Website Beginners Guide

Learn How to Start Your Own Internet Site & More

Website Clean Up in Progress

Filed Under: SEO, WordPress

I like Yoast.com, not only for the great WordPress SEO plugin, but also the blog. On that blog several people write new articles and this last one, from Joost de Valk himself, on website maintenance was not only a great read, but a real eye-opener for me.

Since I merged some blogs I had into this site you did not see much new articles. The site's ranking and number of visitors declined as well as a result of that lack of activity.

Now I am taking Yoast's advice to do some Website Maintenance and Clean Up of Old Posts. When I now look back at the articles on this site I see that the oldest articles are way back from 2006.

And yes, a lot of them are outdated, some are still relevant but could use some TLC. So now I have to decide if I just will delete them, if I will merge some of them into a bigger article or update them with the latest knowledge. Of course I also need to decided which ones I want to redirect after the deletion or not.

To see what are the most visited pages and articles you can go into Google Webmaster tools and Google analytic's, if you have implemented that. So that will be a great help during the clean up process.

Those most visited pages will most certainly stay, but probably need to be updated.

Others really are going to be tossed as they no longer are relevant like news on the release version of Joomla! prior to Joomla! 2.5.x and 3.x.

Website Clean Up

Website Clean Up Results Impact on SEO

For me the biggest challenge of this clean-up is to make sure the result that this site clean up will improve for the benefit of the visitors. They will, hopefully, get better info to solve their problems and the site will contain more relevant up-to-date information.

As for myself, it will be a mirror to check my own progress over the years, both in knowledge as well as in writing English.

What is the biggest risk factor as it comes to SEO? I don't know yet, it's a challenge. I will most redirect the old url's for post that will be merged, but I will have some articles that I will simply delete.

By deleting them the site gets smaller, but as the other articles will become more relevant. Hopefully that will give more authority to the site  so ranking will improve and visitor numbers will grow.

Editorial Calender & Schedule Plugin

One other thing I implement on this site is an Editorial Calender plugin. You can simply install it and check on your post schedule in a visual overview.

For me its a great way to schedule new posts, but also set a posting schedule that can be maintained much easier. You can make short notes and some title suggestions on ideas and set the base for any articles you want to write. Those short notes will be saved as Draft articles.

You can see in your schedule overview when it needs to be done and you can write ahead and release them automatically using WordPress planning option.

Need an article that was already written but would suite better after another planned article? Just drag it to when you want to have it published and plan it. But you can only do the later for posts that are not yet published.

Below you can learn more on this great productivity tool.

So keep an eye out for the changes and new posts.

In a month or so I will write an article on the results of this website clean up from an SEO perspective.

And yes, that article is already scheduled so I can write it during the next month as I keep an eye on this sites progress.

How to Start A WordPress Website Consolidation Project

Filed Under: WordPress

I created lots of websites during the past twelve years working with Joomla and WordPress.

The problem was that I not only created websites for clients but also for myself leaving me with a whole lot of sites to manage.

So this year I wanted to scale down on the number of sites to manage by consolidating different sites into one big site. This is that new website: https://www.websitebeginnersguide.com

Which Sites to Consolidate?

Taking that decision is one thing, getting into action is something completely different.

First off all I needed to determine which sites would be good candidates to move to a different domain and if it was possible to do so with a minimal loss in Google rankings.

When the whole project is done, it should even improve on the rankings and the number of visitors, creating a website that is bigger than the sum of its parts.

Criteria to take into account:

  • Website topic should match the purpose of the new domain
  • Permalinks structure should also be the same to be able to do a 301 redirect form the old website
  • Export and import of data should be easily doable
  • Number of RSS feed subscribers

For me that meant that the first sites to consolidate where:

  • www.herbertvandinther.com
  • www.pathosseoblog.com
  • Others to follow

Setting the First Steps

First off all I needed to setup the new website with the same CMS, in this case WordPress.

Decide on the Layout / design of the site. I now use Genesis with the News Pro theme from StudioPress. Not cheap, even for a premium theme, but well worth every dollar I spend on it.

After WordPress basic installation was done, I checked the common plugin usage in both sites and make sure the permalinks settings were identical.

The main reason for this was that it is a lot easier to do a complete site redirect than creating a lot of single 301 redirect rules per site.

The actual moves were done by creating a WordPress export file from the old sites and import them into the new one. If you want to do the same, make sure you check the box to import the attachments as well, that saves time and prevents some image link problems.

Search and Replace Old stuff and General Housekeeping

Some of the things I did after the migrations

  • Using this plugin to change the URLs of the images and old links form http://pathosseoblog.com/ with the correct new uploads path.
  • Check Old comments to see if there is nothing left that point to the migrated domains.
  • Used Ajax Thumbnail Rebuild for resizing the images for use on archives and layout options.
  • Update the Contact form
  • Set SEO Options -> I was not sure on using a Plugin or the Genesis SEO Theme settings. I decided to go the Genesis SEO options to see if that would work out better than WordPress SEO. Update: WordPress SEO by Yoast is now the main SEO function for this site.
  • Installed the Google sitemap.xml plugin to get the standard xml file to put into my Webmaster Tools account. Update: Sitemap.xml is now handled by WordPress SEO Plugin.
  • Deleted the two other site entries in Webmaster tools. You could do better to just inform Google webmaster tools that the site has moved.
  • Set up a new Subscribe widget
  • Cleaned out old and duplicate post categories

Other this to look out for in the coming weeks:

  • Check the error logs for 404 errors that need to be addressed
  • Check Stats and Tools to find other problems that might occur
  • Decide what other domain could be consolidation candidates
  • Write new articles and guides especially for WordPress and Joomla Beginners
  • Regain focus and have fun!

Website Beginners Guide Base

Google Updates in 2012 With the Biggest Impact

Filed Under: SEO

Looking back  at 2012 there are a few Google updates that had more impact on website rankings and thus on traffic then just a small Panda update.

Top Heavy

In January we got the original page layout algorithm change that targeted websites that had to many ad-space above the fold.  A lot of Made for Adsense sites got hit as they focus on quick wins sending people away from the site into adsense clicks. This was the first so called Top Heavy update.

Penguin Update

In April Penguin was rolled out that brought a big hit on many site rankings.  The basic idea was to get quality content sites higher in the rankings and demotion of SEO. Or like Matt Cutts stated in the article below:

We want people doing white hat search engine optimization (or even no search engine optimization at all) to be free to focus on creating amazing, compelling web sites.

http://insidesearch.blogspot.nl/2012/04/another-step-to-reward-high-quality.html.

Penguin was heavily discussed as real good quality websites that had been around for years serving high quality content to their visitors got dropped as well.

EMD & Panda Update

End of September there was another big impact update, this time focused on Exact Match Domains. This update was to clear out spam websites which rankings were based on the fact that they used keyword rich domain names for exact matches on popular search terms.

The EMD update was targeted towards low quality sites, but this time also some very good content sites were hit as well.

The Panda update that was rolled out at almost the same time as the EMD change so its hard to distinguish your ranking update between those two if you have a keyword rich domain.

Panda's Intend

The Panda update was / is intended to give searchers better high quality content to provide answers on their search. Google wants you to follow their Quality Guidelines and create easy to read content written for users, not for search engines.

These updates mentioned above have made a big impact on search with Google this year. Last year it was Panda, but that did not hit my websites as hard as Penguin did.

Panda Eating

Did Panda eat your rankings and traffic?
Image from: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_panda

Google Ranking Recovering

Recovering from this years updates is taking hard work and a some real hard thinking about what to improve.

In the past creating a site with a clear hierarchy and text links for navigation could bring you a long way. Setup correctly you could get good rankings within a couple of weeks / months.

Now you have to get more updates in, work hard on Google+ and other social media and create more user centered high quality content on your site.

It's a new era in search engine optimization for Google and other search engines will follow. I wonder what 2013 will bring us. Certainly more white hat SEO as several back hat tactics got busted this year.

And you, what do you think about these major algo changes? Good or bad for SEO consultants? And how about website owners?

Start Blogging on SEO and More…

Filed Under: SEO

It has been 1 year, 7 months and 25 days since my last post on this blog…

During that time I did a lot of work on client websites and setting up websites to earn money as an affiliate. From the later I learned the most on how search engine optimization has changed in that timespan.

In The Netherlands where I live Google has a market share of almost 99% so you can imagine that SEO here is heavily focused on how to get top rankings in Google.

With the Google Panda update (yes, it hit the Netherlands too) a lot of Affiliate sites dropped in rankings and in visitor numbers. Other large content websites learned from other countries where Panda was rolled out before and prepared for the upcoming algo chance.

Basically the quality of the content and being user friendly has gained importance. Again you see that thinking from a user perspective works best and if you focus on ROI and conversion you have the best strategy.

Google+ and Other Social Networks

Social networking is the big hype in search engine optimization and everybody is focused on scoring well on sites like Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter and others.

Google+ is growing fast and I must admit that I just recently started to use it. That is the drawback that I am in the Netherlands, I have to wait for it to open up by Google…

Google takes social networks into account for their rankings, so if you have a lot of followers on Twitter it will improve your status.

But… what I see now with a increasing number of people around me is that they move away from social networks. People seem to have lost the urge to share what they think and are more and more concerned about their privacy.

If you look at the biggest social networking site in Holland which is hyves.nl you see that in the last six months they lost 18% of their traffic.

Hyves Traffic Drop

Source Alexa.com

Several of those visitors are now on Facebook getting connected to friends. Most of those Hyves users that are now on Facebook are youngsters who use a Blackberry and WhatsApp to keep up with their social network.

Now my questions to you is: Do you see the same behavior in your off-line social networks?

Is it a general decline that will eventually hit all of those sites, or is it related to the economic recession? Could that mean that people will share good news, but not the bad things that happen in their life…

And if it is a general decline, what would that mean for search engine optimization?

I do foresee that a lot of people are going to reduce their use of Twitter and Facebook updates, mainly to reduce the current information overload brought onto them by those social networks…

P.s. The site is now on another theme based on the Genesis WordPress Theme Framework by StudioPress to show my renewed focus on SEO and its future. I hope you like it.

No. 1 on Google and No Clicks

Filed Under: SEO, WordPress

In the last few months I have been moving some websites from subdomains to new domains and sometimes changing there apperance.
Here is what happened on one of them…

The site was number One on Google for a long tail keywords phrase and it site was getting some nice traffic from this term.

After the move from its sub-domain life and going into its own domain I changed the template to a more suitable one and optimized the site to get more traffic.

One thing I did was the craft the Home page title so it would get even more traffic and it worked out nicely. The new theme was search engine optimized and I did not feel like I needed to do anything about it…

As I said, the site had a No. 1 position on Google, but after I wrote a new post on this site this happened to the traffic.

Title Problem Effect

Click to enlarge

Once I noticed the drop in traffic I checked Google and saw the site was still No. 1 but not with the title of the homepage anymore.

The title shown by Google was the title of the last post and no longer this traffic attracting title of the Homepage!
This title was not really on topic of the search term so nobody clicked on it to check out the site!

I checked the theme and changed the header option to make sure I got the Homepage title back into place.

Bringing it Back on Track

So everything is technically set back to how it should be, and now it was time to get Google's spider to re-index the site so the homepage title was back where it belonged.

Writing a new post that to update the site did the trick and the site was back in a few days.

All looked good, but a day later there was again this drop in traffic. Now I can explain the first drop, then the recovery but not the second drop.

The only thing I can think of was the short time upgrade followed by something Google might do like switching back for some time serving search engine cached indexes if they upgrade the primary index.
If you have another explanation, I would love to here it!

After this initial drop and kick back the site is now doing well, thank you for asking.
It is still growing in traffic.

Conclusion: Keep track of your site after you do a mayor upgrade like changing themes or even system upgrades.
The thing you need to watch closely is that the so carefully crafted title of you homepage is still the same so it will keep getting you the traffic. Especially it you have the No. 1 position on Google that you wanted to get.

It’s Done… The Joomla 1.5 SEO Book is out Now!

Filed Under: Joomla, Joomla Seo, SEO

For those who have missed my writings, this is why you did not see much blogging going on here over the last 10 months…

Joomla 1.5 SEO Book

As it is just released Packt is promoting the Book with a special discount that will expire on the 24th of Oct 2009.

So get your copy NOW with the special discount at http://www.packtpub.com/article/exclusive-discount-offer-joomla-seo before it expires.

And I promise I will start blogging about SEO again on a regular base :-)

Need more info on what you can find in my book, check out http://www.packtpub.com/joomla-1-5-search-engine-optimization-seo/book

I hope you will enjoy reading it as much as I did writing it.

P.s. A big Thank YOU to all the people at Packt Publishing that have worked with my on the creation of this book!

Why Joomla, WordPress and Drupal all Fail at Search Engine Optimization

Filed Under: SEO

Yes, that is right, they all fail at Search Engine Optimization…

I have been reading several new posts about how well WordPress is doing SEO compared to Joomla! and how good Drupal is in SEO compared to WordPress and….well, you get the general idea.

it seems that every time people are defending their choice to use a certian Content management system. Which is a good thing, you can show people the reasons why you love the system(s) that you use.

We all do, we all like the system of our choice, whether it is WordPress, Joomla!, Drupal, Modx, Typo3, etc,etc. They are all great open source content management systems.

The Big Three, WordPress, Joomla! and Drupal.

I have written before how Search Engine Friendly WordPress, Joomla! and Drupal can be, but they don't do SEO…, YOU do SEO…

That is right, they don't do anything else then giving you the tools to get your website ready for higher rankings and better performance in the search engines!

You are the deciding factor in how well search engine optimization is done. You and the webmaster and content writers of your website.

None of the content management systems will come up to you and say, here is a great keyword rich title for your post. None of them will provide you with the keyword rich quality content that attracts visitors and back-links.

That is all up to you.

None of these content management systems will give you the right structure and internal linking ideas for the content of your site based on relevant keywords and none of them will do that keyword research for you.

They are just what they say the are, content management systems. You can use them for building websites, for building blogs, for building community's, but they still remain content management systems.

They are the engines that drive your website and/or Blog, but you have to work with them to get a really search engine optimized website.

The deciding factor for great search engine optimization

It is up to you to get the most out of the system of your choice and you will see that you can do it!

Either with WordPress, Joomla! or Drupal, or any other system, you have the knowledge and the ideas to get better rankings for you site.

You know your system of choice and you are the engineer that knows how to fire up that engine to drive it up to the best possible spot in the search engine results pages!

So don't blame or praise a website building engine for getting search engine optimization done right, praise yourself for doing a job well done.

Lost and Regained Traffic from Google, Yahoo and Bing the Easy Way

Filed Under: Optimization, Search Engines, SEO

Above is a little picture I wanted to show you.

For those among you who are used to looking at website traffic graphics you see that something strange has happened here…

You see, the picture above is from one of my websites and shows clearly what the impact was of the following story.

I made a mistake, a simple one but with large consequences as you can see.
Because of this mistake traffic for this site almost went done to zero.
But if it had gone down to zero it would have been clear what happed right from the start, but it did not, I “just” lost traffic from the mayor three search engines.

What happened?

In simple terms: the site was hacked via  a remote inclusion attack from several forum like websites, one of them was successful.
There was just one file affected but one of the most important ones, the .htaccess file.
There were four lines of code injected at the bottom to the file:

RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /
RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} (Googlebot|Slurp|msnbot)
RewriteRule ^ http://example.com/ [R=301,L]three - code used

The code in line three redirects those search engine robots too the site in line four (which I changed, the real site got enough traffic from me).

How was this possible? Simple, because I forgot to reset the security on .htaccess after doing some previous test.
The file was still set to 707 = also public write access, and yes its security is set back to the right access now.

How to find out your site is hacked

As I said before if the traffic had gone to zero you most probably would have checked your site and see a defacing of the site itself of some kind. The site would not work the way you would expect it to.

In this case the only problem I could see was that the traffic dropped hard in the statistics.
Upon looking further into the details I checked the ranking of previous Google search terms the site was ranking for.

I found that all the top 10 ranking pages ware gone! All my efforts to rank for those keywords were lost.

So I logged into Google webmaster to check if there was something horribly wrong with the site and the site had received some kind of penalty.

And yes there were errors with the URLs in the sitemap.xml, errors about unreachable URLs.
So I checked the files on the site that where modified just before the drop, and there was the .htaccess file with the above mentioned code.

Getting back into Google

After cleaning up the mess and setting the security right I realized the impact of these few lines.

All three search engine robots had gotten notice that the pages where permanently moved to another domain! which is not true, but they don't know that.

Checks on site: reference in Google, Yahoo and MSN showed that the domain was still in Yahoo and MSN Indexes, but had no entry in the Google Index anymore.

So it was time to send a reconsideration request to Google telling them what happened, what had been done to resolve the problem and what steps where taken too prevent it from happening again.

After that, you can only wait and wait…, don't expect an email form Google, just an automatically generated message in your Webmaster control center that they will look into the matter.

After a few days traffic started to build again from Google and Yahoo as well as MSN (Live.com) so you can conclude that Google really looks and acts upon your requests.

Hard Lessons learned

Now for the fun part of this episode, the lessons learned
First lesson: make sure to secure your cms installation and critical files.

Some tips:
– change passwords on a regular basis (use keepass if you have a lot off passwords to remember)
– secure your admin directory or files with .htaccess passwords, most of the hosting companies have this option in their cpanel
– update your system as soon as a new version comes out.

Check your stats once a day, or a least every few days for strange things happening, since this could have taken me a long time to get back if it wasn't for those early warning signs.

As a personal note: I need to get more incoming links from non-search engines to diversify my traffic sources :-)

What I realized after my traffic was back to its old level was that Google is really fast in acting on 301 redirects and changes in their index.
They update their index with a higher frequency than Yahoo and Live, and they really act fast on those re-inclusion request as well.

A hack like this before your start your SEO work for organic ranking would also mean that all your efforts will have no effect… so if a cusomers is really having trouble to get his or.her site into the search engines, check the .htaccess file!

If you have your own horror stories like this one, please share them in the comments and let us learn from those stories as well.

Moving from Feedburner to Google Feeds and Why?

Filed Under: Blogging, Search Engine

If you are running your feeds through Feedburner, you should know that Google bought that service in 2007.
Now they are making the next step, moving the feeds from Feedburner.com to feeds.google.com.

And you have to follow… and you should do it before the end of February 2009.
How? well there is nice instruction written by Michel Martin from Pro Blog Design on How to Move from Feedburner to Google

I just moved my Feeds over to my Google account and it is really easy and you cannot !! go back!

The analytics are nice, although I cannot click on the time line anymore to go to the statistics of my readers, you now have to use a drop-down menu to choose that date.
But you can see the mail addresses of the people who subscribed via the Feedburner email option.

So that  is nice, there are however also a few drawbacks…

Even with the Smart-feed options active, you now just get a limited number of options if you want to subscribe to my feed:

Feedburner to Google losing smartfeed

So it seems Google is now cashing in on the Feedburner service and using it to promote their own services and adverts.

Why the move from Feedburner to Google feeds?

Here are some ideas that are on my mind that might be the reasons for Google to force this move upon us Feedburner users:

  • Getting the feed data into the central Google index would mean easier and faster integration into the search results pages (well that would be nice:-))
  • Monetizing the feeds by adding an easy way to integrate adsense adverts (lets see if that works?)
  • Getting more grip on spammers that use a lot of feeds via Feedburner to spam the search index
  • Promoting their own feed reader instead of giving people the choice of their favorite feed reader service
  • Promoting the use of Google personal page to integrate feeds instead of offering the option to using services like Netvibes
  • Taking away the second email subscription option and instead driving people to wards Google mail.

All these reasons will have a large impact on some of the services and companies that where integrated or build on the Feedburner service…

Can you think of any other evil and non-evil reasons, please post them in the comments.
I would love to read your ideas on the reasons for this move.

Ranking on Google is going to change in 2009

Filed Under: Search Engine, SEO

If you keep an eye on things that are happening on Google, you will find some interesting things going on at this moment.

Ranking and Google Changes

First I want to point you to two video's from webpronews.com, the first one is an interview with Bruce Clay about this presentation Ranking is Dead where is looks at how Universal search is going to effect your Search Engine Page results.

The other one is at the same site, but now an interview with Matt Cutts on some of the Changes at Google were he talks about some of the things that Bruce Clay pointed out.

From both interviews you can see that Universal Search is going to target your search result pages based on previous searches and Local Search results based on IP address.
The latter is af course already in place where Google will use IP country ranges to lead you to other Data Centers and gives local and country language specific results.

Universal search is mostly referred to as showing results based on your previous searches , but this time even if you are not logged into your Google mail account!
That might scare some privacy concerned people… take into account that Google, Live and Yahoo already have a lot of information on your search history, be it via cookies, or via your DSL Provider that gives you a nice IP address.
That IP address wil stay the same for a loooong time,which is great! For Search Engines that is…

Actually listening to Bruce Clay I find a lot of things he is predicting for 2009 are already in place, it is just the flick of a switch for Google to turn them on.

Searchwiki

One other new thing you might have seen if you are logged into your Google account and you do searches is the new Searchwiki function.

Next to each Title in the result-page there are two little icons, one for UP and one for Delete, well the last one is to actually remove that result form your own search page.
So now you can get those old or not relevant results out of your own search results, but how will this effect the total results in the long run?

I can imagine Google using those results of up and delete actions to improve results in general.
If you look at large enough numbers of people "voting" on search results you could clean up the total results and make them even more relevant and up-to-date as they are now.

Afraid of your competition "voting" your site out of the results? Don't worry, as you heard before ranking is dead anyway.
But in fact I guess Google will have some algorithm in place that will show that people are trying to play the system.

The effects on SEO

Both Bruce and Matt mentioned it in their interview, as smart SEO is looking no longer at Search Page results rankings but at Conversion and is deep into analyzing his server logs.

A smart SEO is already working on Blogs, News, Images and Video to keep up with the new upcoming personalized search results and to provide your visitors with the quality content they are looking for.

But one thing I am really looking forward too is that importance of links to your site is going to be downgraded and real quality content is getting a more prominent place in the results pages.
This time driven by your own visitors that don't have spam sites but are really liking your content. 

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