Footer Link Optimization for Search Engines and User Experience

Site after site that I visit lately has been showing a tendency for using footer links to run their internal SEO link structure and anchor text optimization. While this practice in years past held value, today I rarely ever recommend it (and yes, SEOmoz itself will be moving away from using our footer for category links soon). Here's why:

1. Footer links may be devalued by search engines automatically
   Check out the evidence - Yahoo! says they may devalue footer links, Bill Slawski uncovers patents suggesting the same and anecdotal evidence suggests Google might do this (or go further) as well. Needless to say, if you want to make sure your links are passing maximum value, it's wise to avoid the footer (particularly the footer class itself).
2. Footer links are often not the first link on the page to a URL
   Since we know that the first link on a page is the one whose anchor text counts and footer links, while anchor text optimized, are often a second link to an already-linked-to target, they are likely not to have the desired impact.
3. Footer links get very low CTR
   Naturally, since they're some of the least visible links on a webpage, they receive very little traffic. Thus, if algorithms like BrowseRank or other traffic metrics start to play a role in search rankings, footers are unlikely to have a positive impact.
4. Footer links often take a page beyond a healthy link total
   Many pages that already have 80-100 links on the page are going to lose out when they add a footer with another 30-50 links embedded. The link juice passed per link will go down and the value of each individual link is lowered.
5. Footer links can be a time suck
   The time you spend crafting the perfect link structure in the footers could be put towards more optimal link structures throughout the site's navigation and cross-linking from content, serving both users and engines better.

That's not to say I don't suggest doing a good job with your footers. Many sites, large and small, will continue to use the footer as a resource for link placement and, just as with all other SEO tactics that fade, they do carry some residual value. Let's walk through a few examples of both good and bad to get a sense for what works:

Thumbs Up: Shopper.Cnet.com

I like the organization, the clear layout, the visibility and the fact that they've distinguished (through straight HTML links vs. drop downs) which links deserve to pass link juice and ranking value. I'm also impressed that I actually see a "Paris Hilton" link in the footer yet am not completely unaccepting of the idea that it could be there entirely naturally, simply as a result of what's popular on CBS.

Thumbs Down: Hawaii-Aloha.com

These are my least favorite kinds of footers. The links are just squashed together, the focus is obviously on anchor text, not relevance, the links are hard to see and read and there's little thought given to users. The links don't even look necessarily clickable until you hover.

Thumbs Up: VIPRealtyInfo.com

When I searched for "Dallas Condos", I was sure I'd find some examples for thumbs down, which is why I was so thrilled to find VIPRealtyInfo, a clearly competitive site in a tough SEO market doing a lot of things right. Yeah, there's some reasonable optimization in the anchor text, but it's definitely not overboard and the links are useful to people and search engines. The visual layout and design quality gives it an extra boost, too - something that can't be overstated in importance when it comes to potential manual reviews by the engines.

Thumbs Down: ABoardCertifiedPlasticSurgeonResource.com

The site's done a great job with design - it's really quite an attractive layout and color scheme. The links in the "most popular regions" aren't that bad; it's really the number of them that makes me worried. If they'd stuck to one column, I think they'd easily pass a manual review and pass good link juice (rather than spreading it out with so many links in addition to everything else on the page). The part that really sent me over the edge though was the two sentences in the green box, laden with links I didn't even realize were there until I hovered. Technically, there's nothing violating the search guidelines, but I wouldn't put it past the engines to come up with smart ways to devalue links like these, particularly when their focus is so clearly on anchor text, not user value.

Thumbs Up: Food.Yahoo.com

Again - great organization, good crosslinking (remaining relevant, then branching out to other network properties) and solid design. Even the most aggressive of the links on the right hand side appear natural and valuable to users, making it hard for an engine to argue they shouldn't pass full value.

Thumbs Sideways: DeviantArt.com

It's huge - seriously big. And while it's valuable for users and even contains some interesting content, it's not really accomplishing the job of a footer - it's more like a giant permanent content block on the site. The arrow that lets you close it is a good feature, and the design is solid, too. However, the link value really isn't there and the potential for big blocks of duplicate content across the site makes me a bit nervous, too.

So what can we take away from these analyses? A few general footer-for-SEO rules of thumb:

• Don't overstuff keywords in anchor text
• Make the links relevant and useful
• Organize links intelligently - don't just throw them into a big list
• Cross-linking is OK, just do it naturally (and in a way that a manual review could believe it's not solely for SEO purposes)
• Be smart about nofollows - nearly every footer on the web has a few links that don't need to be followed, so think about whether your terms of service and legal pages really require the link juice you're sending
• Make your footers look good and function well for users to avoid being labeled "manipulative" during a quality rater's review

Best Practices for Content Optimization

Is it possible that in all the years we've been writing at SEOmoz, there's never been a solid walkthrough on the basics of content optimization? Let's fix that up.

First off, by content, I don't mean keyword usage or keyword optimization. I'm talking about how the presentation and architecture of the text, image and multimedia content on a page can be optimized for search engines. The peculiar part is that many of these recommendations are second-order effects. Having the right formatting or display won't necessarily boost your rankings directly, but through it, you're more likely to earn links, get clicks and eventually benefit in search rankings. If you regularly practice the techniques below, you'll not only earn better consideration from the engines, but from the human activities on the web that influence their algorithms.

Content Structure

Because SEO has become such a holistic part of website improvement, it's no surprise that content formatting - the presentation, style and layout choices you select for your content - are a part of the process. Choosing sans serif fonts like Arial and Helvetica are wise choices for the web; Verdana in particular has received high praise from usability/readability experts, such as this article from WebAIM:

Verdana is one of the most popular of the fonts designed for on-screen viewing. It has a simple, straightforward design, and the characters or glyphs are not easily confused. For example, the upper-case "I" and the lower-case "L" have unique shapes, unlike Arial, in which the two glyphs may be easily confused.

Another advantage of Verdana is that the spacing between letters. One consideration to take into account with Verdana is that it is a relatively large font. The words take up more space than words in Arial, even at the same point size.

The larger size improves readability, but also has the potential of disrupting carefully-planned page layouts.

Font choice is accompanied in importance by sizing & contrast issues. Type smaller than 10pt is typically very challenging to parse and in all cases, relative font sizes are recommended so users can employ browser options to increase/decrease if necessary. Contrast - the color difference between the background and text is also critical - legibility usually drops for anything that isn't black (or very dark) on a white background.

Content length is another critical piece of the optimization puzzle that's mistakenly placed in the "keyword density" or "unique content" buckets of SEO. In fact, content length can have a big role to play in whether your material is easy to consume and easy to share. Lengthy pieces often don't fare particularly well on the web, while short form and easily-digestible content often has more success. Sadly, splitting long pieces into multiple segments frequently backfires, as abandonment increases while link-attraction falls - the only benefit is page views per visit (which is why so many CPM-monetized sites employ this tactic).

Last but not least in content structure optimization is the display of the material. Beautiful, simplistic, easy-to-use and consumable layouts garner far more readership and links than poorly designed content wedged between ad blocks that threaten to overtake the page. I'd recommend checking out The Golden Ratio in Web Design from NetTuts, which has some great illustrations and advice on laying out web content on the page.

CSS & Semantic Markup

CSS is commonly mentioned as a "best practice" for general web design & development, but its principles coincide with many SEO guidelines as well. First, of course, is web page size. Google used to recommend keeping pages under 101K and, although most suspect that's no longer an issue, keeping file size low means faster load times, lower abandonment rates and a higher probability of being fully indexed, fully read and more frequently linked-to.

CSS can also help with another hotly debated issue: code to text ratio. Some SEOs swear that making code to text ratio smaller (so there's less code and more text) can help considerably on large websites with many thousands of pages. My personal experience showed this to be true (or, at least, appeared to be true) only once, but since good CSS makes it easy, there's no reason not to make it part of your standard operating procedure for webdev. Use tableless CSS stored in external files & keep Javascript calls external and follow in the path of CSS Zen.

Finally, CSS provides an easy means for "semantic" markup. For a primer, see Digital Web Magazine's article, Writing Semantic Markup. For SEO purposes, there are only a few primary tags that apply and the extent of microformats interpretation (using tags like or

) is less critical (the engines tend to sort out semantics largely on their own since so few web publishers participate in this coding fashion). Using CSS code to provide emphasis, to quote/reference and to reduce the use of tables and other bloated HTML mechanisms for formatting, however, can make a positive difference.

Content Uniqueness & Depth

The final portion of our content optimization discussion is the most important. Few can debate the value the engines place on robust, unique, value-adding content. Google in particular has had several rounds of kicking "low quality content" sites out of their indices, and the other engines have followed suit.

The first critical designation to avoid is "Thin Content" - an insider phrase that (loosely) means that which the engines do not feel contributes enough unique material to display a page competitively in the search results. The criteria have never been officially listed, but I have seen & heard many examples/discussions from engineers and would place the following on my list:

• 30-50 unique words, forming unique, parseable sentences that other sites/pages do not have
• Unique HTML text content, different from other pages on the site in more than just the replacement of key verbs & nouns (yes, this means all those sites that build the same page and just change the city and state names thinking it's "unique")
• Unique titles and meta description elements - if you can't write unique meta descriptions, just exclude them. I've seen similarity algos trip up pages and boot them from the index simply for having near-duplicate meta tags.
• Unique video/audio/image content - the engines have started getting smarter about identifying and indexing pages for vertical search that wouldn't normally meet the "uniqueness" criteria

BTW - You can often bypass these limitations if you have a good quantity of high value, external links pointing to the page in question (though this is very rarely scalable) or an extremely powerful, authoritative site (note how many one sentence Wikipedia stub pages still rank).

The next criteria from the engines demands that websites "add value" to the content they publish, particularly if it comes from (wholly or partially) a secondary source. This most frequently applies to affiliate sites, whose re-publishing of product descriptions, images, etc. has come under search engine fire numerous times. In fact, we've recently dealt with this issue on several sites and concluded it's best to anticipate manual evaluations here even if you've dodged the algorithmic sweep. The basic tenets are:

• Don't simply re-publish something that's found elsewhere on the web unless your site adds substantive value to users
• If you're hosting affiliate content, expect to be judged more harshly than others, as affiliates in the SERPs are one of users' top complaints about search engines
• Small things like a few comments, a clever sorting algorithm or automated tags, filtering, a line or two of text, or advertising does NOT constitute "substantive value"

For some exemplary cases where websites fulfill these guidelines, check out the way sites like C|Net (example), UrbanSpoon (example) or Metacritic (example) take content/products/reviews from elsewhere, both aggregating AND "adding value" for their users.

Last, but not least, we have the odd (and somewhat unknown) content guideline from Google, in particular, to refrain from "search results in the search results" (see this post from Google's WebSpam Chief, including the comments, for more detail). Google's stated feeling is that search results generally don't "add value" for users, though others have made the argument that this is merely an anti-competitive move. Whatever the motivation, here at SEOmoz, we've cleaned up many sites' "search results," transforming them into "more valuable" listings and category/sub-category landing pages, and have had great success recovering rankings and gaining traffic from Google.

In essence, you want to avoid the potential for being perceived (not necessarily just by an engine's algorithm but by human engineers and quality raters) as search results. Refrain from:

• Pages labeled in the title or headline as "search results" or "results"
• Pages that appear to offer a query-based list of links to "relevant" pages on the site without other content (add a short paragraph of text, an image, and a formatting that makes the "results" look like detailed descriptions/links instead)
• Pages whose URLs appear to carry search queries, e.g. ?q=seattle+restaurants vs. /seattle-restaurants

21 Tactics to Increase Blog Traffic

1. Choose the Right Blog Software (or Custom Build)
   The right blog CMS makes a big difference. If you want to set yourself apart, I recommend creating a custom blog solution - one that can be completely customized to your users. In most cases,WordPress, Blogger, MovableType or Typepad will suffice, but building from scratch allows you to be very creative with functionality and formatting. The best CMS is something that's easy for the writer(s) to use and brings together the features that allow the blog to flourish. Think about how you want comments, archiving, sub-pages, categorization, multiple feeds and user accounts to operate in order to narrow down your choices. OpenSourceCMS is a very good tool to help you select a software if you go that route.
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2. Host Your Blog Directly on Your Domain
   Hosting your blog on a different domain from your primary site is one of the worst mistakes you can make. A blog on your domain can attract links, attention, publicity, trust and search rankings - by keeping the blog on a separate domain, you shoot yourself in the foot. From worst to best, your options are - Hosted (on a solution like Blogspot or Wordpress), on a unique domain (at least you can 301 it in the future), on a subdomain (these can be treated as unique from the primary domain by the engines) and as a sub-section of the primary domain (in a subfolder or page - this is the best solution).
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3. Write Title Tags with Two Audiences in Mind
   First and foremost, you're writing a title tag for the people who will visit your site or have a subscription to your feed. Title tags that are short, snappy, on-topic and catchy are imperative. You also want to think about search engines when you title your posts, since the engines can help to drive traffic to your blog. A great way to do this is to write the post and the title first, then run a few searches at Overture, WordTracker & KeywordDiscovery to see if there is a phrasing or ordering that can better help you to target "searched for" terms.
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4. Participate at Related Forums & Blogs
   Whatever industry or niche you're in, there are bloggers, forums and an online community that's already active. Depending on the specificity of your focus, you may need to think one or two levels broader than your own content to find a large community, but with the size of the participatory web today, even the highly specialized content areas receive attention. A great way to find out who these people are is to use Technorati to conduct searches, then sort by number of links (authority).Del.icio.us tags are also very useful in this process, as are straight searches at the engines (Ask.com's blog search in particular is of very good quality).
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5. Tag Your Content
   Technorati is the first place that you should be tagging posts. I actually recommend having the tags right on your page, pointing to the Technorati searches that you're targeting. There are other good places to ping - del.icio.us and Flickr being the two most obvious (the only other one is Blogmarks, which is much smaller). Tagging content can also be valuable to help give you a "bump" towards getting traffic from big sites like Reddit, Digg & StumbleUpon (which requires that you download the toolbar, but trust me - it's worth it). You DO NOT want to submit every post to these sites, but that one out of twenty (see tactic #18) is worth your while.
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6. Launch Without Comments (and Add Them Later)
   There's something sad about a blog with 0 comments on every post. It feels dead, empty and unpopular. Luckily, there's an easy solution - don't offer the ability to post comments on the blog and no one will know that you only get 20 uniques a day. Once you're upwards of 100 RSS subscribers and/or 750 unique visitors per day, you can open up the comments and see light activity. Comments are often how tech-savvy new visitors judge the popularity of a site (and thus, its worth), so play to your strengths and keep your obscurity private.
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7. Don't Jump on the Bandwagon
   Some memes are worthy of being talked about by every blogger in the space, but most aren't. Just because there's huge news in your industry or niche DOES NOT mean you need to be covering it, or even mentioning it (though it can be valuable to link to it as an aside, just to integrate a shared experience into your unique content). Many of the best blogs online DO talk about the big trends - this is because they're already popular, established and are counted on to be a source of news for the community. If you're launching a new blog, you need to show people in your space that you can offer something unique, different and valuable - not just the same story from your point of view. This is less important in spaces where there are very few bloggers and little online coverage and much more in spaces that are overwhelmed with blogs (like search, or anything else tech-related).
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8. Link Intelligently
   When you link out in your blog posts, use convention where applicable and creativity when warranted, but be aware of how the links you serve are part of the content you provide. Not every issue you discuss or site you mention needs a link, but there's a fine line between overlinking and underlinking. The best advice I can give is to think of the post from the standpoint of a relatively uninformed reader. If you mention Wikipedia, everyone is familiar and no link is required. If you mention a specific page at Wikipedia, a link is necessary and important. Also, be aware that quoting other bloggers or online sources (or even discussing their ideas) without linking to them is considered bad etiquette and can earn you scorn that could cost you links from those sources in the future. It's almost always better to be over-generous with links than under-generous. And link condoms? Only use them when you're linking to something you find truly distasteful or have serious apprehension about.
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9. Invite Guest Bloggers
   Asking a well known personality in your niche to contribute a short blog on their subject of expertise is a great way to grow the value and reach of your blog. You not only flatter the person by acknowledging their celebrity, you nearly guarantee yourself a link or at least an association with a brand that can earn you readers. Just be sure that you really are getting a quality post from someone that's as close to universally popular and admired as possible (unless you want to start playing the drama linkbait game, which I personally abhor). If you're already somewhat popular, it can often be valuable to look outside your space and bring in guest authors who have a very unique angle or subject matter to help spice up your focus. One note about guest bloggers - make sure they agree to have their work edited by you before it's posted. A disagreement on this subject after the fact can have negative ramifications.
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10. Eschew Advertising (Until You're Popular)
    I hate AdSense on blogs. Usually, I ignore it, but I also cast a sharp eye towards the quality of the posts and professionalism of the content when I see AdSense. That's not to say that contextual advertising can't work well in some blogs, but it needs to be well integrated into the design and layout to help defer criticism. Don't get me wrong - it's unfair to judge a blog by its cover (or, in this case, its ads), but spend a lot of time surfing blogs and you'll have the same impression - low quality blogs run AdSense and many high quality ones don't. I always recommend that whether personal or professional, you wait until your blog has achieved a level of success before you start advertising. Ads, whether they're sponsorships, banners, contextual or other, tend to have a direct, negative impact on the number of readers who subscribe, add to favorites and link - you definitely don't want that limitation while you're still trying to get established.
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11. Go Beyond Text in Your Posts
    Blogs that contain nothing but line after line of text are more difficult to read and less consistently interesting than those that offer images, interactive elements, the occasional multimedia content and some clever charts & graphs. Even if you're having a tough time with non-text content, think about how you can format the text using blockquotes, indentation, bullet points, etc. to create a more visually appealing and digestible block of content.
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12. Cover Topics that Need Attention
    In every niche, there are certain topics and questions that are frequently asked or pondered, but rarely have definitive answers. While this recommendation applies to nearly every content-based site, it's particularly easy to leverage with a blog. If everyone in the online Nascar forums is wondering about the components and cost of an average Nascar vehicle - give it to them. If the online stock trading industry is rife with questions about the best performing stocks after a terrorist threat, your path is clear. Spend the time and effort to research, document and deliver and you're virtually guaranteed link-worthy content that will attract new visitors and subscribers.
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13. Pay Attention to Your Analytics
    Visitor tracking software can tell you which posts your audience likes best, which ones don't get viewed and how the search engines are delivering traffic. Use these clues to react and improve your strategies. Feedburner is great for RSS and I'm a personal fan of Indextools. Consider adding action tracking to your blog, so you can see what sources of traffic are bringing the best quality visitors (in terms of time spent on the site, # of page views, etc). I particularly like having the "register" link tagged for analytics so I can see what percentage of visitors from each source is interested enough to want to leave a comment or create an account.
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14. Use a Human Voice
    Charisma is a valuable quality, both online and off. Through a blog, it's most often judged by the voice you present to your users. People like empathy, compassion, authority and honesty. Keep these in the forefront of your mind when writing and you'll be in a good position to succeed. It's also critical that you maintain a level of humility in your blogging and stick to your roots. When users start to feel that a blog is taking itself too seriously or losing the characteristics that made it unique, they start to seek new places for content. We've certainly made mistakes (even recently) that have cost us some fans - be cautious to control not only what you say, but how you say it. Lastly - if there's a hot button issue that has you posting emotionally, temper it by letting the post sit in draft mode for an hour or two, re-reading it and considering any revisions. With the advent of feeds, once you publish, there's no going back.
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15. Archive Effectively
    The best archives are carefully organized into subjects and date ranges. For search traffic (particularly long tail terms), it can be best to offer the full content of every post in a category on the archive pages, but from a usability standpoint, just linking to each post is far better (possibly with a very short snippet). Balance these two issues and make the decision based on your goals. A last note on archiving - pagination in blogging can be harmful to search traffic, rather than beneficial (as you provide constantly changing, duplicate content pages). Pagination is great for users who scroll to the bottom and want to see more, though, so consider putting a "noindex" in the meta tag or in the robots.txt file to keep spiders where they belong - in the well-organized archive system.
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16. Implement Smart URLs
    The best URL structure for blogs is, in my opinion, as short as possible while still containing enough information to make an educated guess about the content you'll find on the page. I don't like the 10 hyphen, lengthy blog titles that are the byproduct of many CMS plugins, but they are certainly better than any dynamic parameters in the URL. Yes - I know I'm not walking the talk here, and hopefully it's something we can fix in the near future. To those who say that one dynamic parameter in the URL doesn't hurt, I'd take issue - just re-writing a ?ID=450 to /450 has improved search traffic considerably on several blogs we've worked with.
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17. Reveal as Much as Possible
    The blogosphere is in love with the idea of an open source world on the web. Sharing vast stores of what might ordinarily be considered private information is the rule, rather than the exception. If you can offer content that's usually private - trade secrets, pricing, contract issues, and even the occasional harmless rumor, your blog can benefit. Make a decision about what's off-limits and how far you can go and then push right up to that limit in order to see the best possible effects. Your community will reward you with links and traffic.
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18. Only One Post in Twenty Can Be Linkbait
    Not every post is worthy of making it to the top of Digg, Del.icio.us/popular or even a mention at some other blogs in your space. Trying to over-market every post you write will result in pushback and ultimately lead to negative opinions about your efforts. The less popular your blog is, the harder it will be to build excitement around a post, but the process of linkbait has always been trial and error - build, test, refine and re-build. Keep creating great ideas and bolstering them with lots of solid, everyday content and you'll eventually be big enough to where one out of every 20-40 posts really does become linkbait.
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19. Make Effective Use of High Traffic Days
    If you do have linkbait, whether by design or by accident, make sure to capitalize. When you hit the front page of Digg, Reddit, Boing Boing, or, on a smaller scale, attract a couple hundred visitors from a bigger blog or site in your space, you need to put your best foot forward. Make sure to follow up on a high traffic time period with 2-3 high quality posts that show off your skills as a writer, your depth of understanding and let visitors know that this is content they should be sticking around to see more of. Nothing kills the potential linkbait "bump" faster than a blog whose content doesn't update for 48 hours after they've received a huge influx of visitors.
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20. Create Expectations and Fulfill Them
    When you're writing for your audience, your content focus, post timing and areas of interest will all become associated with your personal style. If you vary widely from that style, you risk alienating folks who've come to know you and rely on you for specific data. Thus, if you build a blog around the idea of being an analytical expert in your field, don't ignore the latest release of industry figures only to chat about an emotional issue - deliver what your readers expect of you and crunch the numbers. This applies equally well to post frequency - if your blog regularly churns out 2 posts a day, having two weeks with only 4 posts is going to have an adverse impact on traffic. That's not to say you can't take a vacation, but you need to schedule it wisely and be prepared to lose RSS subscribers and regulars. It's not fair, but it's the truth. We lose visitors every time I attend an SES conference and drop to one post every two days (note - guest bloggers and time-release posts can help here, too).
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21. Build a Brand
    Possibly one of the most important aspects of all in blogging is brand-building. As Zefrank noted, to be a great brand, you need to be a brand that people want to associate themselves with and a brand that people feel they derive value from being a member. Exclusivity, insider jokes, emails with regulars, the occasional cat post and references to your previous experiences can be off putting for new readers, but they're solid gold for keeping your loyal base feeling good about their brand experience with you. Be careful to stick to your brand - once you have a definition that people like and are comfortable with, it's very hard to break that mold without severe repercussions. If you're building a new blog, or building a low-traffic one, I highly recommend writing down the goals of your brand and the attributes of its identity to help remind you as you write.