In the third and final part of SEO Best Practices, we will be discussing 301 redirects, blocking pages from search engines, Google search Wiki’s affect on rankings, the affect of negative links from “Bad Link Neighborhoods” & the importance of traffic on rankings.

SEOmoz states that “301 redirects are the best way to redirect webpages, but warn that they do have disadvantages.” Their research suggests that 301 “redirects deplete between 1%-10% of link juice,” but feel that this is acceptable if it is critical to allow one URL lead to another. It is also better than the alternatives (javascript and 302 redirects) which pass very little juice, if any at all.

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In the 2nd part of SEO Best Practices we will be discussing the use of Alt text with images, the use of the Meta Keywords tag, Parameter Driven URLs, the Usefulness of Footer Links & the use of Javascript & Flash.

SEOmoz recommends including alt text for all images on all publicly accessible pages. It is also suggests adding images with good alt text to pages targeting competitive rankings. There are 2 reasons for this. One reason is that everyone (even people with limitations) should be able to use the internet. The second reason is that alt tags have proven to have a larger impact on rankings, than once thought. While, there is not specific information supporting this as an exact cause, it is recommended to use good alt text for pages ranking for competitive searches.

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There are a lot of helpful tips out there about what the best SEO techniques are. In order to not overload you with too much information all at once, we have decided to break this up into parts. In this first part we will go over the best practices for the Title Tag, The H1 Tag and how useful the nofollow and canonical tags are for your website. We have outlined this information for you based on an article from SEOmoz.

The Title Tag format is a very critical area for search engines. If you want to beat out your competition it is essential for you to put your most important keyword(s) in the beginning of the tag. This is important because it is the first thing the search engine will read. If you are competing for a less competitive term, it may be more beneficial for you to put your brand name first.

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Think of your website as your car. To ensure it runs smoothly, it is best to get it routinely examined. Just like a car a website also needs to be examined for the exact same reason. It is not enough to simply create a website and think that people will actually view it. There is no easy fix for maintaining your website and it takes some serious work to make sure it stays current with the ever-changing internet community, but if you can schedule some monthly or weekly tune ups then your site can create more opportunities for you.

1.    Start off by first examining your Meta tags. This includes the Title and Description tags. It is important to make sure that every page on your site has not only unique content, but also Title and Description tags that reflect the page. This is one of the most critical areas that search engines look over. Your tags should include keywords and geo-specific information. This is very easy to do if you have not done this already and it does not take a long time.

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The Google Wave, a new communication service previewed in late May, combines Gmail and Google Docs into a free-form workspace. In this workspace users can write documents collaboratively, plan events, play games and more. What makes the Google Wave different than regular e-mail or instant messaging platforms is that it is designed for users to thread their conversation in-message, which allows people to almost instantly reply or edit information in one central location.

Once you create a Wave you then add people to it. According to Google, “Everyone on your Wave can use richly formatted text, photos, gadgets and feeds from other sources on the web.”

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For those of you that don’t follow Dwight on Twitter or aren’t a friend on Facebook..Dwight and his wife, well mostly his wife, gave birth to a gorgeous and big baby girl yesterday morning!  Her name is Paloma and she was a whopping 9lbs, 8oz. and 21 inches long.  Congratulations to Dwight and Ixchel and best wishes for all three of you from the TM Fam.

Cancel your Stanley Cup celebrations (GO WINGS!) or any other plans you might have Friday night, if you plan on snagging a user name you want on Facebook. According to Facebook you will be able to create a user name for yourself on Saturday, June 13th, at 12:00 AM.

Basically what this means is that instead of having a random string of numbers to identify the millions of people on their Facebook accounts, they have decided to allow users to create their own. The idea is to make it easier for search engines to find you on the web, which is great however there are a couple of catches.

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Last week Google made a few announcements at the Google I/O conference and one major one seems to have gone unnoticed.

A lot of people have suspected that Google is crawling JavaScript for some time but due to the random nature of it nobody has done extensive testing to prove either way. Testing this sort of thing is a waste of time because Google has different crawling rules for different sites and whatever is true today probably won’t be true tomorrow.

The changes were revealed by Vanessa Fox and are based around the way Google handles non-standard web links.

Googlebot is now able to construct much of the page and can access the onClick event contained in most tags. For now, if the onClick event calls a function that then constructs the URL, Googlebot can only interpret it if the function is part of the page (rather than in an external script).

Some examples of code that Googlebot can now execute include:

• <div onclick="document.location.href='http://foo.com/'">
• <tr onclick="myfunction('index.html')"><a href="#" onclick="myfunction()">new page</a>
• <a href="javascript:void(0)" onclick="window.open('welcome.html')">open new window</a>

These links pass both anchor text and PageRank.

This is welcome news from Google, even if it changes things a bit. With an algorithm built on links there is no reason Google should count some links and discount others just because of the way they are implemented. From a users point of view if you can click on a link then it’s a real link and that’s how Google should see them too.

This change does bring about some interesting issues and I wonder how many sites will suddenly see thousands of new pages being indexed or a massive boost in rankings as links that previously didn’t count are suddenly used by Google.

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We recently had a customer come to us with a trademark infringement issue online. A large, corporate competitor was utilizing their name in Meta data of their web site on different pages. In addition to infringement by the competitor, my customer’s name was a common use of words like “Cheap Auto Parts” that was stuffed in their competitor’s meta data. Our customer never “officially” trademarked their name, but had been able to show prior use of their name for almost 10 years online. Another interesting piece of evidence was that the competitor was also using other competitor names in meta to rank for their names in search.

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I know that we all have a tendency to speak a little geeky sometimes and you might have trouble understanding what we’re talking about.  I’ve always wanted to do a glossary and knowledge base on our site to help explain some of the terms and web geek jargon that we use to our visitors, but its quite a large task.  I might have to include something in our upcoming site rebuild.

But, for now, Smashing Magazine, which is a pretty good blog that a couple of us read has a great post this morning worthy of a backlink.  Check it out and if you have any questions or need further explanation, feel free to ask us.

So without further ado, check out Web Design Industry Jargon, Glossary and Resources.