The next 5 things to Help your Findability / SEO

A follow up from the last post about Findability / SEO and your WordPRess blog.

1) Add the title tag to all the links on the page.

The reason for this is to add more information for the search engine spiders to find and read. When you do this it will add more keywords and information about the page / post into their search results. What that means to the person searching is that the words they type into the search engines have a greater chance of finding the article that you have written.

2) Proper placement of the H1, H2, H3 tags on titles on the page.

The reason to do this is to let the search engine spiders know what the most important information on your WordPress blog is, and then you tell it the 2nd and the 3rd most important. The reason you want to do this is so that the spiders will rank this information and use it to help the users to search for the most important and relevant information on your blog.

3) Have the web site verified as W3C compliant (w3c.org).

The reason to do this is that a WordPress blog that is written with W3C compliant code not only makes it easier to optimize for Findability / SEO, but also, compliant code lets a search engine read the whole blog without any problems. If the search engines can do that then there is a more complete picture and record of your blog in the log, and this will help the searchers return more complete and higher placed search results.

4) Add and fill in the atl attribute to all images.

Again, the reason to do this is it gives the search engine spiders more information about the content in the blog. This will not only show up more in searches for keywords, but also in image searches. Google is saying that more and more people are searching for written content that includes images. I have not added images to this blog because I do not think they add anything to the content I write.

5) Add an XML site map (if one does note exist).

The reason for this is to give the search engine spiders a clear road map in the format that they like and will use. With this information the spiders will crawl and index your blog quicker and more efficiently. This will help get time sensitive information in to them sooner, and it will show up in searches faster. With WordPress it is easy to do this with this plugin Google (XML) Sitemap Generator. After set up of the plugin you can rerun it every now and then so that if you have made changes to your blog you can inform Google of the changes.

Hope this helps. If it did drop me a comment. If you all liked this let me know and I will write up 5 more tips.

Thanks for reading

First 5 things to help your Findability / SEO

I was asked to look at a site and let them know what 5 things they could do to their site to increase its Findability / SEO. That got me thinking that a lot of people do not know the first five basic things to do.

We talk a lot about the next five things or five things you did not know. With that in mind I want to talk about the FIRST five things you should do on your WordPress blog to help out with Findability / SEO.

1) Write New and Unique content.

This is where it all starts. If you have strong, well written and unique content, then you will get people to come and read your blog. I know that sounds simplistic, and yes it is, but it is the truth!

2) Add new content often and regularly.

The more often you post the more people will come to your site. Why? Well the more you post, or if you hold yourself to a regular schedule, then search engines will spider your site more often. Therefor, you will have more information in the search engines. This allows people to find you a much more easily when they are searching.

3) Have a great key word phrase that is popular, but not too popular.

One of the first things you should do when setting up your site for Findability / SEO is to come up with a good keyword that works for your blog and the subject you write about. Then think of five more that do the same thing but are not as well known. Why? Well if you use a very popular keyword like coffee you will never get to the top of Google list because a company like Starbucks will have that all tied up. Instead of coffee use Whole bean coffee or cup of coffee. This way you can find a place in a bigger segment of readers.

4) Make sure your site is as accessible as it can be.

Having a well coded accessible site not only will allow the largest group of people to read it, but it will allow the search engines to make it through the site with little or no problems. This will allow them to index more of your content and return a better search result.

5) Use your keywords in your titles, domain name and your url.

This gives you a bunch of new places to put keywords that will not only help you with your search engine rankings, but also to give the people searching for things a new set of keywords to find in their search.

I hope this helps out those of you that are just starting your blog and even with people that have long time blogs that are just now starting to do the Findability / SEO thing to it.

Please drop me a comment if you have any questions. Also drop me a comment if you have tried any of these and let me know what kind of results you had with them.

When to hire someone to help you with your WordPress blog

Let’s face it. WordPress is really easy to use. They have a quick install guide from WordPress.org and many hosting companies include a one click install option. Then all you have to do is pick a template, and you are off and running.

Once you have it up and going, then most of the upgrades and add-ons you want are with plugins or just changing the default settings built into your WordPress blog.

So why would you ever want to pay someone good money to work on your blog? Lots of reasons. You want a custom template / Layout and you are not a coder or a graphic designer. In the course of implementing the Findability / SEO things I talk about on this blog, you realize that you do not have the skill set to dive into the code that is sometimes necessary to implement some of the tricks that I bring up.

Because of the ease of setup and use of the WordPress system, anyone with little or no web skills can set it up and make it look and work great. That is part of what I love about this system.

If you are the kind of person that is happy with things that come right out of the box and just work for you, then you will probably never need anyone to look at or touch it. Now, if you are the kind of person that wants to get 110% out of your install but do not think you have the skills, then you might just be the kind that wants to contact a WordPress professional.

A WordPress professional is someone that works with and is intimately knowledgeable on how WordPress works and ticks. With them doing it for you (or teaching you how to do it), you can really crank up what this blogging system can do for you.

All of that said, I believe that almost all of the tips I talk about on this blog can be used by anyone no matter what level of knowledge they have. Just remember that there are good people out there who know this system, and for a reasonable amount of money they will help you out and work on your blog.

In my next post I will talk about where to find a WordPress Pro and, what to expect when you work with them.

Have you ever hired some one to work on your blog? Would you ever hire some one to work on your WordPress blog? Drop me a comment and let me know.

Search on your Blog Part 3

For the third and final part of the articles on searching and your WordPress blog.

I came across this post Have you SEO’ed your search feature? on Marketing Hub. A lot of good information about rewriting the code on your search.

They have written a great post that talks about ways to improve the default code on the search section of your WordPress blog. The reason you would want to do this is to help Google index the search results of your blog, and that way you have a chance of get more pages index into the search engine. More pages index means a better chance of getting a good results when some one is trying to find your blog.

I will say that the things that are described in the post are a bit advanced. As I have said before, if you do not feel like this is something you can handle or are just plain scared to play around in the code, then do not try it. Find someone (like me) that knows what they are doing and hire them.

If you want to try this then I suggest reading through the post two or three times and making a copy of the page you are working on before you try it out.

The post has all of the code snippets you need and some good directions on where to put them.

Having done this to my WordPress blog, I have seen an increase in Google information about the searches, and I know this will increase the SEO / Findability of my blog. I am fairly sure it will do the same to yours.

Let me know if this was easy or hard for you to do. If you did it, how has it worked out for you?

Thanks for Reading

Search on your Blog Part 2

Part two of the three part series on Search and your WordPress blog.

This time I want to talk to you about a great little plugin on Addicted to New blog called the WordPress live search plugin.

This plugin does all of its work by letting your readers do a search on your blog without having to refresh the page. It can do this with the use of Ajax. Your readers can save a lot of time when they are performing searches on your blog. This is also a great way to increase not only the interactivity between the users and the blog, but also it will help make your WordPress blog have a richer Findability added to it. The reason it achieves this is because the search responses come to the reader instantly without loading a new page.

A thing to note is that this plugin needs the default WordPress search form still on your blog. If you have changed it all, especially the id attribute of the search form (searchform) or the search input box, this plugin will just not work. If you have changed it and you want to still use this, I suggest you add the code back for the original search.

It should be noted that to test this out, I had to install it on a default template that comes with WordPress to get it to work.

Search on your Blog Part 1

Lets talk about search and the search function on your WordPress blog. Almost all themes you can use will have a search function built in, and it will work well for you 99% of the time.

I was having problems getting the results I thought I should have from the searches that I conducted. With that in mind, I went looking for a new on site search. I came across the google custom search. As with everything else that is Google it works well, and there is a free option for you to use.

The problem is that with the free version Google brands the search box on your website. Not something I was excited about. Also I found the results were not any different than the ones I was getting with the default built in search.

That lead me to think about the way I was searching. I was just asking for a word to be found in a whole lot of words. Is that the right way? Does it matter? How can we as the developers of our WordPress blog help our readers search more effectively?

We all know that part of the core of having good Findability is the ability for your readers to be able to find what they are looking for on your blog in as many ways as you can offer.

This is something I will be looking at for the next couple of posts. I would love to get your thoughts on this and any tips or things you do to help your users use search more effectively.

Thanks for reading

WordPress SEO Tips from Matt Cutts

I was looking through some old notes and found one about WordCamp 2007. WordCamp is a two day conference held in San Fransico thrown by WordPress. To be fair, they are not the only Wordcamp, but they are the original and the biggest.

So my notes talked about a session given by Matt Cutts about white hat SEO and WordPress. Matt is the head of Google’s Webspam team and many say an expert on SEO when it involves Google.

I re-watched the presentation today, and wow it is just full of tips and tricks and just a bunch of good information coming right from the guy that can tell you if it matters to Google at all.

The link above has an embedded video which plays just fine, but if you go to Matt’s blog (one you should be reading any way) he has provided the PowerPoint Deck and links to the video and a synopsis if you do not want to watch the whole thing.

I know this is kind of old information, but the stuff he talks about is still relevant and we all can learn alot form it.

MY question for you all is are these kind of conference videos helpful or is it a poor substitute for the event and a waste of time? Drop me a comment and let me know what you think.

Thanks for reading.

Fun with 301 Redirect and Permalinks

In my post on Permalinks I made the following statement:

As the article above says, please be careful to remember that if you change the permalink structure on your blog in WordPress it will change all the links that you have already published, and that could screw you up if you or someone else has linked to them. I am sorry to say that there is no way to not have this problem. So you can remember to do this from the time you set up your blog, or you can bite the bullet and just change for the better and forget the past.

After posting this I got a great comment from David LaFerney correcting and saying that yes you can change your permalink information and use a 301 redirect to not have the links get lost.

Actually, if you change your permalink structure you can 301(permanent redirect) the old addresses to the new ones using your htaccess file.

So that got me thinking that if you could do that, then why not use a plugin to help with this process. You would normally have to manually edit your .htaccess file to do a 301 redirect. While this is not a hard thing to do, not everyone is cool with mucking around with the code associated with their blog. Besides, sometimes the .htaccess files is a hidden file and can be hard to find.

So I did some looking and found this plugin Permalink Redirect WordPress Plugin by Scott Yang. With this plugin, all you have to do is install it and activate, and then when you are up and going the instructions on the site and the interface on your blog will walk you through the rest of the work.

Just remember that you should take the time to set up your permalinks the way you want them before you activate and set up this plugin. Why? As I was reminded by David, if you change the redirect too many times in a row this could hurt your Google ranking / search engines listings.

Also remember that changing the permalink structure of your WordPress blog is one of the easiest SEO / Findability steps you can take.

I hope this helps to clear up my little mistake form the earlier post. Will this make you all more likely to try and change your permalink structure? Drop me a comment and let me know.

Thanks for Reading!

PlugIns 101

A lot of the tips I pass on to you all involve the installing and using of plugins. Plugins are part of what makes WordPress such a great platform to blog on. They not only help you with SEO / Findability, but also almost anything you could think of.

With that in mind, I thought I would take a second and walk you through the process of installing and activating a plugin on your WordPress blog.

As with anything else I tell you all about, if you do not feel like you have the skills to do any of this, please hire someone that is qualified to do so.

Now on to the steps:

1. Download the plugin. Normally it’s in a zip file. That means you will need to uncompress the files before you can use them.

2. Using the FTP client of your choice, upload the file to the plugin directory on your webserver. That is usually located at /wp-content/plugins. There are times that you’ll need to upload the entire directory into the plugin directory.

3. Then login to the WP admin dashboard of your blog, click on the Plugins tab to find and activate the plugin that you just uploaded to your server.

4. Keep in mind that there are some plugins that may need some customization. You can find the options located either under the Plugins tab or the Options tab – just look around.

Also please be sure to read the README file that comes with each plugin for installation details.

I hope this has been helpful information for you. Now that we have talked about installing them what is your favorite plugin? Why?

A WordPress Read Contact Form

I decided I want to add a contact form to Findability Today instead of just adding a mailto link with my email address. The reason I made this choice is three fold.

The first reason being that with no email address on the page there is a much smaller chance of getting random spam email from a bott that farmed my email address off the the site.

Now that more and more people are using web based email as there only email, a mailto link is not as practical. As the code is written, it cannot open up a browser and then launch the web mail site you use like it can with a desktop based mail application.

The last reason is with a form that is accessible, usable, and well thought out, the reader can narrow the question and just zip you off a quick note. That is part of what Findability is, giving the readers a well thought out way to complete a task on your site.

So I decided to add the page, and then I got to thinking. I could hand write the HTML / PHP to make the form work and come up with a safety to keep spam out of it, but this is WordPress and we have a community of developers that have written some great plug-ins. So, there must be one for this also.

And there was. After some short searching I came across a plugin on Beast-Blog.com . A great secure and accessible form plugin for WordPress written by Mike Cherim (http://green-beast.com/) and Mike Jolley (http://www.blue-anvil.com/) . If you can install a plug-in on your blog, then you can by all means do the install for this one.

A great install guide is on the site that walks you through the set up once you have uploaded the files to your server. You can even add custom CSS to it if you like. I started with the default style and it looked good in my template. If it does not look the way you want with yours, you can fix it by hand or there is a list of styles that come with it for a whole lot of popular WordPress themes.

So did I make the right choice to not include my email address on the site? Do you like a form or a mailto link? Drop me a coment and let me know what you think.

As always thanks for reading.