www.diyara.com

It all began in the late 90’s. I wanted to put some news on my website. A diary. A list of forthcoming events. Let the visitors see my human side (I don’t have one, but that’s another story).

I started with simple HTML. One page, with sections for every post. Simple.

Then I heard about ‘blogs‘ and ‘blogging‘. Being smart, I picked Wordpress, the most popular software. How clever, I thought. If you get the WYSIWYG editor going, anyone can put up a web site. Very democratic.

This encouraged my to post my outermost thoughts; on politics, London, and sinusitis. As a webmaster, I watched to see Google index them. “Here we go”, I thought, “soon, my jewels of extrospection will belong to the ages!”.

Except Google didn’t like my blog. It wouldn’t index much beyond the front page. Why, why, why?

Duplicate content? I set it to put only one post per page.

No improvement.

I looked at what Google was indexing. Then I looked at the blog HTML. Soon, all became clear.

In sum:

- Wordpress was still duplicating my content, and

- It had no proper META tags, and

- There was a lot irrelevant HTML, and

- The layout obscured the content.

I had a quick search on Google to find search engine optimisation tips. There is a plugin ‘head META description’ ( http://guff.szub.net/plugins/ ). But I didn’t use that, oh no.

For some reason, I got the notion that a complete theme would be the ticket. I tried modifying an existing one myself. Better, but not perfect. Google was starting to index more pages, but they all had the same title. My missives to an uncaring world were being ignored.

So I got someone else to do one, based on my criteria, which were:

- Grab a META ‘title’ from the blog post ‘title’;

- Grab a META ‘description’ from the blog ‘excerpts’;

- Put a ROBOTS ‘noindex’ tag in non-content pages.

But that wasn’t enough. For best SEO results you need to configure Wordpress brutally. You have to be _mean_ to it. You have to _man_ enough.

I did a bit of research and came up with to following tips.

WARNING: They are extreme. If you already have good rankings, making radical changes to your URLs may affect them. In my case:

- Moving my blog http://www.ttblog.co.uk to the root web directory (oh dear)

- MOD_REWRITING its URLs (eek!), and

- Removing a 301 redirect (crazy!),

… caused my PageRank to go to 0. BUT, page indexing was unaffected.

This is temporary, I hope, as Google sees it as ’suspect’ behaviour. I had radically changed my site.

Here are the tips, for real _men_, who can look in the face of internet death and laugh:

1. Activate permalinks by going to ‘Options/Permalinks’. You may have to enable Apache MOD_REWRITE on your web account.

1a. Shorten the permalinks code to just the %postname% variable. Don’t bother with the date codes. This keeps your URLs short.

2. Point your blog in the uppermost directory possible. http://www.ttblog.co.uk is better than http://www.ttblog.co.uk/wordpress/

So a typical post would look like
http://www.ttblog.co.uk/Im-hard-as-nails-me/
rather than
http://www.ttblog.co.uk/wordpress/2006/08/03/Im-hard-as-nails-me/

3. Under Options > Reading > Show at most ‘1′ post
This is so duplicates of your content don’t appear on your site.

4. Then install an SEO’d theme.

My blog posts are now being indexed beautifully. The Google ’site:’ command returns all my posts, and little else.

For my next challenge, I take on Windows XP, and turn it into an operating system. Come on, you devil, I’m ready for you!

T. O’ Donnell ( http://www.tigertom.com/freeware/upload/index.php ) is a web developer and tough guy living in London, UK.

Share This

These days you have to design your sites for both Internet Explorer and Mozilla Firefox. As most designers know, pages don’t always look the same in different browser platforms. But it doesn’t stop at page design, there’s a bug in IE which could have a negative impact on your site.

Now one of the reasons Wordpress has become so popular is because it takes the guesswork out of designing pages. It’s now beginning to take the guesswork out of SEO too.

However, you may be in for a big surprise if you’re using a Custom 404 page inside Wordpress. Especially if you have an old site with 100’s of pages outside Wordpress as I do.

As more and more domain owners convert their sites to Wordpress, the 404 problem is going to become more common.

You see I’m running about 10 domains on Wordpress and my browser of choice is Firefox. I always check my themes in Internet Explorer, but I don’t usually check my 404 page in IE.

I’m willing to bet a good number of Wordpress users have a simple redirect for their Custom 404 page and never check it in Internet Explorer.

Well, get ready for a shock. If your redirect page is less than 512 bytes it won’t work in IE. Can you believe that?

A simple meta-redirect in your Wordpress 404 page does not work in IE. You have to add enough code to be over 512 bytes in order for a 404 redirect to work correctly.

So if you love FireFox and Wordpress you might want to check your Blog in IE to see if your 404 page is working. If not, it could be costing you a lot of traffic.

I reclaimed 100’s of hits by correcting these pages and you can too. If you’d like to learn more about optimizing Wordpress as well as download the Best Wordpress Theme visit: http://www.bestwordpresstheme.com.

Dan Nickerson is the Founder and CEO of Got-Zip Inc. Got-Zip’s unique Geo-Affiliate concept and site network are growing in popularity daily. Would you like to download the Best Wordpress Theme?

Share This

WordPress is getting more popular by the day. It enables people to set up a blog, and even a complete website within minutes.
With all the great free plugins and designs out there it is really an easy to use and complete blogging solution.

I get asked for specific SEO tips for WordPress very often. Basically all the ‘usual’ SEO stuff is also applicable for WordPress.
But besides that, there are a few tips for WordPress I’d like to share with you.
Here it goes:

1. Use Permalinks
Be sure to use Permalinks on your blog.
By default WordPress uses web URLs which have question marks and lots of numbers in them. These links are hard to spider for search engines, and therefor your postings aren’t indexed as fast and as good as you want to.
WordPress offers you the ability however, to create a custom URL structure for your permalinks and archives.
You can find this option in your Admin panel. Choose ‘Options’ in the menu and there ‘Permalinks’.
This brings us immediately to Tip 2:

2. Place your titles up front in your URLs
In the Permalinks section you can choose for the ‘Date and name based’ option. This will place the year, month, day and post title in your URL.
For SEO purposes it’s better to have your post title up front. So instead you should choose for the ‘Custom’ option and put in something like:
/%postname%/%year%/%monthnum%/%day%/

This will give you an URL like this:
http://www.seo-portal.com/section-targeting-for-adsense/2006/07/06/

3. Tags
Tags are a great SEO addition to your blog. They enable search engines to crawl your website more easily and in addition to that, create specific pages for your tags/keywords.
You can install the Ultimate Tag Warrior plugin on your WordPress blog. Get the plugin here: http://www.neato.co.nz/ultimate-tag-warrior/

4. Page Titles
Make sure you set good titles on your pages. We discussed putting the post title up front in your URL. You should do the same thing for your Titles.
You can do this by changing the < title > tag in your header.php (located in wp-content/themes/your theme/)
You can use the following code in order to get your post title in front, followed by your blog name:

< title >< ? php wp_title(); ? > : < ? php bloginfo('name'); ? > < /title >

5. Choose your Post Titles carefully
Your Post Titles should be as clear as possible. Don’t stuff your titles with keywords you are targeting with your whole blog.
Choose your keywords carefully per posting, and get those words in your Post Title.

6. Autolinks
Cross link to your own posts and pages in your own content. Do this by linking your keywords to the relevant postings.
To facilitate this work, you can install the SH-Autolink plugin.
http://www.rockschtar.de/wp-plugin-sh-autolink/

7. Related Posts
Put links to related posts under your postings. This helps search engines crawling your site and indexing all your postings.
You can get a plugin for this here: http://www.w-a-s-a-b-i.com/archives/2006/02/02/wordpress-related-entries-20/

8. Ping Services
Everytime you post or edit a posting or page, your WordPress blog can notify lots of sites that you updated your blog.
Be sure to use this feature!
You can set up this feature in Options >> Writing. You can find a list of sites to ping on the WordPress site:
http://codex.wordpress.org/Update_Services

9. Google Sitemaps
Google has a tool for webmasters called Google Sitemaps(http://www.google.com/webmasters/sitemaps/). This will help Google index your website, and let’s you tell Google which pages
are most important. If you make use of this feature, you will be able to see for what searches your site was shown in the results.
This helps you optimizing your appearance in Google.
You can use this plugin to automatically create a sitemap for your WordPress blog:

http://www.arnebrachhold.de/2005/06/05/google-sitemaps-generator-v2-final

10. Categories
Categories help you organize your content. If you have the permalinks turned on, the category names will appear in your URL.
This is why it is also very important to name your categories carefully; Try to use keywords to name your categories and don’t be afraid to make a load.
WordPress enables you to make use of subcategories and sub-subcategories etc. etc. This way you can narrow down your focus on certain keyword phrases.
Consider the following example:
You have a website about selling photocamera’s. You could organize your articles/postings like this:
fotocamera’s >> Digital camera’s >> SLR >> Nikon
If a user would be searching for “digital SLR camera nikon” the deepest nested category would have a good optimized url for this search as the url would be something like this
www.yoursite.com/fotocameras/digital-cameras/SLR/nikon/

You can make use of the King Categories Widget to organize your categories:
http://www.blog.mediaprojekte.de/cms-systeme/wordpress/wordpress-widget-king-categories/

Chris writes daily SEO postings on his weblog SEO Portal on http://www.seo-portal.com

Share This