SWFObject Google Crawl Thingy

Hey everyone... Sorry the posts are so few and far between.

According to Google and beu blog, Google is supposed to be able to execute the SWFObject methdod of embedding Flash files onto a page. We're about to jump into the water ourselves. 

One of the sites I'm working on is going to implement its media viewer using SWFObject.

I'll definitely keep you posted on this one. I'm trusting that Google has their ducks in a row here. The update to their algorithm should have gone out around July 2008.

If anyone has any suggestions, I'm all ears.

Cheatsheet!

Who doesn't love cheatsheets?

I'm on the Aarron Walter kick these days and I recommended his book "Building Findable Websites" to a co-worker. He found this cheatsheet and now I'm recommending it to you.

Technically, this how good SEO is supposed to work. Put out good content and people will link to your stuff... just like I'm doing. Here's the URL

http://aarronwalter.com/wp-content/uploads/2008/07/findability-strategy-cheatsheet.pdf

I can read!

Hey everyone.

I'm reading a book right now called "Building Findable Websites" by Aarron Walter. The copywrite is 2008 so i figured it was fairly up-to-date.

I'm about halfway through and it's pretty good. A little too Apache oriented but still pretty darned good.

Except...

Repeatedly, he mentions a SEO technique for image replacement using CSS where the text is aligned left like -9999px and a background image is used on the visible portion of the screen.

Seems pretty shady to me and I'm surprised it even gets mentioned in the book. I have to ask "why" though.

Is it because the CSS isn't inline and Google won't know about the external stylesheet? I think Google's has to have figured this out and considers it a form of cloaking.

If anyone has any thoughts, I'd love to hear about it.

Answer: Dynamic .aspx sitemaps

According to the responses I received on the Google Webmaster Forums, it looks like Google doesn't care what the file extension is as long as... well here's the quote:

"The it doesn't matter what you use and what you call it - the content-type has to be application/xml or text/xml .

The server does what it does with that extension .aspx - it will execute the script. The script produces output in the xml format. You just need to ask your script to produce the correct header for content-type, before it starts outputting the xml content. So what the user agent gets is the output of the script. And what type it is - well, that's what content-type is for." - webado

Does that make sense to everyone? Good.

(thanks webado)

Wordpress Sitemap now up and running

Ok, I finally got the sitemap up and running on the site. Turns out that comment rating system wasn't blowing up because of the plugins and sitemap. It was because of WP-Cache being set to 3600 because the hosting company hates us.

All is right in the world.

WordPress update from yesterday

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.

Wordpress Robots.txt

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...

Wordpress SEO again today

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.

WordPress SEO cont.. cont....

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!

Google Labs Gets a Little Busy

Google labs has put up some interesting new tools/ideas for enhanced searching functionality... and stuff. Check it out here : http://www.google.com/experimental/index.html

WordPress SEO cont....

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)

Now Optimizing a WordPress site

I'm starting a project to do some SEO for an area of a site completely generated with WordPress. Preliminary checks of the source code show some small, easy-to-fix issues such as duplicate keyword meta tags. I think this is most likely due to the autoMeta plugin running alongside the keyword generator widget you see when post an article. I still haven't decided which I'm going to keep. If anyone has any thoughts, let me know.

Once I make that decision, I need to decide what keywords to even optimize for. I've retrieved a list of phrases from our web analytics application and then run a Google report against them. We're doing pretty well there. Now, I'm waiting on a Search Volume Report on that list from one of our SEM guys. He gets it from Yahoo! but we can use that as a guide.

If the search volume is too close to the traffic generated by these terms, then we may have too look elsewhere to generate traffic and this might not be an SEO project after all.

I'll try to keep up with everyone on how page-views are increasing (hopefully) as the project progresses.

Any tips, as always, are welcome.