One of the issues which is greatly overlooked is SEO or Search Engine Optimisation. Think of when it comes to releasing a product, you have your research, your production and your marketing. Think of SEO as the marketing side of your service /  product.

So how do you optimise your already built product in this case your website? WordPress / 3rd parties offering tools / plug-ins which allows you to configure your website to allow optimisation on your website. This blog uses plug ins that allow pages to become SEO friendly to help boost SEO ranking performance.

It is important you also have a google webmasters account and any sort of analytics program, for this website I use google analytics to monitor my traffic. I also use it for a lot of sites I build. It is slightly more advanced than the typical stats type package but once you used it a few weeks you can get the hang of it.

Tools

These tools can be found in the plug-ins section of wordpress…

• All in one SEO Pack
  Quite a good SEO pack, allows to add meta information, a title, description to each page.
• Google Analytics for WordPress
  You can use this to apply your google analytics code to the site to read stats within each article / page.
• Google XML Sitemap
  This is important to get your site indexed quickly and efficiently with conjunction with google webmaster tools.
• Redirection
  No one likes going to a link on google finding out that the page is not found. Redirection prevents that offering a more efficient way of directing you to the right content on the site.

Optimising wordpress

So we know the tools, we know, Google webmaster helps sort out indexing problems and get your site indexed faster in Google. But what can we do to optimise wordpress. One handy tip which I have learnt from another site (applogies about this as I do not remember what the site name is) is to make article url’s user and SEO friendly.

Permalinks allows you to customise how to display your article urls. By default it shows a query string ?p=13432 which to any search engine is never good. Other customisation can be done but having a custom structure where displaying the title of the article helps wonders. What would you rather have wordpress.htm?p=13432 or wordpress/my-article?

To allow this you have to add /%postname%/ within the custom strcture in permalink settings.

Hopefully now your website over time should improve, make sure you use targeted keywords in your content as well without spamming your own content.

Alot is going around now that Google are now taking into consideration the speed of the website. While this has come to no surprise. While I agree that the speed of the website is important I do disagree that blaming the website is not always the case.

Looking into considerations I have made a list what could cause slowdown on the site.

• web server

One problem that it cause be the web server at fault, over an overload of websites slowing the system down or a cheap free service.

• JavaScript (Google, twitter etc)

I am sure everyone has used some bit of code which takes just a few split seconds to load such as displaying twitter on their website but could this be taken into consideration with Google?

• Peak times

We all know when it comes to end of school the Internet slows down a lot because many Internet users are logging on.

Conclusion

I am sure Google have set up some sort of overall percentage figure where it takes results over time and gives an average score.  I also noticed that some less standard compliance sites run faster than ones using valid XHTML / HTML, Google for example does not include a </html> is there markup, because it improves performance.

It will be interesting what kind of results this brings but to be honest the percentage of sites this will affect is minimal.

Read the full story at Google Blog

Website structure is important for SEO. I find out a lot of people including myself is guily for not correctly structuring websites schematically. For SEO websites should contain h1, h2, p , strong and other elements to scructure a document. I am sure alot of people are guilty for this, including me applying h* tags to make text bigger.

I noticed an issue about one of our website rankings were dropping, we included lots of key text phrases, everything we thought had been done right and could not think of a way why our ranking were doing below average.

I looked at the structure, what was behind the scenes within the HTML language. As I found that the admin was using his updatable website to present all his text in h1 format. Thus givng priority over h2. So when google comes to check for keywords within the title tags it was seeing paragraphs of text with random works instead of just a few words which tells google the purpose of page.

While our site was great from a user point of view, schematically, it was very bad.  I have found alot of people having this problem but it is easy to get sidetracked. Another issue is using strong tags on text for styling rather than emphasising.  font-weight: bold and <strong> are very different regarding to structure.

This is bad for your client because he / she then thinks that your not doing a good job just because someone on the other side of the line claims that whoever managing the site is doing a bad job because they are not number 1 in google even though the site has been up for less than a month.

I tend to find out now that alot of people / businesses use tactics which are classed unethical and if you are a freelancer is the client going to believe a big SEO firm or an independant web designer?

It is important to stand your ground and as long as you can forward your arguement you have a winning chance.  So if anyone questions anything make sure it is backed up and you will most certainly win.

Also did I say the people claiming why their site is not at the top of Google has only been live for 3 weeks at the time?

In comes google adwords. While used to sell a service or product it can help improve ranking to give your site that extra boost. It is almost like paid advertising but with a twist. This can be done short term and long term.

if you do consider using adwords for SEO remember these key rules.

• Make sure your keywords, content and meta information match what you are advertising, putting in random keywords can give a low quality score.
• Refine your words, to popular will bring in bad traffic and use up your budget quickly, to refined won’t get you anywhere fast.
• Make your landing page count, do not add to many back links and always have links to your other pages such as sitemap, disclaimer, about etc etc.
• Just because you pay more does not mean you will get to number 1 faster. Useless adwords will give you a low quality score, and result costing more.

Remember that clicking through to your website through google adwords will not improve google ranking but the importance of gaining popularity. It is your job to keep those visitors there.

For most of us we take this as a pinch of salt but if we are charging a cost to do SEO work for clients and these people ring up manipulating clients I work with claiming that the work we do is bad and they can deliver solid results to end up at the top of Google natural listings especially when they claim they work for Google or part of the Google team.

We do tend to get a few phone calls from the clients questioning this issue. They tend to be hoax calls that basically want to steal money without even touching any websites.

I tend to get a few clients wondering why they google there name or product they sell and say why they are not at the top. I find it one of the most fustrating things. Because there is never an accurate answer. We at work, are testing new tools now to help improve SEO rankings but it’s touch and go and only time will tell. Maybe these SEO dedicated companies know something we don’t? maybe there is not a quick answer and with Google’s algorithm  changing all the time byt the time we figured out the anwer it is already to late?

My co-worker said to me today that SEO is a dark art and I have to agree.