Wordpress seo checklist

This article gets a Wordpress blog installed and SEO optimised. Its advised that you test the site for W3C HTML and CSS validation each step of the way, especially checking your chosen theme is compliant. The blog files will be located on your web servers domain within the httpdocs folder. If you want to install it into a sub directory of the domain then create this first (ie yourdomain/blog).  Another method is to create a sub-domain for the blog, and a fully optimised index.html file in the domains root.  This index file will then point to the blog in the sub-domain (http://blog.mydomain.com). For Amen the sub domain is created in the user area – Domain TAB – DNS expert – Add record

(1) In your web servers Plesk admin panel create a database and user. Ensure your web server MYSQL version is adequate for the version of Wordpress and theme you intend using.

(2) Upload the wordpress files to the web server directory

(3) Open and edit the wp-config-sample.php file to reflect your connection details (ie DBname/User/password/localhost). Then save it as wp-config.php

(4) Install wordpress as instructed in its contained instruction file.

(5) In Wordpress enter your new password, web log title and email address

(6) Upload your chosen theme to the wp-content/themes directory.

(7) Upload a blank .htaccess file to the Wordpress root directory. Set its permissions to 666

(8) For a more SEO friendly permalink. Change it In settings/permalinks to : /%postname%/%year%/%monthnum%/ This will ensure each page and post has a good SEO link title for google.

(9) Download and upload “all-in-one-seo” into the plugin directory http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/all-in-one-seo-pack/ This adds extra fields to your post and page creation templates. 

 (10) In themes/header.php replace the <title> with
<title><?php wp_title(’ ‘); ?><?php if(wp_title(’ ‘, false)) { echo ‘ :: ‘; } ?><?php bloginfo(’name’); ?></title>. This gives a well structured name to the page title ie softpages :: Links

(11) From the themes header.php remove :
<meta name=”keywords” content=”<?php bloginfo(’description’); ?>” />
<meta name=”description” content=”<?php bloginfo(’description’); ?>” />
This prevents duplicates by inserting default description mettags based on yout tagline entry

(12) Insert standard metatags in header.php :-
<meta name=”author” content=”your name” />
<meta name=”copyright” content=”your company – 2007″ />

(13) Download google sitemap generator and upload into your plugin directory. Upload 2 blank files to the root directory called sitemap.xml and sitemap.xml.gz, make them writable CHMOD 666 Activate it.

(14) Go to the google analytics page and create a new profile for your site Insert supplied code into the themes header.php. You can now monitor your sites activities.

(15) Set up google webmaster tools.

Shape tweening text

Flash CS3 cannot shape tween text, only basic shapes. Hence to tween a letter it must be first converted to a shape.

1. Select the text tool and type a letter “A” at frame 1. Press escape to exit out of text mode.
2. Select frame 20 and insert a keyframe (F6). This represents a change in content.
3. Edit the letter “A” to a letter “B”
4. Select frame 1 with the letter A and press Ctrl+B. This convert the letter to a shape (break apart).
5. Select frame 20 with the letter B and press Ctrl+B. This converts the letter to a shape
6. Select frame 1 and in the properties bos set tween to “shape”.

Google supplemental index

The supplemental index is a secondary index for lower ranking pages and doesn’t contribute anything to your sites visibility on Google. Pages found in the supplemental index tend to be crawled less often and will never be assigned PageRank. As a result, these pages tend to appear lower in organic search results. There are many reasons why pages lose rank and fall into the supplemental index. Here are the most common:

• Low quality content or mainly images (1 line posts).
• Duplicate content from other sites. Beware of blogs as they create duplicate pages for archives etc.
• Identical page title or description.
• Orphaned pages – no or poor ranked inbound links.
• Lack of external links.
• Old and stale content.
• Excessive reciprocal links, linking to spammy neighbourhoods.
• The number of query string parameters exceeds Google’s algorithm.
• Too many pages, publish fewer but meatier pages.
• Cannonical issues causing PageRank to split (see below).

Doing a search in Google gives results from its “normal” index first, and then results from its supplemental index near the end. Sometimes, if not enough pages are available from the normal index, Google will include results from the supplemental results.

 

Calculating your supplemental index ratio

The The best way to calculate how many of your web pages is in the supplemental index is to work out the ratio as follows :-

Total Pages Indexed = site:www.yoursite.com
Pages in the Main Index = site:www.yoursite.com -inallurl:www.yoursite.com
Pages in Supplemental Index = Total Pages Indexed – Pages in the Main Index
Supplemental Ratio = Divide supplemental index by total pages indexed X 100

 

How to improve your supplemental index ratio

• Good quality relevant inbound links.
• Use a robots.txt file to stop search engines spidering irrelevant areas of your site.
• Remove or rewrite duplicate content (duplicate to your site and others (i.e. cut and pasted text from other sites).
• Create a Google sitemap.
• Lean and focused pages with rich content.
• Do not over seed your site with keywords.
• Unique quality meta description tags on each page. Otherwise Google will use the top text of your pages content and that may be navigation.
• Create original, compelling content, marketing it, and getting links you deserve.

 

Cannonical issues are causing PageRank to split

The sum of all inbound PageRank links to your site, is split between the total pages in your site. Thus a bigger page count, means lower average PageRank per page (depending on the site structure). A page with a low PageRank (minimum threshold ) ends up in the supplemental index. By reducing the number of pages you increase the average PageRank per url. Resulting in supplemental pages going back into the main index.

Google search tips

A bunch of useful google tips to improve your searches and allow you to do a lot more than just basic searching with google.
Reference : The google story by David A.Vise

(1) Google can be your phone book – Type a buisness name, city and state to get a number or type the number to reverse search it.

(2) A Calculator – Type in a maths problem to compute it. words or numbers

(3) More search words the better – To narrow your search

(4) Use quotation marks for precision searches – ideal for exact search occurances.

(5) Google dictionary – Type define followed by the english word.

(6) Capitalization doesnt matter – Google ignores words like the, and , is, of.

(7) Forget Pluralism – Typing dances, dances or dancing returns the same results.

(8) Get the picture – To search for images click on the images link first

(9)Browse bookshelves online – Search for a topic at print.google.com and you will see information from actual books scanned and indexed by google

(10) Dial googl when youre on the go – Get phone numbers, directions, movie times, stock quotes and more delivered to youre mobile. Send a text message with the query to 46645 and you will be text back answers

(11) Weatherman – Type weather followed by your zip code or a city name to get a weather forcast.

(12) Get a stock quote – Type a stock ticker symbol into the search box

(13) Translate into other languages – Hit the language tools link on the right side of the search box

(14) Take a magic ~ ride – Type in a tilde before a word and google will search both the term and synonyms

(15) PG rated results – Select preferences and change the safesearch settings

(16) More results per page – Adjusted under the preferences option

(17) Google search guide – google.com/help/cheatsheet.html

(18) Newscaster – Reachable via the news link or news.google.com

(19) Become a scholar – Tap into thousands of acedemic journals at scholar.google.com

(20) Focus your search – restrict searches to a specific domain, site or page by putting site,domain after your search phrase ie. pirates site,disney.com only return “pirates” from disney sites. To eliminate specific pages from a search add a minus sign prior to site ie. vista -site,microsoft.com filters out results from the microsoft sites.

(21) Search google cache – To find sites which arnt responding or no longer available then you can search googles cache (copy of the internet). Type cache, infront your search string or select cache link at the bottom of the results page.

Creating symbols for motion tweens

This tutorial shows you how to create symbols for use in adobe flash CS3 motion tweens. Extra instances of symbols used does not increase required memory resources.

1. In the library tab select the “new symbol” icon. Then enter its name and select “graphic”.
2. Draw the graphic on the stage. Notice it now appears in the symbol library tab (the current view is the symbol stage not the main stage)
3. To align the symbol on the stage, use the align tools panel.

Another method is to draw the image on the stage and then using your selection tool right click on it and select “convert to symbol”.

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Full web site building tutorials. W3 delivers quick and easy learning. At W3Schools, you can study everything you need to learn, in an accessible and handy format

Web page meta tags

META Tags can be used for excluding content from search engine crawlers. It is also used when you cannot upload a robots.txt file. Its purpose is to keep content out of search engine indexes.  They should be added between the HEAD section of your page(s) in question:

(no)index determines whether the crawler should index this page.
Possible values: “noindex” or “index”

(no)follow determines whether the crawler should follow links on this page and crawl them. Possible values: “nofollow” and “follow.”

Here are a few examples:
1) This disallows both indexing and following of links by a crawler on that specific page:
<meta name=”robots” content=”noindex,nofollow” />

2) This disallows indexing of the page, but lets the crawler go on and follow/crawl links contained within it:
<meta name=”robots” content=”noindex,follow” />

3) This allows indexing of the page, but instructs the crawler to not crawl links contained within it:
<meta name=”robots” content=”index,nofollow” />

4) Finally, there is a shorthand way of declaring 1) above (don’t index nor follow links on page):
<meta name=”robots” content=”none”>

If this meta tag is missing, or if there is no content, or the robot terms are not specified, then the robot terms will be assumed to be “index, follow” (e.g. “all”). If the keyword all is found in the robots terms list it overrides all other values. That is, a robots terms that is “nofollow, all, noindex, nofollow”, would effectively be “all”.

Designing a robots.txt file

Search engines collate an image of the internet by searching it, using a special program called a spider. This spider, sometimes called bot, retrieves a map of the internet and all its web pages and files. This map is then used as data to compile results for queries we type into the search engines like Google and Yahoo.

The robots.txt file sits in the root of your web site and tells these search engine bots what NOT to spider. Areas you may not want them to spider and hence not show up in search queries are sensitive pages, areas with no suitable content, images and pages of duplicate content. Indexing the same content twice risks the bots marking it as duplicate content.(monthly archives, category folders and on your front page) Duplicate content usually ends up in search engines supplemental index as opposed to its main index

A Robots.txt file is can be constructed using Notepad and contains statements like below :

To stop all bots indexing your site (indicated by “/”)
User-agent: *
Disallow: /

To block googles image bot scanning the site
User-agent: Googlebot-Image
Disallow: /

To prevent all bots from indexing certain directories
User-agent: *
Disallow: /cgi-bin/
Disallow: /privatedir/
Disallow: /tutorials/blank.htm
Disallow: /file.html

Dissallow all bots from indexing except Alaxa
User-agent: *
Disallow: /
User-agent: ia_archiver
Disallow:

Dissallow all bots except googlebot. This uses the ALLOW term which only google bot knows
User-agent: *
Disallow: /
User-agent: Googlebot
Allow: /

This statement tells the bots where your sitemap is. Sitemap: http://www.yoursite.com/sitemap.xml

Do not leave a robots.txt file empty as some bots will not index your site.

Macbook Hot keys

Take a screenshot of desktop - Shft+Cmd+3
Take a screenshot of a selection - Shft+Cmd+4
Take a screenshot of an element - Cmd+Shft+4+Space
Screen Zoom Ctrl+Scroll or 2 Fingers, then 1 finger to pan
To make a file smaller Select it – File/Save as/Select jpg compression

Quit applications – Cmd+Alt+Esc or Alt+Cmd+Esc
Delete Fn+backspace
Cut, Copy, Paste, All Cmd+X, C, V, A
Quit current application – Cmd+Q
Quickview – Spacebar
Find all , Undo Cmd+F, Z
Alt mouse click 2 finger press or click & hold or Ctrl+MouseClick
Open a file – Cmd+O
New Finder window – Cmd+N

Window Switch – Cmd+Tab (only open or hidden apps..not min ones)
Minimise to Dock – Cmd+M
Hide – Cmd+H

New Finder instance – File/New Finder
Import Itunes Music File- /Add to Library or File/Import to Library
Create an alias without alias Click & Drag while holding Option+Cmd key

Spaces :
Show all – Fn+F8
Switch between spaces – Ctrl+Arrow keys
Collect all – C
Direct Switch – Cmd+Space No.

Safari :
New window – Cmd+N
New tab – Cmd+T
Mail page to contact – Cmd+L
Mail link to contact – Cmd+Shft+L
Reload page – Cmd+R
Text size – Cmd+ and Cmd—

Solutions for your mac

A list of problems and solutions for your Mac :-

1. An application hangs : Press CMD + ALT + ESC
2. To open files in another application : 
   Either drag the file to the application while holding CMD + ALT or for a more permanent association Select the file then press APPLE+I/OPEN WITH/OTHER then browse to the program remembering to select change all.
3. CD stuck in : To eject restart the Mac while holding down the left mouse button or go into Terminal and type “DRUTIL TRAY OPEN”
4. To reset the Admin password : Restart the Mac with the original Leopard disk in it while holding down C. Before the laptop goes to the install sequence go to UTILITIES and reset the password.
5. Lost Airport connection : To force a research for a connection switch the Airport connection off and then back on again by selection the icon top right.  or if this doesn’t work Renew its DHCP lease by SYSTEM PREF/NETWORK/TCIP section/RENEW DHCP Lease.

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