SEO Tips
Posted by Wesley LeFebvre on April 23, 2010
I blogged about this nearly 3 years ago, but some people didn’t believe me back then, and I imagine there are still plenty of skeptics now.
From my experience, changing your home page title tags too often can temporarily result in a HUGE loss in rankings!
The title tag is one of the most heavily weighted on-page factors in Google’s algorithm. It is the one place where a few slight changes can result in huge ranking increases. So it makes perfect sense to me that Google would apply a temporary “penalty” to a website that changes them to frequently (or at least having that be one of the many triggers) – making it tougher to game the system.
If no such penalty were in place, we’d have a bunch of people always changing their title tags in an effort to out-optimize their competitors. And if everyone was doing it, it would be a lot like a dog trying to catch it’s tail. Which would just be a lot of wasted efforts, IMO.
You can almost always expect a slight drop in rankings after you initially change your title tags, but normally, depending on how active your site is, they will likely come back within a few days to a few weeks.
So how long can it take to recover if your website has actually been penalized?
From my experience it takes about 4 to 8 months to work you way out of the penalty box for this particular type of penalty. Other penalties may be longer or shorter.
I just had another one of my nearly abandoned web projects recently work its way back from this type of penalty.
I strongly suspect this also applys to Google maps as well, however, I believe the triggers and penalties are applied much differently. Either way, pick an appropriate title and stick with it.
For the organic search results I don’t recommend changing your home page title tag more than twice in a six month period, however, I don’t know what the exact number is. If you need to change them more often than that, then I suspect you doing a bunch of stuff wrong.
If your site has been penalized, then I recommend just doing what you normally do to properly increase your rankings (content, links, patience, etc.), just stop playing with the title and meta tags for awhile. A long while.
You could also try requesting re-inclusion or changing domain names entirely, but that really depends on your particular situation. I wouldn’t expect to get much help for Google if you’re not a major brand name.
I’d love to hear your experiences and thoughts on this.
Posted by Wesley LeFebvre on March 29, 2010
I don’t know about you, but I stopped worrying about using XML sitemaps on most of the websites I manage a long time ago. Frankly, I felt It was a complete waste of my time trying to keep them updated regularly. There was no noticeably difference in the way Google crawled each website, or indexed the updated pages. So I DON’T agonize over them anymore.
I think site-maps are a great idea, and maybe they’ll be better in the future, but I honestly feel like site-maps have been more of a nuisance than anything. They give a false sense of security that a page will be indexed or updated in a timely manor. And from my experience, an XML sitemap submission does not guarantee much of anything.
If you have a website or pages you want to get crawled frequently, here are a few things you might want to put your focus on before you worry too much about your XML sitemap.
- Add a blog to your website! I can’t emphasize this enough. If you have a website, you need a self-hosted blog. Twitter is great, and so is facebook, but a blog brings people and the search robots to your website. Update it weekly, and you’ll establish yourself as an authority, attract readers and links, plus Google will crawl your website for updated content more frequently.
- Link to your important pages! Do you have several “important” pages many clicks into your website? If so, you need to bring them closer to your home page. If you have several links on your home page to the less important pages, you may want to rethink your navigation structure.
- Get more links! If your website isn’t being crawled very frequently, maybe you need more links. Link-building is still as important as ever. Don’t ever underestimate the power of link-building.
- Create a static HTML sitemap. A static sitemap is great because it helps users find the most important content on your website. Obviously, it will do the same for the search engine robots too.
Even if an XML sitemap helps get your pages indexed, it’s not going to help much with your rankings. An important page that wouldn’t have been indexed otherwise, isn’t going to show up in the top of the search results if it isn’t getting any PageRank. Don’t get too excited about getting your pages indexed. Indexation doesn’t equal ranking.
If you use a content management system like wordpress, you can try a sitemap generator. I haven’t used it myself, but this one has over a thousand reviews, most of which are very positive.
In conclusion: If rankings are important to you, then finish optimizing your website before you worry too much about your XML sitemap.
What has your experience been like using an XML sitemap? Has your experience been different than mine, or about the same?
Posted by Wesley LeFebvre on March 15, 2010
How’s it going everyone? Good I hope! Yes, Yes, I know, it’s another blog post about WordPress. I thought it would be helpful t to share with you another related tip on how to further optimize your individual blog posts in WordPress by expanding on our last post optimizing your WordPress permalinks, rather than moving on to a completely new area.
This time I’m going to tell you how to optimize your individual post titles for users as well as the search engines.
You’re going to need to install the all-in-one SEO plug-in to do what I’m about to show you. And I highly recommend you do it now if you haven’t already. This plug-in has many great features, so even if you don’t use the plug-in the way I’m going to show you here, you won’t be disappointed by installing it. It is absolutely the most useful plug-in I use.
Once you have the plug-in installed, you can now optimize the title of your post for the search engines, while leaving the heading of your post perfectly written for your users.
The below image shows you the section on the post edit page that allows you to add a custom title tag, description and keywords meta tags.
For this blog post I changed my the title to “Optimizing Blog Post Titles in WordPress”, which is what will be shown as the click-able link in the SERPS; whereas I’ve used “Optimizing Your Blog Post Titles in WordPress” as the name of the post, which is what will be shown as the heading of the page, in an RSS feed reader and the subject line of email subscriptions.
The downside to customizing your post title tag and post name is that your anchor text to that blog post won’t match exactly as it would have throughout your site. So you may rank lower than expected for certain search phrases, especially when you’re site is low on domain authority. I actually consider this an advanced SEO technique, and don’t suggest worrying too much about practicing it unless your domain has a decent amount of authority or you’re very comfortable with SEO.
As always, I hope you appreciated this post. I appreciate you taking the time to read it. If you have any questions, or want to share your thoughts, please feel free to leave a comment here. I’d love to hear your experiences or opinions regarding custom blog post titles.
To great success!
Posted by Wesley LeFebvre on March 8, 2010
WordPress is such a great tool for blogging and building websites alike. But do you sometimes get tired of reading the same old SEO tips for WordPress? Yeah. Well I do too! This time I’m going to tell you about a couple of tips you won’t likely hear anywhere else. To be honest with you, I learned both of these shortly after I had already started blogging here. Which kinda sucked because it usually takes a lot more work to fix up your website after you’ve created a handful of blog posts.
These two search engine optimization tips are for making the most out of your permalinks in WordPress. However, theoretically they can also be applied to other blogging platforms and content management systems. I figured both of them out by carefully studying what some of the most well-known SEOs were doing. Then tested them out for myself. I didn’t read them in how-tos, on any blogs, or in any books. It seems as if these are some the trade secrets you’re not supposed to disclose. I don’t know. But it did surprised me to see only the best of the best were doing it. Regardless, here are two awesome ways to use more effective permalinks in WordPress – for the search engines, and of course, your users.
SEO Tip #1 – Change Default Permalinks
Now I know you’ve probably heard this one before, but I bet you weren’t told to use a Custom Structure, and you’ve probably never been told to set it like this: /%postname%.
You’ll will find your permalink settings under Settings >> Permalinks >> Custom Settings.
So what does that do?
It changes the default url structure of your posts to something like this:
http://www.nameofblog.com/name-of-post
Which has a few major advantages:
- Makes the URL easier to read by the search robots
- Makes it easier to read in the search engine results page
- Gives more weight to the words in the URL
You’ll likely notice most people optimize the permalinks in thier WordPress blogs to look something like this:
http://www.nameofblog.com/year/month/day/name-of-post/
Compare that to our optimized URL:
http://www.nameofblog.com/name-of-post
Do you see how far away your keywords are from the root domain in the former? Can you see how unnecessary the directory structure and the date is? That doesn’t tell us or the search engine robots anything important about the post, and it also doesn’t include any helpful keywords. It’s really a waste!
Typically search engines give the greatest weight to the most prominent words in the URL, and considers each word slightly less important the further it is from the beginning.
Now let’s take it even a step further.
Do you ever optimize individual post URLs? Most people don’t. But with all else being equal, don’t you want to find an easy way to get a leg up on the other guy? Well, that’s what I’m going to show you next.
SEO Tip #2 – Optimize Permalink For Individual Posts
This step is pretty straight forward and is set on individual post pages, as shown below:
This allows you to customize individual blog posts and remove unnecessary words. For example, some times you might have a blog post title that gives you a default URL like this one:
http://www.nameofblog/i-think-these-were-the-best-cars-ever-made
And compare that to our optimized URL:
http://www.nameofblog/best-cars-ever-made
Can you see how many unnecessary words are in the former? Doesn’t the latter look a lot cleaner, giving only the important keywords all of the weight? From my experience, this is a much better way to structure your URLs.
Note: If you decide to go back and update your established blog, just be sure to permanently redirect the old URLs to the new ones using a 301 permanent redirect. That way you make sure the old link-juice gets passed on to the new pages.
Well I hope you’ve appreciated these two SEO tips for WordPress. Please feel free to leave me a comment or subscribe to my blog if you liked this post!
Thanks!
Posted by Wesley LeFebvre on March 2, 2010
Today, on the office Google Webmaster Blog, Google released their SEO report card which aims help Google’s product teams identify potential areas for improvement in Google’s product pages. Previously only released internally, this report card has been released publicly and includes a great deal of SEO related information.
The summary of the subjects covered include:
- Search Result Presentation
- URLs and Redirects
- On-page Optimizations
It’s a PDF doc; about 49 pages worth of interesting details. I encourage you to take a look for yourself, and you might even want to print it out!
http://www.google.com/webmasters/docs/google-seo-report-card.pdf
Posted by Wesley LeFebvre on January 11, 2010
When you are ready to build a website for your business there are a a few simple search engine optimization tips you should consider as soon as you purchase your domain name. Implementing a few things correctly, right from the beginning, can slingshot your website into top search rankings within just a few months of launching.
These are my top ten highly effective SEO tips which you can apply to your website for free:
- Choose a short descriptive URL with your primary keywords in it (if possible).
- UPDATED: Only target 1-3 major keywords on each page.
- Separate keywords with hyphens in the url – with the domain name being the exception, preferably.
- Use Keywords in your navigation links where they make sense, however, like always, don’t overuse them.
- Optimize your title tag – a good rule of thumb is up to 70 characters with your most important keywords first. Separate phrases with a “|”.
- Optimize your meta description tag – One or two sentences max; using a keyword variant or two.
- Provide a substantial amount content on each page and use a few keyword variants within the content.
- Install Google Analytics.
- Add a blog to your website and post to it at least once a week – don’t use a separate domain name for your blog, make it a sub-directory or sub-domain and fully integrated into your main site.
- Get links pointed to your website using keywords in the anchor text related to the page they link to – AboutUs.org, DMOZ.org and sending a free press release are a few good ways to start.
Do you have any SEO tips you think should have made it on my top 10 list?
Posted by Wesley LeFebvre on December 21, 2009
Well, kinda. SEO is a lot about getting links. In fact, getting a few select links can get a poorly optimized website ranking for just about anything. But getting that caliber of link is nearly impossible unless you’ve got serious connections or you’re filthy stinking rich.
However, this blog is true testimony that a well-optimized website can rank highly in a competitive industry with only a fraction of links, comparatively.
Since I started posting here regularly only a few months back, I have made no major attempts (offering payment) to get it listed in the high-authority, SEO-friendly web directories. Nor have I manually requested links from anyone other than a few free blog directories – most of which use nofollow anyway – so they don’t even count. And yet, this blog still ranks really well in Google for a lot of SEO related search queries.
It doesn’t make much sense for me to spend money or time link-building on this blog right now. I don’t make any money from it; it is just a side project at the moment. A place for me to centralize the tools I use regularly and further my writing skills. If I had time to monetize this website I’d definitely spend a lot more of it adding tools, content, and link-building.
Let’s take a quick look at the on-page factors contributing to why this site ranks so well for related search queries: (I’ll put them in order of importance)
- Domain name contains two primary keywords (and more variants)
- Keyword variants are used in the title tag
- Blog posts and pages stay on theme
- No overuse of keywords throughout internal linking
- Useful out-bound linking to related web pages
- No keywords stuffing
Yes, there are plenty of other changes I have made to the blog template to properly optimize it (and some I still need to do), but the list above covers the most heavily weighted, competitively.
So, is SEO just about getting links? Absolutely not! Links are very important, however because of the rise in information pollution and linking misuse, on-page optimization is gaining its importance again.
Posted by Wesley LeFebvre on November 27, 2009
They answer to the best way to structure your URLs may vary a little, however I think most SEOs will recommend something very similar what I recommend.
When structuring your URLs two things to consider are how memorable it will be to the end-user, and how it will be treated by the search engine (including how it will be displayed on the SERP). Other than the root domain name, I think the latter is more important than the former. However that could all change in the future.
For now I’ll discuss the basics on good URL structure, and what works best for the average website.
Here are a few URL structuring tips:
- Keep your URLs short (3-5 words)
- Use descriptive keywords in the URL – where possible.(i.e, domain name, folders and file names)
- Separate each word with a hyphen. Hyphens are better than underscores.(although I don’t recommend using hyphens to separate words in the domain name)
- Don’t use capital letters
Typically it is going to be easier to search engine optimize your static URLs than it is your dynamic ones.
Example of a bad URL:
http://www.example.com/caterogy1/subcategory4/productgroup3.html
Example of a good URL:
http://www.example.com/clothing/mens/dress-shoes.html
Not only does this type of URL structure help with user click-through, it also helps the search engine identify what your web page is about. And now your website’s URL is search engine optimized.
Posted by Wesley LeFebvre on September 28, 2009
More specifically, SEO is like a can of Campbell’s Vegetable Beef soup.
Why Campbell’s Vegetable Beef soup? Call me crazy but I love the stuff. I’m not going to lie, I also hate to cook. Actually, I dislike cooking so much I usually eat my soup right out of the can. I know, that’s not really cooking anyway, and how about EWWWW!
If you can, think of the juice as the Internet; you need the juice to make soup, and you need the Internet for SEO.
The vegetables are like SEO best practices. We all know we need our vegetables, just like we know using best practices is the healthiest kind of SEO. Usually we choose to ignore them, that is, until we grow wiser and accept the facts which are essential to our livelihood.
The meat is like gray-hat SEO. Many people choose to stay away from it for fear of the long-term risks; however there are plenty short-term, and even many long-term benefits too. Either way, you have to consider the potential consequences. You could be damned if you do, damned if you don’t.
Last you have the sodium which is about 85% of our daily value and it’s not really that good for us. But it’s also what keeps the soup “fresh”, and that sort of “freshness” is why I get to keep eating my cans of soup. Similarly, there is a ton of content on the web today, but about 85% of the content created is crap. But that crap, is fresh, and to the SE’s that freshness isn’t crap. So as long as there’s crap to compete with, I’ll get to keep my job as an SEO.
Posted by Wesley LeFebvre on September 16, 2009
Are you wondering if the Keyword Meta Tag will help with your SEO efforts?
Well Google reportedly doesn’t take note of your Keyword Meta Tag, but that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t use it.
There are many companies out there who say the keyword meta tag is worthless, and to some extent, I agree. However, when you have a more holistic view of SEO you may find there are several benefits to using the keyword tag:
- Helps maintain focus of the page
- Easily identify what the page was previously optimized for when updating it at a later date
- Each consultant working on the page can quickly identify what the page is optimized for
- Used to auto-populate form fields in various time-saving software programs
Here is a list of Meta tags Google does look at.
A Few Tips Regarding the Meta Keyword Tag
- Doesn’t increase ranking in the major search engines
- Should contain the major keywords the page is targeting
What reasons do you have for using or not using this tag?
