April 8 Customer Website Tips galin
The blogs we put together using WordPress have a pretty practical categorization structure. Using category options is very beneficial for your site. This is because for each category, your sitemap grows with the number of posts in that category (and you can keep it keyword specific). A larger sitemap is useful for search engines since you will have more pages out there as possibilities for being crawled (when a search engine visits a page and looks at all of the keywords on the page). The larger sitemap helps your SEO.
There are two types of categories to choose from, “Categories” and “Post Tags”. You should see both of these options when writing a new post. I view it this way. “Tags” are specific topic categories while “Categories” should be more general. For example, this post I am using the “Category” titled “Customer Website Tips”. The “Tags” I am using are “seo”, “WordPress”, “web advice”, “blogs”, and “Google”.
When running a blog, you should use this tag/category strategy. You should make sure to not have too many tags or categories and try to make the tags/categories grow in the number of posts that fit those categories. My blog currently has 5 categories and 55 tags. Tags can be more specific so your number of these should be greater than your categories. Not only is this useful for SEO since it grows your sitemap in a keyword friendly manner, it is also useful for your reader since they can easily view all of your sites posts for a specific category (i.e. here is where you could go to only look at SEO posts on my blog).
April 7 Development Techniques galin
Search Engine Optimization is a very hot web topic. I prefer a simple strategy in regards to SEO. I treat it like obeying laws that Google and other search engines make. Obey the laws and you will see a benefit. Not everyone sticks with this philosophy though. Some prefer a “laws were meant to be broken” mentality. An example of this is with “The AOL Way” that has been all over the tech news world as of late. 
AOL’s news department recently laid out a blueprint for a plan on generating more web traffic through search engines. Here is a leak of the strategy called “The AOL Way”.
Sticking with the law comparison, Google actually differs from legal systems. Google is a lot less beauractric than the U.S. legal system we are used to. They can actually react quickly to changes. Exploiting loopholes can be very difficult since Google can easily realize a loophole and change their algorithms accordingly. “The AOL Way” is a blatant attempt at ignoring what Google wants in their top search results.
Recently Google made an algorithm change aimed at hurting “content farming” SEO practices in an attempt at improving search results. Here is a blog post I wrote about it. “The AOL Way” should of been hurt by this algorithm change. That is because a lot of the practices preached in that leaked article are of a content farming nature.
Essentially AOL thinks they can ignore Google’s long-term algorithm goal because they are smarter. Google works every day on their algorithm and a big mission of theirs is the quality of search results. But AOL, being like the arrogant child stealing from the local convient store, thinks they can break the rules. The amount of resources required to stay ahead of Google’s resources amazes me. It seems impossible. If I had these types of resources, I’d focus on a lot more productive of ideas and gone with a K.I.S.S. (Keep It Simple Stupid) philosophy in regards to SEO.
K.I.S. tells me this. Play by the rules. Listen to Google. They want quality, content driven, spamless, keyword intelligent sites. Or for you to pay for results. Not sites ran with a content-farming philosophy to get a search hit and in turn lose all their quality. Engadget, the popular AOL ran tech blog, is losing its staff. Let’s see if this trend follows.
April 4 Customer Website Tips galin
We prefer setting up your site on Google Analytics. Google Analytics is a web traffic reporting tool developed by Google. It is loaded with features and has a very simple interface for analyzing your traffic.
Analyzing web traffic can be useful for more than the obvious monitoring your site purposes. One incredibly useful purpose is for SEO. With Google Analytics, you can easily see how much traffic you are generating from search engines. You do this from your main Analytics screen by navigation to “Traffic Sources>>Search Engines”. Once here you will see a break down of your hits from all of the search engines. Clicking on the search engine will then give you a list of all the search terms giving you these search results.
This is great for analyzing SEO. You can easily see which keywords are doing well. In addition, you can check to see if any keywords you wish to have be hits are on the list through a simple search.
Understanding your site in this manner is an important step in the constant research that is involved for proper search engine optimization.
April 1 Customer Website Tips galin
Customers may sometimes be contacted by other websites about putting a link to their site up in exchange for a link on their site. This is called a “link exchange”, and they are definetley useful for generating more traffic to your site.
Link exchanges are great because they generate additional traffic to your site in multiple ways. The obvious way is by people on the other site clicking on the link to go to your site. This direct effect is nice but not the main reason people are interested in link exchanges.
Link exchanges also help your search engine results. Google and other search engine “crawlers” see a link on a site and then follow it the link destination. By having links on other sites, it will increase the number of crawls you get to your site. There are some important factors to both be cautious of and to look for when deciding whether to link exchange with a site.
Important Factors for Link Exchanges
- Traffic of the Partnering Site – This can be researched through Alexa Ratings. Higher traffic sites will help you more.
- Relative Content of the Partnering Site – Do you have a law site and the partnering site is about basketball? That link wouldn’t be smart. Partner up with sites that have similar content but are not direct competitors.
- Dofollow Links – The link must be allowed to be followed by search engines. This means the link should not have the parameter “rel=’nofollow'” in it. Here is a blog post about html links that explains the ‘nofollow’ parameter.
- Link Text – If the partner is willing to put nice keywords in their link, then this should help SEO. That is, instead of “GPM Web Solutions” saying something more keyword rich like “Affordable Website Designs”. Search engines take note on the words in the link and what they should indicate for search results.
Always make sure to give careful thinking to who you decide to partner up with for link exchanges. They can be very useful, but one link can be more effective than 200 links. It is the quality of the link that matters.
March 30 Customer Website Tips galin
WordPress is great for a lot of reasons. One reason is for its flexibility. WordPress plugins illustrate this flexibility.
WordPress plugins are add-ons you can install on your site to accomplish certain tasks. These plugins are easy to install and also easy to uninstall/deactivate. This is great for you, the customer. You can easily install a plugin to try to add something to your site on your own, and if it doesn’t work the way you wanted, just uninstall it. This is how.
Login to your WordPress admin dashboard. Using the menu on the left, go to “Plugins” and choose “Add New”. From here start searching. There is a huge library of plugins out there. Some that may be understandable to you and some that may not. Once installed, see if it accomplishes what you wished. If not, simply go back to the “Plugins” tab and choose “Plugins” to view all of your sites plugins. You should see a lot of plugins on this page. Only look for yours and choose to deactivate the plugin you installed. This will remove the plugin you experimented with from your site.
Feel free to play around with this or not. You can always contact us for adding a feature to your site, but at the same time this could be a simple way for you to do it cost free.
