Pagination with WP-PageNavi

To understand one reason why it would be useful, let’s examine how page rank is typically assigned to a website. Keep in mind this is an oversimplification of how Google actually works, but it’s useful as a model. Let’s say your site has been assigned a page rank of 5, that means it has 5 points to distribute to all its pages. So if there are 5 links on the home page each link would get 1 point. Now let’s say that page also has 5 links, each of those links would get 1/5 of a 1 point. So what’s the takeaway from this? That the more clicks it takes to get to a given page, the less value Google and the other search engines assign to it.

So if your WordPress blog uses the default, out of the box pagination; your older posts are going to be considered less valuable, because the user and the search engines have to “click” on more links to get to them. This might be fine for some blogs that are more current events focused, but many blogs have good “evergreen” posts, that even written some time ago are still valuable.

How your older posts fare under default WordPress pagination

For example, let’s say blog post #7 was a popular post, ranked well for it’s keywords etc. But I’ve written 6 blogs posts since then, and now it has moved off the home page and even off the first page of its category page. Because it now takes three clicks (see above) to get to post #7, the post gets less “SEO juice” given to it by the search engines.

Now your older blog posts get the attention they deserve!

• Matt Cutts announced in March that a “over optimization” penalty was coming.
• Soon after that, many sites received a “unnatural links have been detected ..” message in GWMT (Google Webmaster Tools).
• A Google Panda update was released on April 19, 2012.
• Google Penguin was released on April 24, 2012.

Google Panda, first released in February 2011, was aimed at lower quality sites. Sites that had thin content, too many ads and overall less useful content saw their traffic drop, sometimes by large percentages. Google has continued to release updates to Panda over the last year, and sites continue to suffer from it.

Google Penguin, is an whole other thing entirely. Its goal is to weed out sites that have been engaging in building “over optimized” (or less charitably – spammy) backlink profiles. This post will focus on detecting a Google Penguin penalty – but the techniques I outline here are useful for detecting an unfavorable impact on your site’s organic traffic for any of the Google changes (algorithmic or otherwise) that roll out with regularity.

What does a “unnatural” or “over optimized” backlink profile look like? Lots of links that have “perfect” keyword rich link anchor text coming from lower quality sites, particularly sitewide links in the footer or in the “blogroll” sections of the sites.

How to check if a Google change has impacted your site

I’m going to assume that you have Google analytics set up on your site, but you should be able to use other analytics software.

First – check your Google Webmaster Tools messages (if you haven’t already) – if you see the dreaded “unnatural links” message – chances are you’ve been hit by Penguin. Although Penguin had a release date, reports by site owners that received the message indicated that some sites saw an impact as early as late March.

Second – look at your organic traffic. Google Analytics reports on ALL your traffic, not just on your organic traffic that you get from the search engines; this includes:

• Referral Traffic: Traffic you get from other sites, (including social media sites like facebook).
• Direct Traffic: Traffic you get from people typing in your URL (also may include traffic from email links – if the email is not read on a website.
• Paid Search: If you use PPC (pay per click) that traffic can be tracked separately.
• And finally, Organic Traffic: SEO Traffic you get from the Search Engines that you haven’t paid for.

Organic Traffic in Google Analytics

Like a lot of things in Google Analytics, there are a number of ways to segment out your Organic Traffic for viewing. But the easiest way to do it is to navigate to Traffic Sources –> Search –> Organic in the menu on the left side.

Alternatively, a more advanced technique, is defining a custom segment where you can specify to include the dimension “Medium” to contain “Organic”. Custom segments are useful because you can turn them on anywhere in Google Analytics to filter your data.

Regardless, what you are using, now that you are looking at organic traffic, adjust the dates to look at your organic traffic over the days April 19, 2012 (Panda) and April 24, 2012 (Penguin). If you received a message about “unnatural links” you should start from the date of that message. If your organic traffic is normally erratic, you may need to switch to a “week” view, but generally the “day” view is best.

If you are a brand or a well known personage, you will also need to filter out your “branded” traffic, for example the name of your site, a product you sell or your name. Google algorithm changes and penalties generally don’t impact your branded organic traffic, and if you get a lot of it, this may obscure any change in your keyword based organic traffic.

Click on "Advanced" to get a dialog to help you filter out branded terms

To filter out your branded terms, start by click on the Advanced link that is under and to the left of your chart. This will reveal a dialog similar to the custom segment one where you can specify the keyword terms to exclude.

These techniques are handy whether you have been impacted by a Google change like Penguin or not. Take some time to play around with Google Analytics, there is a lot of power in the tool, and even if you use just 20% of what is available, you’ll be far ahead of your competition.

Most people divide SEO (search engine optimization) into two buckets – on page SEO and off page SEO. However, with changes in the SEO landscape over the last couple of years, these tactical ways of thinking may have you overlooking some key SEO principles. It’s time to take a bigger picture, more comprehensive view of your site’s SEO.

What is on page SEO?

On page SEO, sometimes also called “technical SEO” is the optimization of various on page factors to help your web page rank better in the search engine results pages. These include factors such as:

1. Page titles
2. The h1 on your page
3. Meta descriptions
4. alt tags on your images

What is off page SEO?

Off page SEO is also known as linkbuilding. Here you are actively trying to get other websites (preferably authoritative and relevant ones) to link to your website with keywords in your link anchor text.

These are all good tactics, but they are not the full picture of all the things you should think about when you build your SEO strategy for your website.

Here’s the way I think about SEO

1. Search engine friendliness
2. Optimization – this is mostly our old friend – on page SEO
3. User engagement
4. Promotion – includes, but is not just limited to linkbuilding

Is your site search engine friendly?

What good is your optimized page if the search engine can’t find it? And what if this page appears as multiple pages to the search engine. SEO’s today have to think about getting rid of duplicate content within a site, page load speed (which Google announced it would consider as a signal over a year ago) and submitting XML sitemaps to both Google and Bing.

Is your site engaging?

If users quickly bounce off your website, that is a negative signal to Google and the other search engines. Good website design, good navigation are all considerations SEOs have to take into account. Social media is a factor here, a strong following across the social media channels often turn into backlinks.

Think of off page SEO in terms of campaigns rather than as linkbuilding

Backlinks occur as a result of PR efforts and marketing campaigns. Instead of thinking of getting a couple of links to your website, think about how you can promote your business and what value you can provide that will naturally attract links.

Recently Google has been publishing blog posts that cover search algorithm changes. Google makes hundreds if not thousands algorithmic changes each year, but some of them have more impact than others, and these blog posts summarizing the recent changes have been popular.

In a November 2011 Google blog post, entitled Ten recent algorithm changes, one bullet was titled “Better page titles in search results by de-duplicating boilerplate anchors” and included the statement “We found that boilerplate links with duplicated anchor text are not as relevant, so we are putting less emphasis on these.” What they mean by boilerplate links is a lot of backlinks that all use the exact same anchor text.

Google has always had an uneasy relationship with linkbuilding, it likes to pretend it is not needed, that if you write great content the links will come naturally. This may be true but it’s very slow as I can attest to (I’ve done almost no linkbuilding for this blog). It doesn’t help that linkbuilding WORKS, I have definitely seen (albeit prior to this announcement) a site rank for a keyword based almost exclusively on the strength of duplicated anchor text in many boilerplate backlinks. However with Google it’s always important to keep in mind that your rankings can change quickly, so the more clever SEOs vary the anchor text in the backlink profile so that it is more natural looking and won’t get devalued by Google as spammy at some point.

So to me this announcement from Google indicated that they were getting more clever at detecting these unnatural link profiles and linkbuilders needed to vary the link anchor text in the backlinks, if they weren’t already.

Peter Prestipino in an article “Inside the Black Box” has a different take on the Google announcement. He thinks it is a sign that Google has begun to deprecate the value of anchor text within inbound links in the influence of search result page titles.” He then goes on to say: “This means all of the work SEO professionals has put into varying the anchor text used in their link-building campaigns may be for naught.” A different conclusion than the one I came to for sure.

Like many things in the SEO world, the reality is that only data from a focused test will conclusively say one way or the other. But I hate to write a blog post that doesn’t offer any conclusive actions to take so here is what I am suggesting:

• If you do linkbuilding and you don’t vary the pages you link to nor the keywords in the anchor text – start doing so. Read up on using “partial matching” and “synonyms” in your anchor text.
• Make sure there are some natural looking backlinks. Most sites (like this one) have backlinks with the domain name or the author name in the anchor text – yours should too.
• Engage in activities to attract links to your site. Promote via social media and learn the art of PR.
• Make sure the links you get are from good quality sites that are relevant to your topic. Another bullet in the November post covered “snippets with more page content and less header/menu content.” indicating Google is looking more closely at page content (rather than just the header) to determine what a page is about. If they are truly deprecating the value of the link anchor text, it’s not much of a leap to theorize they are using the page content surrounding the link as a stronger signal.

The more natural you can make your backlink profile look, the less likely you will be affect by Google algorithm changes like these.

First some definitions

• Dynamic Websites are websites that are generated in all or in part at the time of access. This is often done by assembling information retrieved from a database. WordPress is an example of a dynamic website. All the content is stored in a database and it is presented as needed in multiple forms.
• Duplicate Content here refers to duplicate content within a site (not duplicate content across domains). In this case, duplicate content is when more than one page has the same content. Or, put another way, there are multiple URLs that lead to the same page. SEOs also classify pages with very similar content as duplicate content, I touch on this briefly below, but it really deserves a separate post.

Why is duplicate content bad?

• Your domain is only given a fixed amount of PR (page rank) / link juice. Duplicate content wastes that link juice on pages that you don’t need in the index.
• Extra pages that are the same as other pages wastes the spiders time. Googlebot and the other search engine crawlers may not get to your “good” pages because they have wasted time with your duplicate pages.
• To Google it is a low quality signal. Which means that Google adjusts its opinion of your site downwards. I’ve seen at least one partial recovery from Panda by fixing a duplicate content problem on a site.

If you see that some of your pages end up in the dreaded supplemental index, then you know you have a duplicate content problem.

What causes duplicate content on dynamic websites?

There are three common culprits for duplicate content:

• Multiple navigation paths are reflected in the URL As a user navigates through a site, the directories are added to the URL. This is fine, however the problem comes in when there is multiple ways to navigate to the same page. So let’s say you have a cooking site and you have a category called vegetables and a category called soup. Your vegetable soup would fit into both categories and could be reached via two URLs:

  mywonderfulcooking.com/vegetables/vegetable-soup/

  mywonderfulcooking.com/soups/vegetable-soup/

  This is one reason to avoid using categories in your WordPress permalinks.
• URL parameters can cause duplicate content, especially on sites that use them as a tracking mechanism. The problem is that now you have two URLs that render as the same page, one with the URL parameter added and one without. Using our cooking site as an example:

  mywonderfulcooking.com/soups/vegetable-soup/

  mywonderfulcooking.com/soups/vegetable-soup/?tracking=twitter

• Aggregate pages are pages that have summaries or excerpts of your content pages. This is more of an example of very similar content rather than duplicate content, but I wanted to mention it because it is a common problem in WordPress sites. Excerpts is one approach to handle duplicate content on aggregate pages in WordPress.

Common fixes for duplicate content

• Use the rel canonical tag to specify which page is the authoritative page that should be indexed.
• Adjust the URL parameters in Google Webmasters Tools. These settings tell the crawler what parameters change the content on the page and what parameters don’t. For the parameters that don’t, Googlebot now knows that there is no point in crawling pages also that have this parameter, even with a different value. Bing Webmaster Tools has a similar feature “URL Normalization”, I would love to see examples of this working, as it hasn’t for me yet.

I often get asked whether both fixes should be used. Although I haven proven this beyond a doubt, my sense is that the URL parameters settings are best to keep Google from crawling duplicate content in the first place, while the rel canonical tag is heeded more quickly to remove duplicate content from Google’s index. So my answer is yes, both should be used – especially if there is already duplicate content in the index. If you have seen scenarios where setting the URL parameters does remove duplicate content from the index, I would be interested in learning about it.

These are just two ways to address duplicate content, there are more approaches, such as a 301 redirect or using the robots.txt to block the crawler from the pages. Keep in mind that the rel canonical tag is a “hint” (albeit one Google heeds, although Bing not so much), a 301 redirect is always a stronger signal to the crawler on which page (and which page should not) be indexed. Of course setting up your website to avoid these problems in the first would be ideal.

In this case, I had a client that had a number of very similar pages that did not fully have the rel canonical tag fully applied as a solution. Based on Eric Enge’s interview with Duane Forrester, where Duane stated “If we are finding your pages, but not keeping them in the index, there is a reason for that.” I decided to see what Bing Webmaster’s Index Explorer had indexed as “quality content” as a data point.

Bing Webmaster Indexation Stats, the spike in the middle was due to some crawl errors.

Google introduced the URL parameters settings in Webmasters Tools so you could help Google decide whether to crawl pages with a parameter. With Google this is working fairly well. Bing has recently introduced a similar feature, called “URL Normalization”. The feature is confusing, you have two choices: “Enabled” and “Disabled”. Non intuitively “Disabled” means that Bing doesn’t do any “URL normalization”, so if you want the search engine to do the normalization you enable it. What that means is not entirely clear, but the instructions on the page say “use this page to specify the parameter “abc” be ignored …” So apparently “enabled” means “ignored”. Clear? Maybe to you. It hurts my head.

So far the tools at my disposal have proven ineffectual in addressing the duplicate content in Bing’s index. Of course the search engines have the position that rel canonical is a hint, a 301 is the preference, but a 301 is not an option here.

And even more sadly, I didn’t even get to a strategy for the similar pages.

The opponents say that SOPA would give the US government the ability to completely block a website from US viewing even if just one link on that site violates copyright. It wouldn’t matter if the link was created by a user and not the site owner, blockage would still be possible. If that doesn’t bother you, this FAQ on SOPA may. No wonder sites such as reddit – which are driven by user generated content – are up in arms over this legislation and plan to go dark on January 18th as a protest.

While there is some fearmongering going on here, it is clear that the legislation is dangerous and not really in the spirit of a free and open internet that many of us expect. SOPA opponents have many valid points. While there are signs that the White House is beginning to waver in its support of the bill, we are not out of the woods yet.

Joining the SOPA blackout protest? Read this first

Many are urging webmasters to protest by posting a statement on their site or altering their site to redirect to this effective AmericanCensorship.org infographic. There are already WordPress plugins created that you can use. However before you run off and implement any of these, consider that your actions may have a negative impact on your site’s SEO. Have a read of this post: How to participate in the outage without hurting your site with Google search. Google recommends that you have your site return a 503 HTTP status code so that it knows not to spider your content that day.

It occurs to me that maybe Google should just not crawl that day?

Picture by aussiegold and published under the Flickr Creative Commons License

I used to get frustrated after carefully explaining to new bloggers and site owners how to write SEO friendly permalinks, page titles and meta descriptions — and then watching them forget everything I told them by creating poorly optimized posts and pages. Now I can lead the horse to water, and he (or she) actually drinks it! Another great bonus about this plugin is that is it so comprehensive is that it does the job of several plugins. For example there is no need to install a sitemap plugin – Yoast’s plugin will take care of that too for you.

There is so many features in this plugin, that I am not going to cover them all, but I would like to show how it helps you optimize your pages and posts to be SEO friendly. When installed, the plugin adds an additional form to your page/post edit screen that has three tabs. The key to the first tab is to first choose your focus keyword (a drop list appears to help you refine the keyword even further – and there is a related keyword button). Once you’ve decided on your keyworde, you can then customize the page title and meta description (here I have customized the title but not the meta description tag). Then you can use the initial page analysis results as a guide to optimize further. Perhaps you need to weave in your keyword into your content? You’ll be reminded to do so here:

First Tab has the Snippet Preview and is where you choose your focus keyword and customize your page title and meta description.

The second tab takes the page analysis a level deeper. You’ll get reminders on placing your keyword in the first paragraph of your copy (as I am reminded here) and a reading level score.

Taking the SEO analysis of your page to a deeper level

The third tab has a lot of power. Here you can noindex your page if you need to, setup a 301 redirect, also define your canonical URL, and even tweak your sitemap priority settings.

Don't overlook the third tab, there is a lot of power here.

The plugin has many more features available in a separate menu on the sidebar. Yoast has taken the trouble to add commentary to help you use the settings correctly. Just taking the time to read through his comments could help many learn SEO. The plugin is available in the WordPress plugin repository (search on “WordPress SEO Yoast”) and by download from his site.]]> http://webenso.com/wordpress-seo-plugin-yoast/feed/ 7 http://webenso.com/to-seo-or-to-ppc-useful-info/ http://webenso.com/to-seo-or-to-ppc-useful-info/#comments Fri, 30 Dec 2011 12:07:22 +0000 Guest Author http://webenso.com/to-seo-or-to-ppc-useful-info/ Once you have a website launched, the next question you need to answer is how you are going to get traffic to it.

Today you have a lot of options you can choose from. One way to get traffic is to pay for advertising with the search engines and other networks (such as Facebook). Or instead of paying for advertising, you can focus on getting your website found when people search for a solution that your business provides. You can also attract interest with social media. In this article we are going to look at advertising using PPC and ranking using SEO.

What is PPC?

A popular way to advertise is by using PPC. PPC means Pay Per Click. Often when you search on Google or Bing – you will see “sponsored” listings at the top of the page and/or to the right. If you click on one of these sponsored links, the advertiser will pay the search engine for that click.

It isn’t a simple flat rate. The advertisers bid for placement in the listings. You would think the highest bidder would always get the first spot, but this is not always true. Google and Bing take many factors into consideration, including the quality of the ad and the site and how well it matches the searcher’s query.

What is SEO?

SEO – search engine optimization – is the art and science of getting your website to appear in the coveted top organic listings (those that appear under the sponsored listings. SEO activities include optimizing your website pages to match the keywords that searchers enter into Google and the other search engines, and also promoting your site to get other websites to link to yours.

Which is better?

It depends on the answers to the questions below:

1. What’s the competition like? The effort it takes to rank for a set of keywords can vary widely based on the market and how “niche” your keywords are. If you are a local business, using local SEO to rank for search terms that have your city name in them can be successful without a lot of effort and time. However if you want to rank for “car insurance” you will have to have a big SEO budget and time.
2. What will be your PPC spend? Competition matters in the PPC world too. Some terms (legal issues are an example) are quite expensive to bid on.
3. What’s your timeframe? To get traffic quickly, PPC will be much faster than SEO. New sites can take 3 months or more to rank consistently. You may want to consider using PPC to kick things off for your business until your SEO efforts start to pay off.
4. Are you testing? Maybe you are creating a new landing page for a product you are offering. A focused PPC test can give you a lot of information on how well your page converts. This information can help guide both SEO and PPC efforts in influencing the headline you write and the keywords you use in both your PPC campaigns and SEO efforts.
5. How do you want to target your audience? With advertising, particularly on Facebook, you can get fairly precise on who to advertise to. Google gives you the ability to select the geographic locations to advertise to. If you advertise on the display network (adsense ads) you can even choose the websites to advertise on. Facebook additionally lets you target certain demographics and interests. While you can target your SEO efforts as well, by its nature, SEO traffic will be less targeted – focusing only on the keywords used in the search query.
6. What do your competitors do? If your competitors are heavy users of advertising and their sites are not well optimized, you should ask yourself why. It might be an opportunity for you to capitalize on their oversight, but then again there might be a good reason why they are focusing their efforts in one area over the other. Keep in mind, that certain types of sites (think a lot of content) lend themselves more naturally to SEO, and others more to PPC.

Many online businesses will employ both SEO and PPC campaigns to get traffic. To answer the question, which is better? the answer is neither, it all depends on what you want to accomplish and the market you want to compete in.

One annoying thing, and many people miss this, is that you should verify both the ‘www’ and non ‘www’ versions of your site with Google Webmasters Tools, even if you have a 301 redirect (as you should) setup from one to the another.

Why verify both the ‘www’ and non ‘www’ versions of your site?

• Google is pretty smart about the ‘www’ subdomain, but telling it you own both your domain and the ‘www’ subdomain just is another signal that helps your site. Google doesn’t automatically transfer the trust and authority it’s given to a domain to a subdomain. This is because it is possible for someone different to own a subdomain.
• Verifying both versions allows you to set the “preferred domain” (Site Configuration -> Settings) in GWMT, again another signal that can only help.
• If you ever have to move your site to another domain, you will want to submit a “Change of Address” in GWMT. You will not be able to do this unless both the ‘www’ and non ‘www’ versions of your site have been verified.

More on Google Webmasters Tools Verification

To verify your site in Google Webmasters Tools there are three methods (the third method is newer):

1. Add a meta tag in the of your home page
2. Upload a file to the root directory that GWMT provides to you
3. Add a DNS record for your site and telling Google about it.

DNS Text Verification was released in mid 2011 by Google.

There are many step by step articles and videos on how to do the verification, including in this blog. Also as one might expect, there is a WordPress plugin that makes it easy to do the verification if you don’t want to deal with FTP, editing your site or DNS records. Here are some links to resources:

• I cover both the Yahoo and Google verification process and submitting a sitemap.
• One of many videos on GWMT verification (covers the HTML file upload option and doesn’t mention DNS Text Verification). Most of these videos assume you are using particular hosting provider.
• Article that covers all three verification methods
• Why submitting a change of address is beneficial when you move domains even if you also use 301 redirects.