DAY 10: Developing On Wordpress Engine
March 17, 2010 by Tyrone
In today’s lesson we will be exploring the blog system Wordpress and how to use this to leverage our SEO efforts. You can see the previous post: Day 9: Cascading Style Sheet Design to help you understand the technical aspects of SEO as well.
“Innovation distinguishes between a leader and a follower.”
- Steve Jobs -
To be the best you have to use the best
WordPress is by far the most popular blog engine online and for a good reason; it’s not only open source, totally free, extremely powerful, it’s also loved by the search engines and Google in particular.
WordPress is like a search engine spider’s magnet, there’s no reason why you wouldn’t want to leverage on that!
The moment of truth
This is it; finally after 10 days of hard labor, you are finally ready to take the next step by officially designing your site.
In the past 10 days, you have worked so hard and methodically to
prepare a solid base for your site, from the best possible keywords, structure design and optimization, architecture and navigability; there’s just a final step left for you before giving birth to your site.
And that step is choosing the right engine support for your site.
The time of static sites is over, we are in the WEB 2.0 era, whether
you want it or not. Now, if you had to chose an engine support for your site, even if it’s a static one, which one would it be:
- Support static pages but not WEB 2.0 technology.
- Support static pages and WEB 2.0 technology.
Of course, one should go with the one that supports static pages and WEB 2.0 technology even if you don’t implement it, at least it’s available for you if you want it to.
DAY 9: Cascading Style Sheet Design
March 16, 2010 by Tyrone
If you haven’t completed day 8 of the SEO course, you can review: DAY 8: Sculpting Your Site Structure before starting this post.
“A picture must possess a real power to generate light and I’ve been conscious of expressing myself through light or rather in light.”
- Henri Matisse -
Developing a SEO friendly framework
Although more related to web design than SEO, it is important for you to understand some basics of HTML and other related languages if you really want to improve your SEO work.
Whether you are going to implement the changes yourself or get a competent web designer to put your site together, the information we are going to discuss today will have a tremendous impact on your on-page SEO.
What Are Cascading Style Sheets?
Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) is a fairly new method of formatting and styling the content of your pages.
Traditional HTML pages where quite limited in what you could personalize on page and how you could customize and style your design.
All to this has changed with the introduction of CSS; you can now
customize as many elements of your content as you wish!
Not only CSS allows for much nicer web designs, it also allows much neater code as search engines don’t read cascading style sheets.
CSS are the best method to show ethically one thing to the search engines, and another one for the human visitors, this way you have an optimized page both for the search engines and your visitors!
How Cascading Style Sheets Work?
I’m not here to teach you how to program in CSS, that’s not the objective of this lesson, but nonetheless, I just want to show you with illustrations what I mean.
A traditional old HTML page would look like this:
Cascading Style Sheets work differently; instead consider each styling information as a new “layer” that you apply on top of the previous one:
While the search engines will see the basic non styled page (as above) containing all what they need to know, the visitors will be greeted with a pleasant layout and overall design.
Read more
DAY 8: Sculpting Your Site Structure
We are continuing on from DAY 7: Understanding The Link Juice Flow and this is the start of a new week for Day 8 from our series of guest posts.
“Because things are the way they are, things will not stay the way they are.”
- Bertolt Brecht -
It’s time to patch the holes on your site!
Despite the recent buzz about Site sculpting no longer working, I have to tell you that I don’t buy that at all, and decide to share with you what’s site sculpting is all about and how you can implement it on your site.
Even if the situation was to be proven true, it can’t hurt you to learn and how more about it!
Why Should You Sculpt Your Site?
Link juice flowing throughout your site is much like electricity.
The more electricity you have at your disposal, and the more convenient it is for you to use powerful electric appliance that make your everyday life easier.
Now, this doesn’t comes free, there’s a price to pay for this luxury that’s your utility bill each and every month.
Being a person with no sub-standard, I would say that I don’t intent to consume less to reduce my bill, but instead prevent to pay for wasted energy.
Just ask yourself how many electric devices you have in your house that you don’t use, but yet consume electricity, how many power switches do you have turned on, even though you don’t use the equipment?
Well, it’s the same with the link juice on your site.
The more you have flowing on your pages, the more things you can do and the better you do it, and you certainly don’t want to have less.
Now, you worked very hard to acquire that link juice so I do believe that just like electricity you don’t want part of your work going to waste either.
What do you think is happening when the link juice on your site flows onto pages that you don’t want or don’t need to have indexed in the search engines?
Aren’t you wasting some of that precious energy that could be better used on another page?
This is what I’m going to show you today.
DAY 7: Understanding The Link Juice Flow
March 12, 2010 by Tyrone
If you haven’t completed day 6 of the SEO course, you can review: DAY 6: Mapping Your Site Structure before starting this post.
“It is a thousand times better to have common sense without education than to have education without common sense.”
- Robert Green Ingersoll -
Understanding links from a SEO point of view
Your ability to design a SEO friendly site comes from your understanding of Link juice flow and how you can leverage its power and compensate its weaknesses.
The lesson today will help you have a better understanding of what is link juice flow and how it works.
Why Link Juice Flow?
In order for your pages to be indexed (yes, remember pages get indexed, not sites), they first need to be crawled.
Using a proper site structure like we learned yesterday in “Day 6: Mapping Your Site Structure ” highly helps and increases your chances to meet this first requirement.
After a page has been crawled, if this one meets the minimum requirements of the search engines, it will be indexed.
In Google a page can be indexed either in the primary index (that is where you want to be) or the supplementary index (for the pages that are relevant enough to be indexed, but don’t have sufficient authority yet to figure in the primary index).
When it comes to link juice, only pages from the primary index in Google can transmit some; that is strictly from a SEO point of view,
backlinks from pages in the supplementary index are worthless.
You can easily identify those pages as they don’t have PR (not PR0 but really no PR).
Link juice is transmitted by links between different pages from the primary index only. Those links can both be internal or external.
You can identify pages from the primary index as they all carry a PageRank score ranging from 0 to 10.
The higher the PageRank, the more link juice each link from that page can transmit.
If you want to read more about PageRank, I invite you to read my old article Understanding Google PageRank.
DAY 6: Mapping Your Site Structure
March 11, 2010 by Tyrone
If you haven’t completed day 5 of the SEO course, you can review: DAY 5: Evaluating Your Keyword Difficulty before starting this post.
“Good judgment comes from experience and experience comes from bad judgment.”
- Fred Brooks -
This is where you make your site SEO friendly
Before we go anywhere else in this course, I want to remind you that all the lessons we just went through represent all the homework you are supposed to do BEFORE you go and see your web designer, and not after!
Today, we are going to take all the keywords we have selected, evaluated, grouped and analyzed, and organized them to start mapping our site structure and optimization strategy.
3 Tiers Structure
If you are not familiar with site structure or web design, I invite you to read my post “Improve Your Crawling Rate”.
Search engines spiders on your site are like a man in a shopping mall.
As long as you have a main alley, shops on the left, shops on the right it’s cool to go around that, but if I have to start to go through one small door, and another one, and another one, I quickly become confused of what is where, and more importantly, I lose interest in finding out.
The same concept applies with search engines spiders, if your navigation is too complex or too deep, the crawler loses interest to visit or index your pages.
Keep it clear and keep it simple, it works both with the search engines and your human visitors too!
That being said, the site structure we are interested in is the one called the 3 Tiers Structure.
In this type of structure, no page in your site is further than 2 clicks away.
This is not only good for the search engines, but also good for your visitors, which is very important.
Here’s the summary of such site structure:
- Tier 1: Index page
- Tier 2: Category pages
- Tier 3: Content/Products pages
By now, you may have already noticed that this is looking strangely familiar with the exercise I gave in Day 4: Grouping Your Keywords…
Read more
