Google SEO Footer tactics: We've really been concentrating in putting high quality content and links in very well designed footers, but what else can you do besides the normal stuff (title attributes, alt text etc)? Also, how big do you think is too big for a footer, assuming that there is no spamming, repetition or unrelated content?
I'm not a massive fan of putting links in the footer, looks a bit spammy for me - although you see a lot of site's get high PR by offering a template/web design service etc and putting their site's link in the footer of the user/clients site.
I have used footer links extensively through most of my sites, especially the larger ones. One thing I do however is not use the same anchor text links in my footer as I do in my main menu. I also do not link to each page of the site in my footer. What I have found to be effective is to create "anchor phrases" to the top six or seven pages and use them in the footer. For example, instead of a link in my footer saying "trucking jobs" I would have it say "Find a new job as an OTR truck driver". By using an anchor phrase in my footer it gives me different type of link based on a possible search query phrase. By limiting the footer menu to five or six phrases it keeps it from looking so spammy. It has worked for me.
Basically you should do what helps your visitors most. As far as I know the footer links are not given as much weight as mid-content links, so basically you'd be aiming on gaining value from those links by keeping the visitor on the website. I'd try to provide links to related content, or go even further and check if the visitor came from a search engine and provide more links related to his search. Anything that would keep the user from leaving the page is of good value. As for the length of the footer, I'd say that 10 links on top of each other should define a maximum reasonable length.
Footer is important for me and also for a lot of internet browsers out there. Others said footer is one factor for sitelinks in Google SERP. Just size and format them just right to see for your visitors.
Great stuff in this thread! I've always felt that really well designed footers were key, and now it seems that Google is making that idea a reality. I gave my designers this link: http://www.smileycat.com/design_elements/footers/index.php?page=1 when I found it to make sure they do this on every site they create. I also really like the point that logodesign77 made about using different anchor text in the footer.
Great stuff. Most designers don't care very much about the footer as if nobody looks at there. Probably the best way to tell if anyone is a good designer is looking at their footer designs.
No doubt, the unique design of the footer will not only attract the attention of the human visitors but by properly doing the SEO, the bots can give more importance to it and restrict the number of keywords to important few in the footer and from the keywords, link it to the respective pages.