Above this its very important for a web developer/SEO to stick to the correct HTML coding standards for better visibility of a web page.

Let me explain why..

Search engine crawlers are just programs created by human beings to read the content from pages and index them. It is programmed to read content from pages based on the common HTML coding conventions. They do not possess high end artificial intelligence to distinguish the tags which is improperly coded. So it is very important for anybody to validate the HTML code for the pages which is meant for search engine optimization.

The World Wide Web consortium is the organization that has set coding standards for the web development languages such as HTML, XHTML etc. Hence they have also provided some tools to validate the code developed by us and match it to the standards.

The validation tool can be located at http://validator.w3.org/ .

You can use this tool in 3 different ways to validate your HTML code – by inputting the URL of the page, by uploading the file from your system to the w3c tool, or by direct input i.e copy-pasting the HTML source code into the text area provided in the tool.

This tool gives a consolidated report pointing the errors on the page, which can be corrected.

Bounce rate : is the percentage of visitors leaving the site from the landing page.

Exit rate: Exit rate of a page is the percentage of visitors leaving the site from the particular page.

Now.. (Still confused??). Okay.. In the case of bounce rate, the visitor enters the site through a particular page (say about.html ) and leaves the site without visting any other page in the site. On the other hand, exit rate is for those pages where people exit, but prior to visiting this page they have come from a page within the same site.

So will you purposely keep any link in your site which can end up in ‘Page not found? You shouldn’t..

Google crawler is a simulation of a human being browsing through a site and grasping contents in it. When it find good things, it stores into its memory and pours it out when another person requests for it.

So the same way you hate a site for having broken links in it, Google also must hate them. Do you want Google to hate your site and never want to visit your site? The answer should be no, if you are really concerned with the SEO performance of your site.

How to eliminate broken links in a site?

Broken links can be present in a site due to a simple human error. One way to find them is by checking the links manually. But it becomes tedious when you are checking a medium to heavy website having a good number of pages.

I am using a tool called ‘Xenu’s Link Sleuth’. It’s basically a crawler, which will open up page after page in site and open all the links in it, whether its outbound or within same site. It finally gives you a comprehensive report about the broken links, redirected URL’s and a sitemap of the website.

So will you make sure that your site is free from broken links from now?Â

Some of the things I observed are,
- You can’t have a separate title other than the post title, and the title tag gets messed up with so many things. You don’t have full control on title by default.
- Meta Tags.. Default installation does not come with options to add/edit meta tags
- Content duplicity - The same content repeats in category pages, archives etc..

If you agree with above, I have few tips for you to improve the SEO performance of your blog. The knowledge level required to try my tips is entry to medium level.

First customization, you might do is changing the look and feel of your blog. Wordpress themes are available for free download from many designers and it does not need any code editing capabilities to change a Wordpress theme.

Help crawlers to index your page properly - Validating XHTML code

Most of the themes will be coded in XHTML which is very good for SEO as it reduces the document size a lot for better crawlability. But what I observed is most of the theme developers don’t bother much to validate the XHTML code, resulting in lot of W3C validation errors. This is as bad as keeping a theme based on HTML and tables. Get the themes validated and all the errors fixed for better SEO performances.

This blog currently contains valid XHTML code which you can verify yourselves..

Choosing the right permalink structure

You might know about Apache’s mod_rewrite or URL rewriting. Make sure that you host your blog in a server running on Linux OS and using Apache web server configured with mod_rewrite for making use of the URL rewriting features.

For enabling your custom permalink structure, you need to simply add a .htaccess file into your hosting directory.

Go to Options > Permalinking on your Wordpress admin.

There you can specify which way your URL’s should look like. I prefer site.com/postname/ as the URL for my post instead of site.com/2007/06/05/postname/ . In former, you are pushing your page name to the start of your URL string. The more you push your main keyword to the front, its advantageous for you in terms of SEO (My View).

So you need to just select ‘custom’ permalink option and should give /%postname%/ in the field provided. Once you update the permalink structure by clicking below, Wordpress will instruct you to update content of your .htaccess file (if exits) or create new one. Just copies the content suggested by Wordpress and use it.

If you need .html extension for your posts, you can just enter /%postname%.html in the custom permalink field.

For more info on permalink structures, refer http://codex.wordpress.org/Using_Permalinks

Title and Meta Tags - Beginner Level

By default a title tag will look in following form in a post.

SEOLion ’s Personal Blog » Blog Archive » Basic On Page Optimization for beginners

Here your main keyword will be pushed far from the starting character of your title and by default it contains the title you have given for your post.

Here is where you can use SEO plugins available for Wordpress. For example I am using a plug-in called ‘Another Title’. You can download and install this plugings from Wordpress site. This title will make the same post title to appear in the title tag and blog name and other words are not displayed in title.

For meta tags, I am using a plugin ‘add meta tags’. All these plugins you can download from Wordpress site.

Title and Meta Tags - Medium to Expert Level

The above method is for beginners. And what I am explaining below is for experts who can do a bit of PHP programming, and want to have a customized title other than the default post title to appear.

In Wordpress, you can define custom fields. While making a post, you can enter value for a custom field and it can be retrieved in the blog post for display.

For example, you can give a ‘key’ for your custom field as ‘my_own_title’ and give the full title in the value field.

This custom field will be saved when you save the post.

Now you can edit your theme files, particularly the header and put this small code where you want to display the value you just entered.

<?php if(is_single())
{
echo get_post_meta($post->ID, “my_own_title”, $single = true);
}
else
{ ?>
<?php bloginfo(’name’); ?> <?php if ( is_single() ) { ?> » Blog Archive <?php } ?> <?php wp_title(); ?>
<?php
}

This code will check whether you are viewing a single page/post or a category page or an archive page. If it’s a single post or page it will retrieve the custom field value for ‘my_own_title’ and display it.

The custom field is really a very handy option in case you would like to store custom alt tags or header tags for your page. Similar way you can keep custom fields for keywords and description.

I am using a plugin called ‘custom field gui’ which you can customize and make the custom fields to get displays as usual fields in the post creation page.

Avoiding Content duplicity

You can add the following code to display only an extract of the post in archive and category pages. The actual post only will contain the complete post contents. This can help you coping with Content duplicity issues.

In Wordpress loop, there is a portion to display the actual post content.

It will look like

<?php the_content(__(’(more…)’)); ?>

Or

<?php the_content(); ?> Etc..

Modify the above to

<?php if(is_single()) {
the_content();

} else {
the_excerpt();
}
?>

Here this code will check whether the current page is a single post or archive or a category page. If it is single, it will display full post content.

While creating the post/page, there is a provision to add the excerpt for that particular post/page. An excerpt is similar to a short description of that page/post. If an excerpt is present, it will be shown in above case when a category or an archive page is loaded. If excerpt is not present, Wordpress will show few starting lines of the post in the place of excerpt.

Lets get into the topic on how to do OnPage Optimization.

Search Engine Optimization consists of basically two stages - On Page Optimization and Off Page.

OnPage optimization refers to the SEO activities we perform on a page in our site, and offpage optimization refers to the SEO activities we do on external factors which assist in a better ranking of our website.

Basic On Page optimization consists of

• Creating proper content having right keyword density
• Creating a title tag, meta description tag, meta keyword tag
• Creating sentences which is put into header tags h1, h2, h3, h4 etc
• Anchor text in links within the page, title tag for the link (which comes as tool tip)
• Alt tags for images

An optimum keyword density for content (current trend) is about 3-5%. i.e no of keywords / No of total words

Title tag : Its a very important entity of a web page. Its like a unique page number in a book. You need to have a very unique title for each of your pages. A keyword can be repeated in a title tag at the most 2 times (Main keyword of a page must be present in title tag at the starting position for best SEO advantage). A title tag is basically a sentence with not more than 100 characters long. Its a one liner which explains about your page.

Meta Description Tag: Its a brief description about your web page. Again main keyword in description tag carries a lot of importance.

Meta Keyword tag : You can list down the keywords present in the page one after another separated by a comma.

Earlier search engines used to rank pages based only n title, description and keyword tags. But it became obsolete when people started to misuse this fact and search engines developed algorithms to find them.

A major factor to get ranked in Google is the off page factor, which I will be explaining later. Again on page factor is very much required to keep the relevancy of page for a particular keyword.

Header tags: These are another set of tags which the search engines will have a close look at to identify the main keywords on a page. So keeping sentences containing in header tags - h1, h2, upto h4 helps in SEO. Text in H1 tag usually will be of larger size. This can be reduced by use of proper CSS (cascading style sheets).

Alt attributes for ‘img’ tags: Another important location to put your keywords for a page.

An optimum keyword density of should be maintained for the whole document, i.e including title, description, keywords , content, alt tags, header anchors etc. If you stuff keywords into a page, it will serve adverse effects than higher ranking in google.

We will discuss the donts in Onpage optimization in a later stage.

Wordpress has support for pages as well as posts. Pages, well you would have used pages in wordpress to create an ‘About Us’ page or a contact page, but with an extensive use of the page feature of wordpress you can have a custom made CMS up and running.

I started as a newbie in wordpress a few months ago, setting up this blog with my nickname. Recently I got a new project from my work place to develop a custom made CMS. I am not familiar with Drupal or mambo, but I have seen in digital point forums that wordpress can be used as a CMS, but I couldn’t find a tutorial on how to do that.

Before starting the project, I wanted some match practice, so I decided to convert one of my websites into a simple CMS system.

In wordpress, by default home page displays a number of posts from the recent one you have just made. But wordpress is developed by intelligent people who have kept provisions to make the home page or any other page as we wish.

First thing you need to know is that, its the theme pages which is getting displayed in the front end when you view a page or post, so our starting point is the custom theme you have selected for your blog / cms website.

Basically one will find following files in your selected theme folder

* style.css

* index.php

* header.php

* sidebar.php

* footer.php

* comments.php

* comments-popup.php

First step, you need a home page which is different from the typical blog home page and should contain home page content.

Save a copy of index.php as in theme folder and rename it as home.php

Go to the dashboard, create a new page entering page content, title everything and enter the page slug as home (i.e the file name you just saved).

Edit your home.php

You can see a function call something like this in very beginning.

<?php

get_header();

?>

Now change that to

<?php

get_header();

query_posts(’pagename=home’);

?>

query_posts is a wordpress function where you can forcibly show a page according to the parameter you are passing. Here the parameter pagename is given as home which the page slug.

Once you do this much, save home.php and when you open home page, you will see the home page you created instead of the normal wordpress home page. Of course the content will be what you entered when you created the home page from dashboard.

How this happened? Well.. I told earlier, wordpress is developed in such a manner where you can twist wordpress into whatever way you want!!

Its called Page Hierarchy in wordpress. Typically wordpress looks for ’slug’.php for whatever page you create with a page slug. If ’slug’.php is not present, it shows index.php content. In our case, page slug was home which had priority over index.php when home page was viewed.

Now you have successfully converted your blog to look like a CMS in the homepage.

Now to make into a complete CMS, I suggest you to use the page feature rather than the categories and posts. Another thing to note is that a page can have child pages just like in normal websites. For example you have a page called Spain and there is a child for Spain, which is Alicante. So you can have a page hierarchy

Home -> Spain -> Alicante

So you can have a structure like site.com/spain/alicante/ etc

next steps are a bit complex as it requires that you go through the function reference of wordpress.

Basically you shuld know how to use functions like

wp_list_pages

get_permalink

is_page etc etc (which never ends !!)

It took me 2 days to convert my website Cheap Flight to a simple CMS system even being not a wordpress expert. My strengths are a bit of programming knowledge in PHP and an ability to explore and grasp developer documentations and courage to experiment.

I am sure that this one post is not sufficient to explain how I exactly transformed my website into a CMS powered by wordpress, but I will certainly try to put in some more time to explain a bit more.

Few pages I referred are

From Weblog to CMS with WordPress - Which helped in creating a customized home page
Wordpress Function Reference - A must to see information where you can see the API’s and select which wordpress functions to use and when.

If affiliates use there referring URL’s as links from their site, it will be counted as a back link pointing to the site’s URL having the affiliates unique id.

Now think of a situation where you have a number of affiliates doing marketing with the above method. there will be an equivalent number of landing URL’s but all with the same content.

In this way we are actually inviting the supplement listings for our site.

How to avoid this and use the same for SEO advantages.

The affiliate tracking system can be modified as follows.

Direct traffic to a tracking page which records the hit from an affiliate. If you are using a server sided script like PHP, its easy to set a cookie with the response headers. Give out a proper 301 redirect response and redirect the visitor to the actual site.

Once conversion happens, check out the affiliate id from cookie and mark conversion from that affiliate.

By using a 301 redirect, you are actually redirecting the backlinks to the real site which will boost the sites SEO performances.

Generally if there is no robots.txt file in the root of your website or it has no instructions written in it, it is interpreted by the crawler that there is no restriction for crawling documents within that site.

On the other hand you may want to hide some documents from being crawled.

Following example show how you can block a document private-data.html from being crawled by bots.

For this you write the robot instruction as below and save in the robots.txt file.

User-Agent: *
Disallow: /private-data.html

Now see the first line, it says which bots should follow these instruction? * indicates that it is applicable for all bots. you can replace it by Googlebot for the crawler used by google alone. Knowing the user agent, such instruction can be written for any bot.

See the second line, it says not to crawl the document private-data.html which is found in the root of the website.

If you want to hide all documents within a directory from crawl, you can write the second line as

Disallow: /directory

Now how these instructions are taken into effect?

Crawler bots of major search engines are programmed to check the instructions found in the robots.txt file before accessing any document in the site in a crawl session. It can be said as a rule for the crawlers. So according to the instructions written, bots continue the crawl process.

Now how to keep your site crawler friendly?

The crawler comes one of your page first, picks up the content from it, it can take out information such as your title, meta tags, body content and can take out the links in that page. Now what the crawler does is it starts visiting the pages to which the current page has been linked to. The crawl process continues.

Making a site crawlable (Making it crawler friendly) is the basic think you need to have for proper indexing of the web site and subsequent ranking.

What you need to do?

As of now, search engine crawlers are not developed to read links in JavaScript, flash etc. So its always better to use proper text links (Normal html hyperlinks) as far as possible. Even in case you are using JavaScript dropdown, you can have text links somewhere in the footer to make the crawling easy. On a trial, the whole website should be able to be navigated just following text links.

Use of Sitemap

A sitemap is a page in your website where you present links to all your pages in your website. Again, this makes the crawling more easily. Once search engine crawler is able to visit sitemap, it can go to any other page in the site which is directly linked.

Now in case you want to restrict crawlers accessing your pages?

This can be done using a document called ‘robots.txt’ in the root of your website. My next post is how to use robots.txt and about creating this robots instruction document.

If you have such questions in mind, read on as the following paragraphs give some insight to it.

You have developed a brand new website and made it live. Now how to get into SERPs ?
The basic thing is Search engine will not come to know about your site unless and until they are made them aware of your new site. Now how to make them know that you got a new website.

There are two methods to do this..
1. Almost all search engines provide an option to add the site to their database. You can look for a ‘Submit Site’ option provided by the search engines to give details of your website.

2. Get a couple of hyperlinks pointed to your new website from another site already found in a search engine index.

Let me explain the second option a bit in detail.

Search engines use program called crawler or bots to fetch out information from a website. The crawler keeps visiting websites on internet and reads out the content from the pages. It also lists out the hyperlinks found in them and adds to its queue for continuing its crawl process.

Now when a new link is being added to a website where search engine crawlers keep visiting, it finds the link to new website and visits the website for getting the contents in it. When it goes into a new site which is not found in the search engine’s daabase, it automatically adds it along with the data fetched from the pages in that website.

First is a more traditional way of getting into a search engine’s database, but second is the most practical way.

Now the search engines has the data fetched from various website in their databse, it assigns ranking positions to those sites depending on relevancy as calculated by its ‘ranking Algorithm’.

If the new site made by you meets the criteria specified in the algorithm, the site is listed on higher positions for queries related to your website.

Different search engines vary in terms of their ranking algorithm. In the next post ‘Treating search engine crawlers’ , I will explain in deep how search engine crawlers aid in ranking a website.