All in One SEO noindex settings

June 17, 2011 / Search Engine Optimization, WordPress / by Kathy Alice

Blue WordPress LogoThe All in One SEO WordPress plugin is a very popular plugin. Many install it so that they have the ability to customize their post’s page title. This is very useful to do from the SEO perspective. Your post title should be written for your reader and be catchy, your page title for your post should be more oriented towards keywords.

But the plugin has other settings that require attention. Out of the box the plugin configuration will noindex your category pages but not your tag pages. This isn’t necessarily what you want and I’ve had to fix a couple of blogs that had the default settings.

Continue Reading

WordPress SEO plugins to improve bounce rate

April 26, 2011 / Search Engine Optimization, WordPress / by Kathy Alice

One of my goals has been to address my high bounce rate on this blog, which has been above 80%. To do that I’ve been working on features that increase my website stickiness.

Bounce Rate is a SEO factor

Bounce RateWhy would I want to do this? Let’s put the SEO factor aside for a moment. As a blogger you of course want people to get value from your blog, read several posts and return. A high bounce rate means that most of your visitors just visited the single page they originally landed on and then left your blog. Of course if the article answered their question completely that would be a good thing, even if they left without browsing further. This is more difficult to measure, but you can look at time spent on the site as another clue.

Most SEOs would agree that Google and the other search engines are taking bounce rate into account. Google might be looking at Google Analytics for the bounce rate, but even if you don’t have Google Analytics installed, Google and Bing can collect bounce rate data by looking at how quickly the user returns back to the search engine results page and clicks on the next result. A quick return and click on the next website on the list means the user didn’t find what they are looking for on your website.

So from both the SEO and user engagement / conversion perspective you should care about your bounce rate and website stickiness.

Continue Reading

The rel nofollow tag and page rank sculpting

April 19, 2011 / Search Engine Optimization, WordPress / by Kathy Alice

Updated: May 25, 2012
I see a lot of outdated information about the rel nofollow tag. Particularly a lot of advice to use it in page rank sculpting. That might have been useful at one point, but it hasn’t been for over a year now.

What is the nofollow tag?

The nofollow tag is a tag you can add to a href link to tell Google not to pass page rank to the link. It is typically used for comments on a blog (to discourage comment spam) and for sponsored links. By adding this tag to your href HTML code you are telling Google, I’m not sure I trust this site and I don’t want to pass my link juice over to it.

Continue Reading

Getting Your Website Logo to Appear as a Favicon

April 6, 2011 / WordPress / by Kathy Alice

What’s that logo in the browser tab?

Webenso LogoWith many of the websites you visit today, you’ve probably noticed that a little image or logo shows next to the URL and in the browser tab. The question is how to get that an icon showing up for your website? That little image is called a favicon and it dates below to early Internet Explorer days when it was used in the IE “favorites” menu. Fast forward to today, and now most modern browsers support it and it, in my humble opinion, has become a “must have”. Having your logo show up as browser tab image and next to your website’s URL reinforces the branding of your website. In fact I get annoyed these days when I can’t instantly identify a browser tab I have open by the picture or the page title, so it was high time I installed one for this site.

Continue Reading

Help, My WordPress Site is Hacked – What do I do?

March 26, 2011 / WordPress / by Kathy Alice

Attack Site Image
Courtesy of stwn - Flickr Creative Commons License
Early on March 10th, webenso.com was infected by malware. It started out as parts of the site not working however by the end of the day, it had been blacklisted by Google with any access to the site getting the dreaded red “reported attack site” image.

If your WordPress site is hacked – what do you do?. First things first, are you (or your web designer) up for the challenge? Security is a specialized field that can require a different perspective and skill set. If you are not comfortable with browsing through code and don’t know your way around .htaccess, other configuration files and phpadmin, consider using a service that will clean up your site for you. Whether you get help or not, it helps to be familiar with the issues and remediation steps. Here’s my take on what you need do.

Continue Reading

Use Excerpts to Avoid Duplicate Content Problems

February 21, 2011 / Search Engine Optimization, WordPress / by Kathy Alice

WordPress is an extremely flexible platform. One aspect of it’s flexibility is that it provides many different sorts of aggregate pages, you can choose to show your posts chronologically, grouped by your tags and/or grouped by category. And of course the home page shows a list of your posts unless you have chosen to show a static page instead. However having all these different ways to show the same content can be seen as duplicate content by the search engines.

Unfortunately duplicate content in wordpress is a rather complex topic, but in this post I want to focus on just one aspect that has a relatively straightforward solution to it. But first let’s understand the problem better. When I talk about duplicate content, I am talking about content that is the same across multiple pages of your site. This is beyond having duplicate pages. Google and the other search engines essentially don’t want to see the same block of content on multiple page. Which is precisely what you have when you have category, tag, home and archive pages showing your posts in their entirety.

Continue Reading