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Looking to move your website’s search listing up on Google, Yahoo! and Bing yet don’t know where to start? Here are five more basic tips to help you improve your search engine optimization efforts.
“Sticking with the basics that everyone can do, with relative ease.” – Jimmy Best, Websites Built In Hollister
If you want your website to rank higher and more often in Google (or any other search engine), it’s essential that you know a handful of techniques regarding SEO (search engine optimization). When you optimize your web pages so Google can more easily find you, you’re sure to be found much more often when prospects are searching for your products or services while searching online. If you can take advantage of the five tips that follow, your web pages will receive more traffic from the people you really want to find you…potential clients and customers.
The most important word to remember through each of these tips is, “keywords.” Think of keywords as search engine magnets. The more relevant keywords you have, in the right places on your pages, the more energy you are giving Google to find your website and have it appear in search results.
Each tip that follows is something you can do to your actual web pages that can improve your Google visibility, but this one doesn’t. The first tip is for you to get as many links as you can to your website, from other websites. These are called, “inbound links,” and Google loves them. When other websites have a link to your website, Google is more likely to see your website as authoritative and more important. This means everything else you do on your web pages when it comes to SEO will be more valuable. However, not all inbound links are created equal. The bigger the website you can get to link to you, the more impressed Google will be. Start with your Chamber of Commerce website, and keep it going from there.
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…is something you want people and robots to do, right? Where and how you host your blog is as important to your search engine rankings as which plugins you use and how you optimize your blog posts.
No blog? If you are simply launching a new section of content about your business, listen up. This applies to you, too!
While each of these options are available, workable and have their own pros and cons, there is one clear choice. We are going to eliminate externally hosted solutions right off the bat:
A business should almost always host their blog under their own domain, rather than the other options mentioned above. When other websites link back to your posts or other pages of your blog, you want the backlinking credit to go to your domain, not to Blogger.com or Typepad.com., etc. And it’s not just backlinking “credit”, it is also the very important factor of search engine results as they relate to your site (not the [externally hosted] site with your nomenclature that is hosted completely away from your domain name).
I’ve always wondered why somebody would have complete separation of their blog from their business site. And when I thought about it, and put some personal recall into it, the answer came in the form of, “I didn’t know any better.” The pervasive idea of “more is better” would win me over and the then next thing I knew — blogs and ineffective little website attempts were everywhere around me! Today is a much different story.
readmoreHosting your blog on a different domain from your primary site is one of the worst mistakes you can make. A blog on your domain can attract links, attention, publicity, trust and search rankings — by keeping the blog on a separate domain, you shoot yourself in the foot. From worst to best, your options are — Hosted (on a solution like Blogspot or WordpPress), on a unique domain (at least you can 301 [redirect] it in the future), on a subdomain (these can be treated as unique from the primary domain by the engines) and as a sub-section of the primary domain (in a subfolder or page – this is the best solution).
-Rand Fishkin, SEOmoz
Speed is a crucial aspect in providing a pleasant user experience to visitors of your site. It ensures that a visitor’s limited attention span and time are spent on actual content and not wasted waiting for images and scripts to load. Studies have shown that users will not tolerate more than a 4 second load time. If your site fails to offer a quick response, your users will leave.
In terms of SEO, Google is actively using a Page Speed score in its ranking algorithm. As developers and marketers look to optimize their sites, page speed should be among the top optimizations to consider. An in-depth look into what Google says can be found here: http://code.google.com/speed/page-speed/
“Basic to the plan of speed optimization are hosting, loading and coding.” -Scott Kindred, SafeHouse Web
Another soon-to-come article that goes deeper into some hosting considerations will tell you which host(s) we recommend and why. But for now, it’s safe to say one word (actually, one name) about hosting: Dreamhost. We are so pleased with Dreamhost’s personable and professional-grade services that we offer a discount to our clients who choose to use them; ask us before you buy and we’ll hook you up.
Onto loading. This is where most of the work is, and also where a huge impact can be made upon the
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When you’ve been involved in something for a while, whether it’s golfing or building websites or else, there comes a point when you can say you’re no longer a newcomer. BUT, it’s the word from the newcomers – in this case, new to WordPress – that serve as reminders about why we use WordPress, how great it is, and how much of a business impact it can have even on the newest of WP users.
Here it is, from this past week:
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This WordPress plugin does one thing: identify and capture mp3 links and insert a small flash player on click. That’s it.
With “simple” as one of the 3 principles of SafeHouse Web, I really like this lightweight, to-the-point audio player. Made available to the WordPress community by Christopher O’Connell at Compu.Terlicio.Us. Yes, for free.
This is a plugin that was introduced in 2008 and has seen a few upgrades; something this straight-forward and effective did need to have “2010″ or “look at me, I’m new” stamped on it. Another reason I liked it.
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Repetition, when you want to do something well, is a good idea. Learn the right way to do it and then repeat, repeat, repeat, until you continually improve. Blogging is no different, nor is the need to repeatedly go back to a list or an outline of what your blogging about, why you’re blogging about it, and the basics of what any blog should include. While there are many, many lists out there and , even here you will see different variations on blogging tips, it is always good to keep the same basic principals drilled into your head.
So here you go! These 5 can help you make sure you get the most out of your blog activity; a short list of some blog framework that you can hang your quality content on:
Need help setting up the tech side of your blog? Just want to have some help putting it together? We’re just a call or click away…. and it won’t cost an arm & a leg.
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After a half year’s work, the developers are going to get some rest and their byproduct is running happily into the jungle.
WordPress 3.0 has been released. The folks over at WP have dubbed their latest and greatest as “Thelonius.” At the time of this post being published, I am still doing research as to the origin of the dub – my guess, it’s going to be a humor-added discovery.
You can now take WP 3.0 for a test drive and check out the many new features that are available. Head over to www.wordpress.org for the free download, the Famous 5 Minute Install Guide, or the full-blown documentation and support resources. Many people already use WordPress for many things other than just blogging but this release will certainly create opportunities for managing content even more effortlessly than before.
WordPress was first released in 2003 as a content management system intended for bloggers, and today is regarded as the most popular blogging software available and a CMS-favorite of professionals and do-it-yourselfers, alike. WordPress is constantly being upgraded with great new features that make it possible to use it as a full website CMS instead of just a blogging platform. Many blogs and even large business sites are using WordPress as their CMS: CNN, Wall Street Journal, Nikon, Pepsi, etc. No question about it, WordPress 3.0 has extended the possibilities for creating a full website with a user-friendly CMS for clients.
In my opinion, this is one of the most noteworthy new features with WordPress 3.0, and it’s included in the default installation. Before this, it was possible to create a dynamic menu with some plugins and/or WordPress ninja skills. But it was never very easy to accomplish and now they’ve made it super simple.
You can add pages, categories, and even custom website links. With the custom website links option, you could link straight to a post, another website, whatever you want. It’s very user-friendly and setup similar to the current sidebar widget area where you can easily drag and drop to customize it just the way you like.
Currently, you can only create pages and posts with WordPress. In 3.0, you can create your own custom post types, and set up the appropriate fields to go along with each. When a user chooses a new post type, something like a Podcast, they will just add a podcast, simple as that. You don’t need to walk your clients through a complicated process and explain why they need to add a new post for a podcast and then click on a certain category and fill in a certain custom field. It’s one step now, and clients will love the simplicity. It does require the use of a plugin, but before it required much more work to setup.
WordPress MUhas been around as a separate entity for a while but will now be integrated in WordPress 3.0. MU allows you to maintain multiple sites from a single admin panel. It’s great for anyone that runs more than one site or blog and would like the simplicity of logging in once and maintaining them all from one place. This is especially helpful if these sites share content, templates, or plugins. One installation means less work and less time to create the same thing.
This isn’t completely setup in the default installation, but it’s fairly easy to get it up and going. First add this line to wp-config.php.
define('WP_ALLOW_MULTISITE', true);
Now “Network” will appear under Tools in the main menu. Once there, fill in the Network Title, Admin Email Address and press Install. WordPress gives you the option to set these sites up under sub domains or sub directories. If you’ve installed this version of WordPress in a sub directory or you’re using localhost, WordPress requires that you use sub directories.
You can now choose your own username and password in the installation process, no more auto generated passwords using the admin username. Not only is this cool, but also a significant security improvement.
The new default theme, Twenty Ten, is nicer. It’s clean and lightweight with minimal style attributes.
I’m looking forward to a couple of things with WP 3.0: Getting our existing clients upgraded, and then proactively using 3.0 for as many new website installations as possible. At SafeHouse Web, I think it’s important to stay as close to the leading edge in a new Release Version – while many people will remain complacent with their WP 2.9 (or earlier) installations (which are very strong platforms, don’t get me wrong), I have experienced the benefits of being able to confidently tell my clients that they are getting the best, newest WP version to run their business website.
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Optimize it for humans, and it will be optimal for engines, too:
OK, maybe that’s not the complete story but it’s the best you can get in a short answer. To quote Michael Torbert, maintainer of “All in One SEO Pack”, the most popular WordPress plugin currently:
The biggest thing, of course, for SEO [...] is content. That will never change and it’s become increasingly, more and more important [...] as the search engines get better and better determining what is on your page and parsing through all that data. So, having good content is the key.
Michael Torbert, AKA hallsofmontezuma, in: “All In One SEO To Go”
With that said, search engines can always use a little help to index a website better. There are two very popular WordPress plugins suited for this.
“Google (XML) Sitemaps Generator for WordPress” is a must-have. It automates the generation of an XML sitemap, a document recommended by the search companies themselves.
An XML sitemap tells web crawlers (also known as “spiders”, “robots” or just “bots”) where to find the content to be indexed. So, everything is indexed, even pages with no links, internal or external, pointing to them. An XML sitemap helps crawlers in other ways too. For instance, when a crawler sees the same content repeated in the home page and in the permalink of an individual post, it does not have to work too hard to decide which to give more weight to: it just looks at the XML sitemap, and learns that the main and permanent location is the permalink.
XML sitemaps and sitemap pages in websites are DIFFERENT things. The former are unstyled XML documents meant for web crawlers. The latter provide an index, an overview of the site’s content, for human visitors.
“All in One SEO Pack”, the other very popular SEO plugin, does various kinds of optimization. One is similar in purpose to XML sitemaps: It adds noindex tags (“do not index this”) to pages that duplicate content (category pages, tag pages, etc.), so that crawlers can work better.
It can also rewrite page titles, add meta descriptions, and more — see its page for details.
Both plugins work fine in their default settings. Just install and activate.
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Got and old website or landing page that you don’t want to take down?
First Rule: Don’t let your visitor decide where to find your new location; make it a one-way street right to your new site.
If you need to redirect your visitors to a new page, this HTML redirect code may be just what you’re looking for.
When designing a web site, many times you must change the location of a web page. However, if the page is popular, your visitors may have already linked to it. In addition, the Search Engines
have most-likely already indexed the page.
For this reason, a prominent option is to redirect your page to a new page. This provides a great way to provide your visitors with the information they were looking for and prevent you from losing your traffic.
However, when using this HTML redirect code, please ensure that you don’t use it to trick the Search Engines, as this could get your web site banned. It is always best to work hard and learn quality ways in which to drive traffic to your web site.
Place the following HTML redirect code between the <HEAD> and </HEAD> tags of your HTML code.
<meta HTTP-EQUIV=”REFRESH” content=”0; url=http://www.yourdomain.com/index”>
The above HTML redirect code will redirect your visitors to another web page instantly. The content=”0; may be changed to the number of seconds you want the browser to wait before redirecting.
Do you have questions? Need help with getting your site redirected? Call us today and we’ll get you fixed up!
readmoreSome of these steps may seem overly protective or overly simple. But, we all know some of the ill-intentioned people out there often thrive on the most simple opportunities. We think this is good stuff to remember and to put into practice; and it really doesn’t have to curtail the entertainment or communication benefits of this powerful social tool!
Using a Weak Password
Avoid simple names or words you can find in a dictionary, even with numbers tacked on the end. Instead, mix upper- and lower-case letters, numbers, and symbols. A password should have at least eight characters. One good technique is to insert numbers or symbols in the middle of a word, such as this variant on the word “houses”: hO27usEs!
Leaving Your Full Birth Date in Your Profile
It’s an ideal target for identity thieves, who could use it to obtain more information about you and potentially gain access to your bank or credit card account. If you’ve already entered a birth date, go to your profile page and click on the Info tab, then on Edit Information. Under the Basic Information section, choose to show only the month and day or no birthday at all.
Overlooking Useful Privacy Controls
For almost everything in your Facebook profile, you can limit access to only your friends, friends of friends, or yourself. Restrict access to photos, birth date, religious views, and family information, among other things. You can give only certain people or groups access to items such as photos, or block particular people from seeing them. Consider leaving out contact info, such as phone number and address, since you probably don’t want anyone to have access to that information anyway.
Posting Your Child’s Name in a Caption
Don’t use a child’s name in photo tags or captions. If someone else does, delete it by clicking on Remove Tag. If your child isn’t on Facebook and someone includes his or her name in a caption, ask that person to remove the name.
Mentioning That You’ll Be Away From Home
That’s like putting a “no one’s home” sign on your door. Wait until you get home to tell everyone how awesome your vacation was and be vague about the date of any trip.
Letting Search Engines Find You
To help prevent strangers from accessing your page, go to the Search section of Facebook’s privacy controls and select Only Friends for Facebook search results. Be sure the box for public search results isn’t checked.
Permitting Youngsters to Use Facebook Unsupervised
Facebook limits its members to ages 13 and over, but children younger than that do use it. If you have a young child or teenager on Facebook, the best way to provide oversight is to become one of their online friends. Use your e-mail address as the contact for their account so that you receive their notifications and monitor their activities. “What they think is nothing can actually be pretty serious,” says Charles Pavelites, a supervisory special agent at the Internet Crime Complaint Center. For example, a child who posts the comment “Mom will be home soon, I need to do the dishes” every day at the same time is revealing too much about the parents’ regular comings and goings.