SEO, Social Media and General Web Designs Stuffs
So I was doing a search for a response I posted on this blog to a Search Engine Watch article.
When I was logged in to my Google account in Chrome, my article was #1. When I was not logged in and using Firefox, I was #8.
Just another example of how using SERP ranking as a success metric is becoming more and more wishy-washy.
Ok. I still haven’t gotten the sitemap up yet. I’m waiting for some template changes from one of the other guys.
However, I did a little tweaking with the title tags. Here’s what I put in:
<?php if (is_home()) { ?>
<title><?php bloginfo(‘name’); ?> | (Lot’s o’ keywords here)</title>
<? } else {?>
<title><?php wp_title(); ?> | <?php bloginfo(‘name’); ?></title>
<? } ?>
Hopefully this will help as well.
Since WordPress doesn’t provide a Robots.txt file with the standard implementation. I needed to find one. I looked around and the version over at www.askapache.com seems to be working well for a lot of people.
I uploaded it yesterday..
One more piece of the puzzle (i really should compile all of these into one post but it’s been done so well here)…
Having “related links” at the end of an article is a good way to create interlinking to older content. It’s SEO goodness, people. And, of course, there’s a plug-in out there. I found one that’s absolutely super-duper. It’s at Contextual Related Links link.
This one’s as easy as pie to get up and running. You just need to tweak a couple of things.
1) As mentioned in their site, change the related.php function related() file to what they have in this file. (i tried pasting the code but the formatting got all janked and I didn’t have the patience to fix it. Use the link, please.)
2) Add the following php snippet to your single.php or other article file where you want the links to appear.
if(function_exists(‘related’)) related($post->ID);
If you don’t add this code, the links will only appear at the end of the comments section. You probably won’t want them there.
Thanks again, www.weblogtools.com!!! This was the easiest implementation I’ve had yet.
Ok. So I tried using the ddsitemapgen and it blew up the posting rating system that one of the other guys had set up.
On to Plan B…
This guy had another idea. It involved installing the phpexec and the wp_Catgegory_post plugins. I won’t totally go into the rest of the steps. You can follow the “another idea” link. Why am I telling all this if someone else already had it worked out? Well, because it didn’t work for me.
I ended up installing the exec_php plugin, which has great documentation BTW. This one worked and you don’t need to put tags around everything.
Couple of IMPORTANT things to remember…
Don’t forget that you have to turn off the WYSIWIG and balanced tagging for your profile. If you don’t WordPress will, which is VERY irritating, keep changing your code and stripping out the php tags.
I just have a little more formatting to do and I’ll be ready to put up the new sitemap. Bye for now!
Today, I updated the .htaccess file to redirect everything to the same style URLs. For example, there were instances of paths ending in a “/” and some where they were not. This should tighten up the links that Google is picking up to where there aren’t any duplicates. Here’s the basic code:
Options +Indexes
Options +FollowSymLinks
RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^myblog\.com
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.myblog.com/$1 [R=permanent,L]
RewriteBase /
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} !(.*)/$
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.myblog.com/$1/ [L,R=301]
Then, I used the DDSiteMapGen plugin to create the sitemap. Actually, the plugin was already installed. They just didn’t have the link to the actual sitemap anywhere in the site. This should help the spiders pick up any URLs that they may have missed.
I’ll keep you posted!
(UPDATE: forgot to mention… thanks to http://www.jimwestergren.com/wordpress-users-sharpen-your-urls-with-google/ for the code)