The use of the ‘nofollow’ attribute has greatly affected the link building process for many website owners. The hyperlink value essentially tells the search engine bots crawling your site not to pay any attention to the links specified. This has its pros and cons – by implementing the ‘nofollow’, you’re ensuring that the specified links aren’t adding to the link juice of your site, ie they won’t be increasing your popularity rating. However, they will still help associate your website with other relevant pages and so improve your exposure. It has been extremely useful to deter spammers from gaining any sort of advantage from posting irrelevant comments on your pages or blogs.
The ‘nofollow’ is an attribute that can be added in to HTML coding – it’s often called a tag by mistake.
All links are set to ‘dofollow’ by default. This means that their worth is assessed by the search engine crawlers as standard. To turn the link path into a ‘nofollow’, use the following code:
rel=”nofollow”
in your code syntax as below:
<a href=”www.yoursitename.co.uk” rel=”nofollow”>Example of Page</a>
If you want to, you can also make the entire website ‘nofollow’ by implementing the code into your meta deta on each individual page. An example is listed below:
<html>
<head>
<title> NoFollow Tutorial Example</title>
<meta name=”description” content=” “/>
<meta name=”robots”> content=”nofollow“>
</head>
<body>
Using ‘nofollows’ correctly will lower the number of outbound links that are indexed by the major search engines and aid a natural, white-hat link building process.
Alt tags (or alt attributes, as they’re formally known) are the brief descriptions that are implemented into the images that appear on your website. This SEO tutorial will explain the relevancy of alt tags and teach you how to create them.
You can bury the alt tag within the HTML code of the image that appears on your page. This incredibly simple move will ensure that the search engines have something to index and that site users have a brief description of the image if for some reason it fails to load (or if the user is using a text-only browser such as Linx). Obviously it’s important to keep the alt tag short, and bear in mind that the description has to convey the purpose of the image, not necessarily be a direct description of what it looks like. Embedding relevant search terms within the description is also a great SEO technique.
Here is an example of an alt attribute:
<IMG SRC = “photo.gif” ALT=”man walking dog”>
Note that the alt attribute itself has been added at the end of the embedded image tag. This is the standard form of the HTML.
