Before I get on to the actual point of the post: my new domains have propagated for the majority and you can now get to my site through jemjabella.co.uk, .com, .net and .org. HOORAH.
SEO, or Search Engine Optimisation, is the process of optimising your website to increase your rank in search engines (not just Google, although I aim for high rankings in this primarily.) I’ve created a post which explains my top tips for helping your website rank higher.
12 Oct at 8:08 pm
I was tempted to get the com/net/us version of my domain, but I’m far too lazy and cheap to buy any of them. Though if I come across some godaddy or namecheap, I might invest in them. The last time I checked, I think I was 4 out of 10, but that’s honestly because I haven’t even tried to get my pagerank up. But as of late I’ve been pretty into stats, my vistors, and keeping them up and happy, as well as getting more. However, at least this article wasn’t like reading webworkshop.net/pagerank.html. I nearly shat myself at how it all works, and figured I’d prefer the “for dummies” version of it all. :P
12 Oct at 8:09 pm
Thank…you…so…much… Ok, I hope that didn’t sound sarcastic because it wasn’t meant to be. I never actually thought about it that much, truth be told.
12 Oct at 9:18 pm
I laughed at the Sapphire comment. :P I’d do the tip #1 but I’m using Jack’s static pages.
12 Oct at 10:06 pm
Nice tips, especially the one for WordPress.
12 Oct at 10:25 pm
I’m a big fan of #1, but I’m doing a different method so you know which subfolder you’re in as well, so it’s like Luve-me.net »(if that works) Domain » Links Out, and so on, that’s a plug you can use. I would give a link if I could find it.
12 Oct at 10:28 pm
Lol, doesn’t but I think you can guess what it looks like. I also wanted to ask, when you say link to yourself properly, you mean like the full link, not something like /about/me/etc but the full http://mysite/about/me/etc?
12 Oct at 10:36 pm
Ah, that sounds good. I think I can set up Expression Engine to give all my entries titles, and I know I meant to.. time to implement that when I clean my code up (now that I know what I’m doing!)
13 Oct at 1:35 am
I think the importance of page titles, which shouldn’t even *need* stressing, illustrates what a bad habit ‘header’ includes are. Putting templated page content in an include file is one thing. Putting a HTML document’s [head] section into an include file defeats the purpose of having metadata.
13 Oct at 7:36 am
@Gemma: I agree and disagree. Includes make people lazy and therefore perhaps shouldn’t be used as much, but at the same time there’s no reason that they can’t put the meta tags/etc into includes and still customise them fully. I personally have three variables which I can customise before I include my header – meta keywords, meta description and subtitle. These are then echo-ed (if changed) within the header or, if I am not feeling imaginative enough to make a custom title, are left as default. Works a treat for me :) @Corinne: I don’t know if it matters where you do a relative link (personal/fanlistings.php) or a full link (https://www.jemjabella.co.uk/personal/fanlistings.php), as long as you keep linking to yourself. I use a full link because I’m lazy and use Firefox’ right-click “Copy Link Location” if I want to link to something, which grabs the full URL for me.
13 Oct at 9:47 am
Thank you so much Jem! Great:D I also found this for wordpress users http://www.dech.co.uk/2005/11/ultimate-wordpress-seo-tips/
13 Oct at 2:58 pm
I need to figure out how to to change the meta tags for each page, too. -_- I feel something manual coming up.
15 Oct at 8:19 pm
If you wanted to capitalize the first letter of each WORD (in your first example), wouldn’t it was ucwords instead of ucfirst? Like, the way I understand the example is that you mean the tutorial to take a_title_here and make it A Title Here but with ucfirst wouldn’t it be A title here? MAYBE I am just on crack! Nay doesn’t KNOW PHP, she’s slinking away now in horror.
16 Nov at 3:02 pm
@Renay: you’re totally right. No idea how I missed that mistake, hah.
26 Jan at 11:07 pm
Hey great tips, just launched my website, and I stupidly purchased an articles script which utilised too much php’age ie faq_qanda?100045. Enough said LOL! so that has now been relegated to the site FAQ only, as indexing wasnt going to plan really due to created on the fly pages :| Gah well decided to scrap that for my main content and have been shlaving away at my keyboard setting up endless contents pages and separate articles pages since….. but hopefully having read your great help above, I have not wasted my time and that you have just clarified that I AM heading in the right direction….. so cheers must goto Jem :) One question though! (arrrgh) Do search engines take into account for directories? ie sitename.com/web-design/how-to-make-websites.php? in terms of seo?
17 Apr at 10:11 pm
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