The 15-Minute Guide to Becoming an SEO Ninja | Hacker News Reader

The 15-Minute Guide to Becoming an SEO Ninja

ecommercefuel.com

4 pointsspiredigital9 comments

This is a very thorough and useful guide. I've always been pretty turned off by the SEO "community" as guides like this mostly come across as guesswork and quackery.

On a personal note I read Andrew's ebook a while ago (which is very good) and had a brief email conversation with him. He struck me as very genuine and knowledgeable guy - even if he was an investment banker! :-)

Thanks boothead! Spent a lot of time trying to distill SEO down to the need-to-know concepts without skipping over anything major. Glad you enjoyed the eBook, and thanks for not writing me off based on my past career! ;-)

It's interesting how the nofollow tag has evolved over the years. Originally, people used it not only to control blog SPAM but also to shape the way PageRank flowed throughout a site - a method called PageRank Sculpting. The idea was you'd nofollow links to unimportant pages on your own site so that more PageRank would flow to the important pages you wanted to rank for.

I'm pretty sure Google has confirmed this doesn't work anymore. Now a nofollow link still takes a portion of a page's PageRank just without passing it along. Hence, no more sculpting power.

Agree with the others -- solid piece. I get asked about SEO all the time, and I think this is the best explanation while remaining concise I've seen of late. Will definitely recommend this to people before I attempt to explain things.

Good info without quackery but why do you call the title element "meta title"?

It's technical name is 'Meta Title', which helps disguising it from an article's on-page title, which is actually an H1 or H2 tag. Often, please think the meta title is what appears in big letters at the top of an article. While they are often the same, they're set in ways and just wanted to make the distinction.

The HTML 5 spec refers to it simply as "the title element" (as opposed to a title attribute)

http://dev.w3.org/html5/spec/single-page.html#the-title-elem...

There is no such thing as "on page title". There may be a top level heading in the DOM outline.

Throwing "meta" in there is just going to confuse people.

This means the <title> tag inside the <head> element does it not? As in

<html> <head> <title>Something SEO worthy</title> <head> ...

Or is it a separate <meta> tag?

Nope, that's right! Should have explained it that way the first time.

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