We all want a successful blog or website, but we may not be experts in the area. Decisions on what will make a site more search engine friendly never come if we don’t know the basics. Here are some search engine optimization tips that are easy to implement. Perhaps for some of you, your first seo lesson!
Many of us love to display tons of awards, pretty widgets and all kinds of fun things in our sidebars. The problem is, they are terrible for optimization and can make search-engines not like your site. The answer is, reducing the clutter on your site! Now don’t get mad at me for calling your beautiful set of awards “clutter”!
In wordpress, you can move them to a page in the tabs at the top of your site. On blogspot, you can do something similar if you are familiar with template modification and know html fairly well. If you aren’t confident in html, perhaps just moving some of them to a post will do quite well.
To find out if your site needs some cleaning up, go to Sitening.com and open an account. It’s free, and it’s a nice tool to use providing some easy to understand information. Once you’ve signed in, go to tools, seo analyzer. Simply enter the url of your site and see what score you get. I got a 75 my first go around which is not good. I moved several awards to a page and that almost fixed it.
You want your main page to be under 100 KB. Next, I removed the alt text from several widgets in my side bar. You don’t really need alt text and it’s fine to remove some. In the old days when lots of people used text only browsers (no images), the alt text is what they would see instead of images. I could care less if someone doesn’t see the alt text, they need to get a modern browser! I use text only browsers for certain things, but am not worried if the alt text isn’t there.
I ran the test again and scored a 90. Much, much better! I know it can be hard not displaying every award and best buddies site widgets in your side bar, but it will be good for your site.
For Blogger blogs: Here’s a nice little code you can put in your side-bar on blogger or any where else you want a link to your awards post to be:
Just change the url to the post url of your awards post. This way, your awards will be easy to get to, especially if you are proud of them like me. If your site is 280 KB, I recommend you clean some of it up. Search engines are picky and they will love you for it!
Sometimes, less is more.
I just found this site of yours, and I am very impressed. You just got a new subscriber!
Hugh Hollowell: Thank you so much Hugh! I like subscribers. I will return the favor
Excellent piece of advice for those suffering from “clutter” blindness. I’ve been clearing some items but I guess I need to do more in the coming days.
Markk: Thanks Markk! I will leave some things, I have some very close friends and I want certain things there because I like them a lot. It is true that it is very good to clean up! As long as it’s under 100 KB it’s good to go
Ok, I will check out this site u recommend NOW! See ya later Bobby! Thanks for the tip! Alakazam!
Mariuca: Yes, your site needs a little cleaning! That’s up to you. I left up all the little buttons of my friends and had to move the Awards.
Hi Bobby! I went to Sitening and did a check-up for my blog! My score is same like you–a 90! My download size/time is 72.11kb. Yay!
I was afraid mine was gonna be bad because there are tons of artworks in there.
Emila: I already know! One good thing for you, is your niche. There is not nearly as much competition as the category of “blogging” blogs. This is why your google page rank is PR2 which is great for such a short period of time. There’s not much tweaking you need to do for your site. What browser do you use?
I changed my sites title tags from a blogging blog to business integrity and blogging ethics. I think it is more accurate of my blog and hopefully I can gain page rank. You just need higher Alexa and Technorati ratings. Your blog is doing very well. Page rank is more important than anything else
I wish my PR could be higher like before, it was PR3 before I switched to WP. But it’s ok I guess. I read in google that to help improve PR ranking, I need to create a sitemap, so I did that last week. And I should submit my blog in Google web directory, I submitted but still haven’t got response. They need me to change my blog’s title to Yusof, Emila (for Illustrator category, but I didn’t). Should I change it?
Oh sorry Bobby I forgot to mention that I use IE.
Emila: Very good! I have a page rank of 0. But it is extremely hard to get rank with a blogging blog. My competition is Pr Blogger with over 30,000 subscribers. That’s why I changed categories! There are 2 kinds of sitemaps, internal and external. You now need an internal sitemap like the one I have in the tabs at the top of my blog. Go to:
http://www.dagondesign.com/articles/sitemap-generator-plugin-for-wordpress/
Read the instructions and install the plug in. This will be a page in your tabs. If you have any trouble, let me know:)
Using IE, make sure you go to Alexa.com and install the Alexa toolbar for IE. It must be running at all times. This way, Alexa can keep track of you. It will raise your Alexa rating a lot!
hi bobby… i too did this seo analyzer thingy… and it says i am missing a no follow something or another.. what is that and do i need it.. other than that i got a 90 which it says is pretty good… please email me on this as i do not check back for comment responses…
my email addy is on my comment….
Paisley: I will e-mail you! For my readers, Paisley’s site is fine, very good! I will now help her seo her blog in the area of literature, etc. SEO is not just for money blogs. It is for any blog. Paisley is a writer, who in my opinion, deserves to get a book deal and get paid for her incredible talent. I will help her get this going because I like her
Hehe Bobby, I have dagondesign’s plugin installed for my sitemap few days ago: http://emilayusof.com/?page_id=611
Emila: You are a natural born web master! I am impressed! You take these things on and learn yourself. Do you have a Google xml sitemap? In the options of the dagondesign plug in, there is a place to fill in this info?
Wow, I ran my site through sitening and I got around a 45. It’s tough deciding which of your favorite widgets have to go, but after cutting just 4 of them, I was up in the 70’s. I’m gonna keep going and see how high I can get! Thanks for the great tool.
Billy Yen: 90 is a good enough score for now. Later on, I’ll show you how to clean up in-line styles. I still need to do that myself. It requires a little CSS knowledge
Bobby! I don’t know how to do the Google xml sitemap, so I left it blank. Can you guide me how to go about it? Thank you Bobby!
Go to: http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/google-sitemap-generator/
install a google sitemap. The sitemap url, once installed will be http://www.emilayusof.com/sitemap.xml
One thing, Do you want your site to be www? It needs to be only one. With or without http://www. I personally think it’s better to not have www at the beginning of your site name. If you would like to go with emilayusof.com without www let me know
Great tool. And of course too many widget on site will make our ind dizzy to read and cannot give concentration. Also like said here, slow loading and so on. Then moderate is better
Forumer:It’s a first step for a lot of folks. I need to come see Earthworld
I’m guilty of this, but have gotten better. I disabled a handful of plugins and moved things out of my sidebar. One of the few things remaining are my awards. They seem to have come over night.
Even before reading this I was planning to put them on another place. We’ll see how it goes.
Rolando: We do want to have fun of course and enjoy ourselves, but finding a good balance is a great idea. To qualify for those $100.00 PPP’s would surely be nice. I read a post yesterday where this site was selling spots on it’s blogroll for $200.00 per year. That is ridiculous. I’m just fascinated with the system
Woot! I just signed up at sitening.com and took the analyzer test. I got a 90 out of 100.
I moved the awards to a different area and the site size about about 93.7. I moved it back to where it was and the size only went up to 94.0.
Thanks for the link. I’ll play round with that some more. I don’t want to take too much away from the site.
Rolando: That’s a fine score! You are good in this area. Do you use IE or firefox?
I changed to FF full time about 2-3 month ago. I noticed that IE did not show certain code, colors, and scripts that FF did.
Plus, FF seems a lot faster.
In FF addons, go to extensions and install sparky (alexa tool bar). Using this alone dropped my Alexa rating by 150,000 in one month. Alexa can track your site as long as this tool bar is running! FF is much, much better!
Done, thanks for the advice!
Absolutely Rolando! Information is no good if I can’t share it! There are tons of places to get the same information, but few who explain anything in a manner we all can understand. I actually learn more from you and other people than from any other source!
Hi Bobby…
Great info there! Will check out the site. Thanks for this post!
Nafa: Yes, you have some minor problems you should correct! I hope this helps get it cleared up
HI Bobby! Thank you! I would like to drop the www, simpler and shorter. So, again, can you guide me?
Emila: There is a plug in that will issue what is called a 301 redirect (tells the search engines your url has permanently moved if it has a www in front). It does it all for you:http://photomatt.net/2006/06/13/wordpress-no-www/If you type in your url with a www, it will strip it and it will be correct.
Thank you Bobby!
Sorry Bobby, it’s me again. I’ve dloaded the plugin but not sure which folder to put it in, is it in the plugin folder? Thanks.
Hi Emila! You should install the auto install plugin:http://henning.imaginemore.de/pluginstaller
This will allow you to install/uninstall plugins without having to access your account! Some plugins wont install automatically, but most will.
Great post Bobby.
I was wondering, did you suggest removing the ALT text for reducing the HTML size or is it more a case of removing mostly irrelevant text content that the search engines will pick up on?
Samir: Mostly to reduce the size of my site’s homepage. I have read some seo experts say that alt text is not good, and others say it really doesn’t matter. That being the case, a smaller home page is more important than alt text!
Hello Bobby! I’ve had PluginInstaller installed in my WP few months ago(followed Mike’s link) but haven’t installed anything new since then. So, I used thin plugin to install Photomatt’s plugin but there seems to be an error. I dunno, I will try ftp later.
Thank you Bobby!
Hi Emila! The no www plugin needs to be uploaded to your plugins folder. If installed properly, there should be a folder in your plugins folder called- no-www and inside this folder is the php script. Some plugins in your plugins folder are in there and are not within a folder. This one is. Just extract it into the plugins folder
Thanks for the decluttering ideas. I haven’t used sitening in awhile and appreciate the reminder. One site I have used to reduce blogspot sidebar clutter is flooble.com. I don’t know how it effects page size but it is great for aesthetics.
Neena: I’m not going to take cleaning my site to an extreme like so many of the so-called pro’s do. I’ll check out flooble.com
hi bobby! great tips! i’ve been in dilemma whether should i remove something from my sidebar all this while. I’ve tried minimizing it but my sidebar seems to still hv a long list..Haha! well, i might try registering at Sitening.com and see how i score! nyway, thanks for sharing!
JeanChia
Jean: Google should be updating pagerank soon and I would like to have some. I think you should clean up your site some for that reason :some:
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