Andyrew

Make Wordpress blogs SEO friendly - Part 1

admin — Fri, 07 Mar 2008 01:19:02 +0000

For a long time, i ignored the importance of SEO. I figured that having quality content, and quality content alone would get me to the moon and back. It doesn’t.

Can you imagine how many of your first time visitors come from search engines? You can’t. Forget the return visitors for a second. The first time, a visitor ever visits your site - There is around a 70-80% chance that they will have arrived from a search engine. (others including email refers, website refers, etc).

Let’s just imagine your website gets 10,000 visitors a day. We take your search engine traffic away.. which leaves you with around 2-3,000.. Poor. Now, imagine the opposite effect, and you get more search engine traffic than you already do..

Markets for blogs such as this one, are saturated. So, you need to take time into increasing your rankings, because they account for more traffic than you think. I’ll show you a few techniques that you should be using, and how to easily achieve them in your wordpress blog.

1. Proper Placement and Use of Header Tags

Depending on what theme you’re using, especially if it’s a custom one — Your header tags will be poorly placed, or non existent. the h1 being the most important tag! Make sure you put it as soon as possible after the tag.

/”>

Make sure that is in your header.php; The first thing that a search engine wants to know is what your blog is about.

There’s also a

tag, which should be placed in your Main index template, Search Results, Single Post and Page Template, which stands as the title for the posts. Obviously, the titles of the posts are EXTREMELY important!

” rel=”bookmark”>

Search engines take the header tags seriously. Make sure you include h3, h4, h5 and h6 too (They get less important as the number gets higher)

2. Domain Canonicalization

Many people think that http://Website.com, and http://www.website.com are the same, search engines don’t.

I can’t really elaborate anymore on this. Those are effectively seen as different, different page ranks, different search results.. make your life, and the search engines life allot easier and just stick with one of them.

http://scott.yang.id.au/code/permalink-redirect/ — Wordpress Plugin

If you’re not using wordpress, I wont leave you out.. Just add this to your .htaccess file

RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^yourdomain\.com$ [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.yourdomain.com/$1 [R=301,L]

3. Permalinks

As useful as PHP and other server side scripts are, search engines doesn’t see it as a static page. Let’s take for example..

http://www.site.com/page.php?page=photoshop

‘page’ is only a variable there.. That could be changed to anything, but.. effectively - it’s still part of page.php.

Wordpress is set by default to present your site in the exact same way.. http://www.andyrew.com/?p=123 — See?

In wordpress, go to Options > Permalinks - And set your custom permalink structure to..

/%category%/%postname%/

And then just copy and paste your new .htaccess file that wordpress gives you. PHew!

Again, for those of you not running wordpress.. here is a basic code (Obiviously, you’ll need to play about with it)

RewriteEngine on
RewriteRule ^/pages/([^/]+)/?$ pages.php?&page=$1 [L]

(If you’re having trouble, leave a comment and i’ll try and help you out)

That’s it for part 1. Check back in a few days, and i’ll post section two. Please subscribe to the RSS feed

Selling AddMyLayout

admin — Tue, 04 Mar 2008 17:04:33 +0000

Technorati Profile

Firstly i made some subtle changes to the design of the blog. By subtle, i mean adding a big orange RSS button to the bottom of every post. Tada.

Time has come to sell things that I no longer need. I probablly snet about $200 on AddMyLayout in total, and maybe 10 hours personal work time. I don’t expect my $200 back for the site, but it would be nice.

It’s probabalyl safe to say this project failed. Not failed in a sense that, i tried the site and it didn’t work like i wanted it to, but - Failed in a way that i never had time for it.

12 Ways to make your potential RSS subscribers, subscribe.

admin — Sun, 02 Mar 2008 16:01:33 +0000

If a potential RSS subscriber visits your page, how do you get them to subscribe.. rather than scare them away? Very subtle differences can make a reader self-consciously lean one way or another.

Post everyday/Stay on Topic

I’m sorry. I know this is a cliché.. so I wont delve any further into it.

Use large Orange RSS button

People often associate RSS with the huge orange button. Having a small green one, like i have at the minute, wont mean anything to allot of readers. Get their attention. It goes without saying that something that is large or colourful will often stand out in a crowd>

RSS button above the fold

Everything that has any important goes above the fold in a page. The headers, the adverts, the navigation… Having your button in view when the user first visits the site, makes them aware that it’s there. Having it in the footer, isn’t going to help anyone

Subscribe by email

You know that millions of people use RSS readers, but that’s only a percentage of people that use the Internet. Giving users the option to subscribe by email will include almost everyone with access to the Internet, not just the ones with a feed reading program

Steps needed to subscribe

“Visit this page, and then this page, then click here, and here” — Noone wants that. ‘Click here’ is fine.

What is RSS and how to get started

RSS seems to simple doesn’t it? It isn’t for someone who has never used it. Can you remember where you first learned how to subscribe to someone’s RSS feed? Having a quick little guide on your site wont do any harm

Ask them to subscribe

As the saying goes, ‘those who don’t ask, don’t receive’.. Just having a little message at the bottom of all of your blog posts reminding your users to subscribe. The worst that can happen is that they don’t.

Email your commenters

If someone has took the time to comment on your blog, chances are they’re interested in what you have to say. Emailing them asking to subscribe again, can only really help you. Whilst you’re never going to get 1,000,000 subscribers by doing this - You can get a few just for the short amount of time that it takes

Interesting headlines

What’s better, “How to get traffic to your website”, or.. “10 Guaranteed ways to get traffic to your new blog”. Imagine seeing them both on your RSS program, or in a search engine.. or anywhere, which one would you click?

Offer something for subscribing

As hard as you might think this is, you’re wrong. I have found a great little program that will only show links and text to those who are reading through RSS. Having a “Please subscribe for the link to this free template” For example..

Guest blogging

Imagine blogging on a similar related blog to yours, with 1000 RSS subscribers. They are all interested in what you have to say.. they already know and use RSS, and chances are they’re not subscribed to your feed already, success!

Don’t publicise the number you have

Let’s face it. The fact that you have 4 RSS subscribers isn’t going to convince anyone that your blog is worth reading, unless you have about 150+. Keep it a secret.. at least for a little while.

7 Ways to Keep motivated whilst working

admin — Fri, 08 Feb 2008 16:54:58 +0000

Being very lazy, I find it difficult to keep motivated throughout the day, and without these simple procedures.. I’d imagine it would be allot harder.

Whilst working a straight 6 hours without blinking can be rewarding in the short run, it will tire you out and put you off doing similar sorts of work in the future.

1. Stay away from caffeine

When your body is tired, it’s time for sleep. Caffeine is just a short-term fix. Eventually, you’re going to have to replace the sleep that you’ve lost by drinking it. Go to bed, and wake up earlier feeling fresh and distressed.

2. Take short breaks

Working yourself silly for 6 hours straight will do more bad than good. When you’ve been working on something for so long, your workpace slows down to about 70%. Just a 10-minute break will ensure you come back to your computer focused and feeling focused again.

Anything such as going outside for a cigarette, walking to the shop, listening to music.. anything that will take your mind off of your computer for a little while.

3. Eat well

Just because you have lots of work to do, it doesn’t mean you should deprive yourself out of good nutrition. Having a good breakfast is key; it will give you an energy boost for a good 4 or 5 hours. Giving yourself little energy boosts at lunch and snack times will make you feel lots happier

4. Don’t dilly-dally

Distracting yourself with emails and games whilst you’re trying to work, to pass some time does not work. Getting your head down and concentrating makes time fly by a whole lot faster.

5. Set goals and targets

Setting targets will not only keep you focused into doing your work, it will also help motivate you to do it. Noone likes to set a target and fail it, because it feels bad.

6. Reward yourself.

Don’t confuse this with having breaks. But, if you complete a target.. then reward yourself. Have some chocolate or a beer (Maybe not the most exciting, I know). Maybe even then you can start checking your emails and playing games.

7. Inspiration & visual aids

Being in a small room with black walls isn’t going to help anyone. Put your computer in a big room, with posters and windows. If you have a laptop, swap positions and go and sit in the garden.

Oh.. What’s this.

admin — Sun, 03 Feb 2008 15:26:37 +0000

I’ve been busy the past few days working on another new site. (Hmms.. yes.. i’ll do anything to put off completing pornaroo) If there is any LOST readers, you’ll know that LOST season 4 came out in the US a couple of days ago (It comes out in the UK later on this evening). So, whilst i was looking around the internet for some LOST released dates.. i stumbled upon a few sites.

Quite obviously it seems, lost-related sites took a staggering increase in traffic over the last week. Perfect! I took my CMS and everything else from NarutoResource, and bought a domain.. made a few adjustments and added some content: Lost Resource. This isn’t really “webmastering” at it’s best.. i know.. but seeing a i’m a keen lost fan.. and it would only take me a day to complete.. i mgiht as well.

As another method of putting off finishing Pornaroo, i decided to focus some attention on Doonuts. It’s probabally a couple of years old now. I did once start marketing it, and it was getting around 1,000 uniques a day for a while. However, since i started to venture into Porn a little more, i have gathered an insight of what these sites need to succeed. In this case, it needs a links system. A place for folks (mainly other website owners), To submit links. In exchange, i will put my plug on there.. voila.

The site runs on smarty.php - I don’t know why i want to attempt modifying it to add a plug system, because it’s as confusing as hell as it is.. If you’re ever going to start a similiar site, try to stay away from SMARTY.

So, i decided to start anlysing the site, coming up with a few new ideas and whatever. I know the site is at a steady 150 visitors a day (No monster, i know) So as far as i’m concerned, it’s sustainable. The site works.. and probabally has some regular visitors. Now i just need to increase that number…

I decided to have a look what kind of traffic search engines were bringing in, and like usual, i cannot hlp but look at the search queries used.

There were others.. gay mud wrestling, goth torturing.. I think what’s more worrying is that my site comes up for thoes queries.. I have thoes phrases on my site.. Hmm.

I think next update, i’ll write some sort of article.

I’m awake, and before 12:00!

admin — Fri, 25 Jan 2008 18:10:42 +0000

11:55, the first time I have been awake this early for months, and probabally wont again.

For the last few days, since the transfer of funds from paypal takes so long (like, 9 working days) - I decided to a bit of coding for Damien, for his new site Ownedd. A strange concept. Since everything of mine is kind of on hiatus at the minute, i.e. Paypal holding me up, I figured i’d just do a bit of work to pass the time.

I had to link to Technorati. I signed up.. not really knowing what it was. So.. they told me to add a link to it. suckers.

So, since i’ve been up really late for the past week or so, i’ve been able to catch the sunrises before go to sleep. I’ve never really been able to get up in the mornings.. even when i used to go to school, mornings were often a problem and I wouldn’t ver go to school until 10:30.

So. I think i’ve finally figured out what my plan is for the next few weeks. I know Lost season 4 starts at the end of this month, so.. that’s just easy short-term traffic. I’ll just clone Naruto Resource, change a few things and then make it into lost.

I think after that, i’m going to have one last crack at Photography Forums. I’ve already spent a bit of money on advertising over quite a large period of time, and I think I just need to think things through a little bit more to get users to register and stay.

Failing that, I hope to find an already established photography forum, and talk to the owner to see if they’d fancy ‘merging’. Meaning, i get all of his members/thread.. and he gets my domain name, design, interviews, etc..etcs.

Failing THAT. I’ll sell it. I’ve had a few people give me a rough estimate of how much they think that it’s worth, and.. in all honestly, i know that it’s not even worth 1/2 of what i’ve put into it, which is a kick in the nuts. So, this really is my last resort.

I think some sort of laptop will be getting bought too. In this one room, i spend far too much time.. it would be great if i could just pick up my things and go where i want. I’ve wanted to do this since i found out you can get 2mb internet anywhere, with a little bit of hardware plugged into your laptop.

T-Mobile web ‘n’ walk USB modem

I think within the next few months, i’ll be needing it. More about that next time.

Let me just say now, the time is 18:11.. which has taken me ovewr 6 hours to write this.. which is because i misplaed my camera somewhere in my house and needed it for the picture.

How hard can it really be?

admin — Tue, 22 Jan 2008 01:29:51 +0000

A few weeks ago, a friend asked “how hard can making money on the Internet really be?”
“It’s not, really… hard…” I replied, thought for a moment, and smiled. He loved me.
“I want a site, with funny video’s and pictures then, I’ll do one myself”
How hard can it be I thought? “Go for it, I’ll help when you get stuck”

Let’s call him Jason. Jason, like most people in today’s society are computer and internet savvy. They know how to open their emails and buy unneeded possessions from ebay, right? I began telling him that there would be allot to learn, in the small amount of time that he wanted to learn it in.. in a brain so small.

I decided to start by telling Jason to buy a domain name, and look for some web hosting. I felt confident, after all he is a server admin for a Call of Duty 4 server. I told him Namecheap would be a good place to get his domain from, and told him to keep an eye out for a host.

A couple of days go by, and he tells me he found an available domain name (a true premium domain, something resembling ReallyFunnyStuff4u.biz..) and the host he found was BT broadband or something of the equivalent. Maybe this wouldn’t be so easy. A job so simple would take me such little time… and would require so much brainpower. How long does it take, before you can recognise a good domain? Learn that .biz, and .info’s are no good… and that BT really isn’t the type of web hosting provider we are looking for.

Trying to get someone to back down after they are set on a task like this, would be like trying to stop a fat man from getting to the fridge. I began thinking how much of my time, and his time would this cost us? But.. I persevered..

Another few days went by, I had found a decent domain name, and a suitable hosting package. Bare-naked minimum. (Entertainment sites I’m sure can use allot of resources, but with so little knowledge, can it really?)

I think what people don’t realise is that often, they don’t get anything out of something.. if they do not put anything into it; even-more-so if they have little knowledge in the subject area. So, a free script was planned out at first. After all, the domain and hosting must have come to $40 for the year.

Just for the record, there are no decent entertainment scripts for free.. none at all that I found, and none at all that he found (So somebody make one). Looking for “Free video script”, or “entertainment software”.. is easy to search for? Jason was bringing results back for everything after I told him look for a PHP “entertainment script”. Results like, “CGI directory indexing”, and “ASP dating software”.. all of which seemed the right choice for him!

In the end, after purchasing one.. I told him to get some FTP software. Now, it seems that people who haven’t used FTP before can grasp that ‘Your computer is on the left hand side, the server is on the right hand side..’ — Simple concept? no? Leaving him a few days to follow the instructions in the readme files, didn’t help anything.. except wasting a few days.

Now, lets for one second imagine I setup the databases, uploaded the script, installed it, changed the logos for Jason, setup the configs, added a few files to show him! Hurrah. The site is complete.. everything is pretty easy from there.

After a few weeks he wanted to start bringing the bacon home. So applied for Adsense. Adding Adsense to a site is easy, no? Click “Setup Adsense”, grab the code.. and paste it in.. A walkthrough that took me 45 minutes to explain.

This whole process has taken me about 4 weeks, from a-b.. which includes how to get a little bit of traffic to the site. A few people have asked me since to also make them one.. However, telling them that per 1,000 page views, you make about $0.30.. and it makes things a whole lot better.

The things that really made me realise how much I actually knew, when questions like..

How do I get my site on Google?

What is the URL?

Isn’t FTP the same as Cpanel?

Can i turn my computer off?

Has anyone seen the numa-numa guy?

Ask yourself now, how hard and how long it would take you to teach someone even the BASICS of html, ftp, hosting, SEO, Adsense, domains.. and how long would they remember it for?

After trying to make my mother computer-compliant for the past few years, my guess would be ‘a very long time’

Wait until winter is over.

admin — Sat, 19 Jan 2008 18:09:00 +0000

Winter seems to have lasted so long this year. It’s depressing. It’s dark when i go to bed, and it’s (almost) dark when i wake up. I took this photo yesterday shortly after i woke up.. It was about 3:45..

It’s rainy everywhere here. All flooded. Hmmm. But i don’t really mind all that much, because i don’t really walk all that much.

I’ve made a little change to my new years resolutions, which I posted just before new years. I think it’s safe to say, i don’t have any intentions in getting fit.. I will use my new-new years resolution as an excuse though.

I have to be making a comfortable living from webstuffs before i go to the gym.

I’m going to set my standards high, too. I must be living like a king before i go.

I have sort of temporarily sold my devcustoms site, though. However.. I haven’t got paid for it yet. I have got my paypal sorted though.. at long last. Which kind of defeats the entire point of selling devcustoms in the first place..

But i can’t really say i’ve been doing anything creative for the past few days. I have been playing the Bloon Tower Defense game though. And i’s great. took me a while to do all 3 levels.. so.. this is my link for the day.

http://www.addictinggames.com/bloonstowerdefense2.html

Taken a nap.

admin — Tue, 15 Jan 2008 23:46:08 +0000

After working much crazy hours.. I can’t seem to get my body-clock to work right now. Even when i have 10 hours sleep, i’m tired again after i’ve been awake a while. But I, have just taken a nap.. (a 3 hours nap at that), andhaven’t done for quite some time.

But now my weeks work is over, i’m back on girlfriend time now.. and don’t get as much time to work. It’s good in a way, because i know that if i didn’t have to see her.. i’d be working much more hours than i think is considered healthy..

So, allot has happened since my last update (4 days ago!). My paypal dispute is still not corrected (Bah! Tomorrow!), So.. i still have’t got sufficient funds in my paypal (Christmas’ fault there), so i cannot sell any websites, so i cannot get any money to advertise and launch pornaroo.

It doesn’t really matter now. AddMyLayout had abit of a problem anyways. I was going to sell it.. but.. someone decided to hack about with it and.. basically delete all of the entries! DAMN.. and by the time i’d noticed, Google cache’s already updated itself. It’s my own fault really.. insecure coding. Could have been miles worse anyways, but it sort of renders that site.. value-less.

So, that kind of put me off doing anything for a couple of days.. So, i decided to have a go at my family tree, at Genes Reunite, I’ve been watching allot of TV..

But of course! It was macworld today.. Oohhh..! Sounds like there were some pretty cool things, but maybe the coolest - Was the new, Macbook Air..

It’s super light, super fragile, and super small. If you just tap the screen lightly, the whole thing closes because it’s so light. The keyboard looks a little weird because it’s black on the aluminum, but the keyboard feels great. It feels just like a MacBook (normal) keyboard. The screen looks gorgeous—very bright and clear (and better than the Sony). It’s even better looking than the MacBook’s, most likely because of the LED backlit display.

Source: Gizmodo

At £1170, i doubt i will be getting one.. Not that i need any sort of laptop anyway. I just like the little camera.. Maybe i should invest into a camera though and do some video updates.. less thinking then.

New site..

admin — Fri, 11 Jan 2008 21:47:54 +0000

Errm.. i’ve been pretty, actaully really busy for the past couple of days. Staying up until 9am.. sleeping.. waking up at 2pm.. working until 9am again.. i do it sometimes. I’m cool.

So. After I finished my bit of client work (didn’t even know i did it!?) It’s family. But, I saw a site for sale on sitepoint the other day. I thought, “Hey, this could be quite cool..” So, i checked out the amount of sites that actaully had taken up this little niche.. and apparently, there aren’t many - but the sites that do have it, are fairly large.

well. at least now i linked to it, Google will pick it up. But yeah.. i did the design (well, borrowed it from my other website as i couldn’t be arsed to make a new one) - did the pages, did the administration panel, added all of the content.. in like.. 3 days.

I’m pretty pleased with my results.. Even if that site only gets 5,000 visitors a day.. it’s still like.. $500 a month.. which is pretty achievable. But.. i want to add a whole lot of other things to it, so i can just, set it up and leave it - and then get back to my Pornaroo website.

Ahh.. shit. Probabally too, paypal will have added the £0.02 and £0.07 to my bank account today, so.. i should have checked that out. Lazyness.

I guess now i’ve written quite a few posts (like, 10?) and still have no subscribers (it keeps going to, maybe 3.. and then down again) maybe i should think about actaully link exchanging with someone.. with some RSS subscribers.