Let’s start this post with a minor clarification.  The relevance attribute or “rel” tag basically defines the relationship between the current document and a linked document.  For example, say I have two html pages, cookies.html and milk.html.  I decide to link the cookies.html page to the milk.html page, hence fulfilling the current document and linked document requirement.  When linking the cookies page to the milk page the code on the cookies page will traditionally look something like this in standard html:

<a href=/milk.html>Milk</a>

Milk is the word that displays to the web user.  Just as “href” is an attribute the same is true for the “rel” attribute.  Href tells “Milk” where to go when the user clicks on the link and Rel describes the relationship between milk and cookies, which we can all agree is pretty darn good.  With a “rel” tag, the same link may look like this:

<a rel=”friend” href=/milk.html>Milk</a>

This makes the assumption that Cookies and Milk are friends.  Why include a “rel” tag?  For one, it’s great for classifying content and styling links.  Search engines like Google, Bing and Yahoo! will refer to rel tags to get more information about a link for search engine optimization or SEO.  Browsers support rel tags but do not use the attribute in any way.

Below is a list of different relevance tag values and what they do.  Each can impact SEO in its own way.

Almost twenty additional rel tag options exist, but the rel tags listed above will make the biggest impact on search engine optimization or SEO.

If you have more questions about relevance tags or search engine optimization, visit us at www.thenetimpact.com.

At The Net Impact, we conducted a short study pitting the SEO efforts of our local St. Louis non-profits against national powerhouse non-profits.  In other words, we graded their websites using HubSpot’s Website Grader tool. 

HOW WE DID IT

Through a Google search, we selected 10 recognizable St. Louis based non-profits for our St. Louis SEO sample.  Then we selected the top ten non-profits from a 2005 Forbes list of the Top 200 national charities (we verified that all 20 organizations in our sample still exist and have websites).

Using HubSpot’s Website Grader tool, we analyzed all 20 non-profit URLs.  Then we averaged all the statistics to compare St. Louis SEO to national SEO.  Here are the results:

WHAT WE MEASURED

Average Website Grade.  This is a HubSpot scale from 0 to 100 (100 being the best).  Hundreds of thousands of websites make the top 5% (scoring 95-100). An average score of 77.1 means there is a huge opportunity for St. Louis non-profits to improve their overall SEO efforts.

Average Indexed Pages.  This metric is the average number of pages that Google indexes from each website.  Google indexed as many 37,000 pages for the top indexing St. Louis non-profit in our sample and as low as 58 pages for the lowest indexing St. Louis non-profit in our sample.  Interestingly enough Google indexed only 32,000 pages for the top indexing national non-profit.  And the average page index of 5,742.2 pages nationally versus 4,552.1 pages here in St. Louis, is fairly comparable. 

Average Linking Domains.  Perhaps the largest gap in performance is the number of inbound links to St. Louis non-profit websites versus the average number of inbound links to national non-profit websites.  St. Louis SEO fell short with an average of 1,063 inbound links compared to the national average of 15,256.2 inbound links.

Best Traffic Rank.  Traffic rank is a statistic that defines a website’s overall rank in terms of site visitors compared to all indexed websites.  The top ranked website of our entire 20 website sample hailed from St. Louis as the 1,422^nd most visited website (which is actually pretty darn good).  The top national traffic rank was 8,547 (hint: it was the Red Cross). 

% Sites With Blogs.  Only 4 websites in our sample contained blogs that Google recognizes.  One non-profit in our St. Louis SEO sample had a recognized blog.  Three national non-profits hosted a recognized blog.  So on this metric, everybody gets a big fat…Eh….

MozRank.  Yet another linking measure.  The Moz Rank weights inbound links not only by quantity but by the popularity of the referring website.  For example, one referred link from CNN.com might be worth as much as many referred links from a small blog. 

Overall, St. Louis SEO is growing among local non-profits, but we can do better and we’re well on our way to competing with huge national non-profits.  If your non-profit is looking for an SEO solution or any other type of interactive marketing solution, check us out at http://www.thenetimpact.com/.

AIRHAWK, a comfort seating system for motorcycles manufactured by ROHO Group Inc., announces the March 18, 2010 launch of their website, www.airhawk.net. The Net Impact and XG-ad, a full service advertising agency specializing in print advertising, combined services to create the website design for the comfort seating system’s website, which is powered by the Auctori, web content management system (WCMS) built for search engine optimization.

AIRHAWK’s parent company, The ROHO Group Inc., approached our team to work with AIRHAWK’s print advertising agency, XG-ad, to create the web design for the premium product’s website. We took XG-AD’s Phohotshop design work, and made it web ready before placing it into the Auctori web content management system. The Auctori solution provides AIRHAWK with the opportunity to strengthen their Internet presence and their overall brand reputation by giving users a cutting edge yet professional site as well as the power to maintain their content in real time.

“This was one of the smoothest web launches I’ve managed.  We had the best of both worlds for design and internet marketing utilizing The Net Impact and XG-Ad.  The design is edgy and fresh while the back-end that I oversee is so user-friendly, easy to understand and of course, completely search engine optimized.  These two companies made a great team and in the end, produced a fantastic site that we are very proud of and excited to promote,” said Rebecca Heckert, eMarketing Coordinator, The ROHO GROUP.

Read the Full Press Release!

Join a great lineup of marketing specialists, including Steve Thomas, President of The Net Impact, St. Louis-based Internet Marketing Company, on February 26th, 2010 at Maryville University, for a 1/2 day seminar presented by the American Marketing Association - St. Louis Chapter.  AMA-STL’s annual student conference is well known as one of the premier marketing conferences in the Midwest. Connect with hundreds of students and marketing professionals and learn from the experts at this year’s seminar -  ”The New Decade of Social Relationships”.  Register today!