When I wrote my list of Counties in the UK post I had no idea about the number of hits it would have. Read the rest of this entry »

Since I seem to have dropped quietly down to page 2 of google I’ve been doing a lot of research to try and catch up on what’s not working anymore and what I should be doing to get to the first page again.

Coming upon a well written and concise post from Tad Chef at SEOptimise that addresses my concerns,  I thought it’s a post well worth investing some time in and sharing here.  It does mean that my way of thinking needs changing and methods need updating.

Enjoy

When I design a new site that has a content management system (cms), the owners seem to have most trouble with images. The problems they have are:

• The images are straight from their camera so are too big to fit the desired format and/or eat away at their bandwidth.
• The image needs cropping.
• The image needs some other changes.

What is needed is a quick and easy way of making the desired changes without having to go to the extent of buying some software to do the job just for their website.  If it’s just a few images I don’t mind making the changes, but often the owner wants to do it themselves straight away.

So what do I do, recommend they use an online free editor. Read the rest of this entry »

For a recent web design project I was looking for a list of UK counties. No problem, I thought, the internet is a wonderful place, bound to find something.

How wrong can you be? Lots of lists, but none of them complete and most out of date. Spent far too long looking and eventually had to make my own. I think it’s pretty complete, though, as ever, you probably know better.

I’ve added a text file you can download with just each County name.

Please let me know what you think or if there are any missing by adding a comment. I promise I’ll be grateful and will add any missing counties.

Finally if you make use of the list, feel free to link back to this page http://www.imaker.co.uk/blog/list-of-uk-counties/

Astonishingly easy and painless!

For such a major upgrade, giving a totally new look admin, it was much easier that previous releases (2.6) and gave no problems at all.

Today Google has announced Google’s SEO Starter Guide that says

We thought it’d be useful to create a compact guide that lists some best practices that teams within Google and external webmasters alike can follow that could improve their sites’ crawlability and indexing.

There are also “pitfalls to avoid” that are listed here: Read the rest of this entry »

Techniques to follow for on page search engine optimisation

Domain names:

• It seems that having a domain name with a keyword may have a benefit.

File Names / File Paths / URLs:

• As with Domain name used with keywords may have a benefit.

Header tags:

• Page titles are one of the more influential things to use for SEO and should contain the keywords / phrase for that page. They should be unique for each page - do not use the same Title for multiple pages. Page titles should give a clear idea of what the page is going to be about.
• Descriptions should be unique and Informative and further expand on the page title.
• Keywords should only be relevant to the page they appear on and avoid using as many keywords in the tag as possible.

Content:

• The H1 tag should only be used once per page and should be the most important text on the page.
• H2 / H3 / H4 etc tags can be used to provide sub-headings, breaking up the content, again should be used once only on the page.

Navigation:

• Use meaningful text, preferably keywords, for the link, don’t use “click here”.
• Link title attribute should be used to describe and inform in a short sentence what will be found at the  destination page.

Images:

• Alt attributes should convey the same message as the image.  If a product, for example, describe it as well as including the product title.

Links out:

• Linking out may help get some recognition as an authority with Google based on the sites you link to.
• Only link to relevant/topical/quality/useful sites.

Content:

• Content is very important!  IF you don’t have something that can be read by visitors and bots, then you are basically wasting your time.
• You should have unique, informative and well written content.

Do not:

• keyword stuff any of the above.
• copy other sites.
• use junky or spammy content.
• fill pages up with just images.
• load content using JavaScript.
• load pages in Frames.
• have Flash only based content.

Background to this post:

The list above has come about through observation, testing and experimentation of what currently works best for the main search engines.  Results from forums and other blogs are also included once they have been tested.

If you have any observations you would like to make please comment.

Squidoo has been rattling my cage lately, so finally I’ve gone off, had a look, thought about it, and started a lens. It’s more of a try out and to see what happens so my seo knowledge is going to provide the basis of said page.

What’s up with Wordpress 2.6 upgrade

Upgraded to Wordpress version 2.6 today and unfortunately, the blog collapsed giving 404, page not found errors on every post.

The site was hosted on a wind-oze server where .htaccess was not allowed and so I used a custom permalink as in /index.php/%postname%/ as the recommended work around. This is causing the problems with Wordpress 2.6 throwing errors since the /index.php/ was “forgotten about (?).

Since I have now moved to Linux hosting and can use htaccess again I decided to abandon the workarounds and get back to htaccess and redirect from my main Wordpress directory directly to the posts and remove the /index.php/ workaround.

How to fix it.

Wordpress say that if you have blank category base and tag base in your permalinks then setting them to anything will temporarily fix the problem until the next release. Then presumably you have to change them back.

How I fixed it

I decided not to use anymore workarounds and so used the following to get rid of the cause and the problem itself.

First I changed the custom permalink from index.php/%postname%/ to /%postname%/ and saved it. On the permalinks page - near the bottom Wordpress then gives you the redirect code for your htaccess file. I copied that and pasted it into the .htaccess file and, guess what, it worked. All my pages are now bearing the new urls and if I use a search engine for one of my blog posts and click it, that gets redirected too, and all without the /index.php/ extra!

In the meantime Wordpress are working on release 2.6.1 to fix the problem.

I was recommended to getClicky by a colleague the other day. I’ve been using it for a couple of days now and am impressed so far. It’s a great alternative to google analytics, and has some really good features.

You have to register to use it, but it is free to use. You get a 21 day free trial of the full version, but there are several versions available, so it’s well worth a look.