Blogging On My Mind

At the end of the year, many businesses start to think about redesigning their tired old website to breathe some new life into it. You may even be in the midst of a website redesign right now. If so, the first thing is to make sure you hire a design and development company that knows how to build the infrastructure of the website in a search engine crawler–friendly manner.

Beyond that, you need to address a number of additional SEO tactics before you get too deep into your redesign. The reason you need to keep SEO front and center during this time is twofold: so that you do not lose your previous traffic, but also so that you can gain additional targeted search engine visitors when the new site goes live.

Here are 6 SEO redesign secrets your developer may not know…ignore them at your own peril!

1. Creating Your SEO’d Site Architecture

Search engines look explicitly at how all your pages are linked together in order to determine their place within the site. Pages that are linked from every other page will be given more weight than those that are only linked from a few others. This is all considered a form of internal link popularity, or in Google language, internal PageRank.

Recommendation: During your redesign, don’t bury too deeply within the site any content that was previously bringing targeted search engine traffic. Ensure that any informational content that will be focused on the more competitive keyword phrases (for example, product and service pages) is high up in your site hierarchy.

In addition, all content contained in a specific category should be cross-linked via some sort of sub-navigation within that section.

2. Categorization and Avoiding Duplicate Content

When people are seeking information from a search engine, they usually have a question, a problem, or a need for specific information. The search queries they use at Google and the other engines reflect this. The more ways you can categorize your content for the various target markets you serve, the better.

Recommendation: Be sure that all top-level pages answer the potential searcher’s (your potential customers’) questions, and that it’s clear that your products and services can solve their problem. In addition, you also have to ensure that regardless of how someone found any piece of content on your site, they always end up at the same URL to avoid PageRank splitting and duplicate content issues.

For example, if a specific product can be classified as both a product and a service, it makes sense that it might be listed under both categories. However, the page (URL) that the potential customer eventually lands on, regardless of which category they started in, should always be the same.

3. New Content Management System and Changing URLS

If URLs must change in the redesign due to a new content management system or back-end coding, search engines may take some time to index the new URLs as well as give them the same weighting they gave the previous URLs due to URL age factors.

Recommendation: It’s critical to 301-redirect all old URLs to their relative counterpart within the newly designed website. This will pass the link popularity of the old URLs to the new ones quickly, as well as ensure that site visitors don’t receive 404-not-found errors.

This will be easier if the new URL naming is similar to the old one, because you can use automated methods. If URLs must change completely with no correlation to the names of the old URLs, and hand-redirects are required, you’ll want to at least redirect all the top-level pages, as well as those that you’re sure receive keyword traffic from search engines. But, ideally, every URL should be redirected if at all possible.

4. Coding of Navigation Menus

Links contained within the navigation of your website should be coded in a search engine–friendly manner so that they are visible and crawlable. Some DHTML and Flash menus are invisible to search engines, which causes the pages linked within them to not receive the internal link popularity they should receive.

Recommendation: Make sure all navigational menus are coded with CSS that is visible to search engines. In addition, avoid drop-down box links as the main form of navigation (CSS mouseovers are fine). You’ll also want to ensure that all content can be reached by hard-coded links – don’t force the user to go through any kind of search box menu because those are traditionally search engine unfriendly.

5. Custom HTML Elements

While some level of automation for titles, metas, headers, URLs, and alt attributes for images can be helpful, it’s critical that your new website’s content management system allow you to create custom descriptions for these as well.

Recommendation: Make sure the content management system has fields for custom title tags, meta descriptions, heading tags, etc. There should be no limit to the number of characters allowed in these fields either, because every page may need a different number of words and characters.

6. Session IDs and Other Tracking Links

It’s best not to use session IDs to track visitors, but if your system must use them, you’ll only need to feed the “clean” URLs to the search engine spiders – otherwise, they may get caught in an infinite loop, indexing the same content under multiple URLs.

You’ll also want to avoid any sort of campaign tracking links appended to URLs because these can split your link popularity by causing your content to be indexed under multiple URLs.

Recommendation: If this type of tracking is inherent in your system, use the canonical link element to maintain one URL for every page of content.

Don’t be surprised if your developer isn’t happy to receive some of these “secrets.” He or she may feel that their authority is being usurped or their creativity is being hindered. Just remember that it’s your website that you’re paying them to create in a way that will make you the most money possible. Let your developer know up-front that these things are non-negotiable. If they tell you that they can’t do any of the above, start looking around for a new developer – ASAP!

While there will always be a few unexpected bugs to work out when your site goes live, you won’t have to be afraid of losing your search engine visitors as long as you know what you’re doing. We’ve successfully helped many companies through this transition without any glitches. At the end of the process, there’s nothing like the feeling of having your beautiful new website launched. But more than that, there’s great comfort in knowing that the people looking for what you offer will continue to be able to easily find you in the search engines.

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Jill Whalen, CEO of High Rankings and co-founder of SEMNE, has been performing SEO services since 1995. Jill is the host of the High Rankings Advisor newsletter and the High Rankings SEO forum.

This article courtesy of SiteProNews.com

Ain’t we all glad that Automattic has just made available WordPress 2.9? This latest upgrade has addressed over 500 tickets, bugs and enhancements, according the official WordPress blog where you can also view a short video of some of the “cool things” about the new version.

Writing in the WP post, founder Matt Mullenweg says this is a major release and that’s why the video was made. If you want to watch it here, you’re welcome.

So what are some of the coolest new stuff on offer with v2.9? Here’s what Mullenweg has listed on the official blog:

1. Global undo/”trash” feature, which means that if you accidentally delete a post or comment you can bring it back from the grave (i.e., the Trash). This also eliminates those annoying “are you sure” messages we used to have on every delete.

2. Built-in image editor allows you to crop, edit, rotate, flip, and scale your images to show them who’s boss. This is the first wave of our many planned media-handling improvements.

3. Batch plugin update and compatibility checking, which means you can update 10 plugins at once, versus having to do multiple clicks for each one, and we’re using the new compatibility data from the plugins directory to give you a better idea of whether your plugins are compatible with new releases of WordPress. This should take the fear and hassle out of upgrading.

4. Easier video embeds that allow you to just paste a URL on its own line and have it magically turn it into the proper embed code, with Oembed support for YouTube, Daily Motion, Blip.tv, Flickr, Hulu, Viddler, Qik, Revision3, Scribd, Google Video, Photobucket, PollDaddy, and WordPress.tv (and more in the next release).

Looking at the new features, I quite like the newly tweaked image editing feature. Now bloggers can crop, scale and rotate images within WordPress itself which is pretty cool although it’s not Photoshop.

The next good thing is that any deleted stuff will move to the Trash where it will still be recoverable if you happened to change your mind and want to retrieve a deleted item.

If you want to know more about the new upgrade, WP guru Aaron Brazell at TechnoSailor.com has summed up “10 Things You Need To Know About WordPress 2.9“.

You will find that the best way that you can drive traffic to your site is by using search engine marketing. If you use the best SEO tools out there to help, then you’ll definitely be on the path to succeed.

To make life a little easier for website owners, SEO tools have been developed in order to allow them to take a lot of the hard work out of optimizing their websites.

Any website owner who wants to improve their page’s optimization can gain a lot of benefit from these SEO tools.

There are a lot of different kinds of SEO tools out there which can be helpful to site owners. Keep reading for a look at the very best SEO tools available which can help your online business to become more successful.

SEO Tool s

Tip #1 – Backlink Checkers

A backlink checker can be extremely helpful in getting more out of your business’ online presence. Backlinks (links which point to your website from other sites) are great for increasing your page ranking and of course, they provide another way for people to find your website.

It can be useful to know who is linking to your site and how many sites link to your own. These tools can even tell you how well your competitors are doing when it comes to backlinks.

Tip #2 – Start Posting in Forums to Increase Traffic

Another of the best tips to keeping mind when it comes to SEO tools is to start posting in forums in order to increase traffic.

Many people actually overlook this SEO tool. It’s easy to join forums where you can post on a regular basis and when you post information of high quality, chances are you can use this to your advantage.

Add a signature file that has your website link on it, and more than likely you’ll begin to drive more traffic to your site in this manner.

Tip #3 – Used Advanced SEO Tools

Last of all, another of the best SEO tools tips you should remember is to use advanced SEO tools if you want to bring in more traffic and reap excellent conversion rates.

Advanced tools and techniques can be used to really begin to make your site successful and lucrative. It’s a top technique that will help you to get your site up there on the search engines, and you may even make it to the number one ranking with this technique as well.

About the Author:  Simon M Skinner has worked in the SEO and internet marketing industry since 2002. He has successfully optimized websites from a wide range of industries. He owns webpositionexpert which markets SEO tools and ebooks. If you are looking for industry leading SEO tools and information then be sure to try webpositionexpert.

This is an alert for WordPress.org users running self-hosted blogs. You may be under attack!

If you’re not using WordPress 2.8.4 you’d better upgrade immediately. Or you’re gonna face a very trying weekend, according to the heads up from Mashable blog.

The Mashable blog got the warning from Lorelle on WordPress today.

According to Lorelle’s warning post there are two clues to indicate an attack:

1. There are strange additions to the pretty permalinks, such as example.com/category/post-title/%&(%7B$%7Beval(base64_decode($_SERVER%5BHTTP_REFERER%5D))%7D%7D|.+)&%/. The keywords are “eval” and “base64_decode.”
2. The second clue is that a “back door” was created by a “hidden” Administrator. Check your site users for “Administrator (2)” or a name you do not recognize. You will probably be unable to access that account.

Looking back:

On August 12, 2009, the WordPress blog announced the security release of WordPress 2.8.4 saying how they had fixed a vulnerability problem.

I reproduce that post here:

“Yesterday a vulnerability was discovered: a specially crafted URL could be requested that would allow an attacker to bypass a security check to verify a user requested a password reset. As a result, the first account without a key in the database (usually the admin account) would have its password reset and a new password would be emailed to the account owner. This doesn’t allow remote access, but it is very annoying.

We fixed this problem last night and have been testing the fixes and looking for other problems since then. Version 2.8.4 which fixes all known problems is now available for download and is highly recommended for all users of WordPress.”

Well, better to be safe than sorry. Upgrade to WP 2.8.4 NOW!