Example of Footer Links on McBuzz.com: an easy way to boost Search Engine Opimization

Can you use links in the footer of your website to improve search engine rankings? If those footer links go to internal pages on your own website, the answer is absolutely yes.

I have read on some SEO sites that footer links are not as helpful to SEO as they once were. This is probably true, given that Google has become more adept at determining when links are being used as navigation on every page as opposed to an “editorial” link that appears in the body of a page and is being used by the author as a way to specifically recommend another web page or a piece of quality content.

However, I have direct confirmation of the power of a footer link to improve search ranking – and also to improve the click-through rate of the listing that appears in a Google search engine results page (SERP).

Another Example of Footer Links Being Used for SEO

Rand Fishkin has written one of the most popular posts about footer links: Footer Link Optimization for Search Engines and User Experience. He thinks footer links are no longer a great asset to SEO, but they do count for user experience. Still Rand concedes that links in a footer can be used to advantage if they are not abused.

One very good way to improve SEO for your blog posts is to add a Latest Blog Posts or Latest Comments widget to the footer of your site. You can see examples of these footer links at the bottom of the mcbuzz.com home page. These are effective primarily because the link text contains keywords that are highly relevant to the topic of the post.

Footer links still carry weight with Google as indicated in a post by one of the top authorities on Link Marketing, Debra Mastaler, where she says emphatically, “Avoid buying or selling footer links.” Linking from the footer of your website to another site, or soliciting or paying for a link from someone else’s footer to a page on your site, is not what I’m talking about here. But if you read Debra’s post, you’ll see there’s good evidence that, even though it may be true that footer links don’t have as much significance in the Page Rank algorithm as they once did, Google does continue to pay attention to the content of footer links and to the way those links are being used.

There is one case in which a footer link is almost essential to good SEO: if you are forced to use images or Flash for navigation links/buttons. In situations like these, you would be foolish not to put text links to the main pages of your site in your footer.

Does Google like footer links in some cases? Here’s proof that Google loves footer links when they provide a really useful clue as to what the page being linked to is about:

In SERPs for one of my client’s sites where Flash is used for the main site navigation, Google actually picks up the text of the footer link to create the title of the search result listing!

The actual text has been changed to protect my client. For my example, I’m using a keyword that’s kinda sorta like the keyword my client ranks on page one of Google for, but here’s what that looks like:

FOOTER LINK: luxury hotel seattle

TITLE IN GOOGLE SEARCH ENGINE RESULTS PAGE LISTING:
luxury hotel seatlle – Seattle Hotel Accommodations

The words luxury hotel seattle are not in the page’s title tag or in the visible header on the page. There’s no doubt that Google is pulling the text from the footer link because it’s lower case, and there’s nowhere else on the site that the keyword appears in lower case but the footer link. The page the link points to is strongly related to all things “luxury hotel seattle” and – I know from Google Analytics – when visitors come to that page with a search on keywords related to “luxury hotel seattle” there is a low bounce rate. Visitors find what they are looking for, in other words.

Google sees the frequency of clicks on the result in the SERPs and the low bounce rate and is happy to continue to serve up the listing high on its search results pages. In fact, Google goes so far as to create a customized listing using text from the footer link. Obviously, this is good for users. They are more apt to click the listing, and when they do, they get what they want from Google and from my client’s website.

The bottom line: Don’t be afraid to use links in the footer of your website with keywords in the anchor text, especially if you have site navigation that uses images or Flash, as long as those links point to internal pages or posts on your site. Ideally, you should not use images or Flash for navigation, but you may not be able to change that. So, put those text links in your footer!

Even if you have text links in your main site navigation – as is the norm today, thank goodness! – you can boost search engine optimization for internal pages and posts on your site by including keyword-rich text links to those pages in your footer. Adding a Recent Posts widget is one easy way to do so.

UPDATE: July 8, 2011 – The slides for this SEO presentation are embedded below.

Here are the slides from the SEO presentation & workshop.

If you are a WordPress user – or even if not – you’ll learn how to set up your website to collect the essential information you need to find out whether your search engine optimization efforts are paying off.

For more information – including map and directions to TechStars – and to RSVP, visit the SEO Success with WordPress Presentation page on the Seattle WordPress Meetup site.

Here’s a summary of the presentation and workshop, which also appears on our Meetup.com website (link above). You do not need to be a Meetup.com user to attend, but do sign up if you would like to learn more about our very active and growing WordPress group for developers, designers, and users of every stripe, including great support for newbies. [...]

The presentation will be about 40 minutes with 5 minutes for questions at the end. We will also do a follow-up Q&A and SEO workshop after the break. I’ll show how to install the required search optimization plugins and tools during the workshop instead of during the main presentation.

Some background
Justin Briggs gave a great presentation on SEO at the recent WordCamp Seattle. He noted that WordPress does a good job of optimizing your posts and pages automatically. All you need to do to get these benefits is install WordPress. Combine this with the list of SEO techniques Justin offered in his talk and you are on your way towards practical SEO for WordPress.

Once you apply SEO techniques, you need to use some basic analytics and SEO tools to find out if the work you did actually paid off. My presentation will show you how to set up and use those basic tools so you can clearly see the connection between optimizing your website and getting the results you need to achieve success for your business.

Specifically, you’ll be able to use the All In One SEO Pack plugin and the information you get from Google Analytics, Webmaster Tools and the Gravity Forms SEO Add-on to follow a process of continuous optimization that will actually make you money, not just put you at the top of search rankings.

In the main SEO presentation we’ll cover the following:

1. How to choose good keywords and improve the content you already have
2. Where to put keywords (and how to come up with great ideas for new content)
3. How to check Google Analytics, Webmaster Tools and  Gravity Forms for feedback about keywords and traffic on your website
4. How to refine content on your website using keywords that produce the best results

Following the break, I will offer an informal search engine optimization workshop/SEO class to show how to install the following plugins and tools you’ll need.

1. Install All In One SEO Pack plugin
2. Install Google Analytics plugin by Yoast
3. Setup a Webmaster Tools account
4. Install Gravity Forms
5. Install SEO Add-on for Gravity Forms
6. Install Rank Checker add-on for Firefox

For more information – including map and directions to TechStars – and to RSVP, visit the SEO Success with WordPress Presentation page on the Seattle WordPress Meetup site on Meetup.com.

Pingbacks and trackbacks (another form of linking between blogs) are important to search marketing because although many businesses use, or want to use, their blog for online marketing purposes, they usually have no idea what pingbacks and trackbacks are. Although pingbacks look like comments – and, indeed, they show up in the comments section of the WordPress Dashboard – they are quite different.

Publishing pingbacks without knowing what you are doing can have serious detrimental consequences for the search rank of your blog pages and for the search rank of your website as a whole (if it shares the same or a related domain).

I have yet to find a good explanation of pingbacks and trackbacks for newbies. If you know of a good one, please add a link in the comments below.

You can wade through this discussion of pingbacks, if you have time.

Pingbacks are turned on by default in WordPress and most major blog platforms so that if someone creates a link to one of your blog posts in one of their blog posts (rather than leaving a comment directly on your blog), you get a notification (depending on how you configure this in the WordPress Dashboard) and you can publish the pingback. You’ll get an email from WordPress asking whether you want to publish the pingback or not. If you decide to publish the pingback, it will show up at the end of your post along with the published comments. Your readers can then click the link in the published pingback and go see what that person who linked to you is saying about your post – on that person’s blog.

Displaying Pingbacks and Comments Separately

There are also ways to modify the comments.php file in your WordPress theme so that comments are listed first, and pingbacks and/or trackbacks are listed separately below the comments. Instead of leaving pingbacks and trackbacks out altogether, this allows you to publish them without confusing your less blog-savvy readers. This might also encourage readers to link to your posts, because they know they will get a link back to their blog in the form of a published pingback.

I looked for a clear explanation of how to separate pingbacks from comments, and I searched for a WordPress plugin that would do it for you, but I found no plugins and I did not find any easy instructions about how to modify the code in a WordPress comments.php file to accomplish this.

While we are on the subject of blog comments and rewarding commenters on your blog, I want to mention a great WordPress plugin called CommentLuv. As the developer says, the plugin rewards commenters by “automatically placing a link to their last blog post at the end of their comment.”

Should You Disable Pingbacks?

To disable pingbacks in WordPress, in the Dashboard go to Settings > Discussion > Default article settings. Uncheck the box for “Allow link notifications from other blogs (pingbacks and trackbacks.)” I prefer not to disable pingbacks. I like to know if someone, or some bot (spambot), has linked to my blog, so I leave this box checked.

Pingbacks and Search Engine Optimization

In terms of search engine optimization, link building and attracting traffic to a blog, it’s more beneficial for the person who links to your site to do so than it is to leave a comment on your blog (as long as you actually publish the pingback). Why? (a) It means your readers have to go to the other person’s blog to read what they are saying about your post, and (b) – more importantly – when you publish the pingback, you create a link to the post on their blog that is directly relevant to the topic of your post. Otherwise, when someone leaves a comment on your blog, they will typically only use their top-level domain as the URL along with their name.

For example, if you look at the comments below, each of the commenters’ names is a clickable link, but each of them has used a URL that is the general address of their website or blog, not the address of a post about pingbacks.

How to Disable “Internal” Pingbacks

It’s worth mentioning that, whenever you link to a page on your own WordPress site from one of your blog posts, you will get a pingback notification letting you know. Of course, you  don’t need to get these. You already know if you linked to your own site. There is a way to disable these internal pingbacks using a plugin or by editing the functions.php file for your theme.

Pingbacks and Spam

The most common use of pingbacks is for spam. By publishing a pingback, you give a “vote” to any link provided by the person or bot linking to your site, and you associate your site with the site you link to. If the pingback is spam, you are putting a spammy link on your blog. This is bad. It waters down the quality of your site in the eyes of search engines, and it looks pretty bad to human readers as well. It looks like you don’t know – and don’t seem to care about – what’s on your blog. In this sense, spam pingbacks and spam comments are very similar.

Since some blogs automatically publish pingbacks, a spambot can create a link to one of your posts and once it’s published, the bot/website creating the link to you will automatically get a link back to their site. Perfect! For spammers, that is. The image at the top of the page shows what pingbacks look like in the Comments section of your WordPress Dashboard. These happen to be spam pingbacks. The square brackets and ellipses [...] signify a pingback as opposed to a comment.

Should You Publish Pingbacks?

I don’t publish pingbacks, not even the legitimate ones from humans who link to my site. I think they are generally confusing to readers. Pingbacks are for serious bloggers – people who blog every day. If I were a big-time blogger, I probably would publish pingbacks so that other bloggers would reciprocate. But it’s worth noting that even a successful blogger (and very smart guy) like Ian Lurie does not publish pingbacks.

If you want to include pingbacks on your WordPress blog, as I said, you can probably use a plugin that will put them at the bottom of the page, below all the comments. (Although I have seen this done, I haven’t found a plugin yet that will do it.) That way people can read the comments before getting to the pingbacks and getting confused. In most cases, unless your readers are also big-time bloggers, they will get confused because pingbacks mixed with comments don’t make sense unless you already know what they are (or maybe your readers will just ignore the pingbacks). So why include them?

You can ask a question about WordPress in the comments on this page (click here), and we will answer just as soon as we can. For FREE!

Mark McLaren and McBuzz Communications have been offering Free WordPress Help and Free and Easy WordPress Tutorials for nearly four years. That’s 28 years in dog years, and 132 years in Internet years, or something like that.

Got a question about Search Engine Optimization? Check out this video tutorial on Search Engine Optimization and WordPress recorded at WordCamp Portland 2010. You can post SEO questions in the comments on that page, and we will answer for FREE! (Please note that McBuzz Communications, McBuzz.com and Mark McLaren are not affiliated with Automattic, WordPress.com or the WordPress.org website.)

You can also search for Answers to WordPress Questions that have already been answered on these help pages:
WordPress Q&A: More Answers to WordPress Questions
Questions About WordPress? Ask Them Here!
More WordPress Questions? Ask Them Here!

I have added a new search feature to the www.McBuzz.com site (at the top of the page up there on the right). Looks terrible, but it works great. If you are looking for something specific, try putting it in quotes, like “free wordpress help” or “submit xml sitemap”. You can also put only part of your search term in quotes, like theme “navigation menu”. This search feature does a much better job of searching through comments, where there are lots of questions and answers about WordPress, SEO, Online Marketing and such.

Choosing good keywords is hard – no matter what size your business is. Sometimes it’s a challenge to get my clients to see the importance of using language in their marketing materials – including their website – that they themselves wouldn’t necessarily use to talk about their products or services.

Sometimes C-level executives don’t like using words they feel have the wrong connotation. Sometimes this boils down to the fact that they see their product or service as unique, so unique that it can’t be described in standard terms. Sometimes the Marketing Department is concerned about the brand, about setting their company apart from the competition in a good way. These things are fine. You want to show that you are different from your competitors in significant ways. But there are a couple of serious problems with insisting on being unique when it comes to choosing the language you use for marketing.

First, if you brand your product or service using language that none of your competitors uses, you stand a good chance of not being found in search results for the keywords that really matter, the keywords that will bring success. Second, you risk being so unique, so innovative, in the way you talk about what you do, that customers and potential customers won’t see you as being able to solve the problems that matter to them, the problems they know your competitors can solve – because you are not using language that they recognize and associate with the needs of their business.

Some companies understand this, and they do the right thing. Here’s a concrete example. Look at the box for Bayer Low Dose Aspirin above. (Click on the image to enlarge it.)

Why does this low dose aspirin have a bottle with an Easy Grip Cap? Because the product is for elderly people. If it’s for elderly people, why does it say “Baby” Aspirin on the box? This aspirin is most certainly not for babies. The fact that “Baby” is in quotes is a clue. It means that this product is identical to baby aspirin. It’s what’s called “Baby” Aspirin. It’s the same dosage. This is the aspirin we have all heard so much about in the news and in medical studies. One tablet a day prevents heart attacks. Not in babies. Babies don’t have heart attacks. Bayer wants you to know that this product is for elderly people AND it is the “Baby” Aspirin dosage, just in case there’s any doubt.

This is exactly how we need to choose keywords – the language we use in web pages and in links to our web pages. Just as people will search for “Baby” Aspirin on a grocery store shelf, people will search for and recognize keywords they associate with what they need when they use Google or any other search engine. If your web pages don’t include those keywords, you’re missing a huge opportunity and you are not going to win at SEO.

If Bayer didn’t put “Baby” Aspirin on the box, shoppers might see the easy grip cap and think that’s not what they’re looking for. All the studies and all the news reports have said “Baby” Aspirin is the form of the drug that is most effective against heart attacks. Is it aspirin for babies? No. Should Bayer call it that? Absolutely.

WordPress SEO – WordCamp Portland 2010 – Full-Length Video

Mark McLaren on 5 Tips for Better Search Engine Optimization (SEO) with WordPress – These Tips Apply to All Websites

Here is a video of my presentation at WordCamp Portland in September 2010 covering Search Engine Optimization using WordPress. Much of the presentation focuses on a basic working example of what constitutes good SEO, using titles from the WordPress.org support forum to show why some web content works and other content fails miserably.

The presentation also stresses the importance of link building for search engine optimization. The number and quality of links to your website from other websites is the number one factor used by Google and other search engines to rank your site. Finding ways to grow the number of these “inbound” links is essential to SEO success!

Choosing a good set of keywords – the words you use on your site to tell people about your business and what you do – is also critical to SEO success, so I spend a good bit of time on that.

SEO Presentation Outline:

1. Choose Good Keywords
2. Build Inbound Links
3. Use Detailed, Keyword-rich HTML Page Titles
4. Turn on Permalinks in WordPress Settings
5. Create Engaging, Well-structured On-page Content with Video, Slides and Keywords in Headings, Bullets, Links

Included at the end of the presentation slides are links to Search Engine Optimization Resources – for link building, tracking inbound links, tracking search ranking of pages on your site for various keywords, best tools for keyword research, using Google Analytics and Google Webmaster Tools for search engine optimization and so forth.

Here is a link to the slides:Search Engine Optimization for WordPress – WordCamp Portland 2010 (3 MB PDF)

Huge thanks to Joe Christensen and Peter Schmidt at Portland Video Broadcasting and Recording Company Blaze Streaming Media for the awesome live stream, video recording and production work they did for WordCamp Portland.

You can find the original video on WordPress.tv: Mark McLaren: Get Found Easier and Grow Your Business — 5 Tips for Better SEO

I’m buying. Along with work by Eric Ward it’s one of the best posts I have read on link building in some time. The article is well-documented (at least I take the author at her word) and well-written.

The author recommends a strategy of developing quality links from legitimate sites rather than a large volume of links from sites that are much less obviously related to the focus of the site you are trying to optimize.

It’s particularly interesting that Stott says “Anchor text [in inbound links] isn’t the signal it once was.” I still think we should always try for good anchor text, but the point of the article is that engineered links are more obvious today than they once were, and that probably includes anchor text in inbound links.

Today Google has much more information at its disposal when it determines what a web page is about, so it doesn’t need to rely on anchor text as much, just as directories like Yahoo! and DMOZ used to have much more significance for search engine optimization. Still, all other things being equal, better anchor text is better SEO.

Here’s Google’s Maile Ohye saying very recently that anchor text in internal links will influence sitelinks.

So clearly Google still looks at anchor text for important clues about a page’s content.

I will be speaking, as well. The topic is Search Engine Optimization and WordPress. This will not be the same SEO and WordPress presentation I gave at WordCamp Vancouver. The focus will be on keywords and the importance of links for search engine optimization.

Did I mention that WordCamp Portland also features awesome food – and BEER?! How many conferences, un- or otherwise, have you been to that have kegs of killer microbrew at the snack table? Right.

Your website’s home page is the center of your online sales and marketing universe. Design your home page so that it compels users to take action – action that is perfectly aligned with your key business goals: Buy Now, Learn More, Subscribe, Follow, Like, Share.

Here are a few examples of home pages that do this well. If you know of others, share them here!

PipelineDeals

The PipelineDeals home page tells you everything you need to know about the service at a glance. There are no blocks of text for you to get hung up on, only links that act like headlines, actual headlines (“Simple & Powerful Tools for Your Sales Team”), bullets, key info and eye-catching stuff like “iPhone Edition” and “$15/mo.” . Blocks of text aren’t bad, necessarily, but if you are going to have them, optimize them for search engines and put them below the fold.

There’s an important relationship between a web page and the way that it’s listed in search results. For search engine optimization, you want to be sure to have a compelling “HTML page title tag”. The title tag should use keywords people actually use to search and that describe what the web page is about. On the PipelineDeals home page, the title tag looks like this:

<title>Sales Tracking and Online CRM Software – PipelineDeals is Simple CRM</title>

This is an excellent title tag. Great keywords at the beginning of the title tag, and a branding statement that contains the name of the business and a keyword (“Simple CRM”). PipelineDeals ranks well in Google for “sales tracking software” and it’s on page 2 of Google for “online crm software”, which is a competitive keyword. With a little more SEO work, they can get to page 1 for this keyword. Getting from page 2 to page 1 can be HUGE in terms of the amount of traffic: at least a 10-fold increase or more in some cases. Given that PipelineDeals is very near the top of page 2, this is a perfect example of low hanging fruit.

Something else to look for is the meta description tag, which, like the title tag, is not visible on the web page when viewed in a browser. It’s an important part of the HTML, though, and you can see it if you View > Source Code in your browser while you are on the page. The meta description is what shows under the HTML page title on search engine results pages. It has little to no impact on your search ranking. Instead, it’s an opportunity to use a pitch that reads like ad copy to get people to click and go to your site. If a page doesn’t have a description, Google makes one for you using text it finds on the page. Sometimes this is good, sometimes not. Here’s the PipelineDeals description.

<meta name=”description” content=”Sell more today with PipelineDeals. Organize, track and manage your deals, leads and contacts in our affordable online CRM, sales tracking and lead organization software. (866) 702-7303″ />

This description is cut off at 151 characters when shown in Google SERPs. So it looks like:

“Sell more today with PipelineDeals. Organize, track and manage your deals, leads and contacts in our affordable online CRM, sales tracking and lead …”

This is pretty good “ad-like” copy, but it would be more effective if it were cut to 160 characters or less. Finish that thought!

Jobfully
This home page sports a great headline: “Jobfully. A Revolutionary Job Site for Today’s Job Seekers.”

Nice look and feel, too. Video is front and center. Do you think the video does what it should to compel users to action?

Here’s the HTML title tag for the home page: <title>Jobfully</title>
This title tag is good for one thing: people searching for the word “Jobfully”, otherwise it’s useless, a major missed opportunity. Compare it to the PipelineDeals title tag.

Room for improvement:
In terms of SEO, there is a lot of room for improvement on the home page, and throughout the site. HTML title tags on every page all nearly as weak as that on the home page, and every page on the site lacks a meta description tag, including the home page.

If users want more information about the three parts of the Jobfully value proposition (productivity suite, coaching and community) they should be able to click the eye-catching icons to read more. The testimonials are intended to be read as more information about each of these areas, but no one reads testimonials when they are this long and dense. Instead of long testimonials, the home page needs short, compelling “ad-copy”-style text. Not only that, real testimonials lack the keyword focus that is needed on a home page.

Another SEO principle that could be put to use here is to link from the home page to internal pages on the site. These internal pages should focus on – and be search engine optimized for – each of the three parts of the value proposition.

It’s also vital to use actual HTML text in the three boxes, with words like “job search productivity suite” being used as “anchor text” in links to their respective internal pages. Right now that “text” is literally a part of the image that’s used for the box. It’s essentially invisible to search engines. Even if the boxes themselves were  links, this would not be nearly as effective for SEO as actual text links.

Gist
Great look and feel. Love the giant yellow “Sign Up” button.

<title>Gist – Connected People Change History</title>
Catchy HTML title tag, but there are no keywords in it, nor does it say what Gist does. Missed opportunity here on several counts.

<meta name=”Description” content=”Gist provides the only full view of the contacts in your professional network by creating a rich business profile for each one that includes the most news, status updates, and work details.”/>
This description is better than the old completely generic description that was there a few months ago: “A startup focused on delivering real user value and rapidly iterating based on customer input.”
However, the new one is 188 characters. It will be cut off at 160 or less. It needs to be succinct and compelling.

If you have ideas about what makes an effective home page, or you agree or disagree with any of this, I’d love to hear it.

My presentation was called “Get Found Easier and Grow Your Business: 5 Tips for Better Search Engine Optimization with WordPress”. Thirty minutes is just about enough time to get through the essentials of SEO for WordPress, although I’m sure it could be a two-hour presentation without too much trouble.

Half of the time does not involve using WordPress! I do a quick overview of what a keyword is, how to pick a good keyword, how to check your initial search ranking, and, after optimizing, how to see if your optimization efforts had any effect!

Understanding keywords is absolutely critical to search optimization, but it’s not often talked about in a way that most people can get. This is going to have to change as more businesses use WordPress and other CMS solutions for websites and then decide that they need to do their own SEO.

The 5 Tips for Better SEO are spelled out in the presentation slide deck below. They are also available in PDF form here (right click and select “Save Target As…” or “Save Link As…” to download).

5 Tips for Better Search Engine Optimization with WordPress (PDF)

At the end of the slides and the PDF, there are links to SEO Plugins, Tools and Resources. If you would like the .pptx file of  the presentation – including the Notes – contact me.

Here are the 5 Tips for Better Search Engine Optimization with WordPress in case you want a quick overview:

Tip #1: Use keywords in your HTML page title

Tip #2: Write a page description that makes people want to read more (include keywords)

Tip #3: Customize permalinks

Tip #4: Use keywords in the visible page

Tip #4 continued: Make content “sticky”, useful, a resource

Tip #5: Links