website Archives - Website Beginners Guide

Website Clean Up in Progress

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And yes, a lot of them are outdated, some are still relevant but could use some TLC.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 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!

How To do Keyword Research to Build a Keyword List

Filed Under: Featured

Doing Keyword research and Using the right tools to get the keyword information you need is essential if you want to build a successful website.

Keyword Research

Keywords are the most essential part of website creation, especially if you want your website to out perform your competitors.
And Since you are here reading this Blog, you must be looking for a way to do that and improve your Search Engine Rankings and user experience on your website.

Improving your website to get beter performance is in the first place a matter off creating a good website structure and for that, you need to understand two things:

Your website topic
What terms are used in search engines related to your topic

For the first part, you probably already know more than you think, so first thing to do is to get a piece of paper (or open a text editor) and start writing down all terms you can think of about and related to you website topic.

Example for the Topic Games: “Online Games, Download Games, Free Games, Video games, Adventure Games, Joystick, Game Computer, WII, Nintendo DS, Games Console”
Just to get you thinking and do some brainstorming before getting to do online research for the best search terms.

Now, before you take the next step, go to Google or Yahoo and do a search for the Keyword you are most likely to know a lot and want to focus on that term.
For “Games” you get 1,430,000,000 results on Google and 5,450,000,000 results on Yahoo.
For “Online Games” you get 111,000,000 results on Google and 2,690,000,000 results on Yahoo.
You can see that these are still very competitive keywords to target…
So lets take it one Little step further in Google and try two extra keywords “Free online kids game” and now you are down to 11,300,000 results.

So what do these numbers tell you? Well, first place, that there are a lot of Games sites :-)
But looking at it form an SEO Point of view, it will be a lot easier to rank for “Free Online kids game” than it will be for just “Games”.
It is time to Introduce the term Keyword Effectiveness Index (KEI) and this is a rank based on how popular the keyword is, and how much competition it has.
Now the competition factor we have seen above, the popularity factor, that you will read about later on.

Back to getting into the heavy hitters.. there is an the hidden secret in doing your keyword research and building your keyword list the right way:

[Read more…]

Free Search Engine Optimization Video’s and Website Analyses Tool

Filed Under: SEO

I have been following the Stompernet guys for some weeks now, as they are moving into the next Stompernet teachings.
Just have a look at Stompernet Going Natural 3 but you have to leave your name and email address to get to the real goodies.

Inside you will find some great videos from guys who really know there business.
Here are some of the video titles:

ClickFu & the LOST video
AdWords Triangulation Method
Keyword Research
Stomper Site Seer Introduction
Stomper Site Seer How To
Member Case studies
en some more…

But make sure you got some time on your hands, because most of the video's are about 30 Minutes and bring some great tips.
My Favorite is the one from Keyword research.

The Site Seer Tool
Looking at the tool that they provide, you can get even better keywords targeted to your website.
Using the tool is simpel, just fill in your website URL and two times your email address and the link to the full report is mailed to you.e report shows in one of the fields " How Google sees your site" and that will bring some great information.

It shows you the main keywords that Google thinks what your website is about, but you can click on these words to get even more related keywords.In my case it showed me that one site was not on the keywords I wanted to target, but another one was spot on.

Further looking at the first site I found what was wrong so I can improve it.Please be aware that you can only get 5 reports within 24 hours, so take your main sites first.
There is other software like IBP SEO that can do a website analysis like the Site Seer tool, but they compare your site to the top ten websites for you keyword.
And I must say it is a great tool that I frequently use.
But the above mentioned Site Seer report part shows you if your Website theme is setup right.

Stompernet
Now the new Stompernet is open, but still out of my reach with a Membership price of " Just" $797,00 per month, but it seems that it is well worth the money.

For now, I just have to settle for the free video´s and the tool, but that is really great offer to start with.
One more thing you have to look at once you have access to the free video´s is the way they have set this up over a short period of time, using the the AIDA formula to get people to want to sign up before the deal was on-line.
They get your Attention with the first video, build Interest with the full range of following video's, got you to Desire for more with the tool, and set you up for the Action to sign up for the full package…

The video's are really master pieces of soft selling the deal, something to keep in mind for your next product launch.

How to Optimize your Joomla site with Keywords

Filed Under: Joomla Seo

If you have read several topics on Search Engine Optimization, you will find that the term “Keywords” is used to indicate several different items of SEO.

Like:

Metatag keywords
Search keywords
Targeted keywords

And the latter is what I am going to give you some extra inside information on, and it will show you how easy it is if you really want to boost your sites ranking for your mayor keyword that you are targetting.

Optimizing your site structure

First things first… do your keyword research and find the topics related to your website main topic.

Then reorganize your site structure to reflect that relations.

So if you would create a website about, well lets say eheh… Joomla! then you know it will be very difficult to rank for the search term Joomla! itself.
But there are a lot of keywords related to Joomla, like Templates, Components, Modules, Plugins, Mambots.
See how these terms kan create a cluster of keywords?

Here is an image of elliance infographics that shows it all:

keyword clustering for better rankings and SEO

And the best part is… Joomla will actually force you in to structure it the right way, if you do you keywords research!

You see, where may people think of the rigid structure of Joomla for placing content is a bad thing, it is actually a great thing for SEO.
In Joomla you have to set up a structure in Section, Categories and Items which is pretty simple as you can read on Understanding the Joomla structure

But clustering you keywords in categories within the a section is the best keyword cluster you can create!

In a more diffecult term this is called LSI, Latent Semantical Indexing which is covered in Joomla and LSI for SEO

So if you really want your site to rock in the search engines, get your keywords together, create categories for them and start writing your content items accordingly…

Oh, one more thing… if you are going to restructure you Joomla site, make sure you 301 redirect your old URLs to the new ones!

Placing your Keywords in Joomla!

To get your keywords into your Joomla! articles you need to open the Metatags section on the left of you article writing screen:

Placing Joomla Keywords

You will most likely see a screen with lesser options, as this screen is taken from a website that allready has the Joomlatwork.com SEF Patch installed, which I highly recommend.

You will have a field called Meta Tag Keywords and that is where you place your keywords. Make sure those keywords are also in the text of the article and keep them limited to a maximum of 10.
Also be aware the Google doesn't use these Meta keywords to index your pages but other search engines still use them.

There is a place for Keywords in your Global configuration screen, my advice… don't use that option…

Global Configuration Metadata Settings
Joomla! will use that data on every article where you don't use the Meta Data fields in your articles and thus giving the search engines the same values over and over again.

You can check if this happens with your website by searching Google with the term “site:www.example.com” ( without the ” ” and replace example.com with your own domain name)

Focus for Search Engine Results

Filed Under: SEO

If you are building a blog or a website, you need to focus on the topic of your online adventures.

Why? because search engines love websites and blogs that have only one or two topics, if there are more than two, they need to be related to the main subject.
The relevance of the site that is focused on just one topic is much easier to classify for them.
If you have pages or blog entries and categories that are “all over the place” you will have a hard time trying to get into top search results.

If however you are building a site that is highly focused on just one topic, it becomes a lot easier…

If you read How search engine help finding keywords then you have noticed that the keywords suggested are allmost always “on topic”.

How to Build a Theme based site

A theme based website means that you can have several “silos” where you can put the content.

Lets take the example of the Music site again.
If you are trying to build a website that is about music in general, you will find your self in a challenging competition with a large number of websites:
From Ask.com Showing 1 -10 of 548,040,000
From Google.com Results 1 – 10 of about 1,110,000,000 for music
From Yahoo 1-10 of 2,660,000,000 formusic

So get realistic and focus on a more specifick group to target (find your “niche”) and bring them relevant information.
A website with just information about Anastacia is not going to do it as well, as Anastacia herself can do that a lot better and most probaly a Big fan will have something similar.

But if you want to build a site about female singer-songwriters, now that could be a lot easier.
Doing the search on google for the term “female singer-songwriters” give you about 503.000 results.

But how many people will be searching on that term? I guess its not going to bring you masses of visitors to your site…

So how can this term help you?
It's not that difficult, you just have to use your imagination.
Check the results that came up like the one from Amazon “best female singer-songwriters”

On that page you will find a nice selection of artists like:

Jewel

Fiona Apple

Alanis Morissette

Sinead O'Connor

and more

And looking at other related singers on the term Anastacia like Pink, Gloria Estafan, Beyonce, Shakira, Joss Stone and Natasha Bedingsfield.

So if you would build a website with information on those realted artists, you are more likely to score on the individual keywords from those female singers.
Because they are all related and the search engines will look for information that has a relation to the topic of your site.

So you could build a site with silos like Biographys, Lyrics, Music CD's and Music Videos.

A more simple example

Lets say you want to build a website about Joomla, what might be the related keywords?

Joomla CMS
Joomla Templates
Joomla Components
Joomla Modules
Joomla Plugins
Joomla Books… the list goes on…

Next is to find the search volume for each item so you would know where to focus first if your start building the site.
But you already know how to do that…

Does building a themebased website work? Yes!
How do I now?
I just recently started building a Dutch website and I had only the Theme based structure setup, so there was no content yet on the pages…
But the site is already ranking in the first 10 results of about 1.860.000 hits with a two word search term I was targetting.
And again, there was no content on the pages, just the Themebased menu structure!

Choose Your Administrator Control Panel

Filed Under: Open Source CMS

I work on different Open Source Content Management Systems, and I really do like the Systems mentioned here…

But when it comes to the Administration panels there is a lot of difference:

The Joomla CPanel:

The Joomla Administrators Panel

The WordPress Administrator Panel:

The WordPress Administrator Panel

The Typo3 Administrator Panel:

The Typo3 Administrator Panel

And The Drupal Administrator Panel:

The Drupal Administrator Panel

O, No, that is not the Right one..
So again The Drupal Administrator Panel:

The Other Drupal Administrator Panel

I Guess You see the point I am trying to make…
Drupal is the Only system that standard changes the Administrator Theme to Match you Site Theme.

And yes, I know you can choose a standard Administrator Theme Panel that does not change with the Site Theme.

But what I really like about Joomla, WordPress en Typo3 is the consistency (not always logical) of the Administrator and Publishers website workplace.
Once you get it, you always know where to find the stuff you need to change.

With Drupal I am always searching, trying to find where that function was, how to put content in, how to change the Meta-descriptions etc…
For the True Drupal adapt, this might seem strange, but what I really would like is a standard Control Panel in Drupal!

A Standard Drupal Controle Panel

It doesn't need to have icons, WordPress doesn't have icons, but please put the stuff on the same place every time..
Give it a standard panel that doesn't change with the Website Theme!

Why? Because I think it would be better for managing the site from the back-end.
It would be easier to write manuals for webmasters en that in return will make it easier for newbies to work with Drupal.

Drupal is a great Framework for Building Robust websites, so promote it where ever you can, but please give us a Workplace that always looks the same, no choices, just a plain Website Control Panel

What is the right term? optimisation, optimization, optimalization or optimalisation

Filed Under: Joomla Optimization, Joomla Seo, Search Engines

I was at a conference a few days ago, and as a follow-up you could visit a website with the presentations in a pdf format.
For me it is a lot easier to handle digital formats to store, than paperwork, so I went and downloaded them.

But as I was reading one of them concerning SEO, I read a definition of SEO that stated it means “Search Engine Optimalisation”
This one was new to me……..
The speaker is a well informed Search Engine Optimizer him self and is very good at it.
But now he got me more then a little curious.

What is the right term for what a Search Engine Optimizer does?

I did some soul searching but in the end I did run some Google queries. [Read more…]