Optimising sites for search engines by Retiarius Internet Design

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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Google announced in early 2005 that hyperlinks with rel="nofollow" attribute would not influence the link target’s PageRank. In addition, the Yahoo and Windows Live search engines also respect this attribute.

How the attribute is being interpreted differs between the search engines. While some take it literally and do not follow the link to the page being linked to, others still “follow” the link to find new web pages for indexing. In the latter case rel="nofollow" actually tells a search engine “Don’t score this link” rather than “Don’t follow this link.” This differs from the meaning of nofollow as used within a robots meta tag, which does tell a search engine: “Do not follow any of the hyperlinks in the body of this document.”

The effective usage of the rev=”nofollow” tag can improve selected pages Google PageRank by preventing the leakage of ‘Link Juice’ to non-essential (for site PageRank purposes) pages such Terms and Conditions, Privacy Policy pages etc. which do not require to be indexed by search engines, but which can, if “nofollow” is not used, dilute the optimim PagerRank for your essential pages such as product descriptions etc.

Learning to implement “nofollow” tags is fairly easy. Learning how to apply them in the proper way does require some skill.

The use of “nofollow” tags can serve many different purposes. They can be used to limit the amount of ‘link juice’ that flows out of a page to external pages of different domains, or they can be used to control where the ‘link juice’ will flow to within a site and its internal pages.

This post is about the use of “nofollow” tags to control the amount of link juice flowing within a site and its internal pages. To better explain this I came up with an illustration that should help the “not so technical” crowd understand this process.

If you would, please visualize your homepage as a bucket, and the subpages as sub-buckets. See the image below:

Your total search engine authority can be represented by what I’m going to call SEO Juice”.

Now, imagine that every link you have, in every page of your site, is a hole in the bucket. Once the different Search Engines pour their “SEO Juice” into your homepage bucket, the juice leaks out to your sub-pages, and external pages, through every link you have.

The problem is that some of your sub-buckets (sub-pages) don’t need that “SEO Juice” as much, while others need a lot of it. A good example is having those “Privacy Policy”, “Shipping Info” types of pages that really don’t need to rank highly in any SERP. So, instead of spreading your “SEO Juice” thin, you’d direct it to where it is most needed. Your site could have an extremely relevant, and high converting sub-page that you want to boost, this would be a good place to start.

The “nofollow” tags help you plug the holes of different buckets and let most of the juice flow where you want more Search Engine authority. See the image below:

Once you’ve drawn the “nofollow” strategy map for your site, and decide on what pages need more search engine authority, the implementation part is quite simple.

Now that you understand what “nofollow” tags can do for your site, make sure you look into taking advantage of this awesome tool, and take control of where your “SEO Juice” is flowing!

Still confused? Let us help you out! Check out our full list of search engine optimization services.

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Welcome to this blog on search engine optimisation techniques. Retiarius Internet Design have been designing web sites since 2001. Owned by Andrew Jeffcock, a former UK Government research scientist, explosives engineer! and computer programmer, Retiarius Internet Design have been developing sites for small to medium businesses and individual clients, specialising in gaining enhanced search engine placement by utilising World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) compliant coding with Google-friendly SEO techniques.

Based in Buxton, Derbyshire Retiarius provide a personal and rapid response service for its clients.

We intend this blog to provide an insight into some of the SEO techniques we employ.

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