Top tips for SEO 2

Posted: under News.

In our previous post on Top tips for SEO we discussed some of the basics required to kick start your web page optimisation initiatives.

We introduced the meta headers – ‘title’, ‘description’ and keywords’. In this post we will discuss some basic things that can be done to make your web pages visible to search engines.

Firstly – <title></title>. This is the most important element as, whilst there are many other things that the search engine algorithms will measure, the first thing that any search engine will access on a web page is the title. Stands to reason really. What’s the first thing you look at when browsing through a book shop? Title (maybe author).

So with a web page it is no different. The home page (or index) is the most likely first page for all users so that has to be carefully titled.

Think about the service you are offering. Is your name familiar and, therefore, likely to be used as a search term? Do you want to promote the name of your business? It is a rule of thumb that the easiest thing to optimise for is your own name or name of the business.

Even a name as common as my own (over 5 million in Google) is number 3 for one of my businesses and no 11 for another.  IYES e-Solutions is as you would expect No 1 on Google.

Here is an example of what a meta title should look like:

<title>3D tiles | 3 dimenionsal tiles | scultured wall tiles | name of business</title>

You will notice that we use key phrases rather than key words here. These reflect what the business is about and immediately the search engines know what the site is about too.

The web site with the above meta title is no 1 on Google out of 54 million results.

The next important meta header is description.

For each page it is important to write a short description in that meta header that reflects the content. The trick is to repeat the main elements of the title in the description.

eg <meta name = “description” content=” Companyname is a design company based in location, specialising in the design of 3 dimensional – 3D – sculptural tiles.” />

The final meta header is ‘keywords’ and whilst these are not as valuable as they once were due to keyword stuffing and spamming, if done carefully can be made to work to your benefit. As with the description, the key is to repeat the key phrases that are in the title.

eg

<meta name =”keywords” content=”3D Tiles, 3 dimensional tiles, sculptural wall tiles, company name, location” />

As you can see there are also only 3 key phrases apart from the company name and location.  I like to repeat the last two key words throughout the site as they do help in the page rankings.

The key phrases should also be repeated throughout the copy on the page (but that is a different skill and topic altogether).

Finally make sure that each page has something different to reflect the content of that page (‘about’ as a title is a waste of time).

Keep this page bookmarked so you can follow some more of our Top Tips for SEO.

 

 

 

Comments (0) May 27 2011


Top tips for SEO

Posted: under News.

Just recently I was asked for some ‘pointers’ on how to do SEO on a website. Now usually this would involve money changing hands, but in the spirit of co-operation, I was happy to point the individual in the right direction.

I thought  too, that it may be worth sharing these with you.

SEO or search engine optimisation on one level can be a long drawn out affair (and expesnive if you  are not careful). There are plenty of so called ‘experts’ out there who are determined to part you from your well earned cash.

There is no doubt that for businesses it is important to ensure that their websites are maximising the traffic and hence the potential custom. This involves a whole bunch of techniques that are honestly best left to someone with the knowledge, expertise and commerical nous to do it on their behalf. That last element is the one that most SEO providers lack.

The tips that I am going to outline here are within most people’s capabilities with only a very small technical knowledge required.

So where to start?

1. The basics!

Name pages with something relevant – page1, page2 etc (as generated by some template software) is a waste of time.

In CMS websites, use search engine friendly strings. index.php?page=12 is useless. Tells nothing about the content and search engines tend to stop at the ? mark. WordPress will manage this for you through the permalink function. Just choose the format that suits you best. I personnally prefer the name of the page right after the site name eg ian-young.co.uk/top-tips-for seo. To do this just add /%postname%/ in custom field in permalinks settings.

2. Some elementary page optimisation.

To manage this, you need to be able to access the coding of your website – if a straight forward html site. CMS sites make this easy for you.

Meta headers: These are found within the <head> area of the html page. For our purposes there are three:

<title></title>

<meta name =”description” content =” “/>

<meta name =”keywords” content =” ” />

Of these the first two are the most important and title is the most important of all.

Keywords whilst useful, is less important but if used in combination with the other two can be a powerful tool.

So how do we use these to our advantage? All will be explained in the next post.

 

Comments (0) May 27 2011


Adding a WordPress blog to existing site

Posted: under News.

Sometimes we find that we want to have more than one WordPress on our site. Perhaps, there are two strands to the business or, you want to have a photographic blog as well as a diary thing.

There is, of course, the facility at install to have more than one set up, but it is probably more normal to add blogs as you go along and your tastes develop.

Well it is a simple enough thing to do, but there are some things to watch out for.

If you have access to more than one MySQL, then it is even easier. Make a new folder, upload WordPress to it and follow the instructions – just like the initial install. You don’t, of course, need an additional MySQL, and, in my opinion, it is a waste of a good resource – unless your database is going to be very large.

For most circumstances, adding a second WordPress to an existing database is perfectly feasible. All you require to do on install, is change the prefix to the tables on the prompt. Whizz! New blog.

Now, of course some folks are real cool and point different domains at the various folders hosting the blog. It’s a good use of resources, provided that you have the bandwidth to support it.

Most folks will do the domain change after the install and wonder why the blog doesn’t work. WordPress is really quite clever and on install, it determines the URl of the home page and the site itself. If you change the domain that points at the blog, WordPress won’t recognise and you obtain a 404 error messgae at worst or maybe a page devoid of all styling – and you certainly won’t be able to access the wp-admin.

All is not lost and there is a simple step to take before changing to the new domain.

In wp-admin under settings go to general and you will see two fields that have the URl of your site. Change these to the new Url, save and logout.

You will not now be able to access your blog until the DNS for the new domain has propogated which can take 24-48hrs depending on suffix, and, funnily enough, whether during the working week or the weekend. I have had .co.uk domains point almost immediately after changing the DNS details.

If you forget, all is not lost and provided that you can access your MySQL database. Any decent host will have this facility available through the customer control panel. Once into the control panel look for MySQL management or similar, open it and look for table with the suffix wp_ (or whatever you designated this to be at install). Scroll down until you find the table wp-options, click and the click on ‘browse’ at top of page (if required). You will immediately see the Url of the original blog on the first field of the table, click on the edit icon (a pencil) and make the necessary changes. Save. You will also need to page through until you find the address of the home page – around field 40, change that to the same as the site URl. Save.

Your blog should now work.

If you have any problems with this, we are always willing to offer advice and, if all elses fails we can sort it out for you for a very small fee.

 

Comments (0) May 25 2011


WordPress Hacks

Posted: under News.

This morning, I received an email that one of the WordPress sites that we host had an advetr for Viagra on the front page.
Another dreaded hack.
For some reason, of all the WordPress sites that we host this one seems to attract more pharmaceutical hacks than any other.

So how did it manifest itself and how did it happen.
The first is easy. A line of code had been inserted which called upon a php page class-php.php which had been added to the wp-include file.

On downloading this file and opening with a text editor it was clear that this was bogus as it was had an eval(base64_decode()) function. Deleted pronto.

The good news is that it was only uploded the day before so no great harm done.

In addition, the database had to be searched for rogue commands and a search through wp-options table will highlight the problem.
There an excellent article on the Pearsonified blog on how to diagnose and sort this kind of hack.

So how did it happen? Difficult to say. I can say that it wasn’t through the internet host as their ftp access is very tightly controlled. As the above article points out it is likely to have been through WordPress itself.

Plugins are potential traps for the unwary and, interestingly enough, ASkimet, which is a plugin designed for anti spamming is a source of rogue code.

Not sure how this hack broke through but as a precaution we have downgraded the admin to subscriber and added a new user with admin privileges.

Additional top tips on how to improve your WordPress security include moving the wp-config file and changing prefix of tables. Neither of these is worth the trouble I feel as, in the former you could experience trouble with your theme (and it it would be obvious to hacker where it was located anyway) and in the latter, it is not difficult to search for the relevant tables. You could also block all IP addresses except your own via the htaccess file but that will only work if you have a static IP address.

So my top tips are:
Update all your plugins.
Keep WordPress up to date (although that wouldn’t have helped in this instance).
Deactivate plugins not required.
Only use the very best plugins.
Downgrade admin to subsciber and add a new user with full admin privileges.

You ain’t going to beat the hackers but you will keep them at bay.

Comments (0) May 18 2011