Gabriel Harper's Blog

The SEO FAQ is designed to answer the most common and important questions about optimizing websites for search engines. It was last revised on June 10th, 2009 with the most current information.

Send your questions or comments on the SEO FAQ. Your feedback is vital to provide the best information possible.

Frequently Asked Questions on SEO

1. What is rel=nofollow, and should I add it to my links?
2. What are search engine friendly URLs?
3. What is keyword density?

1. What is rel=nofollow, and should I add it to my links?

The nofollow tag (as it’s commonly referred to), is an HTML attribute proposed by Matt Cutts of Google and Jason Shellen of Blogger.com in 2005. It is a recommendation on behalf of search engines to add a special identifier to links that shouldn’t be counted towards search results. For instance, unmoderated blog comments might be a candidate for nofollow attribute. Read my post on nofollow to learn more.

2. What are search engine friendly URLs?

Search engine friendly URLs, or tidy URLs as I prefer to call them, are well-formatted URLs. Tidy URLs are human-readable, easy for search engines to interpret, use minimal dynamic URL parameters, generally contain related keywords, and should be designed to be permanent whenever possible.

3. What is keyword density?

Keyword density refers to the number of times a keyword or phrase appears on a web page. Usually the keyword density is calculated after stripping all HTML, JavaScript and other markup, much like a search engine views your site.