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November, 2007

Search Engines and a WordPress Website

WordPress, is the content management system that runs a Razworks Sarasota Web Design template website . From as little as $499, the template website comes ready to embrace search engines. Its framework and functionality guide a search engine through the posts, pages, and categories, helping a search engine crawl your website and collect the content information required to index your website within its database.

WordPress comes with several built in search optimization tools, including the ability to use .htaccess to create apparently static URLs called permalinks, blogrolling, and pinging. There are also a number of third party plugins and hacks which can be used for search engine optimization (SEO).

However, once you start using various WordPress Themes and customizing WordPress to meet your own needs, you may break some of those useful search engine friendly features. To maintain your WordPress site’s optimal friendliness towards search engine spiders and crawlers, here are a few tips:

Good, Clean Code
Make sure your site’s code validates. Errors in your code may prevent a search engine from moving through the site successfully.
Content Talks
Search engines can’t “see” a site. They can only “read” a site. Pretty does not talk to a search engine. What “talks” to a search engine are the words, the content, the material in your site that explains, shares, informs, educates, and babbles. Make sure you have quality word content for a search engine to examine and compare with all the parts and pieces to give you a good “score”.
Write Your Content with Searchers in Mind
How do you find information on the Internet? If you are writing something that you want to be “found” on the Internet, think about the words and phrases someone would use to find your information. Use them more than once as you write, but not in every sentence. Learn how search engines scan your content, evaluate it, and categorize it so you can help yourself get in good favor with search engines.
Content First
A search engine enters your site and, for the most part, ignores the styles and CSS. It just plows through the site gathering content and information. Most WordPress Themes are designed with the content as close to the top of the unstyled page as possible, keeping sidebars and footers towards the bottom. Few search engines scan more than the first third of the page before moving on. Make sure your Theme puts the content near the top.
Keywords, Links, and Titles Meet Content
Search engines do not evaluate your site on how pretty it is, but they do evaluate the words and put them through a sifter, giving credit to certain words and combinations of words. Words found within your meta tag keywords listings and within your document are compared to words found within your links and titles. The more that match, the better your “score.”
Content in Links and Images
Your site may not have much text, mostly photographs and links, but you have places in which to add textual content. Search engines look for alt and title in link and image tags. While these have a bigger purpose of making your site more accessible, having good descriptions and words in these attributes helps provide more content for search engines to digest.
Link Popularity
It is not how good your site is, it is how good the sites are that link to you. This still holds weight with search engine favoritism. It’s about who links to you. Blogrolls, pingbacks, and trackbacks are all built into WordPress. These help you link to other people, which gives them credit, but it also helps them link to you, connecting the “links.” The number of incoming links your site has that have been recognized by Google can be checked by typing link:www.yoursite.com into Google (other search engines have similar functions). Other ways to generate incomming links to your site include:
  • Add your site’s url to your signature on forum posts on other sites.
  • Submit your site to directories (see below).
  • Note: Leaving comments on blogs will not help with this, since all modern blogging tools use the rel=”nofollow” attribute. Don’t be a comment spammer.
Good Navigation Links
A search engine crawls through your site, moving from page to page. Good navigational links to the categories, archives, and various pages on your site will invite a search engine to move gracefully from one page to another, following the connecting links and visiting most of your site.

Search Engine Site Submissions

There are many resources that will “help” you submit your site to search engines. Some are free, some for a fee. Or you can manually submit your site to search engines yourself. Whatever method you choose to use, once your site has been checked for errors and is ready to go, search engines will welcome your WordPress site.

Here are some tips for successful site submissions:

  • Make sure you have content for search engines to scan. In general, have more than 10 posts on your site to give the search engines something to examine and evaluate.
  • Do not submit your site to the same search engine more than once a month or longer, depending upon their criteria, not your anxiousness to be listed.
  • Have ready to type, or copy and paste, a description of your site that is less than 200 words long, the title of the site, and the categories your site may belong to in a search engine directory.
  • Have a list of your website’s various “addresses/URLs” ready. You can submit your root directory as well as specific categories and feeds to search engines, expanding your search engine coverage.
  • Keep a list of the various search engines and directories you submit to so you do not accidentally resubmit too soon, and you can keep track of how they include you among their pages and results.

Directory Sites

It is also useful for traffic generation and search optimization purposes to submit your site to directories. Both comprehensive directory sites and those specific to the subject or localisation of your site can be used.

DMOZ.org (http://www.dmoz.org) this is the most important directory – it’s content is licensed in an open fashion allowing it to be syndicated through out the web — its content is also used directly in some fashion by almost all of the major search engines.

Search Engine Optimization Resources

While WordPress comes ready for search engines, the following are more resources and information you may want to know about preparing and maintaining your site for search engines’ robots and crawlers.

Meta Tags

Meta Tags contain information that describes your site’s purpose, description, and keywords used within your site. The meta tags are stored within the head of your header.php template file. By default, they are not included in WordPress, but you can manually include them and the article on Meta Tags in WordPress takes you through the process of adding meta tags to your WordPress site.

The WordPress custom fields option can also be used to include keywords and descriptions for posts and Pages. There are also several WordPress Plugins that can also help you to add meta tags and keyword descriptions to your site found within the Codex’s Plugins – Meta Tags list.

Robots.txt Optimization

Search Engines read a yourserver.com/robots.txt file to get information on what they should and shouldn’t be looking for, and where.

Specifying where search engines should look for content in high-quality directories or files you can increase the ranking of your site, and is recommended by Google (http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=35769) and all the search engines.

An example WordPress robots.txt (http://www.askapache.com/seo/updated-robotstxt-for-wordpress.html) file:

User-agent: * Disallow: /cgi-bin Disallow: /wp-admin Disallow: /wp-includes Disallow: /wp-content/plugins Disallow: /wp-content/cache Disallow: /wp-content/themes Disallow: /trackback Disallow: /feed Disallow: /comments Disallow: /category/*/* Disallow: */trackback Disallow: */feed Disallow: */comments Disallow: /*?* Disallow: /*? Allow: /wp-content/uploads  # Google Image User-agent: Googlebot-Image Disallow: Allow: /*  # Google AdSense User-agent: Mediapartners-Google* Disallow: Allow: /*  # Internet Archiver Wayback Machine User-agent: ia_archiver Disallow: /  # digg mirror User-agent: duggmirror Disallow: /  Sitemap: http://www.askapache.com/sitemap.xml

See also:

Feed Submissions

WordPress comes built-in with various feeds, allowing your site to be viewed by various feed readers. Many search engines are now accepting feed submissions, and there are many site which specialize in directories of feeds and feed services.

To submit your site’s feeds, you need to know the link to the various feeds your site provides. The article WordPress Feeds lists the various links of the feeds that come built into WordPress.

For information on customizing these links, see the article on Customizing Feeds.

Technorati Tags

Technorati (http://www.technorati.com/) is a “real-time search engine that keeps track of what is going on in the blogosphere — the world of weblogs.” According to the site, “Technorati tracks the number of links, and the perceived relevance of blogs, as well as the real-time nature of blogging. Because Technorati automatically receives notification from weblogs as soon as they are updated, it can track the thousands of updates per hour that occur in the blogosphere, and monitor the communities (who’s linking to whom) underlying these conversations.”

Technorati tags (http://www.technorati.com/tag/) are used to categorize the different topics and information used by blogs. Technorati uses WordPress categories as tags automatically. You can add more tags (http://www.technorati.com/help/tags.html) by adding a rel="tag" to any link on your site. For example:

<a href="http://wordpress.org/" mce_href="http://wordpress.org/" rel="tag">WordPress</a> <a href="http://codex.wordpress.org/" mce_href="http://codex.wordpress.org/" rel="tag">Codex</a>

There are also several WordPress plugins for maximizing Technorati tags on the Plugins – Technorati list.

Note: In WordPress v1.5.x, Technorati will automatically recognize your category names as tags. For more info, see: WordPress Categories, Technorati Tags and Search Engine Optimisation (http://www.tomrafteryit.net/wordpress-categories-technorati-tags-and-search-engine-optimisation/)

Note: For optimal Technorati listing, you should include the Atom feed in the header of your theme. For this you may use the following code, which you can add somewhere between the <head> and </head> tags:

<link rel="alternate" type="application/atom+xml"  title="Atom 0.3" href="<?php bloginfo('atom_url'); ?>" />

Without adding the Atom feed to your header, your posts in Technorati will most likely be displayed wrongly. Which can result in the post content on Technorati duplicating the post title and listing other (meta) information, which is displayed between the post title and the real post content on your weblog.

Permalinks

Permalinks are enhancements to your existing URLs which can improve search engine optimization by presenting your post, page, and archive URLs as something like http://example.com/2003/05/23/my-cheese-sandwich/ rather than http://example.com/index.php?p=423. See Using Permalinks for more information.

As search engines use links and the title as part of their information gathering, links to posts and articles within your site gain importance with Permalinks.

See also:

As an added bonus, enable the Permalink Redirect plugin (http://scott.yang.id.au/2005/05/permalink-redirect/). This plugin “replies a 301 permanent redirect, if request URI is different from entry’s (or archive’s) permalink. It is used to ensure that there is only one URL associated with each blog entry.”

Sitemaps

A sitemap or “site map” is a single page listing of all the posts on your website. It is intended for your visitors to get a good overview on what your site is about and to find a blog post quickly but it also has great benefits in the search engines as a good link is always pointing to all your blog posts. By having a link to your sitemap on all your sites pages both visitors and search engines will easily get to it and find all your posts.

Here is a tutorial with three different examples of sitemaps with demos and how to set them up:

Google Sitemaps

As of June 2005, Google is now accepting sitemaps of your site as part of their website submissions. Google needs to have this sitemap formatted in a special way using XML. You can find more information about Google’s Sitemap Submissions (https://www.google.com/webmasters/sitemaps/login) from Google, and the discussion on the WordPress Forum (http://www.wordpress.org/support) about WordPress and Google Site maps (http://wordpress.org/support/topic/35465).

Some utilities have been created to help the WordPress user to create a Google site map of their site for submission to Google. For more information on these and Google sitemaps:

Link Relationships

There is some debate over whether listing the link relations actually effect search engine ranking.

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Posted in: Web Design

Color Psychology

Color is a very powerful psychological tool. Many of us are not aware of how certain colors effect us mentally. Color is a very important factor in branding products or services. Websites, print collateral and video interfaces, all utilize color graphics for logos, designs and interfaces. A simple shade of red could stimulate a positive message or generate an aggressive state of mind. Color triggers emotions, which are an important factor in decision-making.

A consumer’s brain responds to colors by triggering emotions. There are specific physical responses documented by science, yet varied color responses can be learned through cultural differences, personal beliefs and subjective meanings. Take a bull for example. Why does a bull charge when it sees a red flag? Because to the bull’s brain, the color red means “Go”. A human’s primal response to the color red is also “Go”, yet in the case of traffic lights, our culture has taught us that red means stop. Red is an intense action color that, through cultural conditioning, emotionally motivates a person to stop their vehicle. General scientific aspects of color psychology such as this can help marketers choose the right colors for branding a product or service in print, video and Internet .

For a corporate website dark backgrounds, especially black, should be avoided. Dark backgrounds are effective in producing drama, power and luxury, but this is not typically the message a corporation wants to broadcast. Colors that promote “purity”, “reliability”, “trustworthiness”, “quality” and other such positive values are typically more effective for the average business website? Unless a mystic atmosphere is inline with your product or service, a “Twilight Zone” look and feel should be avoided.

Light backgrounds are commonly used to produce visually appealing and well organized web design layouts. Sophisticated web designs often employ light colors with dark hue accents. They commonly use simple web page interface layouts dressed up with with genre relevent design themes utilizing unique professional quality graphics.

Logos employ powerful, recognizable colors that capture attention and appeal to the senses.

Blue logos often successful because blue is the favorite color of a majority of people. Gazing at the clear blue sky triggers the body’s production of chemicals for relaxation. Business logos, financial logos and official logos use blue to suggest dependability and honesty.

Green is an organic color and is perfect for the hospitality industry, food industry and ecology.

 Red is a very intense, hot color. It can be overwhelming, especially in web site design. However, Coca-Cola effectively uses red, and with a good design, their message reaches the targeted audience faster than with other colors. That’s because red is the color of energy, movement and excitement.

Although each audience and industry can often be associated with particular colors, there are instances when one color may be successfully deployed in contrast to color psychology applications.

Color theory defines how colors can be combined to produce the most visually appealing result. Using color selection theories such as Analogous, Complimentary, Triadic, etc., help produce a symbiance between different colors used within a composition.

Sampling colors from photographs or images used in the design is a common color theory method to create the best color combination in a particular composition. Because photographs are so effective in connecting with a consumer’s emotions, creating a color pallette sampled from the design’s images is often foolproof.

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Posted in: Web Design

Another Web Site on Google’s first page

Razworks web design services has launched another website that is ranking high on Google Search engine results.

Razworks performed website design and development for Sarasota, FL based D and D Gutters, a seamless rain gutter company specializing in seamless gutter installation and repair. A Google search for Sarasota Seamless Gutters results in 3 positions on the first page of Google Search  results for D and D Seamless Gutters. “The website has been online for only three weeks so we are pleased with the search engine ranking”, comments Razworks’ owner Michael Rassel.

The Razworks Sarasota Web Design Wordpress template website, which is the one contracted by Sarasota Florida based D and D Seamless Gutters, has significant search engine optimization by default. “The software we use to dynamically assemble the template website was selected specifically because of it’s W3C XHTML standards compliance. Web design that passes W3C standards validation is a key factor in Web 2.0 search engine optimization.

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Posted in: Web Design
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