Look how old this is! I post at SearchCommander.com now, and this post was published 16 years 8 months 13 days ago. This industry changes FAST, so blindly following the advice here *may not* be a good idea! If you're at all unsure, feel free to hit me up on Twitter and ask.
This covers most of the basics – As always, whether you’re the site owner, or an internet marketer, do feel free to ask any specific questions about this video here, or start any discussion points…
Thanks so much for the SEO critique.
I’ll get on all those suggestion shortly. I will be advertising soon, but I have been working on SEO for 18 months on this site – starting from zero – didn’t know html at all and had help with the PHP.
Right now I’m working on changing my code to no tables using CSS and then getting it into (or onto, or with ) wordpress. I had the sitemap on there but I overlooked it when I removed 9 tables from the code and so had a new template and forgot to put it on the front page.
I looked through a million wordpress themes and they all look alike to me. I’m aware of the need for a upfront look but it’s hard to be different and have a white background and black text.
I couldn’t believe you found I was #25 of a million or so on Google/Yahoo for nutritional deficiencies. I certainly didn’t know that?
What’s more, I only receive 2,000 visitors a month and 600 (now headed to 900 with the 10 of 24 tables removed) for my page on brushing teeth. It appears someone with some pull likes my site.
I will definitely keep your company in mind, thanks again…
Your welcome, and good luck!
Having moved to wordpress Im worried about content duplication as described here.
They talk about “put a post in only one category to prevent content duplication (Google and other search engines penalize sites that have duplicated content), make use of the ‘more’ feature to prevent content duplication in homepage, single post page, category pages, etc and use a robots.txt file.
To prevent duplicated content in category pages, tag pages, yearly archives or monthly archives make sure your theme uses post excerpts there. Also create a robots.txt file to tell search engine bots which pages on your web site should be crawled and indexed.”
I’m really interested in what you have to say about this Wordpess duplication problem.
I do agree with most of that video, but do not personally believe you’ll be “penalized” for using your own duplicate content, and that’s why I usually do categorize into more than one category, if it’s appropriate.
Right now I have 30 pages in one category, so if I understand you correctly, I should change that to 30 categories each with 1 page. That’s what I’ll do. If I’m mistaken please give me a write.
No, that’s not at all what I meant!
I’m just saying that if I were to write a Google specific post about something I learned at a search conference, there’s no reason that I personally would hesitate to categorize in all three of my categories, “Search Engines” and in “Google” and in “Conferences”.
I’m not intending to contradict Michael in that video, it’s just a preference I have, and I do personally believe that Google is smart enough not to penalize me for content organized by month or category.
There’s no reason someones content can’t legitimately fall under multiple categories, and to force every post into just one category would lead to a poorer user experience in my opinion.
That said, a little extra effort put into making only snippets of your posts appear in archives and categories is an improvement over simply duplicating, and for that I choose to use the post teaser plugin.
I hope this clarifies…
Scott,
Good news on the wordpress duplication problem/worry
I was reading the highlights of the latest update to the wordpress All In One SEO Pack. I put the third one first:
All in One SEO Pack available. Download version 1.4.6.9
* Avoids the typical duplicate content found on WordPress blogs
* Automatically optimizes your titles for search engines
* Generates META tags automatically
* For WordPress 2.3 you don’t even have to look at the options, it works out-of-the-box. Just install.
* You can override any title and set any META description and any META keywords you want.
* You can fine-tune everything
* Backward-Compatibility with many other plugins, like Auto Meta, Ultimate Tag Warrior and others
Roger
Scott,
Would you give me some advice on the coloring of my ads. I’m using the same ads eventhough I changed my site from burgandy and black to blue.
Thanks,
Roger
You mean on your Adsense ads? They say that the best way to get click throughs is to make the ads play seamlessly with the page, matching the color and style.
However if the ads are quite relevant to what you’re writing about, that it really shouldn’t matter. Every site is going to be different in your case, you’re just going to have to test different colors and styles.
Scott,
What is your position on Etags. Yahoo’s YSlow wants you to remove them. I put this code at the beginning of my .htaccess file.
Header unset ETag
FileETag None
Also,
Right now the general order of my HTacess file is:
50 or so 301 redirects
Error page directions
Default Front Page stuff
Stuff about WordPress.
Where in the .htaccess file would I put this?
ExpiresActive On
ExpiresByType text/html “access plus 25 minutes”
ExpiresByType image/gif “access plus 5 years”
ExpiresByType image/jpg “access plus 5 years”
Are Expires directions worthwhile. Do web browsers save cache in the hard drive? If not what good is telling someones browser to cache something for 5 years if the cache is lost every time their computer is shut off?
Thanks Scott,
Roger
I would follow the recommendations from Yslow. Anything you can do to speed up your delivery is going to improve things, in my opinion.
I’m sorry but for liability purposes and common sense I’m not going to be able to give you specific .htaccess instructions here, wince there are too many variables.
I don’t know where you’re hosted, don’t know what version of Apache your server is running, I don’t know what mods might or might not be installed on your host’s Apache, and I don’t know whether or not your host even supports calls for these mods from .htaccess.
Some have default Apache installs and some have added mods, and every host is different.
You’re going to have to take each of these questions up directly with your specific web host / server support.
Scott,
This one question is not based on servers but useful funtionality of code.
Do web browsers save cache on the hard drive?
If browsers don’t save cache to the hard drive, I would think the mod expires function is rendered useless as soon as one shuts their computer off.
What’s your opinion.
Thanks,
Roger
Scott,
I figured it out. On the Firefox web browser, for example, choose tools, options, cache, and you’ll be able to choose how much “disk space” you want the browser to use. Disk space is hard drive space. That’s why expires works becuase browsers can save information on the hard drive that it received from the server, including mod expires information.
Roger
Good Job, Roger! You’ve really learned a lot, and I’m impressed!
Thanks Scott,
I’ve run into one last problem,
I decided to not use Expires and instead use
# max age dates were set november408
Header set Cache-Control “max-age=37440000”
Header set Cache-Control “max-age=87000”
Header set Cache-Control “max-age=300”
I thought I would see some change in the header for my site, but I didn’t. Is there something wrong with the code above?
http://www.seochat.com/seo-tools/check-server-headers/
Roger
There are different versions of Apache, different mods installed on different servers, different methods of calling those mods, from http:conf, php.ini, and even .htaccess.
There are far too many variables to possibly troubleshoot or even offer any suggestions by what you’ve put above, and specific code questions can only be addressed by your own web host, I’m sorry.
Scott,
I figured it out. First if you could, your site automaticilly changed the code I had (above) to result (max-age ) so if you could get it so the code I wrote shows. The problem was that text files in wordpress files are .php, I didnt have .php in any of the (I was still thinking html was the form of the text.) Of course applying header set control to .php files leads to a new problem: If I put a header set cache control on .php, how will that affect xmlrpc.php? maybe in wordpress you shouldn’t apply header set cache control on .php files.
Scott,
I have this code in my .htaccess file (I don’t have access to httpd)
Header set Cache-Control “max-age=37440000”
Header set Cache-Control “max-age=87000”
Header set Cache-Control “max-age=300”
It is working fine except there’s no caching of the files of the text of my wordpress site. I hear such files are .php files. At first I would think I could just slip in “php|” next to the “html” and the .php text pages would be cached for 300 seconds without causing problems. But adding “php” to the the code above would also be caching xmlrpc.php. Can caching xmlrpc.php cause problems? I asked my webhost and they said the question is a programming question and not a server issue nor concern. I asked this question on a number of forums and no one wants to touch it? What’s the big secret? There’s also this php file – xmlrpc.php?rsd. If you know or can find the answer it would be a real service to programmers who reference forums. I’ve looked at the headers of webpages coded by otherwise very capable people and the caption the header tool leaves is that the page is stale – I can only assume that’s becuase they don’t know what to do about the header set cache-control on php. Is it safe to put “php” in header set cache control (with the filesmatch function)in the coding of a site that uses xmlrpc.php?
Thanks for the help Scott,
Roger,
Roscoe