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: Continue reading
Domain names:
File Names / File Paths / URLs:
Header tags:
Content:
Navigation:
Images:
Links out:
Content:
Do not:
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.
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.
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.
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.
I’ve seen a lot of statistics on the most popular browser and most popular operating system but I thought I’d have a look at the stats I have access too and see is there any differences.
I have several sites with stats and took hits from each to show the percentages of usage across them all. The sites used show a cross section of industries, interests and popularity and represent data from 200,000 hits plus. I used only one months data, that being May 2008. Continue reading
I have a page that hasn’t been cached for a long while despite changing it regularly and updating the xml site map. It looks like it’s a duplicate content issue that took a while to find, but that I hope I have resolved. Bunging a link in here to the web design services page in the hope of getting it cached. Not had this issue before so don’t quite know how to handle it, so be interested in any results this gets.
Those nice people at Mozilla, as well as releasing version 3 of the Firefox browser in the next few days are also going to try for the Guinness world record for the most software downloaded in 24 hours.
I’ll certainly be one of the downloaders, it’s a much better browser than IE. If you feel like committing to the download click the image to register your pledge.
Every once in a while I get to work with some absolutely delightful people and this is one of those occasions. Panthers are a long established Bristol kickboxing club who wanted a website to promote their club and communicate with their members via the internet. They approached several designers, received some mixed reactions and were given some very bad advice in my opinion about registering their domain name and hosting. Fortunately I was able to resolve the problems and get them back on the right track.
There were many pictures that Panthers wanted to use and these have been displayed using a “hoverbox” effect and also incorporated some FlickR slideshows into the training pages. The new website has been launched and is going through some final tweaks, and the club are very pleased with our efforts to provide what they wanted. Panthers are now working on getting themselves some good rankings for searches.
Without much effort this page should reach the number one slot on google for crowdedalliances. So the question is how did that happen. Easy really, there are no other listings for crowdedalliances!
The point is that if there is no competition and, more importantly, no-one searches for crowdedalliances therefore it is simple to rank for the term. Yet many website owners will go for such words.
What should be of concern is what searches are made that your website could fulfill, what those keywords are, and how your content reflects that. Otherwise you too could rank highly for crowdedalliances that returns no searches.
