What is Digg?25 Comments
- Dudibob, on 10/12/2007, -1/+8wordpress is pretty SEO friendly anyway, as long as you choose the proper file structure being 2006/11/07/blog-post-title/
There's also a few more steps than just 4 to optimise a blog... - CasaMan, on 10/12/2007, -2/+9###############################################
#Theme: October Special #
#Designed by: Derek Punsalan #
#Search engine optimization by: Neil Patel #
#Copyrighted by Derek Punsalan and Neil Patel #
###############################################
Tables of Contents
1. Theme Installation
2. Search Engine Optimization Overview
3. Meta Description
4. 301 Permanent Redirect
5. Sitemap
1. Upload the 'octoberspecial' directory to /wp-contents/themes/. Login and navigate to Presentation tab and activate October Special. The theme does support widgets. Download and install the WordPress Widgets plugin here - http://automattic.com/code/widgets/
2. Search Engine Optimization Overview
Currently this theme is optimized for search engines, but there are a few additional things that can be done including a meta description tag, 301 permanent redirect, and creating a sitemap.
3. Meta Description
Search engines usually see your content as duplicate. Granted it usually is not duplicate content, but without a unique meta description tag on each of your posts you are hampering your search engine traffic.
To solve this we can use the head meta description tag. It can be downloaded from http://guff.szub.net/2005/09/01/head-meta-description/ and it is easy to install. That URL contains instructions and I recommend setting the length of the meta description tag to 20 or 25 words.
4. 301 Permanent Redirect
When people link to your blog they usually link to http://domain.com or http://www.domain.com. Because of this the search engines usually see them as two separate sites and you may have 100 sites that link to http://domain.com and 50 sites that link to http://www.domain.com. If the search engines saw it as 150 links in total instead of 50 and 100 your rankings would most likely go up. You want to consolidate the links and do a 301 permanent redirect in your .htaccess file. Here is the code that you may want to use:
Options +FollowSymLinks
RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_Host} ^YOURDOMAIN.com [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.YOURDOMAIN.com/$1 [L,R=301]
**Make sure the code is on 4 lines in your .htaccess file and replace "YOURDOMAIN" with your domain name.
5. Sitemap
You don't really need a sitemap for your blog, but it will just help get your pages indexed faster. You can create your own HTML sitemap or you can use a WordPress plugin. I recommend using the Google Sitemap generator plugin which can be found at http://www.arnebrachhold.de/2005/06/05/google-sitemaps-generator-v2-final. - soogy, on 10/12/2007, -0/+6No, bbPress (the bulletin board software from the same guys) is only CSS-based. WordPress themes are completely customizable PHP scripts which output (X)HTML and CSS.
Back on topic, the "search engine friendliness" of this theme is overrated. All it does is add a meta description tag which changes on each page to the head element of your site.
Besides that, by default, WordPress is fairly search engine friendly already. It uses CSS for design, titles are properly enclosed in heading tags, you can choose a different link structure, etc. - Haplo, on 10/12/2007, -0/+3"The blog is about the content. I don't care about your sponsors "
Maybe you should do some math then. How much time (=money) do you think it costs to keep adding original content to a blog? Some of my pages (http://johnbokma.com/ ) took entire Saturdays to write, and then I don't talk about the longer articles like how to use virtual hosting with Apache. Moreover, I prefer to keep those as up to date as possible, which means rewriting now and then. Without sponsors a lot of bloggers just have to stop. Might make you happy, but not me.
Sponsors are good, it makes it possible for some to become professional bloggers. Check out a magazine and count the sponsors there. Wouldn't amaze me if almost every next page is a full color advertisement. Nor wouldn't amaze me if half of the content are sponsored (or worse). - isdereks, on 10/12/2007, -0/+3Did you upload the unzipped folder or the one within?
- CasaMan, on 10/12/2007, -0/+3Good question MoneyShot. In Wordpress themes you also control the html part. So you can play around with your header tags, container placements, etc.. But still, i think "optimalisation" of these things is somewhat overrated. In weblogs content is still king and the structure of standard themes are good enough.
- Bishoco, on 10/12/2007, -0/+3I prefer the Cutline Wordpress theme. http://cutline.tubetorial.com/ It's clean. It's simple and I was able easily modify it for my blog. And the creator, Chris Pearson, is a great blogger (http://www.pearsonified.com/) when it comes to web design. I've learned a lot from his stuff.
- fak3r, on 10/12/2007, -0/+3while there are now tons of great WP themes out there, this is Dugg, and I will try it out on one of mine -- looks nice and clean.
get it quickly (and right to yr server) like this:
wget http://5thirtyone.com/mint/pepper/orderedlist/downloads/download.php?file=http%3A//5thirtyone.com/sandbox/wordpress/seo_october_special.zip - prototypeangel, on 10/12/2007, -1/+3I hate the design. It's fixed width, yet wastes valuble real estate on the left hand side. Also the header is quite plain and unattractive, the page looks congested and intimidating. The problem with themes today is that they are focussing on only having many sidebars and design and css and styling. The blog is about the content. I don't care about your sponsors and the about me and the archives occupying more than 50% of the width. The blog should have more space for the content and good effective web2.0 design knows how to do that. I've been using wordpress for a long time, and I use a simple k2 theme which I've modded for speed and it's very Search engine friendly with sitemap plugins to do a great job. (if you're interested, link: http://www.anirudhsanjeev.org)
I'm pissed that a theme made it to the front page and it's not even a great or a groundbreaking design. Categories at the bottom. Long posts would cause more than 50% blank space(not whitespace, they are different).
Color scheme is nothing great. There's nothing with the CSS too, no images either, just that the layout is a little different. - Goner, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2his ARCHIVES link could use some help... It currently just jumps down to the list of categories... A better SEO strategy would be to jump to a list of all entries with links, etc.
- prototypeangel, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2I was talking from the view of a personal weblog. I write tech stuff too but have like one ad. If you're a professional blogger, you should be plain stupid to choose a theme like this. All professional blogs are feature packed and very well optimized indeed. Sponsors are good, they keep content free and I apologize for writing that comment, which was quite stupid. but the point I was trying to emphasize is that the first thing that shows up on your page should be the most important of all, and there's a huge blank and space wastage which could be used for images and a little livening up.
- lamestory, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2got it, thanks for the help.
- isdereks, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2The theme does not call pages by default. You'll need to hardcode the direct URLs back in, look for a widget, or edit the template.
- lamestory, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2After installing and activating the theme, all my "pages" disappear from the UI. what am I doing wrong?
- inactive, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2looks a good one, giving a try before commenting more ;)
- isdereks, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1I think you definitely need to do the math. Your calculations are obviously _wrong_. 50%? Try again. If it wasn't grossly apparent, the theme was created as a base for whatever customizations users wished to add. No images in the CSS? How exactly is that a bad thing? We can easily look at your page(s) and criticize but to each their own.misc side blips start and end, etc.
If you're so discontent with something hitting the front page, don't read / digg it. Make it clear you're unhappy with something and mark it accordingly rather than lambasting the link. - majumdar, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1Error in the URL to your blog - that closing parentheses is being interpreted as part of the URL and thus broken. :(
It should be http://www.anirudhsanjeev.org/ and not http://www.anirudhsanjeev.org) :) - isdereks, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1Actually, Niel took the time to optimize the code itself. Once the theme was created, Niel went through to ensure that the structure and title tags was optimized for search engines.
- CasaMan, on 10/12/2007, -4/+5All the "SEO updates" has actually nothing to do with this theme.
- MoneyShot, on 10/12/2007, -4/+4Huh? Aren't Wordpress themes entirely CSS based? If so, search engines don't care what theme you're using.
- CasaMan, on 10/12/2007, -2/+1Yes, my bad.. After i read paragraph 2 a second time i got it.
- picaman, on 10/12/2007, -3/+1never mind--digg down.
- fatdog789, on 10/12/2007, -9/+4I call it SPAM!!!
- mikerev, on 10/12/2007, -6/+0I wget'd the zip and unzipped it, went to enable it, and it came up as broken. I give it a F for freakin lame.
- veesah, on 10/12/2007, -9/+3A theme should not be reaching front page digg... sigh...
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