Webmaster Blog

WordPress is the best blogging software available! My recent studies shine!

I haven’t posted here in a while, and firstly I’d like to apologise for that. And secondly, I’d like to briefly explain what this post is really about.

Eager to improve the experience of this blog, I decided to look into the brains of wordpress and all it stands for, and see if it is truly as good as people say it is.  Before now, I just took people’s word for it – and it turns out I was right to do so – but I wanted to really see what makes it so special.

I’m not going to talk about the usual, ie; Easy CMS, Plugin Systems, Widgets, Admin Panels etc – Instead I looked for what I think really matters to a webmaster.

Search Engine Optimisation (SEO)

WordPress’s SEO URLs are undoubtedly phenomenal, we all know that!  But more so than that, the actual on-page SEO standards really are top-quality.  I guess you could put this partly down to the XHTML compliance – that always helps.  But it’s more than that, the use of perfect header tags, quality navigational links, and the absolutely perfect hierarchy of mark-up, search engines LOVE WordPress!

Without any real off-site SEO, I am high up on page #1 on Google for the search term “Webmaster Blog“, and my position is strengthening.  And the best part is, to achieve this, away from the odd link here and there on forum signatures and blog feeds, I am doing NOTHING but posting content!  Wordpress is a fully automated top-ranker!

Functionality:

There is nothing worse than a dysfunctional website.  Nobody likes to have to ‘figure out’ a website before they can use it.. And with so many competitors around, why bother? “I’m sure another blog will be easier to navigate..” – GONE.  Unless your blog is perfectly functional and navigable, you’d be losing out on a LOT of potentially loyal users.. WordPress offers perfect navigation, perfect functionality, and super-light loads.  Obviously this can be compromised by terrible themes and widgets, but the basic structure of WordPress is unbeatable!  As long as you choose a theme which complements the original structure of WordPress, you’re in business!

Speaking of which, I hope to create or buy (if my budget allows it) a nice new unique theme for this blog – I think it needs it!

My advice to you, as a happy and successful blogger, is go for WordPress!  And with the new WordPress 3 bringing even better functionality, now really is the time to soak up those perks!

Popularity: 7%

This article will explain the best ways to utilise the Title tag of your web page effectively in terms of Search Engine Optimisation.

Right, assuming you know your targeted keyword, it is vital for it to be in the title element of your website. But where?

The biggest mistake of all is to think that only the homepage needs the main keyword.  WRONG!

You want your keyword(s) to be on every single page, along with the page’s header.  For these pages, you have a choice to make in terms of what you value more.  Having the keyword present in your title is one thing, but its position does matter.

If you want the main focus to be your main keyword, across every page, you must place it before the title of the current sub-page.   So for example, I would have  ”Webmaster Blog” at the beginning of the title on every page of this blog.

However, personally, I want the main target for my articles to be the content of each article rather than the general content of the site… So I put Webmaster Blog at the end of my Title tag.

This means that the main focus is on the keywords in my headers (as “SEO Tips” or “SEO titles” is what people will  be searching for, if they are to land on this page; so that is instantly given priority over “Webmaster Blog” in my opinion).

How to separate the page title vs. the site-wide title / keyword.

Now you’ll be wondering if there’s any distinct way of separating the two – well, not really.. But what I do know is Google prefers characters like “-” and “|” to separate page title segments.. Characters like “»” can be incorrectly displayed in title bars so it’s best to avoid them and stick to simple characters.

You can however, in the event that you’re using the page keyword then the main keyword (in that order!), you can also use the structure *Page Title* on *Site Title/Keyword*.

This has proven effective for me on a number of sites, but you really do need to just go with what you prefer, and experiment a little!

Good luck with your SEO!  Stay tuned for the next SEO article!

Popularity: 11%

One of the biggest requests here is for SEO articles, so finally I’m going to start on the band wagon and give some useful tips to get your website high up in the SERPs (Search Engine Results Pages).

The first thing to realise with SEO is that you want to take full advantage of every possible place you can in terms of relevant keywords.  This includes your URLs

Search Engine Optimising URLs

The first thing to understand with URLs / links is that if you can’t read them and get a small insight as to what the page is about, how will the Search Engines?  Sure the crawlers will pick up the content on the page but they do take the URL keywords into account!

So, you want relevant keywords in your URL, not /page.php?id=1

Let’s say you have a website about vehicles.  Each vehicle  is listed under the categories for ‘type’ and ‘manufacturer’.

You have a page for a Ferrari F430 Spider under the category “Ferrari”.  A search engine optimised URL for this would be something like:

chuckunvehicles.com/sports-cars/ferrari/ferrari-f430-spider.htm – See the hyphens (-) in between the words? It’s always a good idea to use hyphens in URLs.  Why?  Well simply to define your actual keywords… If you didn’t use hyphens, a search engine crawler may read this as “sportscars” and “ferrarif430spider” – See the problem?  We want to define our keywords without mistake or misinterpretation!

Also, notice the order of the categories? It’s only sensible to make sure your categorised URLs are in a logical hierarchy!  This shows search engines that the page is under ferrari, which is under sports-cars.  You want to build understandable relevance with your URLs.

To create good SEO URLs without making each page individually you’ll need to know how to use Apache’s .htaccess file to retrieve the content.. I will write a post on .htaccess soon!

All the best with your SEO! Come back for more soon!

Popularity: 10%

Hooray! Today is a good day!

Why? I have reached page 1 on Google for the keywords: Webmaster Blog!

I have been straining to get on page 1 for a long time, and it seems all that effort has paid off.

Thanks to everyone who has linked to my best articles, I am sure this has no doubt helped a lot

As a celebration I feel I must do something.. So expect some big change or offer here over the coming week!

Thank you all!

Popularity: 6%

Google PageRank has updated!

This blog has achived PageRank 2, which is great for such a new site!  Hopefully by the next PR update I will have achived great things here which will in turn reward me with a greater PR.

I am going to mess around with a few methods of increasing PR, and will release my methods here as I do so!

I hope you all got the PR you were hoping for.  Having looked around at peoples PR changes, I havent noticed such dramatic increases or decreases this time around! Hopefully this will change for the better next time!

I will post later about methods of increasing PR, so stick around for more information and resources on optimisation for SERPs and PR.

Popularity: 18%