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SEO for Everybody

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Because of the way they are mis Zoloft Online, used all over the Web, categories have grown to become something that we regard in a purely user-centric light. We think of them as navigational tools and guides for users, but in reality, categories are a powerful tool that bloggers can use to exercise precise control over content in a dynamic environment.

Unfortunately, the true power of categorized content has been masked by the one size fits all implementation you see everywhere on the Web—the proverbial long, ugly list of category links now appearing on a blog near you.

As luck would have it, that awful category list also turns out to be a very poor presentational strategy for your site...but why.

Why Your Category List Isn't Doing You Any Favors

By giving users a list of categories to browse on your site, you are creating a psychological conundrum that usually leaves them with a severe case of analysis paralysis. This is a condition where users, when presented with too many options, end up selecting nothing at all, zoloft Online.

Being presented with more choices, even good ones, can hinder effective action. In one study, doctors couldn't make a decision when a second promising drug showed up.
— Fast Company, November 2007

Counter-intuitive. Maybe. Human nature. Zoloft Online, Absolutely.

Whether you're selling products, Antabuse Side Effects, writing copy, or designing interfaces, you can benefit from playing into basic human psychology. And interestingly, with Website categories, accommodating natural human behavior also turns out to be an excellent SEO strategy.

Automated SEO and Content Management with Categories

At first glance, it seems convenient that WordPress automatically creates category pages, tag pages, and just about every other type of page you can imagine¹. Dig a little deeper, though, and you'll find that this form of page bloat is a remarkably poor site-building practice—it's a condition that should be avoided whenever possible.

As far as blogs are concerned, categories are the single biggest contributor to both page bloat and link dilution, two of the most abominable SEO sins, zoloft Online. Ironically, when used properly, these same categories hold the key to efficient, automated site optimization and content management...

The difference, of course, is all in how you use them. Armed with a bit of knowledge and a few lines of code, colchicine Side Effects, you'll be able to use categories to:

display content however you like, wherever you like

link directly to interior pages—not to interstitial "bloat" pages like monthly archives or category archives

provide your users with a smarter, more intuitive way to browse content that may be of interest to them

WordPress Example: "Popular" Articles

Turn your attention to the sidebar of this site, where you'll find lists of posts underneath subheadings like "Must Reads," "Improve Your Blog," and "Worth a Look." As you might have guessed, I use categories to control the content of each list, and now we're going to examine how you can do the same. For the sake of this example, let's focus on the "Must Reads," which are controlled by the "Popular" category.

The first step Zoloft Online, is to categorize each applicable post in an identical and meaningful way—in this case, "Popular." Keep in mind that it makes no difference how many posts you lump under one category, simply because you'll establish all display control through your code (which you are about to write).

Once you've categorized your articles, the second step is to determine what you want to display and where you want to display it. In this example, the goal is to display a list of popular posts over in the sidebar, so in order to do that, you should open the sidebar.php template file for editing.

Now that you've opened the appropriate theme file, it's time to move on to the third step, Cheap atenolol, which is the coding portion of our show. Here's the code I used in sidebar.php to generate a list (<ul>, <li>) of popular articles: ²



<?php

   query_posts('category_name=Popular&showposts=5');

   while (have_posts()) :

      the_post();

?>

   <li><a href="<?php the_permalink() ?>" rel="bookmark"><?php the_title(); ?> <?php comments_number('0', '1', '%'); ?></a></li>

<?php

   endwhile;

?>

Take a look at the following snippet from the above code:



query_posts('category_name=Popular&showposts=5');

This line tells WordPress to look through its database and fetch the 5 most recent posts from the "Popular" category. Once you've acquired the appropriate posts, all you need to do is loop through them, displaying only the information you want, zoloft Online. Here's the code from our example:



<li><a href="<?php the_permalink() ?>" rel="bookmark"><?php the_title(); ?> <?php comments_number('0', '1', '%'); ?></a></li>

In this case, I chose to display direct links to the posts, and I also embellished a bit to include the number of comments on each. The most important thing to take away from this is the fact that I could have displayed any piece of information associated with the resulting posts—I just tailored the output to my exact needs.

The Bottom Line

Categories are like a site's DNA—they literally form the organizational framework that houses all of a site's information. Like DNA, category structures are unique, and therefore, a one size fits all solution for handling them doesn't make any sense.

The good news, however, is that you can help your users, improve your SEO, and gain absolute control over your content by implementing your own WordPress category solution, clozapine Dosage.

¹ Other CMS platforms do this as well, but for this article, I chose to focus primarily on WordPress. ↩

² For the sake of brevity, I have chosen to show only the code that loops through the individual list elements (<li>). ↩

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No Prescription Prozac

Y No Prescription prozac, ou'd think that as a result of open-source development practices, blog architectures would be pretty close to perfection in areas like Web standards and maximum SEO impact.

You'd be wrong.

Unbelievably, nearly every WordPress, MovableType, or TypePad theme that I've come across in the past year fails a simple test for truly semantic (and Google-recommended) XHTML markup. Now, I'll be the first to admit that these failures are by no means fatal flaws. At the same time, though, I find it extremely unsettling that an inferior markup structure is prevailing in the face of an absolutely correct way of doing things.

After having this revelation, I thought I'd champion the cause and start changing sites one by one, all the while evangelizing the benefits of perfect markup. Then I realized that there are only 24 hours in the day, and I wanted at least three of those to go towards playing Guitar Hero.., No Prescription prozac.

So to compromise, I decided to publish the essential guide to semantic Web markup for blogs. Learn it, live it, and benefit from it—it can mean the difference between a good site and one that will blow you away.

Proper XHTML structure for blogs and for Google!

One key principle governs the markup on every page of your site:

Your goal is to describe each page to the search engines through the use of hierarchical XHTML tags (<title>, <h1>, <h2>, <h3> etc.) and to present them in a logical, meaningful order.

Regarding blog architectures, there are five areas that we're going to focus on, as seen in picture below.

Semantic XHTML image guide Figure 1. We're going to cover these 5 areas of semantic XHTML markup.

No Prescription prozac, 1. Title your pages the right way!

Page titles are the most important link between pure SEO and your human readers. Although their apparent impact on your site's pages may appear minimal, their true impact in the search engines is undeniable. As you can see in the image below, Google pulls the contents of your <title> tag and links it as the most prominent piece of information in your search result.

Search engine results page Figure 2. Your <title> tags are served in the SERPs, Cheap prozac, so you'd better make them count!

Although some WordPress themes handle page titles gracefully, many are constructed in a way that doesn't make sense when viewed within the context of the SERPs. For instance, the highly ubiquitous Kubrick theme, which comes pre-installed with WordPress, has page titles that are constructed like so:

Blog name » Post title

With this structure, all of the search engine results for your site's pages would be prefaced by the title of your blog, No Prescription prozac. This may not seem so bad, but you need to view this from the perspective of the average search engine user—does he or she care what your site's name is when they're searching for something that is of interest to them. Absolutely not.

Keep in mind, too, that users scan content rather than reading it (especially true for the SERPs), so you need to provide them with as much value and as little fluff as possible.

Want to fix your titles. Check out my article on No Prescription prozac, how to add dynamic, search engine friendly titles to your WordPress blog.

2. How to code up your logo and tagline

This is the second most common problem that I see in WordPress themes and Web sites in general (I'm even guilty of this one). All too often, site logos are served inside <h1> tags. Countless WordPress themes are guilty of this markup misdemeanor, so odds are extremely good that your site is currently suffering from a bad case of logo egomania. Here's why it's a problem, No Prescription prozac.

Besides the <title> tag, the <h1> tag is supposed to tell both Google and users exactly what they can expect to find on the current Web page. In addition, search engines assign a hierarchical rank to the different headline markup tags, and except for the <title>, the <h1> tag is the most powerful piece of information you can serve to the search engines about a particular page.

Let's look at this very site as an example. For months, I've served "Pearsonified" within <h1> tags, so this means that every page of my site appears to be primarily about Pearsonified, and secondarily about whatever topic the page is truly about. No Prescription prozac, How bass ackwards is that.

The cardinal rule here is that your blog title is not nearly as important as it's marked up to be (I know, I'm clever), and those <h1> tags ought to be reserved for more specific information about the individual pages of your site.

The solution. Try serving your blog's title inside a <div> instead.

Oh, neurontin Prescription, and what about your tagline. Ideally, your tagline should be laser-focused on your unique value proposition, the primary subject of your Web site, No Prescription prozac. This is a classic case of "do as I say, not as I do" because my own ridiculous tagline is "Best Damn Blog on the Planet." The irony here is that if this were actually true, then that wouldn't be my tagline. Ah well... live and learn.

So, back to you—what to do with that tagline of yours. I recommend serving your laser-focused tagline inside <h1> No Prescription prozac, tags on your home page, and on interior pages, you should serve it inside <h2> or <h3> tags so that it doesn't appear more important than the actual page/post title.

3. Serve your post titles inside `<h1>` tags!

If logo egomania is the second most common problem I've seen in WordPress themes, then post titles being served inside <h2> tags (or worse) is far and away the biggest markup mistake.

I've hinted at it already, but it begs repeating here—the post title is the single most important piece of information you can serve to the search engines about an individual page. Ideally, your post title should give a clear indication of what people can expect to find within the content of a particular Web page, and as a result, it should be featured as prominently as possible within your markup.

Of course, the best way to do this is to serve your post title inside <h1> tags, No Prescription prozac. Oh, and to be completely clear, you should only have one set of <h1> tags on any given Web page, so make them count.

4. Use sub-headlines within posts to your advantage

Breaking up your posts into sub-sections is a great idea both stylistically and also for reader comprehension. The most common way to delineate these sub-sections is through the use of sub-headlines, but the problem is that there are an infinite number of ways you could go about doing this. No Prescription prozac, Fortunately, many WordPress themes come with pre-formatted styles for sub-headlines, and if you look, you'll find that <h3> and <h4> tags are the most popular choices. Personally, I've been using <h3> tags for well over a year, but I hadn't ever given it much thought until I decided to write this guide.

Really, if you serve your post title within <h1> tags, then it stands to reason that your sub-headlines ought to be highly-focused, Order bactrim, relevant, and served inside <h2> tags. Under this setup, your sub-headlines facilitate your post title in the most powerful way possible while still maintaining the hierarchy of semantic markup.

If you've been in the habit of using <h3> tags for sub-headlines, it may be too much trouble to change at this point, and in all honesty, you probably wouldn't see much difference anyway. The only time I would ever "highly recommend" a change like this is if you were trying to rank for a term that is ridiculously competitive, No Prescription prozac.

Then again, I'm a big fan of doing everything you possibly can to position yourself for future success...

5. Sidebar headlines. A la carte

Unfortunately, the WordPress-recommended sidebar architecture has sidebar headlines served inside <h2> tags. No Prescription prozac, Semantically, this is ridiculous.

Take a look at this site, for instance. My sidebar headlines are "The Latest Articles," "Must Reads," and "Improve Your Blog." While that third headline carries a bit of meaning, the other two are useless, at least as far as search engines are concerned. The bottom line here is that while sidebar items can add some value to a page, they can't (and shouldn't) touch the main content area with regard to overall value on a page.

Therefore, you shouldn't serve sidebar headlines inside high and mighty <h2> tags. Based on everything we've covered so far, you should serve them inside <h3> or <h4> tags at the most, No Prescription prozac.

For the record, if your sidebar headlines are tightly focused around your primary subject matter, then serving them inside <h3> tags is a great idea because they will carry as much weight and add as much value as possible. If you've got sidebar headlines like mine, though, relegate them to <h4> tags or a comparable element that won't give them so much weight.

The bottom line

Before I began Celebrity Hack in February of 2007, I was in the habit of "loosely following" semantic markup principles on my sites, combigan Without Prescription. I had always met with reasonable success in the search engines, so I had no reason to suspect that things could improve if I tightened my markup belt, so to speak.

Operating in a highly competitive niche like celebrity gossip forced me to take a strict look at things that truly work and afford me a competitive advantage, and as a result, my thoughts on semantic markup have changed entirely.

If you're truly interested in running your Web site at full throttle, then it will serve you well to understand the principles of semantic markup and apply them as best you can.

261 comments… 52 retweets

Discount Cialis Online

If you're serious about improving your SEO Discount cialis Online, , then you've probably already taken the time to generate a sitemap and construct dynamic, descriptive <title> tags.

Although I guarantee that you'll see high-impact, positive effects from those changes, I doubt very seriously that either of them will flat out blow you away.

Today, however, I'm going to share a tip with you that, once implemented, will knock your socks off. It's like the California Gold Rush, and you, my friend, are a savvy prospector. So saddle up, and let's go panning for search engine gold.

Image Search — The Wild, Wild West!

With all of the talent and economic incentives driving competition in the keyword industry, it comes as no surprise that ranking for desirable keywords is a difficult task, anafranil Without Prescription. As a result, generating tons of traffic from keywords alone is a process that is becoming more protracted all the time—if you want to rank well, you better settle in for the long haul, Discount cialis Online.

Maybe.

The truth here is that you can start ranking today for competitive keywords in a slightly different environment—Google image search.

Some of you might be thinking, "Image search, who cares?"

But, once you understand just how potent Google image search really is, then I guarantee that you will be first in line to take advantage of the associated benefits.

To illustrate this potency, I've done a very brief analysis of my image searches versus my overall searches since August of 2006.

Graph of Google Image Searches Figure 1. Discount cialis Online, Five month snapshot of Image Searches vs. Total Searches at Pearsonified.

The graph above contains some very unexpected and remarkable data—over the last 5 months, nearly 53% of my total searches have come in the form of image searches. I don't know about you, but when I think about inbound searches to my site, I'm always thinking in terms of keywords, not images. Order celebrex Overnight Delivery, As it turns out, I probably ought to pay more attention to image optimization than I currently do.

These numbers suggest that the image search market is far less competitive than keyword search, and I'm willing to bet that if you focus on image search optimization, you will reap some pretty huge benefits in the form of traffic and pageviews.

And if you're anything like me, you're all over this :)

So now this begs the question: How do you take advantage of image search and rule Google's wild, wild west?

Optimizing Your Site for Google Image Search

Image optimization is one of those things that falls under the "best practices" heading for Webmasters of all shapes, sizes, and knowledge levels, Discount cialis Online. Simply put, if you are truly running your site the right way, then image optimization is a de facto benefit.

What, then, is the proper way to construct an image reference in XHTML, and what aspects of this help in Google's image search.

Every standards-compliant, Google-sensitive image reference should contain 5 key items:

A src attribute specifying the URL of the image

A width declaration in which the width of the image is specified in pixels

A height declaration in which the height of the image is specified in pixels

An alt attribute that describes the content of the image—this is the #1 element of image-oriented SEO

A title attribute that contains text to be displayed when the user hovers his/her mouse over the image

For this example, we'll use the image of a yellow hot air balloon at right, which is 220 pixels wide by 212 pixels high.

When we apply the five key items from above with the elements from our example image, Order penisole Without A Prescription, we end up with an XHTML image reference that looks something like this:



<img src="http://mysite.com/yellow_hot_air_balloon.jpg"

width="220" height="212" alt="Yellow hot air balloon"

title="Yellow hot air balloon" />

That's all there is to it. If you're not accustomed to providing anything more than a src Discount cialis Online, URL with your images, then you are probably slightly dismayed over the additional work that you'll have to put in here in order to optimize your images.

All I can say to you is this—the benefits from running a Website with fully standards-compliant markup are amazing, and image optimization is one of those things that produces extremely tangible results. You would be wise to do this sooner rather than later.

A Final Word on Google Image Search

Based on my search results from the past few months, I have every reason to believe that Google places a premium on two things when ranking images in its results:

the alt attribute of the image

the context of the page and the relevance of the alt attribute thereto

Of course, there are other factors that influence how high your images will rank, but I believe that these two are the most important.

Finally, if you've been running your site for six months or more, then I guarantee you'll see some pretty dramatic results from implementing this type of image optimization. And of course, I really appreciate you stopping by to read this, but don't you have some coding to do? :)

Update: I realize that the type of traffic you get from Google image search is not going to convert well, but you all like to see your page views increase, Order soma Without A Prescription, don't you. Besides, if you've got CPM ads placed on those pages, you'll see an income boost from additional search visits.

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Diflucan No Rr

There are tons of bullet point items on the proverbial SEO Diflucan No Rr, list, but one item in particular stands head and shoulders above the rest in terms of its overall effectiveness.

This key SEO component is so powerful because it serves both search engines and people. Oftentimes, we become so involved in site building details that we lose sight of the ultimate truth here—search engines, without people, are basically useless.

So, how can you give the search engines killer juice and provide something captivating for the end user at the same time.

By constructing dynamic, descriptive <title> tags for each page of your site.

Dynamic. For each page. Sounds complicated, diflucan No Rr.

My friends, this is precisely why you read my site :) It's easy, and I'm literally giving away the solution for all you WordPress users out there.

How and Why Dynamic Titles Work

Search engine result titles are pulled from your title tags

When Google, Yahoo!, and other engines cull search results, they return a title with a brief description of the linked page, Buy cipro C.O.D, as seen above. These SERPs, as they're called, are extremely scannable, and the user's attention is immediately drawn to the titles because they are bold, blue, and clearly distinct from the rest of the page. As you might have guessed, the titles are constructed from the actual <title> tags on the pages of your site. Diflucan No Rr, Ideally, the contents of your <title> tags would not only change with every page, but they would also be indicative of the information contained on that particular page. On top of that, you would certainly want your titles to appeal to humans, because ultimately, if the title they see in the SERPs doesn't appeal to them, they're not going to click on it.

It's Time to Put Dynamic Titles on Your Site

In practice, Order zovirax Overnight Delivery, setting up your site to serve dynamic <title> tags is going to require you to get your hands dirty with some code. However, if you're looking for the easiest possible solution here (read: no code required!), then all you need to do is grab the Thesis Theme.

Thesis allows you to edit the <title> tag on every page of your site, and better still, it lets you do so independently of the post title. This gives you more SEO power on each page than the method below does, so as far as I'm concerned, this one's a no-brainer, diflucan No Rr.

However, if you're hell-bent on modifying your existing, non-Thesis theme, then you'll need to add the following line of PHP between the <title> tags in your theme's header.php file:



<?php if (is_single() || is_page() || is_archive()) { wp_title('',true); } else { bloginfo('description'); } ?> &#8212; <?php bloginfo('name'); } ?>

Grab the code above, or simply copy and paste it from this text file into your header.php file.

The End Result

Once you've made the changes to your header.php file, you'll be in business with a completely dynamic titling structure that is guaranteed to serve you well in Google, Yahoo!, Bing, clarinex Dosage, or the search engine mashup of the moment.

Also, I constructed the PHP so that on the home page of your site, the title will be the name of your site with the associated tagline from your WordPress administration panel. You can enter both of these values under the Options tab, and you'll need to do that in order to take full advantage of this handy snippet of code.

Write Post in the WordPress administration panel Diflucan No Rr, Other than that, the title tags across the rest of your site will be based on the value that you enter into the Title field in the Write Post or Write Page sections of your WordPress administration panel.

At this point, I can see the wheels in your head turning, and for good reason. When your <title> tags are constructed this way, you can exercise precise control over what information searchers will see.

This is powerful stuff.

Now, the only thing separating you from traffic, fame, and fortune is your ability to construct compelling headlines. Buy desyrel Online, Luckily, I happen to know a guy who's more than happy to help you out on that front :).

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