SEO Training

WEBSHED RSS Poster. Post your Blog and other feeds to Twitter automatically

I haven’t yet fully integrated it into my site yet and it should be considered a beta version, but here is a sneak preview of a new free service on my main site….

It is an RSS feed poster that will take your RSS feeds and publish them to Twitter automatically.  More than that, it is a feed aggregator that allows you to combine up to 6 individual feeds into one feed.  Why?  Well, for example, facebook only allows you publish one feed to your notes page.  So this aggregator allows you to publish up to 6 feeds.

It is called the WEBSHED RSS poster and to use it just click Publish My Feeds To Twitter!

I’ll update you all more when I have it properly integrated into the site an prettied up a bit.  In the meantime I’d welcome any feedback or comments you have on it.

Twitter Tweet Button Slows down Wordpress index pages

Since adding posting about how to install the official Twitter Tweet button yesterday I have noticed an unfortunate side effect.  The button slows down the load time of wordpress sites significantly.

Originally I had placed the button at the top and bottom of each post on the index page.  I have since removed the twitter button from the bottom of the posts.

Why has the Twitter tweet button slowed down my site?

We have all experienced trying to log on to Twitter only to be met with a message that Twitter is over capacity – please try again later.  Well this is what happens…

For each instance of the button on a page the little bit of javascript makes a call to Twitter.  If Twitter is running slow then the query will take longer and it will slow down the page load speed on your site.  If you have 10 articles on a page, and a tweet button at the top and bottom of each article, then that is 20 calls to twitter.  If they slow to half a second then load time will be slowed by 10 seconds!

It’s not just the Twitter Tweet button, The Facebook share button has the same problem.

Maybe, like me you have the facebook share button installed on your wordpress site too.  The same thing applies.  The facebook share button has a far smaller effect though, load times are not effected as much.

Google Adsense Isn’t helping matters either!

Want to really slow down your site?  Add in Google adsense too!  Each of the Twitter button, the Facebook button and Google adsense, all make calls to external sites.  This leaves you at the mercy of their response times.

Should I remove the Twitter Tweet button from my index page?

I am leaving the Twitter button for now.  I may well remove it from the index page in the future.  It all depends on whether more people installing it (which will be millions of users) slows it down even more, or if Twitter address the problem somehow.  I could always go back to Tweetmeme, which seems to have these issues under much better control. Interestingly Tweetmeme are working with Twitter on the button.

Will the Twitter Tweet button affect my SEO?

Google has intimated that they will be taking page load speeds into more consideration.  It stands to reason then that there is a possibility that installing the Twitter Tweet button could have a negative effect on your sites Google rank if the current load speed problems persist.  I for one will be monitoring it closely.

Page load speed not the only problem.

Page load speed has not been the only problem to affect the Twitter Tweet button.  Several major sites removed the button yesterday after discovering that firefox users were getting a pop up that rendered the site inaccessible.  Twitter have since stated that this problem has been recified.

Look!  The official Twitter tweet button is here!  Get the official Twitter Tweet Code.  Ah, but it’s not quite so straight forward for a Wordpress site.

Twitter Tweet Button code generator makes life easy... but modification is required for Wordpress sites.

Adding the official button to Wordpress (like on this site) takes a little more.  The code you get from using the Twitter generator I linked to above looks like this:

<a href="http://twitter.com/share" data-count="vertical"
data-via="SEOHolistically">Tweet</a>
<script type="text/javascript"
src="http://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js"></script>

That works perfectly well for static pages.  But the index page of a Wordpress blog contains more than one blog post.  Inserting the above code into your index page will only tweet the title of your index page and that url.  We need to make some adjustments to the code….

<a href="http://twitter.com/share" data-count="vertical"
data-via="SEOHolistically"
data-related="copyblogger"
data-url="<?php the_permalink(); ?>"
data-text="<?php the_title(); ?>">Tweet</a>
<script type="text/javascript"
src="http://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js"></script>

Lets take a look at these changes.

1. data-via=”SEOholistically” was generated by the generator at stage two “Recommend People to Follow (optional).  It will add in “via @SEOholistically” at the end of the tweet message, so don’t forget to change it to your own twitter account (not that I would mind if you didn’t).
2. data-related=”copyblogger” I have just added in.  It would be generated automatically if I had filled in the second field of the “Recommend People to Follow (optional)” section.  Coppyblogger is nothing to do with me… but you should follow them anyway… good advice! Again, unless you want coppyblogger to be offered as a follow suggestion to everybody who uses the button, change it!
3. data-url=”<?php the_permalink(); ?>” This is where we get into Wordpress specific stuff. This tells twitter to take the url as being the individual blog post url rather than the page url.
4. data-text=”<?php the_title(); ?>” This tells twitter to make the Wordpress post title the content of the twitter post.

That is all there is to the code for the twitter tweet button if you are adding it to a Wordpress blog.

So where do you put the Twitter code in Wordpress?

You should add it to index.php and single.php. In this blog it looks like this (facebook button code removed for simplicity)

Single.php

<div class="entry">
 <!--Twitter Tweet button-->
 <div style='width:100%;'>
  <a href="http://twitter.com/share" data-count="horizontal" data-via="SEOHolistically"
  data-url="<?php the_permalink(); ?>" data-text="<?php the_title(); ?>">Tweet</a>
  <script type="text/javascript" src="http://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js"></script>
 </div><!-- end width - 100% -->
 <!-- end tweet button -->

… so just search for <div class=’entry’> and put it in directly below that.

index.php

Do exactly the same thing as for single.php.

Why use the official Twitter Tweet Button?

You could use Tweetmeme or some other button… but the official button has a big seller for me.  Every time somebody uses it, it will offer up two suggestions of people to follow…. the two suggestions you provide using the data-via and data-related options.  It makes it much easier to gain more followers. That can’t be a bad thing!

The default way that Wordpress displays your page/post/comment/tag pages title is to have the blog name, followed by two >> marks and then the post title, tag title, comment title, or just the blog name if it is the home page. Here is how to do some simple optimisation (ok ok optimization just for you Americans) on your Wordpress site or Blog.

As you can see, on this blog things are a little different.  The home page displays the blog name “SEO Training” and also the site description (small text below the blog title).

On the other pages I have made the blog name go to the right.  Why?  because it is better to have the more important keywords near the beginning of the title for SEO.  This is particularly true when the blog title is repeated on every page as it is in this case.

This is another issue.  Should I have the blog title showing on every page?  Jury is out on that one here… so I’m experimenting.  Another blog I write on my home site about online marketing does not have the blog title on every page. If it is a tag page then the page title will be just the tag.  If it is an article then just the article title will appear in the meta title tag.  The blog is new, so I will give it six months and see if I can notice any discernable difference in performance.

Anyway, I digress a bit. Here is how to change your title tag in wordpress.

1. You need to open the header.php file in whatever theme you are using.  You can do this directly from Wordpress, by clicking on the appearance menu item on the left of your Wordpress dashboard and then clicking on Editor which will show up below it.  Once you are in editor you can select Header (header.php) from the list of pages on the right.  Your files must be writable though or it will tell you it could not save your changes.  Alternatively, if like me you prefer to use ftp, then the path is wp-content -> themes -> (whatever theme you are using) -> header.php.
2. Find the title tag. It will look like this: <title><?php wp_title(’&laquo;’, true, ‘right’); ?> <?php bloginfo(’name’); ?></title>
3. Change it to this: <title><?php if ( is_single() || is_page() || is_tag() || is_category()) {  wp_title(’&raquo;’,true,’right’); bloginfo(’name’);} else {
   bloginfo(’name’); echo ” &raquo; “; bloginfo(’description’);
   } ?></title>
4. Save it.  You’re done!

If you would like the blog title not to appear on every post then you want to use this instead: <title><?php if(wp_title(’&laquo;’,false, ‘right’)){wp_title(false);} else { bloginfo(’name’); echo ‘ &raquo; ‘; bloginfo(’description’);} ?></title>

That is all there is to it. Better SEO for your Wordpress site and it’s not even difficult! Enjoy!

Design your Website with SEO in mind. It is childs play really. . . . honest.

Web design and SEO should be symbiotic. After all, there is no point having a wonderful looking site if nobody can find it.  This site, by contrast, has no design whatsoever.  It can however be found.

Am I saying that SEO is more important than Web design?  Not really.  A good web designer will incorporate basic SEO into a site as they build it.  Not having any design (wordpress default style) is not a good thing though.  While the content on this site is good (or at least I try to make it good) a lack of design leads to me losing traffic.  This shows up as my bounce rate which is high enough for me to be embarrassed to print it here.

Of course there are other factors.  My writing style could do with an overhaul most of the time for starters.  There is no getting away from the fact though, that the first impression of this site is that it is unprofessional.  Nothing could be further from the truth in reality, but it is not a warm, inviting, friendly site.

This is not because I am not a warm, friendly or inviting type of person, it is purely down to how the site looks.

SEO will get a site noticed.  It will get visitors.  Keeping those visitors requires a little extra though.  Both Web design and SEO are extremely important.  The reason this site does not have any design is because I wanted to see the effects of bad design. The wordpress theme is not necessarily bad, but it gives an impression of little effort.  It also firmly aligns itself with spam blogs (splogs) by not altering the theme.  This is because the majority of splogs do not bother altering the theme either.

When I change the theme I expect to see a change in my stats.  That will not be for a while yet though.  I am not finished collecting data on the current setup.

For me, SEO is more important than design, but it is a mistake to ignore web design.  Equally it is a mistake to ignore SEO.

Of course to really market your web site online, holistic SEO is the way to go.  Do not look at the web in terms of SEO vs Design, Adwords Vs SEO or Social Media Vs Adwords.  Look at it in terms of a marketing medium and bring in everything.  There is no more cost effective medium for marketing.  Use it to its full potential to sell your business.

Nobody likes spam on their blogs

Spam Blogs (splogs) are bad enough.  There is nothing worse than landing on a site only to find that there is no useful information and that the blogs only purpose is to create links to other sites or to generate revenue through Adsense.

For those of us who maintain blogs though, the comment spam is hugely annoying.  Spammers crawl the web looking for blogs and then automate posting comments.  The sole purpose is to gain links back to their own site.  My biggest problem with this sort of link building is that it is not even as effective as it used to be.  Google employ a large number of people who are tasked with discounting this sort of spam.

So what are the solutions for a blog owner?

You could turn off your blog commenting, thus preventing anybody from posting any comments.  That is all well and good, but the whole point of blogging is to stimulate debate.  It is a social medium.

Alternatively you could employ a spam blocking plugin for your site.

I prefer to catch them manually though.  The reason is that I can learn from what these spammers are doing. Spammers do it because it works.  Some people approve these comments.

Spotting a Spam Comment

1. Check the users url.  This is often the best indicator.  If the site is full of rubbish or content you would not be comfortable linking to, then don’t approve the comment.
2. References to sex, gambling or drugs of any description in the body of the comment (often with links) earn instant spam marking on any of my blogs.
3. Generic terms like “Great post, I’ll have to bookmark it on Digg”.  These posts have no reference to the content of the post itself.  “I like your ideas on this topic” rather than “I appreciate your thoughts on blog commenting” is a flag for me.  If the post is not specifically referenced then it’s 99.9% likely to be spam.

My favorite blog spam ever was a comment complementing me on the theme of this site and asking me where I got it/ how I made it.  This blog has the default Wordpress theme, I never bothered changing it, although I will at some stage in the future.

I clearly use the power of blogging for SEO.  There is no quicker way of climbing the Google ranks.  However, there is a difference between what I do and what the comment spammers do.  I try to give good content.  Although this site feeds my Webshed site, It is a stand-alone site in it’s own right.  That is responsible SEO.

What relationship does link positioning on external sites have with the effectiveness of a link for delivering results to your site? (I’m just going to stop for a breather after that horrible sentence… the rest will be better… honest)

Some would argue that links are links and you take them where you can get them.  Surely though it is smarter to try and get links that are actually worth something to your site – particularly if you were about to part with cash for them.  Onwards with our SEO training – Lets take a look at how the position of the link on the external site can have an effect on how effective the link is for you and your SEO.

It is important to note that positioning is just one element in the SEO equation.  We will look at others in future posts.

Link Positioning for SEO

Banner and button links: Google does not like paid links.  Banner, Skyscraper and button links are images.  This in itself is not bad.  There is little difference between a text link and alt text in a link.

What is bad is that the positioning of these elements is just about always the same on a site.  Worse still they often come with “Sponsored links” or some other such text in their vicinity.  That is like painting yourself yellow, wearing nothing but a pink tutu, and running past Google buildings shouting “I paid for a link” while a team push flyers with the details into the hands of everybody entering or leaving the building.   Obviously it’s the algorithms you have to worry about mainly (unless you get a personal review). A link to another site from a banner is therefore only worth the number of clicks you get from it.  Add in “ad blindness” and paying for a banner ad seems to make little sense in most cases.

In truth it probably won’t do you too much harm to buy button or banner ads, but it’s not likely to do you as much good as you would like in terms of SERPS.  That said, a nice banner ad on a popular and related site could get you enough click throughs to make it worthwhile.

Footer Links: This is one for you web designers.  You put your links onto every page you design…. in the footer.  It doesn’t do you any good.  Well, it doesn’t do you any good compared to having a nice link in the middle of the page copy.  The footer is also another place where advertising is often placed.  In short, don’t expect much from footer links – they do not work well.

Header Links: Links in the header are not a lot of use either, for much the same reasons.  In general the only links you ever see in headers are paid advertising.  The search engines know it.

Positioning in the source code structure: When your page is crawled, it is the source file that will be read.  Traditionally, important content would be placed as high up that code structure as possible.  This is because crawlers used to only crawl a proportion of each page.  Using CSS you can float the main column rather than the side bar, thus it is closer to the start of your code.  It is still worth doing this for other search engines, but not necessary for Google any more.  Google can understand your page layout (providing you keep to reasonable standards).  Thus positioning in the source code is not as important as positioning on the page.

Best position on the page for a link: I love in-text links.  I think that a good relevant link in the middle of a paragraph of relevant text is the bees knees.

Surrounding Text: What about the text surrounding a link?  I think that the surrounding text is quite important.  It helps to show context and is simply a way of telling dumb machines that it is less likely to be a spam link.

Blogrolls and other Site-wide links: It depends on the site, but having the same link on every page of a site is often not as good as a few links on relevant pages.  Firstly, Site-wide links may be confused with advertising, secondly, in my experience they are just not as good in many cases.  So, if somebody offers to put you in their blogroll, ask them for a link in a few individual blogs instead.  You can ask for a few, because it will probably seem to them like they are giving you something less important.  Get some blogging training and start making great quality links for yourself.

The ideal place for a link on an external site: The perfect link position in my book is in the center of the page (in the main body of text), as near as possible to the top of the page, with relevant surrounding text and good keyword use.

Links are less useful if:-

• The link is in the header or footer sections of the page.
• The link is in a list of unrelated links.
• The page is badly formed (broken source code)
• The link is in Javascript
• It is an image link that has no alt text (makes it nearly entirely useless)

When it comes to training someone on link building, there are a lot of factors that go into what makes a good link.  The page positioning on the external site is just one of the factors that play a role in how effective your SEO is.

Search engine optimisation relies on a wide range of factors (there are over 200 elements taken into account by Google when analysing a page).  The wonderful thing about SEO is that even by paying attention to just a few you can make a positive change to your site.

How vital is on page SEO to overall SEO efforts?

Keyword Stuffing

On page SEO is absolutely vital.  On its own, on page SEO will not get you far. Without it however, your overall SEO efforts will not get far.  This  is where a lot of people make lots of mistakes though.  There is not a lot that can go wrong with link building by comparison with on page SEO.

The prime mistake by people with their on page SEO is keyword stuffing.  Lets take a look at each element of a page and see how keyword stuffing can stuff you up.

Page Elements

Page title

• The page title is the words that appear at the top of your browser when you visit a page. It is a meta tag that goes <title>some text</title> and lives in the head section of your html page.
• Try to keep it to 40 characters or so and do not repeat keywords in it (stuffing).
• That includes variations like “Jobs Dublin”, “Jobs Cork” etc.
• Try to place your keywords at the beginning.  If you must include a company name then put it at the end.

Meta Description

• The Meta Description also lives in the head section of the html page.  It looks like.. <meta name=’description’ content=’blah blah blah’ />  It is usually the text that appears below your page title in search engine results.
• This should be aimed at users, not search engines.  While Google has not ruled out that it may use the content, it is given little importance in terms of gaining rank in the SERPS. Use it to sell your page to a viewer.
• What is certain is that if you stuff it with keywords you could well find yourself penalised, while simultaneously putting off any human visitors (and these are the ones you are after).

Meta Keywords

• Meta Keywords also live in the head section of your html.  These used to be used by search engines to determine what the author thought were relevant keywords for the page. Widespread abuse in the forms of keyword stuffing and non-relevant text mean that it is quite alright to leave this section out.  I still include it, but I make sure that I only include a handful of extremely relevant keywords that are actually in the visible text of the page.

H1 tag

• This is the title of the page, and will appear on the actual page. It is found in the body section of you html page.
• I often have the h1 tag exactly the same as my page title tag.  If this does not make sense to the page then I make sure it is at least extremely similar, containing the same keywords.
• The h1 tag is the most important piece of text in the visible page.  Choose your content wisely.
• There should only ever be one h1 tag per page.

h2-h6 tags

• The rest of the h (heading) tags are also important. The higher the number, the less important.  Treat them in the same way as your h1 tag.

Paragraph tags

• Everything on your page should be contained within tags.  The text in your paragraphs needs to be relevant to your title.  Remember you are dealing with dumb machines.  If you have a keyword in your h tag then make sure it is also in your paragraph tag below it.
• Write for humans.  Do not repeat keywords too much.

How Do I know if I am Keyword Stuffing Unintentionally?

A simple rule of thumb is that if it does not read well to a human, you are probably guilty of keyword stuffing.

To avoid unintentional keyword stuffing try to keep your keywords to about 5% of your page text.  If you go too far over then you will be penalised.  If you see a competitor above you who has a higher proportion of the same keyword it is likely that they are above you as a result of off page optimisation rather than on page optimisation.

Sometimes keyword stuffing works.  I have had pages usurped by pages from competitors with tons of keyword stuffing.  The good news is that it rarely lasts.  They climb and then they drop again as a general rule.  I want to teach you how to have more stable, long term results.

SEO should not be about cheating your way to the top, it should be about working within guidelines and optimising your efforts within those guidelines.  Anything else is risky.  You may get away with it for a while, maybe even a long time, but eventually your site will suffer.  It is easy to be temped by the ‘dark side’, but it is not a good idea for a business that depends on its website.  If you have a non-critical website, then feel free to practice all the dark arts of SEO – it will teach you a lot.  Just don’t host the site on the same server as any sites you care about.

The really bad keyword stuffing practices

• Hidden text. This is where you make the text the same colour as the background so that it is not visible to humans.  This text is often smaller than 8 pixels.  It is always full of keywords.  It works – until you get caught.
• Cloaking. Displaying different text to search engines than to human visitors.  Again this works – until you get caught.

If in doubt, don’t do it.

How far can I push it?

There is only one way to find out…. and that is to push it.  You can either slowly increase your keyword ratio on the page until you lose rank, or you can put in as many keywords as you can and slowly remove them until you gain rank.

The great thing about losing relevance as a result of keyword stuffing is that you can reverse it by fixing the problem.  It can be a slow process though, since it takes days for most sites to be crawled enough for changes to be reflected in the search rankings.

Final Advice on Keywords

• Beware of having keywords (particularly long tail – several worded – keywords) in close proximity.
• Make sure that your headings relate to the surrounding text.
• Remember that on page SEO is just the start.  You need to build links too.

I’ve neglected my blogging for a little while.  This was for two reasons.  The first one was that I have finally got started on my website (WEbshed.ie).  SEO training is the blog for that site really, since it is all about SEO.  I still have a heap of work to do on it, but at least it has started.

The second reason I have not been doing my regular blogging on this particular blog was to see exactly what effect not blogging has on a blog.  This site was consistently at position 1 or two for “SEO training”.  That was not surprising given the domain name, the content and the fact that it is not targeting a very competitive keyword.

It is not so very long from my last post but the site has fallen a fair bit.  Is that down to my neglecting my blogging, or to other sites increasing their SEO efforts for that search term?

How do you go about finding out?  Well I could analyse competing sites that have jumped above me, or I could just start blogging regularly again.

I already know that a blog has to be maintained to be effective, and to keep it’s position from past experience.  It is just like any site.  Information has to be kept fresh.  This is particularly true when it comes to blogging though.  It is not enough to change a page every month or so.  Blog posts (in general) have a shelf life.  Once they cease to be current, excluding the case where the information is still more relevant than anything else out there, then they start to fall down the ranks.

It will be interesting to see if this single blog post will have any SEO effects at all.  Will it stem the fall, slow the fall, or start a re-climb in the serps?  Time will tell.  I intend to return to regular blogging on SEO anyway!