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Regarding nofollow on internal links, does it hurt? Does it help? There are lots of discussions going on over it in webmaster’s forums. Let’s hear the latest from Matt Cutts, the Google guy.

In a recent video, he answered a question on this. According to him, it’s NOT a good idea to use the nofollow relation attribute on internal links. Let’s see why..

• Pagerank Flow : When pagerank comes to your site from your backlinks, it flows throughout your site based on the internal links that you have on your site. If you add nofollow on your internal links, that’s causing your links to drop out of the link graph.
• Internal Backlinks : Sometime, internal links are counted as backlinks as well. When you link a content page from another, it becomes a backlink for the linked page if the content is on same niche. Use of nofollow will cut those chances to nil.
• SERP Boost : It’s also noticed that not using the nofollow on internal links boosts SERP. This may sound wired, but a cse study that I am monitoring (and, will be posting soon) showing huge boost in SERP after removing the internal nofollows.

Below is the video where Matt Cutts answered the question..

1. Focused Topic: Write your blog with a central topic. What do your readers want to know?” Choose a topic that your ideal prospect would want to read about and one you would enjoy writing.
2. Do Not sell: The focus of the blog should be on educating, giving advice, tips, commentaries and opinions. Stay away from direct selling or self promotion.
3. Interesting Titles: Those first few words will make the difference between your blog posting drawing in hundreds of readers and your posting being totally ignored.
4. Easy to scan: Make it easy for your reader to scan your blog and get the gist of it. The main points should stand out in sub-headlines, lists, images, colors, italics and indented text.
5. Short Postings: A typical blog posting should be about 250 words. The longer a post goes, the more people skim. Studies show that people will read up to 300 words. More than that and they will skim only.
6. Keep it fresh, interesting and write original content. This is what keeps your readers coming back. Don’t be afraid to give your opinion.
7. Write clearly: Make it easy for your readers to clearly understand you. Poor writing style and bad grammar makes your readers work too hard.
8. Active Voice: Write concisely, plainly and openly. Write using action oriented words to get your message across as quickly as possible.
9. Post regularly: Writing 3 blog posts per week is ideal. Even a few posts each month will hold onto subscribers. Too few of posts and your blog will become stale or “dead.”
10. Stay positive: Opinions and commentaries are great, they are entertaining and interesting. What turns people off is negative and offensive language.

With many looming changes waiting around the corner for Google’s search engine nobody really knows what is going to happen when their new algorithm tweak comes into affect later this year. One thing we do know is that they are on a speed kick right now and their goal is clearly to speed things up which means rewarding websites that have somewhat of a quick load time.

Here are some ways to speed up your website’s page load time:

1. Images: Do you have an image heavy website? If you use a great deal of images you are going to drastically slow down the load time of your website pages. You have to first compress the images along with using a save for web feature if you are using a program to edit them. Often times you can downgrade the quality of the image that is virtually undetectable to the human eye and will reduce the size of the image for loading purposes.

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For years now companies have been polled regarding search engine optimization and according to eMarketer nine out of every ten companies polled have either increased their SEO budgets or left them unchanged since 2007, which just goes to show you that this industry is in store for a very interesting ride that is bound to bring in heaping amounts of changes in the not so distant future.

The report that was recently produced by SEMPO was a combination of 1,500 marketers and agencies. Paid search was up as well which maybe leads us all to believe that we might be inching away from the dreaded recession that has plagued us all. I’m not the surprised how a great deal of the shift comes from the print industry. Businesses that have spent many years relying on the print industry are starting to shift over to digital marketing which is very important to realize. Print is a very expensive form of communication and many businesses are starting to realize that being online is where it is at. Technology is only growing and more and more companies are trying to lay their path in the online space. As younger generations come into their own and increase in corporate rankings over the next decade or so what do you think is going to occur in the online space again? Another boom is likely.

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