Online PR UK & Expert SEO

This is a follow on from my other post on adding static content for search engines :

This is really useful if you want static content on the front page, but you want to run blog posts below the content.

I have had sooo many problems with this. I have tried ‘sticky posts‘ and a number of other plugins to get s ingle static piece of content to just sit there without affecting other parts of the site ( i wont extrapolate, aside that this issue is a pain)

The usual route is to set up an include on the theme above the blog posts. the downer is that this include then repeats itself on the ‘previous articles’ pages and so you get duplicate content…. not good for seo

So here is my fix

I have added this code below

<?php get_header(); ?>
<?php get_sidebar(); ?>

and ive made sure it’s within the div tags theming the content.

<?php if ( $paged < 2 ) { // Do stuff specific to first page?>
<?php if ( is_home() ) : ?>
<div id=”category-description”>
<?php echo get_staticpage(); ?>
</div>
<?php endif; ?>
<?php } else { // Do stuff specific to non-first page ?>
<?php } ?>

I have then set up a page called static-content.php and added the relevant content and saved it within the template files.

and then i have edited :

and function get_staticpage() {
do_action( ‘get_staticpage’ );
if ( file_exists( TEMPLATEPATH . ‘/staticpage.php’) )
load_template( TEMPLATEPATH . ‘/staticpage.php’);
else
load_template( ABSPATH . ‘wp-content/themes/default/staticpage.php’);
}

then i have edited :

wp-includes/general-template.php

and added at the top of the file (below the php tag) :

function get_staticpage() {
do_action( ‘get_staticpage’ );
if ( file_exists( TEMPLATEPATH . ‘/staticpage.php’) )
load_template( TEMPLATEPATH . ‘/staticpage.php’);
else
load_template( ABSPATH . ‘wp-content/themes/default/staticpage.php’);
}

and it should all work !

I’ve been reading up on my SEO (it’s always good to get back to grass roots) Ive been reading Aaron Wall’s SEO Book which I bought a few months back. Along with it are a couple of other ebooks, one on interviews with SEO’ers. This part of the interview book is most interesting… Jim Boykin speaks:

Links and communities: how do you define a good link? How do you place your site in a good community?

Find who’s linking to your competitors, and get links from them. We use one of our own tools to find them…think there’s other tools on the market which do something like this, but ours looks at all the top sites and find where their backlinks are coming from and any site who is linking to 2 or more of the top sites are located in the community.

We also have an authority finder, similar to your hub finder tool which we use to find possible industry authority sites. This is the community and where you want links from. This is kinda old “forgotten” knowledge (replaced with pushbutton link programs), but still work great.

We also analyze “who you link to” and try to optimize sites for linking to certain industry authorities and resources. The mix for a neighborhood is partly, who links to you, who links to those who link to you, what are the similar backlinks of those in the top to (Google’s “Similar Pages”) and who you link out to.

I believe getting 100 links from outside the community are not worth as much as 10 links from within your community, so if you’re seeking links, where do you want to put your efforts?

Too true ! For more, go and buy the book !

I have been looking for a good end user video explaining how to add a post to wordpress and its been difficult finding one…

but my luck is in and here is the perfect tutorial for that ‘end user client’ you  have, who needs hand holding

http://edublogs.org/eduvideos/postsandpages/postsandpages.html

Im writing this as a reminder as much as anything.

There are a couple of plugins that are ‘must have’ for title tag optimsiation

Reordering the tag  so that the name of the post comes 1st and your site title comes second. the ideas is that the words at the front of the tag more more important than at the end.

 http://elasticdog.com/2004/09/optimal-title/

And then taking th etitle tag optimisation thing to another level there is  http://www.netconcepts.com/seo-title-tag-plugin/

This allows you to edit title tags so they can deviate from teh title of the post you are writing. I hav’nt used this one yet, but i expect i will in time.

Ive been looking for a way of adding a piece of static content at the top of each category in a wordpress archive. The problem with wordpress is that there is too much content curn on any given category page, so as a result the search engines don’t know what content to hang from when it comes to keywords. Its been a pain in the ass finding a decent solution this, so im sharing with you now !

ref this page for the original advice : http://codex.wordpress.org/Category_Templates and go half way down the page for this.

Instructions : (wordpress version 2.1)

in the Archive template just above…

<?php $post = $posts[0]; // Hack. Set $post so that the_date() works. ?>

Use this code

<?php if ( $paged < 2 ) { // Do stuff specific to first page?>
<?php if ( is_category() ) : ?>
<h2 id=”category-name-header”><?php echo $cache_categories[$cat]->cat_name ?></h2>
<?php add_filter(’category_description’, ‘wpautop’); ?>
<?php add_filter(’category_description’, ‘wptexturize’); ?>
<div id=”category-description”>
<?php echo category_description(); ?>
</div>
<?php endif; ?>
<?php } else { // Do stuff specific to non-first page ?>
<?php } ?>

To be able to use HTML go to :

wp-admin/admin-db.php

and edit out
//$category_description = apply_filters(’pre_category_description’, $category_description);

As I have done

then go into your category editor and edit whatever category you like and add the relevant HTML into the description and save

and now you have fixed content for a linked to category page !

Nice

Ive been at a ‘marketing bootcamp’ today. this is where 55 marketeers form the same company get together and go through how we can get more business for our employers.

So I explained myself as an SEO guy and i was about getting us up the search engine rankings - pretty simple, but really a fairly inadequate description

So here is what I said in the bar afterwards

there are 2 parts - the 20 % part which is actual search engine optimisation (tec stuff all done before and definable)

and the 80% part - getting links, and building buzz. (not teccy, undefinable, impossible to accurately predict)
I explained that to understand search engines, you need to understand human behaviour as expressed online. From that you begin to understand where to go and how to get links. (have a look at the map showing a social network of a blogger - you will notice how its very similar to how websites connect with each other)

I also explained that engines have customers they have to please, (you the searcher) and to understand what their customer wants, i.e. great content with great site usability, you will be at the point of enlightment.

The you give yourself a leg up with a bit of black hat (clean-ish style) - some clever paid for link acquisition and site content manipulation and mix it with a genuinely great content site you will rank.

Sounds simple enough and in a sense it is, but of course the devil is in the detail as is the complexity.