3dcart’s CMO Joe Palko & SEO Manager Bryan Falla answer SEO, PPC, and conversion questions questions submitted by 3dcart merchants. To submit your questions fill out this form: http://blog.3dcart.com/get-your-seo-questions-answered-by-3dcarts-seo-experts/

Q. Which major photo-sharing sites (i.e. Flickr, photobucket, deviantart, imageshack) allow outgoing links?

A.  In terms of dofollow links,  most don’t.  There are basically two reasons:  They are protecting their own “link juice”, and also preventing people from wanting to use them only for the benefit of outbound links.  The exception to that rule is Deviantart whose links are dofollow, however a landing page is put between deviantart and your target page which makes it not as valuable.

BUT that doesn’t mean there is not ways to use photo-sharing to build high-quality links: You can upload original images to Flickr’s  creative commons and ask that if bloggers use your image or photo to place a one way back link to your blog or site. For example:
“Feel free to use this image  for your website or blog as long as you include photo credit with a clickable (hyperlinked) and do-follow link to
blog.3dcart.com.”

It’s the same concept as the embed code used for “sharing” infographics, which pretty much tells people “fee free to share this graphic on your website with this code” and within the code there’s a do-follow backlink embedded.

So you can definitely build backlinks through these sites, but it’s important to understand that it’s more through networking than simply by posting. The backlinks won’t come from the sites themselves but from the people who use these sites.

Q. I’ve recently acquired a website that I feel is a bit too busy and might be confusing for some guests. I’m planning to do a redesign and streamline the site, making it more user-friendly. What are the risks in a redesign and what should I concentrate on when rebuilding with SEO in mind?

The only major risk is that the search engines won’t be able to find indexed content. Avoid this by
1. Try to keep the same URLs and site architecture
2. If that’s not possible, make sure all your indexed pages are redirected properly to their new URLs using 301 redirects

As long as the content is the same, you should be fine. On a side note, often times after redesigning a website, rankings will often increase, especially if the site is structured well, gets improved content, and is coded using best practices. I’ve found a nice list of best practices… http://terrymorris.net/bestpractices/

Make sure to register for 3dcart’s free webinar: The New Rules of SEO and check out 3dcart’s SEO services which can help you fast-track your optimization efforts.

3dcart’s CMO Joe Palko & SEO Manager Bryan Falla answer SEO, PPC, and conversion questions questions submitted by 3dcart merchants. To submit your questions fill out this form: http://blog.3dcart.com/get-your-seo-questions-answered-by-3dcarts-seo-experts/