Optimising sites for search engines by Retiarius Internet Design

Capital Aesthetics, a leading London cosmetic treatment clinic have commissioned Retiarius to build their new web site.

The brief was that the site’s owners would like to be able to modify and maintain the site themselves with minimum effort.  This required the use of a form of content management system.

We decided to use the excellent WordPress blogging software as a content management system. There wer several reasons for his:

• The base software is free
• There are many excellent themes for this software that can be adapted to get the look and feel required by the client.
• WordPress can be extended to incorporate powerful SEO plugins that increase the SEO of the site with minimum extra effort.
• The use of an industry  standard software base provides proven upgrade and extension features.
• WordPress is easily read by Google and other search engines
• WordPress can easily incorporate the Google Analytics trafiic measurement system

The client has expressed his satisfaction with the design we have produced which, in his opinion, closely approximates the look and feel of his original site whilst providing the flexibility he needs.

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WordPress is one the most popular blogging platforms in use today. It has many advantages for site owners wanting a search engine optimised web site.

• It is free, open source and therefore secure. Just download WordPress free from here
• It is easy to use and maintain
• It runs on Apache web servers
• It has many fantastic free themes that can be used and modified to produce a look and feel for your site that suits your business.
• It is almost infinitely customisable by web site designers by using the extensive free plug-ins and widgets to ad functionality and ‘eye-candy’.

This post is about the plug-ins and widgets that I think are the most useful. So here they are in alphabetical order.

1. AddThis Social Bookmark
   Help your visitor promote your site! The AddThis Social Bookmarking Widget allows any visitor to bookmark your site easily with many popular services. Sign up for an AddThis.com account to see how your visitors are sharing your content–which services they’re using for sharing, which content is shared the most, and more. It’s all free–even the pretty charts and graphs. By The AddThis Team.
2. All in One SEO Pack
   This plugin will optimise your WordPress blog so that your posts and pages are indexed more efficiently by the search engines. It is fully featured and lets you single out individual pages for optimisation.
3. Akismet: the best comment spam protection available. It fortunately comes pre-installed, though you’ll still need an API key from WordPress.com. This system will prevent your site being deluged with comment spam. If some should get through it makes it easy to kill the offending comments and also notify the Akismet system so that others are protected, just ast they are protecting you.
4. Events Calendar
   This plugin and wdget makes it easy to embed appointments and events into your blog.  So if you are organising exhibitions, conferences or training days this plugin is for you. It can automatically produce a blog post from the data you input for the event and so save you time when working on your blog.
5. FeedBurner FeedSmith: Steve Smith originally wrote this plugin to make it easy to use Google FeedBurner for syndicating your blog. Google FeedBurner has taken over its maintenance. Very easy to use.
6. Google Analystics for WordPress
   This plugin makes it simple to add Google Analytics tracking to your WordPress blog. Google Analytics is a very powerful incoming click tracker, allowing to deep  analyse the performance of your site and see where your traffic is coming from.
7. Google XML Sitemaps
   If you don’t know how beneficial Google Sitemaps can be to your blog then read my articles on SEO. Once set up this plugin will inform Google of any changes or additions made to your site automatically. You can download Google XML Sitemaps from here
8. Share This: Alex King creates incredibly useful plugins and this is one of them. If you want to make it easy for your visitors to share your posts on bookmarking or social network sites, this is the one plugin you need.
9. NextGen Image Gallery
   This plugin by Alex Rabe makes the production of in-line image galleries in your blog posts easy and effective. The in-built slideshow widget (helper application) aloows you to embed an auto-rotating  image slideshow into the side panels of your blog.
10. WP-Cumulus
    Flash based Tag Cloud for WordPress. A bit of eye-candy which displays a graphical representation of post tags.

So there you have my current top 10 plugins and additions to WordPress.

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Whenever a client approaches us about optimising their site and they say “we have had xyz.com optimise it but we still don’t have placement” I always have a look at xyz.com’s website to see if they have optimised their own site.

Despite what their site may say for human readers, the fancy graphics, Flash animations and eye-catching design etc. it never ceases to amaze me that many of the so-called specialist SEO companies have failed to comply with even the basic tenets of search engine optimisation when designing their own web site.

The basic SEO web site design company testing rules Retiarius suggest you use are:

• Always make sure the candidate company’s web site is itself fully W3C (World Wide Web Consortium) code compliant. Put the URL of their site, and any of their recent clients’ sites, into the W3C Validator, select ‘Show Outline’ and see what it shows.
• Check that the CSS (Cascading Style Sheet) commands on their sites are compliant. The W3C CSS validator will do this for you.
• Always spell-check the candidate’s site’s content. Search engines need to understand the context of the content and poor spelling negates that, so they will penalise badly spelled sites. Spell checking by a web site producer should be an integral part of the design function.
• Ensure that the candidate’s sites use the <h1>-<h6> HTML tag structure in a manner that optimises their visibility to search engines and enhances the structure of the site so that the text is read in context. The ‘Show Outline’ option on the W3C Validator shows this, as does using the W3C Semantic Checker.

It is therefore important for potential SEO clients to check that the candidate SEO companies themselves have compliant and correctly optimised sites because if they can’t be bothered, or have the skills, to correctly optimise their own site, how can you expect them to know how to do for you!

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We at Retiarius are firm believers that you cannot ‘bolt on’ good SEO performance once a site has been made. You have to design the site from the ground up to maximise its search engine optimisation potential.

We call this our ‘holistic’ site design philosphy.  All the elements of the site have to work in a harmonious manner to maximise the SEO potential.

These elements include:

• Excluding Shockwave and Flash animations and Flash-based navigation from the site – you won’t stand a chance of having a search engine spider your site if you use Flash navigation.
• Choosing keywords for each individual page, rather than a generic set of keywords for the site used on each page, so that you maximise the keyword density on that page. This takes longer but really improves the SEO performance for that page.

• Ensuring that the main keywords are reflected in the
  • page title
  • file name
  • meta description
  • first 128 words on the page
  • image titles and alt statements
  • link tags
• The page is spelled correctly (see article)
• The page fully meets W3C standards
• The site is searchable using the W3C semantic checker, as this simulates how the search engines extract data.
• Using SEO add-ons if designing a blog-based site. WordPress has some very good free SEO plugins for its blogging system.
• Effective use of subdomains (see article)

We used this holistic approach for our latest site for Buxton Press which will utilise a blog on a subdomain to provide linkbait for its business and provide a news and job vacancies system for the company.

Effective search engine optimisation is a painstaking process but we at Retiarius believe it is worth it.

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There are many advantages in using sub domains (e.g. searchengineoptimising.retiarius.com is a subdomain of the retiarius.com primary domain) to enhance the ranking of the primary domain.

Google and MSN both class a subdomain as being a seperate site to that of the subdomain (see this article ).

Barry Schwartz points to a thread at Search Engine Watch Forums discussing the subject:

“Subdomains work very well at the moment. No doubt about that. I can take a prominent, old, domain, set up a brand new subdomain, add one link from the original domains front page, throw up whatever content I want and within days have plenty of traffic. These days it seems that almost all linkpop value from the original domain is transfered – and I see this happening in both MSN and Google.”

Another advantage is that sub domains are usually free to implement on commercial servers – you own the domain and therefore can apply unlimited subdomains to it.

I think that this separation of a subdomain and its primary domains by search engines will have to continue because of the free blogging sites such as blogger all issue their clients a subdomain such as yourname.blogspot.com, and as such cannot exclude subdomains from their search results because ALL the blogs on blogger are owned by seperate individuals.

By using a subdomain for a blog, and cross-linking a new primary site to it you automatically have set up some linking value to the new primary site. If the blog is sued as ‘link bait’ with articles likely to interest a lot of readers then you can increase the cross-traffic to the, probably less frequently updated, primary site.

But you must not go mad at producing endless referring subdomains because because Google has set a bar on the number of subdomains they will reference.

I would like to quote Vanessa Fox, an ex-Googler and contributor to Search Engine Land :

“Google is no longer treating subdomains (blog.widgets.com versus widgets.com) independently, instead attaching some association between them. The ranking algorithms have been tweaked so that pages from multiple subdomains have a much higher relevance bar to clear in order to be shown.”

So, with care the use of subdomains will enhance your site a low cost but don’t over-egg the pudding … it could backfire on your search engine ranking.

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