» seo

Optimizing WordPress Websites

steve — Sat, 10 Dec 2011 20:07:16 +0000

If you are using WordPress as the hosting platform, (which Is my preferred choice )then you should be aware that out of the box it isn’t that search engine friendly. However it is easy to put right.
Over on my WordPress site is a short tutorial covering the most important settings to Optimize WordPress and Make it SEO friendly.

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Getting Your Website Into the Search Engines

steve — Tue, 13 Oct 2009 16:03:18 +0000

Have you built and uploaded your site and are waiting for your first visitors?
If so here is what you need to do to get visitors from the search engines:

Here is part 2 where we look at adding to directories

Useful Resources:

Promoting your Website

Submitting Your site to Search Engines

Adding Site to Directory Video

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Free Sites Versus Paid

steve — Tue, 06 Jan 2009 11:59:44 +0000

I received a question from a recent reader that will probably affect many of you just starting out as there are so many different free alternatives to starting a start that many will be tempted down that route.

Here is the question

——————-

I have a question concerning websites. Free websites versus hosted sites. I see that on google, hosted websites tend to rank better than free sites.

Why? I am imagining that the top ranking sites (hosted) have, of course, had more effort put into them. If they had put the same effort into a free website, would they have the same ranking? If they had the same in and outbound links, wouldn\’t they attain the same ranking? I don\’t look at the address to a website when I visit it. I just concentrate on the content. Isn\’t that what the SEO crawlers do too? Free websites are so much more easy to build and to control.

I understand there are limitations, and that they have some ads and such on them, but does it really make a huge difference to my success if I use a free website service? I could really use a straight answer to this.

Thanks for the help,

—————

and the answer

I agree with your observations regarding search engines. Free websites seem not to be ranked well by the search engines. A couple of years ago searches would have pages from free sites e.g blogger.com in the first 10 results but I can’t remember the last time I saw that.
It has always been the case that search engines didn’t treat free sites (sites with free domain names) as seriously as standard domain names, but now they almost seem to completely ignore them.
Therefore if you are building a serious site and want to be found by the search engines go for your own domain name and paid hosting.
If there is functionality on the free site that you really need but can’t do yourself, you can build the paid site and use it to promote the free site.

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WordPress Contact 7 plugin

steve — Wed, 23 Jul 2008 18:57:58 +0000

I was looking at my site using Google webmaster tools and noticed that I had duplicate title tags on some of the pages of my consulting site. Here is what I saw

You should notice that the pages like contact have additional pages with ?wpcf7=json added on.

Further investigation showed that it was probably the contact 7 form plugin causing the problem and the only course of action was to deactivate and un- install the plugin.

I also (using webmaster tools) requested that the duplicate pages be removed and edited my robots.tx file to exclude pages with ?wpcf7=json in them.

here is the new one:

——————————–

# All robots will spider the domain

User-agent: *
Disallow: /category/
Disallow: /blog/page/

User-Agent: Googlebot
Disallow: /*/?
Allow: /

—————————————

I checked that it was ok using the robots.txt checker in the Google Webmaster tools.

Hopefully in a month or so it should sort itself out as Google drops the other pages.

If you are using the contact 7 plugin you may want to check your site. I moved to the cforms plugin.- http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/cforms/

Resources:

http://www.google.com/webmasters/tools
the-unusual-string-wpcf7json-will-it-hurt-my-seo

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