and examples of how you can use Social Media and Networking site to help gain valuable links back to your website for SEO purposes. Although the majority of these social sites we use daily will not directly help our site SEO here are a list of some that can:

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So I was on vacation this last week and got to watch my Cubs in spring training in Mesa, Arizona. While there I was thinking about what I could write about to help those that may stumble upon my fairly simple blog. With my experience in mentoring individuals, the question about getting websites indexed in the major search engines is always one of the first questions. So I would like to give a quick outline of what I think you can plan on when it comes to getting indexed in Google, Yahoo, and MSN.

First off there is no real amount of time that I can tell you that your site will be indexed cause I have seen my own sites take as long as 3 months and have had sites get indexed as fast as a week. But overall I have found that my sites get indexed in MSN first within on average about 8 weeks and then Yahoo follows on average of 10 weeks and Google usually shortly follows of an average of 12-15 weeks. Now keep in mind this is just from my research and also that I am talking about brand new websites.

Here is the manual way to see if your site has been indexed go to the search engine (I know this works for Google, Yahoo, and MSN) and in the search box input site:(your url) for example site:http://www.yourseomentor.com/. Then click search and if you see at least your home page in the results then BADABOOM your site has been indexed in the search engine, meaning that the spiders/robots have found your site.

Here are secret SEO tips (ok it so they are not so secret anymore) but none-the-less a great tip to getting indexed faster:

• Start your Link Building and get links from related authority websites with high pagerank
• Also link to other sites (External Links) it is rumored that some search engines don’t index sites that don’t have external links
• Content!!! Make sure that your site has content related to your site Title and Meta Tags (Note: Stay away from Frames, Flash, and all image site design)
• Do not Spam (e.g. Keyword Stuffing)

The most important thing you should remember from this article is PATIENCE, continue your SEO campaign and don’t give up.