Behind the scenes with search engine optimisation

There are many methods that a search engine optimiser can use in order to help their site to gain more favourable rankings. By far the most important part of this is building links. This effectively channels some of the importance from other sites into your own. This influence (or Page Rank as Google call it) flows through links and, as a general rule, the more links there are to a page, the higher the Page Rank for that page.

In order for the work of link-building to be put to best effect, it is important to channel the influence your pages carry properly. This can be done with the rel="nofollow" attribute. This attribute is used by search engines like Google to prevent link spam and it allows you to tell search enignes not to follow a particular link and thus to assign a greater importance to the other links on the page. If you nofollow the links on your site that lead out to sites that you don't want to give influence to or the links that do not contain your keywords, then the links on your site that link to your content using the right keywords for thaat content in their anchor text will be given a far greater level of importance by Google.

Wikipedia is an exponent of the nofollow attribute. In order to stop people from changing Wikipedia entries in order to gian links to their websites, Wikipedia used the nofollow attribute on all external links. This means that people interested in external resources from Wikipedia can follow the links if they so choose but the search engines will not and will not give any extra importance to the sites behind them.

An example of the practice of using the nofollow attribute in a business context can be seen at Tintisha's website. The site is optimised for the keyword speaker stands and so links that do not relate to speaker stands or to any of the other keywords that the site uses are nofollowed. This means that the site can use navigational elements to help people find what they are looking for but inform the search engines that the deeper content on the site relates to the keywords you deem to be correct rather than those that anyone else thinks is right.

In order to see this in action, you can either use your browser, click on View & then Source Code. This shows the code that goes to making up the web page you see. You can then search for the word "nofollow" and see which hyperlink it pops up agianst.

To save time, however, if you have a Firefox browser you can download the Search Status plugin that puts some useful optimisation tools into the browser. Once installed, you see an extra bar. If you click on the 'q' on the bar and select 'Highlight nofollow links' you will now get a visual representation of nofollow links on a given website. Nofollow links will be ighlighted in pink and you can see how people use this attribute and get a sense of how to harness it.