Managing director Andrew Benton agreed and gave us the go-ahead to rebuild the website in a WordPress CMS so they could easily add / edit content as required. The additional ability to use the blog aspects of WordPress to create news, DIY articles, product reviews and distribute newsletters etc is also a consideration…

• We also needed to address the following issues;
• Lack of incoming links / lack of keywords in Anchor Text
• No robots.txt file
• No custom 404 Error Page
• No sitemap.xml
• Duplicate Titles, Descriptions, Keywords
• Etc etc..

At the outset, a benchmark Search Engine Ranking report showed 1 solitary Top 30 Ranking for the old website. The site was duly rebuilt, the previously identified problems were addressed, and the results that have accrued within a few weeks  are encouraging… click the images to see the details.

• their HTML website was looking old and tired
• other people had stolen their content and were getting better rankings
• their site’s visibility had slowly diminished

Flexiscreens - the tired old website

• Lack of incoming links
• No relevant keywords / phrases in link anchor Text
• Dduplication of Titles, Descriptions, Keywords
• No use of H1, H2 in page headings, and poor keyword targeting
• 1st paragraphs not targeting specific keywords
• Overly long pages
• Text hidden in DIV’s containing blatant keyword spam
• No sitemaps / robots.txt / 404 Error page handling
• Etc!

The plan put forward included keyword research, link building submissions, rebuild into a WordPress CMS, full Search Engine Optimisation on all pages, and attention to all the serious issues noted in the review.

Link building was implemented immediately, as is takes months to reach fruition and is independent of site changes. I.e. all links are to the Domain Name, not internal pages. The site was reconstructed in WordPress CMS, with installaion of key plugins to provide additional functionality. This included All In One SEO, XML Google Sitemaps, Feedburner RSS subscription, WP-Supercache, Simple Tags etc.

Flexiscreens - the new WordPress CMS site

The site went live in 3rd week of February. 301 Permanent Redirection of every old page to the corresponding new page was  implemented in .htaccess.

So, one month on, here’s how its shaping up… click Image 1 to view the SE Rankings changes.

Image 1

As a general rule, from an SEO perspective, bear in mind the most fundamental issue. Google loathes duplicate content! Google is trying to index and categorize the billions of pages on the web and calculate each page’s relevance to specific search queries. Therefore, to have any chance of attaining appearance in Top 30 SERP’s, pages must be accurately described…

Keep in mind that Google is an entirely automated text indexing system doing its absolute best to deliver the most relevant content to its core users. Those core users are NOT website owners!!! Google’s main focus is on its search customers. If you want your website to get noticed, you’ve got to assist Google et al in every way possible, by accurately describing your own content.

Make it clear and unequivocal what each page is about. Ensure it is original content, properly described, and easily accessible…

Apparently, there are over 200 elements that Google assesses as its trying to calculate a page’s relevance to a specific search query. Individually, some of them are almost insignificant. Collectively they add up to prominence or obscurity! The thinking man understands that the more elements you get right, the higher the probability of appearance in Top 30 SERPs. Here’s a dozen of the primary indicators of unique content to an SE spider;

1.) URLs:

Precise control of every page URL, carefully using primary keywords / phrase. Use Permalinks wisely!

2.)  Title:

70 characters limit. Accurate, carefully using primary keywords / phrase. The single most important element for every page!

3.) Meta Description:

150 chars limit. Accurate, carefully using primary keywords / phrase. By default, its used verbatim in Google SERP’s. Its very important to write a catchy phrase incorporating primary keyword phrase, one that impels viewers to click on it!

I always use All In One SEO because I’m a “content control freak” and want to make sure every word is in the right place. Dynamic meta-tags are better than no meta-tags – but the ability to manually input as many elements as is possible is what makes the overall difference to SE Rankings…

4.) Meta Keywords:

Accurate, carefully using primary / relevant keywords and phrases. This should NOT be vaguely related words!!! It should be a set of long-tailed keyword phrases specifically relevant to the page content. I’d never use more than 8 – 10 phrases separated by commas.

5.) 1st On-page Title/Heading:

Headings offer limited space, but ALWAYS try and get at least one primary keyword into the title, and the tag must be H1 or H2, not an ‘imitation’ with large/bold text.

6.) First Paragraph:

Very important to get the primary keyword phrase into the beginning of the first sentence!

7.) Last Heading:

If you use one, reiterate a primary or secondary keyword phrase.

8.) Last Paragraph:

Quite important to get the primary or secondary keyword phrase into the beginning of the first sentence!

9.) Images:

Use keyword-rich image file names! Provide a descriptive and accurate image ALT text that uses a primary keyword phrase. Don’t overdo it – just lightly reinforce the page content descriptions.

10.) Anchor Text:

Provide links to other Internal Pages from primary/secondary keyword phrases within page content. Don’t waste the opportunity available to give clues to content on other pages! Using “Click Here For More” is not productive.

11.) Menu’s:

CSS drop-down menus are good. Text menus are good because they (usually) describe briefly the content of the page at the end of the link, providing an additional clue/reinforcement for the SE spiders. JavaScript menus are a disaster because they are completely invisible to Google et al.

12: Latent Semantic Indexing:

Within the overall content, don’t use excessive primary/secondary keyword repetition. Instead, employ a sprinkle of similar words having the same meaning… and variations of the primary words; e.g. mortgage, mortgaged, mortgagee, mortgagor, lend, lending, lender, financing, funding, loan, loans, loaned etc… Reinforce the primary / secondary keyword phrases with supporting content. LSI is based on a mathematical probability that if a page says its about something, AND general content also contains related words / phrases, then it IS accurately described and IS specifically relevant to related search queries.

13.) USE Google!

They’ve got two absolutely essential items designed to help you! The 1st is the Google sitemap, and there are plugins available which totally automate generation of the sitemap.xml file every time you add or edit page or post content. The 2nd is Feedburner… Create a Feedburner account, and add your RSS Feed to it. That gives you an intravenous pipeline directly into the belly of the beast! I’ve regularly got blog posts and page content appearing in “Google Alert” distributions within 2 – 3 hours of publishing the post or page! Feedburner also offers you a managed email subscription service which routes your new content directly to interested users…

Author’s Bio:

Ben has more than 20 years of experience in the IT industry, including 15 years as a free-lance IT consultant. He is one of Australasia’s longest serving website seo practitioners, with clients throughout NZ, Australia, Thailand, UK & USA. He specialises in implementing CMS websites

The SEO Guy (nz)
Email: bjk
Web: www.comauth.co.nz

Search Engine Page Results

When a reference to one of your pages shows up within a SERP, there are 3 important cues that can entice a visitor to click the link and visit your site. In order, they are Title, Description and URL – or page file name. Why not give yourself every possible advantage when competing for visitors, by providing accurate and readable file names? It might well be the final push that slides the mouse pointer in your favor.

Search Engine Rankings

Equally, when search engine spiders are mapping your site and trying to figure out what on earth its all about, giving them some accurate information in every possible area would seem like a smart move, right? Keywords in file names are important, and they do make a difference. It might only be one of 100-plus elements in a search engine relevancy algorithm, but the more places you can tick off as being perfect, the better!

The Reality Check

Oddly enough, few people actually do this! Most file names are either a model of brevity, acronymic, cryptic or just plain gibberish! That’s a bit like driving with the handbrake on…

Top 10 File Name Factors

1.) Use keywords! Why use “contact.html” when you could use “contact-the-blue-widget-specialists.html”??? Your page names are a good place to slip in an “exact match” high-volume keyword phrase… Do this where appropriate – like every page on your site – to help reinforce the keywords in Title / Description tags.

2.) Use hyphens and not underscores! In a URL, or in a text anchor on a page, the underscore blends with the hyperlink underline, making it difficult to see that it is not a space.

3.) Do NOT use spaces! Aside from the fact that the operating system has to fill the gaps with the awful %20 – there are still some operating systems and browsers in use around the globe that struggle to process spaces in file names.

4.) Do NOT use CAPITALS in file names – Windows does not care, and will treat “Blue-Widgets.html” and “blue-widgets.html” as the same file… However, operating systems such a Linux are case sensitive and see that variation as two completely different filenames! If you’ve typed internal hyperlink file names with case variations, you may well generate broken links for some users.

5.) Confine yourself to the Alphabet, and numerals, with hyphens between words. Do not commit the heinous crime of adding special characters into your file names! Linux allows pretty much any character except a forward slash (/) – but other operating systems might choke on them!

6.) Remember that SE’s really don’t like all the “&” and “?” and “=” that some CMS systems add. For example, if you are an osCommerce user, its a straightforward task to have Ultimate SEO URL’s installed, and produce plain-English file names.

7.) Don’t use the default file names and hierarchical structures in Wordpress / Joomla / Drupal / or any other Content Management system. For example, is 2007 a good Category heading, or directory name? Its out of date in a few months time! Still, its not uncommon to see sites based on silly, out-of-date directory/file name combinations.

8.) Make sure your CMS site generates keyword-rich file names that reflect page content. This should be the “normal” way to do things, but apparently the people who write this software genre don’t really understand a web business must generate search engine traffic to survive.

9.) Prevent your session ID’s being added to pages served to search engine spiders. Aside from the special character garbage, it means every time they visit, they get a different URL for the same page – resulting in duplicate content indexing! That can get your site removed from the SE indexes!

10.) Before changing a filename, ensure that you first set up a 301 Permanent Redirect from the old file name to the new file name. This will make the transition seamless, and minimise the possibility of 404 page not found errors. Also, those people who had the page bookmarked will still arrive at the correct location in your site.

Yet another SEO article by Ben Kemp, a free-lance website seo consultant and web site designer. He offers free SEO articles & web design tips, see Web Page SEO & Website Design Blog : Web: www.comauth.co.nz

• distribute new information to clients and prospective clients
• efficiently increase site content by rapidly adding new material
• provide “advertorial” material to other sites
• increase links to your site as your Blog contents are disseminated across other sites on the ‘net.
• increase “deep link” count to internal pages e.g. www.yoursite.co.nz/your-blog/archives/articles/Your_Tips
• increase traffic as people find extracts from your Blog, and come looking for the source
• increase your credibility as people find lots of useful, up to date information on your site

Utilising a Blog as a business enhancement tool is far superior to a newsletter. There is minimal trouble to get a blog up and running, but make sure you host it on YOUR site. You have the choice of establishing a “hosted’ blog on www.Wordpress.org and other Blog software services, but the greatest benefits will be accrued if you get it up and running at www.yoursite.co.nz/your-blog/

Software

In our case, we’ve used Wordpress (www.Wordpress.org) an Open Source application that not only has all the required “bells and whistles” but is easy to install, set up, and manage. It has an excellent “web browser” interface that means you can add new material from your desk, or from home. Hell, you can even configure it to accept and post incoming emails from yourself!

There are some basic system requirements – your (Apache) server must support PHP, and MySQL databases. These days, that’s level of technology is available on most “basic” level hosting packages.

Installation

If you’ve got cpanel hosting with Fantastico, you can do the Wordpress installation in a few minutes because the installation scripts are probably pre-installed already for you! If not, it might take a little longer, but the Wordpress guys take pride in the “5 minute install” concept. It is really easy – even if you’ve got to download the application, unzip it, upload it to your site into it’s own directory, add a new MySQL database, add a user, start the configuration file and insert the database / user /password details into the configuration file, it should be up and running inside 30 minutes. Be a good idea to read through the “Read Me ” file before you start… the instructions are clear, concise, and in a logical and coherent order! Pity all documentation was not like that!

Configuration

With Wordpress, there are a handful of system settings to consider once you’ve got your blog operational. Of these, I’d say the three most important are as follows;

1.) Options / Writing / Update Services

The setting for the automatic update services, where blog search engines, directories and news feed services are “pinged” each time you add new content. By default, Wordpress includes a few services, some of which will in turn update other services. However, you will probably want the widest coverage possible, and to extend that list to include all known services! Takes a little longer to process a new posting, but means you get the best overall result… and that’s what its all about! There is a list of possibilities you can copy at www.comauth.co.nz/ping-page.htm

Copy and paste the ones you want to use into the “Update Services” panel at bottom of this page; www.yoursite.co.nz/yourblog/wp-admin/options-writing.php and choose Update Settings to add them permanently.

2.) Options / Permalinks

As they put it; “By default WordPress uses web URL’s which have question marks and lots of numbers in them, however WordPress offers you the ability to create a custom URL structure for your permalinks and archives. This can improve the aesthetics, usability, and forward-compatibility of your links.”

From an SEO point of view, we’ve chosen the numeric options so that our URL’s not only look sensible, but the Search Engines will be also be able to navigate them. However, getting this arcane bit of trickery to work requires you to implement the supplied “mod_rewrite” in your .htaccess file… if your are developing a glazed look about now, just bear with me a little longer!

The .htaccess file is a dangerous area to be playing in, as a mistake in this file can render your site inaccessible – until the Host Company’s support guy sorts it out for you – usually by renaming it! How do I know so much about this shit? Well, it happened to ME!

You should have installed your blog into its own directory, which minimises the potential problems substantially! Wordpress provides the correct “mod_rewrite” code in;

www.yoursite.co.nz/yourblog/wp-admin/options-permalink.php – its nasty looking stuff, as you can see below;

RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /yourblog/
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule . /yourblog/index.php [L]

1. So, choose the Custom Option /%category%/%postname%.html is good…
2. Copy it into a text file – e.g. open Notepad, paste the code in.
3. Save it as htaccess.txt in your local copy of your site
4. Choose Update Settings in Wordpress Options / Permalinks
5. Use FTP to upload htaccess.txt into your BLOG directory - Please, NOT your root directory!
6. Using your FTP application, rename the htacces.txt file to .htaccess

Open your Blog, browse around it and (hopefully) not only will everything be working, but the URL’s will now not have any of those dreadful &, ? or = thingy’s embedded in them. If its not working… the Wordpress support forums offer rapid response times to such teething problems. However, you should at least be able to access the Blog directory with your FTP client and rename .htaccess back to htaccess.txt and bring it back to life while you await a response from the Wordpress forum.
3.) Categories

From an SEO perspective, its important to develop a good Category Structure, because the category names are going to be embedded as “tags” in all your Blog posts, a little like the concept of the “keyword meta-tag” and this will help define and describe your content, especially in and

Content

Now that you’ve got the basics sorted out, start populating your blog with some quality content. I recommend writing it in an HTML editor such as FrontPage) and making sure it’s spell-checked as you go. Once you’ve got it formatted the way you want, go to the Wordpress / Write / Write Page and paste it in. Add the Title, select your Category/s from the right menu, and click the “Save and Continue Editing” button. You will then have a preview of your article in the lower section of the page. Double-check the formatting, and when you are happy with it, choose “Publish.”

Blog Search Engine’s and Directories

Once you’ve got some content built up over a couple of months, you will then want to get serious about getting it distributed to blog search engines and directories… So, in the next article we will outline how to go about this process.