I noticed the other day, that the google rank for linickx.com has dropped from a respectable 4, to a pitiful 0 !

The reason for the drop is obvious, November & December have been busy real work months for me, and I’ve not been able to post much online.. no art, no php, no comments, nothing ! Now photomatt has recently blogged about the disconnect between productive good techies and people who have time to blog, so I won’t go into it here; I will just say that I agree, and I think my blog reflects that. What I didn’t realise about my google rank is that the age of your links contributes to your overall PR. So although all those other links to linickx.com still exist on the web they’re getting older so they must not count as much; of course this is speculation, google keep to themselves how their ranking is made up, but it’s the only thing that’s changed.

Anyway to get back on the map I thought I’d better take a look at these SEO posts I’ve been seeing about the place (which I guess this is yet another of ! )

1st step - site maps !
Now I already had a sitemap, powered by Arne Brachhold’s wordpress plug in , but it doesn’t hurt to check it’s working every now & again; to do this I logged into google sitemaps and checked out the reports, basically it’ll tell you if there have been any errors, remembers errors mean google can’t view the page properly, which in turn effects it’s PR. I had a couple (4) of “404 Not founds”, so I went through my posts and fixed them.

Validate your pages !
Search engines can’t see your site, they can only read the html code, and if that’s wrong, then so will the index and PR be. I’d gotten out of the habit of checking pages, you’ll notice at the bottom of my theme is a link to say this site is valid, it’s really important that after posting you click this to make sure it works; if it doesn’t, well all is lost before you start.

Page & Post titles
All the articles talk about setting your page titles correctly, I’d noticed ages ago that anaylitics showed the same title for stuff but I’d never gotten round to looking at it. It turns out I’d made a “school boy error” on my custom theme, and the <title> tag within my html didn’t grab the post title from wordpress - DOH ! It was eaily fixed by adding <?php the_title(); ?> into header.php. If you didn’t write your theme there is a plugin that can do it for you…. sadly neither of these fix the titles for my custom scripts, so I guess I’ll have to stick that back on the to-do list !

Meta Tags
“Back in the day” meta tags where the way serach engines classified your site, but abuse of the keywords tag, by repeating words to improve PR, means that they’re not as important as they used to be. Today though, I’m on the search engine offensive apart from spam I’m willing to try anything. This wordpress plugin does the job for you. The advantage of using the plugin, rather than setting them in my theme, means that the description can be dynamially added based on the post, rather than having the same description for all pages, the more words that people search for that hit me, the better !

Related Posts
Search engines need a way to weave through your site, in the past I’ve relied on my web site map (not the same as sitemap.xml) to do the job, but it appears that this is not enough, so I went for the related entries wordpress plugin, the good thing about the latest version is that the formatting can be done within the wordpress admin interface. (The reason this is good, as it means minimal changes to my theme php, which is when problems occur.)

Share This !
At the beginning of what is becoming a marathon post, I talked about my PR being related to incoming links (i.e. links to linickx.com). In the past I’ve just had a small “Bookmark Page” link on each post, this link would then submit the page to del.icio.us for people to share, well alex king has written a share this plugin to expand the idea, but for any service. I like the idea alot, now all I need to do is to find a way to submit my posts to all the services automagically.

Nothing to do with SEO
The final change I’ve made was to install a snap plugin, now this will have no effect on my PR, but it is quite cool, what it does is add a little floating window preview any external links, allowing readers to take a glimpse of what they’re clicking on before they actually click. To be honest, I’ve not yest decided if this is a good thing or annoying, but would be cool is if it could be plugged into mcafee site advisor so that users could see if it’s a safe link before clicking it.

Fingers crossed this will have an impact, but one thing is for sure, it won’t hurt !

This entry was posted on Wednesday, 17th January, 2007 at 7:59 pm and is filed under Blog, PHP. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.