SEO questions

Ryan Kent

Well-known member
I am in the process of designing the home page for my site. My desire is to go for a clean, uncluttered page, but I would make sacrafices if it meant more traffic to the site. There are two things I often see on websites which I am curious about. It seems to be they are unnatural unless they are added specifically because they improve SEO for the site.

1. a "Tags" or similar section on the main page. A collection of random words which apparently are keywords that might be used in a search engine.

2. many forms of user posts such as sections titled "Recent posts", "Active posts", "Popular posts", etc. It seems to me either users would best be served by simply going to the forums and seeing these posts, or having one simple section which offers post summaries. The home page of many sites seem so completely cluttered with all these boxes offering post info. I often see search engine spiders/crawlers on forum sections so it seems they get their info. Does having forum posts duplicated on the home page improve SEO for the site?
 
"SEO" is mostly marketing hype. You can't doctor up your site to make it more appealing to searching engines.

Google's page rank algorithm is what you should be concerned about. Basically your rank goes up when other highly ranked sites publish your link. That means you need good content on your site that is worth linking to, and then you need to try to get published.
 
Ok. Can you help me understand something. What is the point of the "tags" area on website front pages? I believe XenPorta offers it as Character/Media Cloud. Why would anyone want a mix of jumbled terms on their front page?

An example can be seen in the upper-right side of Jaxel's site http://www.8wayrun.com/
 

from the wiki link....

In recent years tag clouds have gained even more popularity because of their role in search engine optimization of web pages. Properly implemented, tag clouds make the website appear more interlinked, when crawled by a search engine spider. This tends to improve the site's search engine rank

As I suspected, there would be no reason for so much focus by so many to have an otherwise meaningless jumble of words prominently displayed on a home page if it didn't improve SEO.
 
In recent years tag clouds have gained even more popularity because of their role in search engine optimization of web pages. Properly implemented, tag clouds make the website appear more interlinked, when crawled by a search engine spider. This tends to improve the site's search engine rank

I can find nothing to substantiate that claim from the tag cloud page. I would ignore it.

As I suspected, there would be no reason for so much focus by so many to have an otherwise meaningless jumble of words prominently displayed on a home page if it didn't improve SEO.

A scene from my favorite movie, Revolver:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rWj7oWlVtag

"The bigger the trick, and older the trick, the easier it is to pull. Based on two principles. They think it can't be that old, and they think it can't be that big for so many people to have fallen for it."
 
Actually, if "interlinkedness" is your goal then a sitemap is probably better. There are generators online, like this one:

http://www.xml-sitemaps.com/

Sitemaps are only used by search engines. That way your users don't have to see the "meaningless jumble".

Though even without a sitemap, all links on your forum are still connected and will be spidered.
 
I have never seen nor heard of Revolver, but I LOVED that scene!

More to the point, I learned a lot about SEO today. I actually presumed you were not correct and that the tag cloud was of benefit for SEO optimization. If I type "SEO tag cloud" in the google search engine there are many sites with "experts" who praise the benefits of tag clouds. I kept reading and found many other experts who agree with your point of view. So that led me to the source....Google. http://www.google.com/support/forum/p/Webmasters?hl=en

An excellent source of "official" information regarding SEO. Google's official answer on the subject is offered in a short official google video http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bYPX_ZmhLqg&feature=channel

My research indicates a tag cloud in and of itself does not necessarily help nor hurt SEO ranking, but the reality is most tag clouds don't help at all. Based on this information I wont be including a tag cloud in my website.

Thanks for sharing your experiences. They led me down the right path.
 
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