Posts Tagged ‘search engines’

15
Dec
2009

What does a PageRank really mean?

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When it comes to marketing your business on the Internet there are two basic ways to promote yourself, the first is through paid advertising such as banner ads and sponsorships but the second is called Organic Marketing and it’s the process of people finding your website through free methods such as search engines, social media and other forms of free links to your website.

The most important form of Organic Marketing is being found on the results pages of a popular search engine such as Google but how does Google rank those results and how does it know who’s the best to link to? In order to determine which websites to return as part of their Search Engine Results Pages (SERP’s), Google employees a proprietary technology called PageRank, this system of ranking webpages does two important things:

  1. PageRank returns high quality links for visitors, which in turn increases Google’s reliability and;
  2. PageRank removes poor quality links for visitors, also increasing Google’s value to consumers

How PageRank Works

The exact formula’s used to calculate the PageRank system are hidden but based on the original patent and filed documents, PageRank works by calculating a value for your website based on both the volume and quality of websites which link to your website. What that means is that making your website popular is not only a matter of increasing the number of links from websites to your website but also the quality of links from those websites to your website.

For example, here are the PageRanks for some popular websites:

These PageRank results are based on a number of factors but primarily, the sheer volume of websites which are linking to each. For example, 45,000 websites link to CNN.com while only 12,000 link to NBC.com but if you delve deeper into the PageRank formula you’ll also discover that the CNN.com links are most likely a higher PageRank value themselves.

A Simplified Understanding of PageRank

To make it easier to understand how Google calculates PageRank, let’s assume that each PageRank value is worth a certain number of votes but since we know that higher PageRanks are worth more, we can assign more weight to each.

PageRank Vote Weight
0 0
1 1
2 4
3 8
4 16
5 32
6 64
7 128
8 256
9 512
10 1024

If we use the chart above as a rough indicator of the PageRank model (remember nobody really knows how they assign values) than we can determine that the best way to increase the positioning of a website on Google is to increase the number of people linking, but also the quality of people linking.

For example,receiving 1,000 links from poor quality website (PageRank 1) would return 1,000 votes but a single link from a popular website such as CNN.com (PageRank 10) would be worth 1024 votes.

Using the same example, receiving a million links from websites Google considers to be worthless (PageRank 0) or damaging (spam websites, sites that spread viruses etc), would result in no bonus to your website.

What does a PageRank really mean?

With this understanding of how Google calculates PageRank, it is easy to understand then that Google uses PageRank to determine the value of your business and it’s website simply be determining both the quantity and quality of websites which link to your business.

Websites with a high PageRank rank higher on Search Engine Results Pages, which allows more potential customers to find them but PageRank is just one of many factors which leads to higher visibility and should be treated as just one step in your Organic Marketing campaign. You can download the Google Toolbar for free to see the PageRank of each website you’re visiting or if you would like to learn more about our Social Media Marketing, including Organic Link Building please feel free to contact Ross Creative.

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Posted in Marketing Advice, christopherross.ca

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13
Jul
2009

10 WordPress Plugins I Couldn’t Run a Site Without

7 Comments

Before I give you my real list, let me tell you that there are some basics that don’t even deserve to make this list because if you’re running a blog without them, you’re simply working too hard. Plugins like Askimet, WP Lockdown, Theme Switcher, WordPress.com stats, the WordPress.com stats smiley remover and WordPress Database Backup.

Delete Duplicate Posts WordPress Plugin

Simply put, this plugin does exactly what it’s name implies. It gives web masters like me the opporunity to quickly scan tens of thousands of postings in databases to ensure there are no duplicates. It’s wonderfully powerful when you have a thousands of feeds to maintain, and only a few hours to do it in. It also happens to be from my close friend, Montreal web designer Christopher Bavota.

WP Auto Tagger

Oh man … I can not stress what a dream this plugin is. Tags are like keys to SEO gold, they’re one of the few things that a blog owner can do well and immediately see amazing results in the search engines but they’re such a pain in the ass to write. Basically a tag is what your article is about, but in popular single words and catch phrases. What WP Auto Tagger does is great, it breaks down your article and suggests the best tags, automatically. That’s a huge time saver.

Syntax Highlighter

This bad bay is the Jonas brothers of WordPress plugins. Sure it’s fairly pointless and a text editor could do the same job but when it comes to saving time (and money) it’s brilliant. What it does is takes a bunch of rough gobbly gook code like this:

$rss = fetch_rss( $url );
$pcount = 0;
$storycount = 0;
$textdate = date(“F jS”, mktime(0, 0, 0, str_pad($month, 2, “0″, STR_PAD_LEFT), str_pad($day, 2, “0″, STR_PAD_LEFT), $year));

echo $textdate;
foreach ($rss->items as $item) {

if (!$first) {$title = $item['title'];$first=1;

$content .= “<h3><a href=’”.$item['link'].”‘ title=’”.$item['title'].”‘>”.$item['title'].”</a></h3>”;
$content .= “<p>”;

if ($item['link_enclosure']) {
$content .= “<a href=’”.$item['link'].”‘ title=’”.$item['title'].”‘><img alt=’”.$item['title'].”‘ src=’”.$item['link_enclosure'].”‘ class=’alignleft’></a>”;
}

and turns it into …

[source lang="php"]$rss = fetch_rss( $url );
$pcount = 0;
$storycount = 0;
$textdate = date("F jS", mktime(0, 0, 0, str_pad($month, 2, "0", STR_PAD_LEFT), str_pad($day, 2, "0", STR_PAD_LEFT), $year));

echo $textdate;
foreach ($rss->items as $item) {

if (!$first) {$title = $item['title'];$first=1;

$content .= "<h3><a href=’".$item['link']."’ title=’".$item['title']."’>".$item['title']."</a></h3>";
$content .= "<p>";

if ($item['link_enclosure']) {
$content .= "<a href=’".$item['link']."’ title=’".$item['title']."’><img alt=’".$item['title']."’ src=’".$item['link_enclosure']."’ class=’alignleft’></a>";
}
[/source]

When it comes to saving time, that’s a huge helper.

WP Super Cache

It simply terrifies me how many people are not running this plugin or a similar flavor of it. It makes your site safer, easier to manage and much faster for the end user. I’ll also mention that by running it you can use a host like BlueHost for $7.95 a month to run dozens of websites instead of spending hundreds a month to run just one site on complex, over priced servers.

Enforce www. Prefix

Actually, I’m going to cheat here and tell you that this and Canonical URL’s are plugins you should have for massive SEO curb appeal. Basically Enforce www. Prefix forces your website to always use the correct SEO address and Canonical URL’s tell’s Google that your article is the source, so even if people repost it you get credit.

Google XML Sitemaps

We all want Google to come to our site right? Well, let’s make it easy for them! Sitemap will provide Google with a free pass to all your content, no matter how deep your links are.

Get Image from Post

People love pictures and with this simple plugin your website will be able to post pictures as part of your excerpt. Speaking of excerpts, Get Better Excerpts will allow you to pull complete sentences or words from your excerpts.

SEO Friendly Images

Between this and SEO Smart Links, I’ll be honest most websites are on auto pilot. The SEO Friendly Images ensures your images have the proper tags to make the most of search engines, while Smart Links adds valuable data to your hyperlinks.

WordPress Admin Quick Menu

quickmenu 10 WordPress Plugins I Couldnt Run a Site Without imageI might be a little bias but this is truly my favorite plugin. It allows you to add your own menu items to the WordPress Admin client, basically creating shortcuts between your website and important things like AdSense and Analytics. It’s completely customizable and saves endless frustrations between myself and clients but providing them immediate access to critical links.

Download Counter

Just like Analytics lets you know who’s visiting and where they’re going, you’ll want to track what people are downloading from your website and how often. This saves a fortune in report generation time, by simply allowing me to tell my clients weekly how often software has been downloaded.

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Posted in WordPress Help

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05
Jun
2009

Free WordPress Theme – One Night in Paris

8 Comments

onenightinparis free wordpress theme 155x300 Free WordPress Theme One Night in Paris imageThis is a complete edit of my earlier One Night in Paris theme for WordPress, I build the original theme over a year ago and have spent a lot of hours improving my skills since then, so here’s my latest free WordPress theme release for everybody to download and enjoy.

The theme features a rich, three column layout for the homepage and a large single column for content within the website. I’ve purposely left formating to a minimum on this theme to allow web designers to rapidly introduce their own creative elements to the theme and make changes.

You can preview the theme live here on thisismyurl.com or download and enjoy the theme free of charge on your own website.

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Posted in Free Downloads, Web Design, WordPress Themes

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02
May
2009

How to use the heading tag to improve search engine listings

12 Comments

In HTML there are few tags as important as the <h1> tag. It is literally the heading for your page and when we talk about how to structure a document, we’re taught that the <h1> tag should represent the title of the document.

Common Mistakes

Having more than one H1 per page.

A web document can have only one title, and that’s what the H1 tag is meant to be. Instead of having more than one, use the <h2> tag and stylize it with CSS.

Using the H1 tag because you like the font size

The H1 tag is big because it’s meant to be important not because people think it’s pretty. As will all HTML elements, you can use CSS to change the look and feel of tags easily. For example:

[source lang="html"]
<h1>Test Title</h1>
<h2>Test Title Two</h2>
<strong>Test Strong</strong>
[/source]

 

[source lang="css"]
h1,h2,strong {
font-size: 100px;
font-weight: normal;
}
[/source]

Using the code above will make all H1,H2 and strong (bold) tags throughout a website look identical.

 

Using the same H1 throughout the site

The purpose of the H1 tag is … as I’ve said to represent the content of a specific page so it’s important that the contents of your heading are unique for each page.

Using the H1 for the wrong content, or not using it at all

If the purpose of a heading tag is to highlight the heading (or title) of the document, then not including one at all will result in search engines being unable to properly understand your content.

Using Heading Tags to separate content

Let’s take a look for example at a simple piece of Lorem Ipsum to see how search engines may see your content with (and without) proper headings.

Example One : No Formating

As you can see from this example, it’s nearly impossible to determine what text is important and which is worthless in this post.

[source lang="html"]
Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit. Sed sapien nulla, malesuada eu, tincidunt eu, dapibus sed, risus. Curabitur rutrum velit non enim. Duis congue, neque non pharetra blandit, est lectus aliquet purus, id dapibus augue lacus sed sem. Aliquam erat volutpat. Ut hendrerit sapien vitae lacus. Duis libero lectus, varius sit amet, auctor ut, mattis id, magna. In hac habitasse platea dictumst. Aliquam libero neque, interdum id, dignissim id, fermentum eget, tellus. Aliquam eget lorem quis nibh fermentum egestas. Duis id ante sed ligula egestas malesuada. Maecenas pharetra mollis ipsum. Vestibulum dignissim, turpis vel luctus facilisis, dolor mi gravida nisi, ac suscipit enim ipsum vel elit. Aenean mauris purus, convallis ac, pellentesque suscipit, varius in, lacus. Morbi blandit odio quis libero. Nullam gravida rhoncus massa. Fusce ullamcorper. Phasellus sapien nibh, consequat eu, semper in, pretium in, dui. Vivamus scelerisque.
[/source]

Example Two: Simple Text Formating

Now, with paragraph breaks, we can at least start to understand the format but not what is important.

[source lang="html"]

Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit.

Sed sapien nulla, malesuada eu, tincidunt eu, dapibus sed, risus. Curabitur rutrum velit non enim. Duis congue, neque non pharetra blandit, est lectus aliquet purus, id dapibus augue lacus sed sem. Aliquam erat volutpat. Ut hendrerit sapien vitae lacus. Duis libero lectus, varius sit amet, auctor ut, mattis id, magna. In hac habitasse platea dictumst.

Aliquam libero neque, interdum id, dignissim id, fermentum eget, tellus.

Aliquam eget lorem quis nibh fermentum egestas. Duis id ante sed ligula egestas malesuada. Maecenas pharetra mollis ipsum. Vestibulum dignissim, turpis vel luctus facilisis, dolor mi gravida nisi, ac suscipit enim ipsum vel elit. Aenean mauris purus, convallis ac, pellentesque suscipit, varius in, lacus. Morbi blandit odio quis libero. Nullam gravida rhoncus massa. Fusce ullamcorper. Phasellus sapien nibh, consequat eu, semper in, pretium in, dui. Vivamus scelerisque.
[/source]

Example Three: Formating with Headings

Using both paragraph formating and headers:

[source lang="html"]
<h1>Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit.</h1>

Sed sapien nulla, malesuada eu, tincidunt eu, dapibus sed, risus. Curabitur rutrum velit non enim. Duis congue, neque non pharetra blandit, est lectus aliquet purus, id dapibus augue lacus sed sem. Aliquam erat volutpat. Ut hendrerit sapien vitae lacus. Duis libero lectus, varius sit amet, auctor ut, mattis id, magna. In hac habitasse platea dictumst.

<h2>Aliquam libero neque, interdum id, dignissim id, fermentum eget, tellus.</h2>

Aliquam eget lorem quis nibh fermentum egestas. Duis id ante sed ligula egestas malesuada. Maecenas pharetra mollis ipsum. Vestibulum dignissim, turpis vel luctus facilisis, dolor mi gravida nisi, ac suscipit enim ipsum vel elit. Aenean mauris purus, convallis ac, pellentesque suscipit, varius in, lacus. Morbi blandit odio quis libero. Nullam gravida rhoncus massa. Fusce ullamcorper. Phasellus sapien nibh, consequat eu, semper in, pretium in, dui. Vivamus scelerisque.
[/source]

As you can see, using the heading tag properly in example three allows us to clearly see a separation of content and allows robots such as Google to properly crawl and identify the critical areas of our websites.

You may also care to watch the video Does it matter what order you put header tags in?

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Posted in HTML Programming

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10
Feb
2009

Using Tags as Meta Keywords in WordPress

18 Comments

One of the more interesting changes in WordPress was the inclusion of Tags, they’re used to help sort content on a website along the same lines as categories but in a very different way. Let’s take a look at how a website can use Tags to improve their organic marketing value but also how to use them effectively on just about any type of website.

Now the first thing to consider is what a Tag is. I’ve found it hard to explain these to people with no blogging experience so instead of trying to teach new comers about the technical validitity of Tags I simply want you to think of them as keywords and phrases from an article. For example, if you’ve written an article about chicken soup, it may go into the Soup category of your website with a great title such as Hearty Chicken Soup for a Cold Day but how do you help users find it when they’re looking for Chicken recipes?  Well, you could add it to the Chicken category as well but what about the Noodle category? Celery? … where does it end? That’s where Tags come in. You can put your entry in whichever category you believe best suites the recipe and then add Tags such as:

  • chicken
  • soup
  • celery
  • winter day
  • hearty

These Tags become almost like child entries on the posting, now users can navigate quickly between web posts in either the category (Soup) or the tags (chicken, soup, celery, winter day, hearty) quickly. Giving users this ability will increase your audience retention rate as well as provide greater opportunity for users to find what they’re looking for.

metatags Using Tags as Meta Keywords in WordPress imageNow this leads me to a funny problem with WordPress and I already know that some WP loyalists will come out cursing that there are plugins to deal with this problem but, WordPress has lousy Search Engine Optimization which is critical for quality organic marketing. The trick is that you want to add quality keywords to the header of your document to help search engines make the most of the content on your page and we do this using the <meta name=”keywords” content=”" /> tag. The exact content is always a pain except, we already happen to know exactly what this article is about … because we’ve included a list of Tags, so why not use the Tags from our post as the keywords?

To do this, all you need to do is edit your header.php file (located in the wp-content/themes/your theme/ directory) and add the following code:

 

<?php if(is_single()) {?>

<meta name=”keywords” content=”<?php echo csv_tags();

 

function csv_tags() {
    $posttags = get_the_tags();
    foreach((array)$posttags as $tag) {
        $csv_tags .= $tag->name . ‘,’;
    }
return $cvs_tags;
}

}
?>” />

 

 

What this code does is devilishly simple, if the page is a post (that’s what is_single() means) then load the Tags for the most and separate each with a comma before writing them to the web browser. Now your web pages will display a list of keywords that matches your Tags.

suggested tags 300x79 Using Tags as Meta Keywords in WordPress imageHow then, do you decide what Tags your page should use? I love a simple plugin for WordPress called Simple Tags. Not only does it do basically the same as the code above without forcing you to edit your page but it also lets you fetch the best keywords for your article straight from one of the top search engines on the planet.

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Posted in WordPress Help

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07
Feb
2009

What SEO Web Sites do I read?

8 Comments

While most web designers are busy pushing pixels around a screen, I’m busy fixing my clients websites and making them more search engine friendly, I don’t really like the term SEO (search engine optimization) because what I do is try to make websites more friendly for organic marketing while also increasing their appeal to search engines. My theory is simply, search engines are only one source of traffic so building websites should be about optimizing organic marketing, not trying to trick search engines.

So what websites have I been reading lately to help me increase my clients chances of succeeding on the web? It might surprise you. There’s a great article over at Darren Jamieson’s blog called SEO benefits of the ‘follow up post’ and another fantastic post called Webmaster Utilities We Dig (which would have been a lot funnier if they’d called it Webmaster Utilities We Digg). Both articles are informative and amusing, well worth the read.

There’s a great video of Joost de Valk talking about SEO that I watched last night while drinking a glass of wine from Castello Romitorio, I’m not sure which I enjoyed more but we’ll talk about that another time. I generally try to read  David Naylor’s blog at least once a month. He’s an SEO chap from Exeter which is near a little town called Crediton which happens to have a lovely pub and some amazing cider just outside the town which as you can imagine is more than enough reason to read his blog.

You’ll notice that all these blogs have a few things in common, they’re not hard core marketing websites and they’re not complex sales sites. Each provides great information, informative content and makes a personal connection with the reader. The other thing that you’ll notice? They all have great PageRanks … which proves that even if they’re not making a lot of money  at blogging they really know what they’re doing.

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Posted in Search Engine Optimization

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14
Jan
2009

Top 10 Web Site Mistakes That Businesses Make

4 Comments

Many small businesses fail to take advantage of the great, low cost marketing opportunities found on the web and make costly mistakes which can be easily avoided.

Where are you?

I don’t get it but a lot of small businesses think hiding their contact information is a good idea. I could get into why your contact information on every page is good for localized search engines, or how it could help regional linking but you know what? It’s simply common sense for a business to want prospects to be able to find them. If you’re a public facing business (retail, restaurant etc) your address should be on every page, it’s that simple. Other companies need an easy to find link, clearly labeled to a contact page.

What do you do?

Honestly, I’m a web designer and half the time I can’t figure out what companies do based on their website. Does your website over think the process? Most do. If you’re a restaurant, post a menu. If you’re an inn, show me your rooms. Post your product or service in the easiest, clearest way possible.

No Images

The only thing worse than a website without contact details? A boring, stale, dull one with lots of text. Pictures say a thousand words right? Well, stop typing so much and buy a $100 camera. Take pictures of your products and people, let me see your lobby, reception area, board room and then I’ll feel better about spending money with you.

Your Company is Run By Robots

Web site are not about technology, stop worrying about fonts and colors. Let me see your people, this goes back to the picture issue above but honestly, it’s worth a second point. Who’s won awards this month? New hires? Experienced professional? Let me know! By the way, having a video on your website is brilliant, people love videos.

Fire and Forget Web Sites

Nothing ticks me off faster than a business who launches a website and ignores it. The Internet is the first place your prospects are going to go to, and they’ll simply move on if ignore them. Answer every email, provide updated content, add a blog to keep content fresh and follow up on every comment on your site. Prompt service wins business.

Outdated Content

If your business wants to succeed, respect your website is an extension of your physical business. Look at it all the time, assign it to somebody in your office or if you can’t afford the time, assign it to me but for the love of all that is digital … Christmas is over in December, make sure your website isn’t promoting St. Nick by News Years. The same goes for the big trade show, holidays, news events and staffing requests.

Butchering the Brand

If your website doesn’t look like your brochure, fire your web designer. Honestly, there’s no reason for your logo to be different on a website. There’s no reason you don’t look as good no, scratch that. There’s no reason you don’t look BETTER on the web than you do in print or in person. Think about it, full color printing costs money but on the web, it’s free.

Broken Down Sites

A 404 Error is the technical term for a website page that no longer exists. 500 is the error code for sites which failed to execute a PHP script from your site … if your clients ever see this, you have no business running a website.

Web Sites Designed by Friends and Family

If your cousin is an award winning designer, hire her but if she’s a database administrator or makes a living putting monitors on desks for a living … walk away. Your website is an extension of your brand, it’s about marketing not technology so hire a designer with a proven track record building quality sites.

Typo’s and Mistakes

Broken images, grammatical errors, poor spelling … these are signs of a business owner who doesn’t care about the company and that tells me that they’re not going to care about the product they sell. Before a website goes live, make sure it’s done.

Effective online marketing is easy, it’s cost effective and it’s a key element of the marketing program of a modern, success business.

If you’re already running a website, take a few moments and ask yourself:

  • Does my website look better than my business card?
  • Does my website tell my clients what I do?
  • Does my website tell prospects how to reach me?
  • Is my website easy to use?
  • Is my website’s content fresh?

Once you’ve asked yourself those questions, ask 20 other people those five simple questions about your website and really listen.

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Posted in Marketing Advice

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01
Jan
2009

What would you trade for a great website?

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Wow, the economy is in the crapper and despite the reassurances of the President last week I’m not feeling much better. OK, that’s actually a lie. The bad economy doesn’t really affect me directly, I live in a government town of about 40,000 people where housing prices are still steady and new home starts? They’re down from last year but more due to the cold weather and labor shortages then anything else but I get that all over the US (and around the world) that’s not the case so instead of trying to sell you a website (even if you do need it) I want to know what you’ll trade me for a great website.

I’ll give you a free basic WordPress website just for signing up with BlueHost which is a great start but I bet there’s a lot of people out there who need more than a starter site and frankly I’m bored off my truck sitting home right now. Don’t feel too bad for me, I have fresh contracts starting up in the spring and I just left a great government contract so I’m not exactly in a bad place right now but what I’d really like to do is broaden my portfolio and add some new, exciting projects to my resume.

I have over 15 years experience in the web industry, which means that I literally started building for the first web browsers and have continued to build my experience and skills to match the current technology. I am a well rounded programmer with xHTML, XML SGML and HTML markup experience as well as a master of tableless design and CSS. I can script in PHP, ASP, JavaScript and ColdFusion as well as program in BASIC, .net and C++. My  design skills are top notch, I am a certified expert in the use of Photoshop and Dreamweaver, excellent in Illustrator and a master of web design and usability. Beyond looking pretty, I build websites that are W3C compliant, compatible with the full range of web browsers, optimized for search engines and organic marketing as well as tested to ensure they’re readable by the visually impaired and meet government standards. I can build Facebook applications, I am a master of WordPress and understand social media very well.

In short, I am just the type of web master that most people dream of having on their team but I live in a small town with few IT jobs. Over the years I have been the Web Master for Corel, built web properties for the International Montery Fund, the United Nations and the Smithsonian Museum. I need to find work and I’m not too proud to ask, so please if you can use an out-of-work hired gun and have anything that I can work on remotely or would like to fly me in for some contract work, I would love to hear from you.

Of course the obvious question is … what would I be willing to take right? I’m like every web guy out there, I’d love to get some quality advertising in print, radio, TV or online and I’d love to have some gift certificates for hotels or tourist attractions around the world. I’ll take your AirMiles if you’re willing to part with them and I’ll gladly take any old Wii/xBox or PS3 games you happen to have. If you happen to live in driving distance to Fredericton New Brunswick, I’ll gladly let you put in a kitchen for me or shingle my roof in the spring.

So, let’s talk turkey.

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Posted in Blog Posts

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17
Oct
2008

Five Free SEO WordPress Themes in Five Days

13 Comments

After reading a great series by Nathan Rice on the setup of WordPress for search engine optimization I’ve decided to spend next week developing a series of freemium WordPress templates for businesses to use on their own business websites. A few weeks back, I wrote an article on how you could put up a website for just $100, these templates would be wonderful for companies interested in building an affordable website for little money.

Free, Freemium or Premium?

Part of why I like being in the WordPress community is the co-operative nature of the community and how we support each other by building better plug ins, better templates and helping to improve the core of the software. To that end, the idea of Premium WordPress themes offends me just a little but I also appreciate everybody needs to make money so I’m torn. There are advantages to Premium themes and money does motivate people to make better themes so I guess I’m at a loss for how to release these themes.

With that said, I plan to release the next five themes as my own version of Feemium. For those who are WordPress experts already, you’ll be able to download them and use them under a license but for those who need help, I’ll provide installation and configuration for a consulting fee. Specifically, the new themes will feature a few things:

  1. They will feature strong designs with various businesses in mind. My previous theme was attractive but these will be better.
  2. They will follow heuristic rules, both my own and those of industry experts.
  3. The designs will be usable, with a focus on usability for the end user.
  4. Each design will be optimized for the web and search engines using the practices I’ve previously discussed.

You may want to subscribe to my RSS feed to see the results or check back often.

The Themes:

  1. Smashingly Good Free Magazine Theme for WordPress
  2. Small Business Theme
  3. One Night in Paris SEO Theme

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Posted in WordPress Help

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09
Oct
2008

Better HTML Helps Search Engine Results

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For the best search engine rankings, you need to understand (and accept) that search engine robots (sometimes called spiders) are not as clever as people, so it’s important if you’re looking to have your website listed on search engines that you speak the same language they do. By language, I mean HTML, xHTML and CSS. Writing valid syntex helps search engines understand the code on your site and in turn, list you effectively. This can greatly increase the traffic your website receives from search engines with very little investment.

Writing valid HTML code will also have the side advantage for rending in visitors browsers better, faster and without errors. Everybody likes a websitet that words, so instead of driving away traffic you can follow some simple tips to improve both the number of people how visit your site and the amount of time they spend on it.

Modern HTML editors such as Adobe Dreamweaver do a great job of building better websites but they still have some problems writing clean web code, once you’ve completed your website pop over to the W3C Validator and test your website. This will tell you how easily search engines can read your website. Remember, a single error can cost you the difference between being on the first page of search results or … somewhere else.

Remember, coding web pages isn’t easy and doing it well is even harder but it takes practice and eventually you’ll pass the W3C’s tests. Sometimes it takes me hours to get a simple page past their inspector, but it’s worth it in the end.

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06
Oct
2008

Five Techniques to Increase Web Traffic

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Getting people to your website is critical but those people have to be the right people, so how do we increase website traffic while also ensuring the people that we’re attracting are the right people? Let’s start by assuming that honesty, integrity and quality are the three most important parts of a website and building from there.

Titles – Proper Labels Help Increase Traffic

Page titles are often overlooked in our zeal to build web traffic but by most reports they are the most important single piece of the puzzle. Your page title in located within the section of your HTML document, between the <TITLE></TITLE> tags and is piece of text displayed at the top of your web browser, within the chrome. Remember, search engines (such as Google) are robots, they use a series of math formulas to calculate the importance of your page, one of the factors they look at is the title of your page.

Make sure your page title is related to the content that you’re displaying and that the words you’ve used to display your content is key word rich. My title for example is Five Techniques to Increase Web Traffic, this is both descriptive for the article that I’ve written as well as a common search phrase in Google.

PermaLinks – Your Document Path

The second part of the puzzle for increasing your page traffic is a little known trick called PermaLinks. Usually when people write a post they save the file in HTML as something like traffic.html and store it on their website. Even my favorite publishing tool WordPress saves (by default) a document with the URL ?p=## to represent the article but what search engines are looking for is help to understand your post and what it really is.

PermaLinks come to the rescue by converting your page title Five Techniques to Increase Web Traffic to an effective path used by web browsers to display your article. In this case, my PermaLink slug is five-techniques-to-increase-web-traffic which clearly demonstrates to Google what my page is about. By using PermaLinks, Google (and other search engines) now know that my web page is located at http://www.thisismyurl.com/five-techniques-to-increase-web-traffic/ and as such, this page must have something to do with Five Techniques to Increase Web Traffic.

Headers – Using HTML for what it was made to do

A few weeks back I was in a meeting with some web designers and one young designer mentioned using the <center> tag. After I finished bludgeoning him with an available laptop, I got to thinking how amazing it is that 15 years after the rise of the Internet people still use the wrong tags. Headers are the same, they have intrinsic value but most people have no idea how (or why) to use them.

Again, let’s remember that Google is a computer and that computers are only as clever as the people who made them, then it stands to reason that the people who programmed Google followed some fairly basic rules. One such rule was the purpose of header tags in developing pages. According to that logic then, <H1>-<H6> must have a hierarchal value structure, determining the importance of content on a document.

Simply put, something in the <H1> tag must, according to HTML publishing structure be more valuable in determining what a document is about that an <H2> or <H3>. So, if you want traffic sniffing robots to know what your page is about, use the power of heading tags to help determine it.

File Tags – From Names to ALT’s

We’ve already covered the fact that the actual name (or path) of your document is important but what about the rest of your page content? Surprisingly, it’s equally critical.

Images for example should have filenames that describe the content. For example, instead of uploading an image and calling it P0234234.jpg, calling it one-tree-in-winter.jpg will assist robots in understanding and indexing your filename. Should you page be about One Tree In Winter, these robots will truly understand the relevance of the image. To add to this, placing an ALT tag in the image tag “One Tree In Winter” will further help and ensure your website is accessible to the blind.

Anchor tags are another source of information for search engines, include a title in your hyperlink which describes the target page and you’ll increase the value of the link for robots.

Content – The true king of SEO

With all this said and done, what is the best way to increase traffic to your website? Quality content.

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12
Jun
2005

Why I use nofollow even though I hate it.

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There’s an attribute that we can assign to the anchor tag called nofollow, it was introduced a while back by Google and has been stirring up trouble ever since it arrived. It’s designed to help stop comment spam but lots of people are not entirely sure that it works.

The nofollow attribute works by telling search engines not to influence the PageRank of my site by the comments left by others. Now, that doesn’t sound so bad until you really stop to think about it because I blog on a lot of really great websites and I want some of those people to influence my rankings, I also want to influence the rankings of others.

So then why use it? Until we have a better way of controlling comment spam, it’s the best way.

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