Wordpress SEO Expert

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

Spot the difference

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Take a good look and tell me what you see (in an unusual stylistic move for me, you can click these images to see them full size):

The top image is a menu made up of images. Which means not only does loading the site require loading a bunch of extra jpg, png or gif files, but much more importantly search engines don’t know what they say. To make matters worse, this particular site didn’t even use alt tags*.

Plus if you do click on it to see the full version, you’ll notice the text isn’t even well formed, it’s pixelated and ugly.

The bottom image is the same menu, with a tiny one-pixel-wide image (well, actually two one-pixel-wide images) repeating. The text is just that, text. So search engines can scan it, and see what they say.

The implications of that is you can have your pages’ headings, which should sum up the content of your site pretty well, on every page. Those headings should be written to include your keywords, and you really want those on every page!

And thanks to modern font smoothing on mainstream operating systems, they look a lot nicer.

I cannot fathom why this menu was originally made entirely with graphics. Unless it was just for the roll-over effect, which did nothing but make the text turn orange.

Which it still does, thanks to some really simple CSS.

* Please note, alt tags are actually not tags at all, but attributes of the img (image) tag. I really should adjust and start using the right terminology, but when you’ve been at this for 17 years, well, old habits die hard.

Search Engine Optimisation (SEO): Code

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There are a number of ways you want to improve your website’s code to help with SEO, and also to improve site speed which as I keep banging on about, is an important metric for Google.

This is probably the most technical of all the posts that make up my SEO primer, so by way of introduction, I’ll simply say the following are a variety of things within your site’s code that are helpful for optimisation. You may not be someone who ever touches your site’s code, but these are good things to know about so you can check your developer is doing their job right. 🙂

As much as I love spinning a good narrative, bullet points are going to be our friend in this piece.

  1. Meta tags.
    I’m getting these out of the way early, because they’re controversial. That’s because the way these are used is often misunderstood owing to historical changes. Basically, they used to be really important, and the first thing old-school search engines looked at. Then the spiders got more clever, and started to look to make sure your page’s text contained all the keywords you were using in the meta. Then they realised they could do away with the meta and just scan your text. For this reason, a lot of SEO (ahem) “experts” will tell you they’re not necessary. That’s bulls**t basically.
    This page     documents Google’s use of the “description” tag, which they do look at and use. Other search engines use them in varying ways too. The description and keyword (and author!) tags are all worth using, and using well. Make sure they tie-in with your copy.
  2. Alt tags.
    Search engines are certainly getting better at seeing what your site’s images are, but it’s far from perfect. Alt tags are the things that let the browser know what your image is representing, and therefore really important for SEO. I always make sure that my images contain tags that say not only what the image is of, but also the name of the page/entry it’s appearing in. That way the page name is repeated in the code too, which boosts it’s importance within the page.
  3. nofollow.
    About 10 years ago, people had things called doorway pages that were nothing but links to other pages in their sites. It was a dirty trick and got stamped all over by the search engine gods. However, you know how WordPress in particular creates pages for monthly archives, category archives, even tag archives? Well funnily enough they look a lot to spiders like doorway pages, containing tonnes of links (including all the sidebar links) to pages that just link to other pages en masse. I’ve measured this myself, and yes, you will get penalised for them. I have most of my links on this site set up with the nofollow rule, meaning the good search engines (technically spiders don’t have to respect this rule, but the big boys all do) will not follow it and count it as a link.
    I want them to see all my pages, but not to see them all a hundred times. I opt to leave category links being followed, but NOT monthly archives or tags.
  4. minify.
    This is just a trick to get all the unnecessary spaces and characters out of your code. It’s particularly useful for javascript and CSS, but your output HTML is worth shrinking too. There are tools out there that do it at load time, but that can place a burden on your server. I love this tool which takes all your CSS and merges parts where it can, and will (if you ask it to) minify the hell out of it.
    If you keep the page load time down, Google will rank you up.
  5. Javascript at the bottom.
    Place all the Javascript you can at the bottom of your page’s code. Again, it’s a speed thing.
  6. Make it clean.
    Don’t use tables unless it’s for, you know, a table. CSS has reigned supreme for a long time now. Don’t repeat attributes within tags. Check for redundant code. Consider taking out all those comments you put in while you were coding the site in the first place. Basically, give your code a nice, long bath.

Technically, your code underpins everything. Make it Search Engine Optimisation friendly and you’ll be much better ranked for it.

Free wordcount tool, aim for 300 for SEO

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Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) is an important part of building your online community.

A good guideline is each piece of content you create (be it a page, or blog post) on your site should have at least 300 words of original content.

Here’s a helpful tool—copy and paste your text in it, and find out instantly how many words you’ve got.

Those people using WordPress have a word counting system built in already, but the other advantage of this tool is is works out and lists the keywords your text is best suited for. So if the results there aren’t what you’d like, tweak your copy until your see your targeted keywords in the top few spots.

300 words can be harder than it seems. You don’t want to waffle and just pad it out. More often than not verbosity and writing for the web are not good friends.

So I challenge you to never take the easy way out, but rather to work hard to get at least 300 words of targeted (effective keyword use), interesting, well structured content.

Word Counter.

Meta tags and building your online community

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Part of building your online community is without a doubt, Search Engine Optimisation (SEO). You want your tribe to be well-positioned, and desirable.

It’s just just new members either, but existing ones want to know they’re a part of something exciting, something that ranks highly. Something prestigious.

The “meta tags” in your site’s code are really important here. There’s a science behind it of course, but it’s something you want an expert like myself to help you with. They’re small pieces of code that search engines read to get a better ides of what your site is about, and what keywords it should look for.

However, here’s one of the tricks of the trade you can use yourself. This tool gives you feedback and advice regarding your meta data, helpfully colour coded for people who don’t want to worry about interpreting too much of it.

My favourite metric it returns is to check how relevant your keywords are to your content. This is an absolute must, and something to look at for all your pages.

It’s a bit technical, but the colour coding helps.

Mind you, so can I.

Meta Tag Analyzer.

Check your search engine rankings, a helpful little tool

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This online tool simply tells you how your site is ranked on Google, Bing and Yahoo! for the keywords you provide.

Why is this worth blogging about? Because it’s free, and the fifth such online tool I found–but the first one that worked.

It doesn’t search terribly far into the search engines, so unless you’re in the top 10 of Google or Bing, or the top 50 of Yahoo!, you won’t get a result. And clearly you need me to help you out. 🙂

via SEARCH ENGINE RANKINGS @ Mike’s Marketing Tools.

The importance of original content

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This comes straight from Google themselves. It’s so important to your Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) to have quality, human readable (i.e., makes sense to a visitor) content.

There’s a lot to be said for curated content, but of course that requires original input too.

One of the most important steps in improving your site’s ranking in Google search results is to ensure that it contains plenty of rich information that includes relevant keywords, used appropriately, that indicate the subject matter of your content.

via Little or no original content – Webmaster Tools Help.

I know a lot of people want to shy away from it, after all, writing isn’t most of our core business, but your users do care about what you have to say. That’s generally why they want to spend money with you after all.

So it’s not just SEO. It’s business. Your business.

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