5 SEO Tips You May Not Be Aware Of

Below are five tips that you may not be aware of to increase your blog accessibility and search engine optimization.

Title tags don’t have an credibility towards Search Engine Optimization

Title tags don't have an credibility towards Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

SEOMoz reports states that most experts agree that a link’s title attribute has no effect on rankings. This means that if you are looking for strategic place to keyword stuff your code, look elsewhere, such as an image’s alt tag or your <title> element.

Caution! We are talking about this title attribute: title=”Useless”, not your page’s main <title> element.

Social Media Links are Used and do increase Search Engine Rankings

Social Media Links are Used and do increase Search Engine Rankings

Search Engine Land reports that both Bing and Google have confirmed that they use “social signals” (Facebook Likes, Tweets, etc.) to help influence regular search results (SERPs). This is hugely important because up until this revelation, most web professionals thought that Facebook and Twitter were simply traffic sources and social interaction centers. This now changes the way we need use social networks to our benefit.

NOTE: Another important aspect of this is deep-linking (matters for SEO more than social network traffic). Configure your FB Like button to link to a specific page, and not the homepage of your site.

HTML5 Can Increase a Page’s SEO Effectiveness

HTML5 Can Increase a Page’s SEO Effectiveness

The fact that HTML5 can increase your SEO is a no brainer if you think about it. HTML5 gives you semantic elements that help define your page’s structure. Because of this, Google and other search engines have a better understanding of how to index your page. More reading on this topic.

Great tools to check your work: Google’s Rich Snippet Tool & W3C’s Semantic Extractor

URL Shorteners Can be SEO Friendly

URL Shorteners Can be SEO Friendly

This is only true if they do 301 redirects. SEOMoz has a great writeup on the benefits (and pitfalls) on URL Shorteners. There are a lot of shorteners out there and most can probably be configured or modified to use 301 redirects. Bottom line is that if you are using one, verify it uses 301.

Meta Descriptions Do Contribute to SEO

Meta Descriptions Do Contribute to SEO

…but not really in SEO. Some old-school people still insist that search engines use meta keywords and/or descriptions when ranking a web page, but the new conventional thinking dispels those ideas. If you are one of the initial adopters who cut these out completely, you might want to rethink your strategy. Facebook pulls them for “Likes”, and search engines show them in their results. They still have no direct effect on SEO, but considering our #2 tip, since it helps Facebook, it helps SEO.

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