Wordpress SEO Expert

Improve your Google ranking with Peter Mahoney, 20+ years SEO & Wordpress experience

What is noindex, and when to use it

by

What is noindex, and when to use it Wordpress SEO Expert“noindex” is a simple setting you can activate for any page on your site that instructs search engines not to scan it.

Using WordPress you’ll usually find this on each page and post in the Dashboard, in the settings for whichever SEO Plugin you use (All In One SEO pack, Yoast, etc.).

Most other content management systems will have their own setting, or if your site is totally bespoke you can add this to the code in the <head> section:

<meta name=”robots” content=”noindex,follow” />

Why would you want search engines to ignore a page when they come to index your site?

There are many reasons actually, but the most common is duplicate content. If you have two pages on your site that have similar content, you want to mark one as noindex so it doesn’t appear as though you’ve stuffed your site with multiple copies of the same thing.

Google and the other major engines see duplicate content as an attempt to make your site look fuller than it really is, or to have stolen content from elsewhere to try to fill your site up quickly, without much thought, and very little originality.

The other time to definitely use nofollow is if you have used a significant portion of content from another site. Sometimes there is a legitimate reason to grab content from elsewhere and publish it yourself, but you should always stop it from being indexed.

Now, before you get too excited and think “I’m fine, I’ve not got anything on my site that exists elsewhere at all”, let me ask you about your Terms and Conditions. Did you have those written from scratch? Or are they standardised, lifted from another site, or based on a template?

noindex them. Even though they’re just the legal bits, you don’t want Google to have any reason to think your site has a predilection toward duplicate content.

Search Engine Optimisation (SEO): Blogging

by

Continuing this series of posts, I want to say this very clearly. Blogging is the very best thing you can do for your search engine optimisation. If you are not blogging, you are ignoring the biggest factor in improving your placement in their listings.

Quite simply, if you put all the other tips and tricks aside, the real key to SEO is regular, original content.

It’s really simple. Google et al want to see content written by humans, for humans. So write some.

1. Regular
Search engines work out how often to scan your website and specific pages within that based on how often it has seen those change in the past.

If your pages are all fairly static (meaning there aren’t any elements on them that change regularly, like text or images) the search giants (Google, Bing, Yahoo!) will stop coming. Google might only index your site every few months.

There’s some massive missed opportunities there. Not only will your site be deemed to have a low Page Rank (not very important in the search results) but even if you do update with some new amazing, original content—it might not be noticed until it’s well out of date.

2. Original
Search Engines are clever. Google is adept at scanning text and knowing if it’s the sort of thing a human would read, rather than a bunch of words strung together to try to fool it. They also know very easily if your work is a copy and paste from somewhere else.

Apart from simply making money, search engines all have an ethos behind them. Google for example wants to see a helpful, information rich Internet that answers users’ queries quickly and efficiently. So they rank sites they believe fit into that plan more highly than those that don’t.

If your site has too much content pasted from elsewhere, you do not fit into this ideal.

What does is original content. Something you’ve written (or someone else has written exclusively on your behalf).

It’s not as hard as it sounds. Pick a subject that relates to your business. I do this with my blog all the time—and then in your head explain it as you would to one of your customers. Type out your side of the conversation, and you’re basically done.

3. Keywords
Before you even ask the question, the answer is yes. You do want to target keywords in your blogging. Bear in mind that as long as you’re writing on topic, they’ll come out anyway. You want people to find you because of the sort of products and services you offer, so as long as you’re writing about the subject you sell, they’ll flow naturally.

Rather than ensuring I type specific words, I do my best to hit a variety of terms.

The sentence you just read is a case in point—it would have seemed normal to use “words” in there twice; where I did and then again at the end of the sentence. By using “terms” the second time, I’m improving my SEO because I’ll be indexed for both “words” and “terms”, rather than just one of them.

I do this all the time. Synonyms are are important but often overlooked aspect of SEO. A potential client might enter either “social media” or “social networking” for instance, and if that’s your industry you want them to find you regardless of the phrase they’re most familiar with.

Search engine optimisation is all about people—people finding you. Make sure you’re giving them what they need to do precisely that.

You no longer own most of your photos (and other digital content).

by

Have you ever uploaded a photo to Facebook, Instagram or Flickr?

Previously, and in most of the world today, ownership of your creation is automatic, and legally considered to be an individual’s property. That’s enshrined in the Berne Convention and other international treaties, where it’s considered to be a basic human right.

The new UK law reverses this human right.

UK.Gov passes Instagram Act: All your pics belong to everyone now

Search Engine Optimisation (SEO): Social integration

by

Social networking is much more than an SEO technique. And while the point of this series is to focus on improving your search engine ranking and visibility, it would be reductionist (and actually really difficult) to talk about social media and it’s relationship to your business without discussing community.

After all, as important as SEO is, its purpose is to build your community of clients, and therefore that tribe of people is the most important thing.

While previous posts in this series focussed on a number of different things you can do, with this topic it all runs together and is a more conceptual dialogue.

Backlinks

At its simplest, the explanation of a backlink is, well, simple. Search engines scan social networks and basically count all the links to articles and content on other sites. If you have 50 links back to one article you wrote, you’ll be seen as having more authority than a site which only gets five.

It’s worth noting that social backlinks are given a fairly low importance by the big search engines, so unsurprisingly a link to your post from an article on The Guardian website carries a lot more gravitas. More on that in the next point.

They are however very useful, because they do offer some weight to your content, and it’s very easy to share content on social media. You’ll notice at the end of all my blog posts is a share feature—I click all those buttons myself to share my content. It’s the easiest way.

Photos/graphics/images

Before you share your article, make sure it has an image as part of it. Facebook and Linkedin both include a graphic from your content next to the link, and links with images get more clicks. Simple.

A word of advice here from personal experience—make sure you have an image in place before you even try to share your content via Facebook once, even if it’s just a test. Facebook caches the content on links, so if you post once without a graphic and then you remember that you really should have included one so you go back and edit your post then share again—Facebook is probably not going to bother looking for any changes. And you’re stuck with a text-only link.

Social networks

You have a bunch of options for places to post to:

  • Facebook is a no-brainer. Have a page on it, and post your content to it. Make sure the privacy for your posts is “public”, and even if you have very few “likes”, at least the backlinks are there.
  • Twitter is a no-brainer. It’s short, simple, scanned by Google in near real-time, and again, even if you have very few interactions on that network the links to your content exist.
  • Linkedin is, for almost every professional business, a no-brainer. It’s where professionals find each other, discuss their industries, and again, if nothing else you’ve got links back to your content.
  • Blogs should be a no-brainer. Their potential as social networking is often overlooked, but those comments sections are valuable. Read an article, a few of the comments, then post your own reply with a link to your site. Backlinks ahoy. I include online newspapers and the link as blogs for this purpose; they’re very widely read. Here’s a top tip. Once a week, read a really popular blog about your industry. Take 10 minutes to write your own thoughts on the subject, and post that to your blog. Then comment on the industry blog saying, “Hey, I’ve been thinking about this a lot too, and here’s my recent blog post that might help enlighten things.” Boom. Your traffic goes up, and you have original content linked to on a popular site—it doesn’t matter that you did it yourself.
  • Tumblr is a great one too. We’re now in the realm of the networks I call “time-allowing”, because while it’d be nice to hit up every network out there, I also hope you’re busy making money. But this is worth having a presence on, and sharing your ideas through.
  • Google+ (a.k.a. Google Plus). I use it because funnily enough, Google search knows what’s happening on its own social network. I haven’t made much of setting up my Google+ presence yet simply because there are so many hours in the week. However, I still think this network shows promise for really taking off, and if it does, I want to be established there while other people are playing catch up.
  • Digg, StumbleUpon, Reddit, Delicious. They’re all worth a go, and are essentially social bookmarking services. People share bookmarks, rate them up or down, that kind of thing. The one to be slightly wary of is Reddit though—while it can drive some serious traffic to your site, they have a very close-knit community of users; and if they grab hold of content they don’t like for one reason or another they will tear it to shreds. And with it your ego.

Community

This is really important, because it’s not just backlinks that you want, it’s to have people taking about them, interacting, and ultimately sharing themselves. That in turn brings other people in, and before you know it you have a community of people to sell to. And this is of course the desirable ultimate result.

But people won’t share content unless it’s right in their faces, and of interest to them. And also importantly, of perceived interest to their friends. People don’t share content on social networks because they think it’s awesome, they share it because they think their friends will think it’s awesome. It’s an important distinction.

Part of this community building is for you to interact with your followers and subscribers. If someone looks like they want to get into a debate, then engage with that. If they retweet something you’ve written, thank them for it. Make them feel included and valued by you. Don’t leave other people’s comments hanging out at the tail end of your posts, reply.

Also consider the nature of a community. If all you ever post is backlinks, people will start to overlook your social content. Twitter is a great example, it’s a very social, social network. Because it’s so quick to post to, and users expect a fair quantity of tweets to be made by other users, ideally you’ll post a couple of times a day with something humorous, or clever, or an original inspiring thought, and perhaps post backlinks three times a week. With this sort of ratio you’re building your community and adding weight to your links.

Find opinion leaders

Within any grouping of people, there are those who the rest look up to, and value their opinions. These are the people who naturally settled into a position at the top of the pack, and set the tone for how people interact, what sorts of things they share, but most importantly decide what will be valued by the group. Marketers are always trying to find these people and to get them onside. Have you ever seen those giveaways on Facebook where if you share an advert, and get the most “likes” for it, you win something? Well those campaigns aren’t just about getting brands shared about, they also allow the marketers to see who gets the most likes—and these are the opinion leaders they know to target their advertising towards in future.

My wife is an opinion leader amongst her peers. Whenever she comments on one of my Facebook page’s posts, or shares it with her friends, that post reaches about five times as many people as a normal one.

Opinion leaders make your shares, backlinks, and social communities much more effective. And bear in mind you want to be one of these people yourself. The go-to-person for a section of your industry. Experts and gurus are opinion leaders.

So start acting like one. 🙂

Warren Ellis on social media, my thoughts

by

Warren Ellis, English author and social commentator, wrote a wonderful post shortly before Christmas in which he discussed the end of the first wave of social media.

Twitter alters its terms of access to its information, thereby harming the services that built themselves on that information. Which was stupid, because Twitter gets fewer and fewer material benefits from allowing people to use its water. And why would you build a service that relies on a private company’s assets anyway? Facebook changes its terms of access regularly. It’s broken its own Pages system and steadily grows more invasive and desperate. Instagram, now owned by Facebook, just went through its first major change in terms of service. Which went as badly as anyone who’s interacted with Facebook would expect. As Twitter disconnected itself from sharing services like IFTTT, so Instagram disconnected itself from Twitter. Flickr’s experiencing what will probably be a brief renaissance due to having finally built a decent iOS app, but its owners, Yahoo!, are expert in stealing defeat from the jaws of victory. Tumblr seems to me to be spiking in popularity, which coincides neatly with their hiring an advertising sales director away from Groupon, a company described by Techcrunch last year as basically loansharking by any other name.

This may be the end of the cycle that began with Friendster and Livejournal. Not the end of social media, by any means, obviously. But it feels like this is the point at where the current systems seize up for a bit. Perhaps not even in ways that most people will notice. But social media seems now to be clearly calcifying into Big Media, with Big Media problems like cable-style carriage disputes. Frame the Twitter-Instagram spat in terms of Virginmedia not being able to carry Sky Atlantic in the UK, say (I know there are many more US examples).

This first wave, or cycle as he calls it, can best be described as one of ecstatic enthusiasm bordering on insanity.

His closing statement wonders if anyone regrets giving up their own websites in favour of just using social platforms yet. I bet the answer is yes, and I’ve been warning people against that for a long time. More on that another day though.

To focus on the core message of the piece—yes, he’s right. People have been so far up social media’s behind that they forgot to try to turn the lights on to check where they were.

And just where are they? At the mercy of a bunch or other companies who have very right (although very little market-mandate) to change their terms of service and take what you thought was yours.

Issues of content ownership and the like aside though, I’ve been waiting for this bubble to burst for a long while—because it’s time to simply accept social media, rather than jumping up and down on the sofa about it.

Is social media exciting? Of course. New technology, ways to reach your audience and methods of interaction always are. But they aren’t the be-all and end-all. Television still has exciting content. Radio programs can still blow my mind.

Once all the hype settles down, content becomes the clarifying point, sorting the overly excited from the thoughtful.

When approaching social media for any business purpose, look at it in the context of all your online work, sites, portfolios, information, etc. If you just think outside the box a little bit, you can have a very large and well rounded arsenal of online communications at your disposal. Which can all work together to improve your bottom line.

I’ve been waiting for a long time for people to realise that as exciting and useful as social media is, it’s one tool you have at your disposal, and you have many. Make them all work together, for you.

Think of it like this, there will always be new waves. And just watching them from the beach is no good, you need to ride them. But stay on top of them where you can see what’s happening around you, rather than falling in and finding you’ve crashed up on a beach with no David Hasselhoff in sight.

via Warren Ellis » The Social Web: End Of The First Cycle.

10 Youtube URL tricks worth knowing

by

So often when I’m embedding a Youtube clip on a website for a client, I’m asked to customise it somehow. Now there are a variety of ways this can be done, from removing the “related videos” at the end (which I always do for schools, at the American School in London we must have done this a hundred times a month!) to overlaying images on top of the video entirely, (see danielwagner.com for an example).

But like so many things online, as long as you know the basics yourself, there’s a lot you can do with those.

Just adding little bits of code to the Youtube URL for example can have a big effect.

Example:

4. Hide the search box

The search box appears when you hover over an embedded video. To hide the search box add ‘&showsearch=0′ to the embed url.

Here’s a great list of 10 tricks worth knowing.

Prices are quoted exclusive of VAT unless expressly stated.

RSS

Peter Mahoney, WordPress SEO expert blog