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  • Paul Sizemore 6:43 pm on February 9, 2012 Permalink | Reply
    Tags: Bossy Color, , SEO,   

    Plugins for the New Bossy Color WordPress Site 

    I had lunch today with Annie of Bossy Color. She’s been blogging for several years, and recently ported her site to WordPress.  She had great shoes, but I didn’t get a chance to compliment her on them, because I was so excited to tell her about SEO and WordPress.
    With sites newly imported into WordPress it’s important to set up the proper plugins and configure correctly. Here’s a few recommendations so that you can use quantified data to drive your content creation.
    • Be sure you have connected Google Webmaster Tools (use the WordPress SEO Plugin by Yoast). This will allow you to see reports on what content you have on your blog that is close to being high traffic.
    • Install SEO by Yoast – It will add a lot of SEO tools you can access from the individual post. See the attached screen capture. Write each post with a ‘focus keyword,’ for example ‘benjamin moore.’ Use that term in the fields titled ‘Seo Title’, the ‘Meta Description,’ in the ‘URL,’ and in the post. This will help you achieve higher rankings for that key word. Let the content you create be driven by the reports in Google Webmaster Tools, and you’ll see those numbers go up.
    • Install and configure ‘Transposh Translation Filter.’ This plugin will help your site rank higher in other languages. It will not be a significant jump, but it will help, and is easy to include.
    These are only a few steps to take to ensure that your new WordPress blog is ready.
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  • Paul Sizemore 10:38 pm on November 5, 2009 Permalink | Reply
    Tags: SEO   

    Maximizing the pages indexed on your site 

    I recently had a client come to me and say ‘We just launched a new site, now what SEO should we do?’ My first thought, was that they had missed the boat, but I didn’t tell them that. That’s a lesson they will learn before they launch the next site or feature. 

    Minutes after running the YSlow Firefox/Firebug add-on, I noticed some low hanging fruit. No HTTP compression on their server. 

    I told them, ‘Just do it.’ They had to ask why. 

    First, it will save you bandwidth, and bandwidth is money, right? Here’s a nice case study from IBM that details the bandwidth impacts server compression has on overall bandwidth. 

    Second, and more important, because engines only index pages to a certain volume, the rest of the page is lost. Implementing it is a change that not only reduces the bottom line, but provides growth into new areas of SEO. 

    According to Sitepoint the engines stop points are:
         Yahoo:    210 kb
         Google:  520 kb
         MSN:      1020 kb

    That means most pages with a footprint more than 210 kb in download size will not be indexed completely by yahoo, and that’s something that could be tragic. 

    Links: 
     

  • Paul Sizemore 2:50 am on November 5, 2009 Permalink | Reply
    Tags: SEO   

    Srsly? SEO Expectations, realistic expectations 

    Often time business SEO stakeholders are not SEO savvy, and therefore might have unrealistic expectations. Education is the key, and relating the SEO efforts is quality reporting. 

    Stakeholders often look for immediate results in rankings, and that they will maintain a steady curve increase. This isn’t the case, report on the incoming traffic, and not the rankings. SEO will increase the organic inbound traffic, and stakeholders can understand this if it’s communicated to them. 

    Stakeholders also often feel that since the research was done on a keyword, the site should rank on that keyword. Certain keywords are more difficult to rank on than others, and the process of the search engine crawling the site varies. There are also a lot of other variables that factor in, and it’s not a 100% process. No business process is 100%. 

    When stakeholders see numbers it sets an unrealistic expectation. The numbers, the rankings and the analytics often set a false sense that the entire process is as sharp, defined and quantitative as the numbers. This isn’t the case. I like to relate it to the stock market, it’s up and down, but there is a trend. This analogy resonates with a lot of stakeholders.
     

  • Paul Sizemore 7:32 pm on October 31, 2009 Permalink | Reply
    Tags: SEO   

    SEO in the Enterprise 

    Enterprise Search Engine Optimization differs from SEO in the enterprise because one is a business process that ensures continued success, the other is based around the knowledge of a single person that currently works in the enterprise. SEO is about long-term success with the search engines, and to be a success in that, there has to be a business process in place that ensures the long-term and continued success of SEO. 

    A talented person can do all the SEO tasks, the technical side, writing good content, link building and the metrics, but in an enterprise that doesn’t work. Those activities are often charged with different departments, with different management techniques and inherent communication difficulties. When one person tries to do it all, they often run up against gaps in departmental approval. 

    Good SEO couples the increasing the top line of Marketing with the reducing the bottom line of IT. 

    In addition to the communication and role-responsibility problems, most enterprise SEO is charged with large scale optimization over complex sites. This creates it’s own unique set of problems from duplicate content, multiple owners, and millions of pages.

    The single most important aspect of enterprise SEO is corporate buy in. Once that is achieved, all the rest can follow, but without that, SEO is doomed to die in the boardroom, then in the trenches. Conductor has some great excel templates that can help persuade executive level the importance of SEO. They include a ‘Marketing Opportunity’ and ‘Share of Search’ templates. 
     

  • Paul Sizemore 6:26 pm on October 29, 2009 Permalink | Reply
    Tags: SEO   

    Post-Domain Decommission Cleanup 

    Yesterday a client asked, we moved to a new domain name, but all the pages from the old domains are still in the search engines. What can we do about it? 

    It appears that the engines have indexed the pages from the old domains, but they are not reindexing those pages. Right now, they are are ’301ing’ requests for the old domain to a new domain, and most of the pages that were indexed were in the lower levels of Google’s Index. The pages are in the Supplemental or Secondary index. The ’301′ response to the search bot would take care of it, but the engines aren’t indexing the site. So, the engines don’t know that the pages have changed. 

    The engines need to reindex the site. This will return the ’301′ redirects that will update the index. 

    Since they still owned the domain, they could still establish a webmaster account for the domain with the engine’s webmaster tools, and then verify the domain by uploading the validation HTML template. 

    That can be done at the following URLs: 
        Bing Webmaster Tools – http://www.bing.com/webmaster/
        Google Webmaster Tools – https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/
        Yahoo SiteExplorer Tools – https://siteexplorer.search.yahoo.com/ 

    Once the validation is done, create a new ‘sitemap.xml’ file, and submit the sitemap to the search engines. One of my favorite tools to create sitemaps is : http://www.xml-sitemaps.com/ Point the sitemap starting URL to one of the validation HTML files, and the sitemap will only have one entry. 

    Once the sitemap is submitted, this will cause the engine to reindex the old domain, thus removing all the older pages in the cache. 

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