The SEO Doctor Is In
August 19, 2010
If you’re a regular visitor then you must have noticed the Diva’s newest facelift. The old one did not project the right personality, In fact I’ve detested it for months, so I spent an entire weekend working on this new theme, which I love!
However, when I put SEO Doctor to work, I was shocked to discover my grade was in the 70s, and of course I immediately got busy trying to figure out what was wrong with the site (the Diva should have 100% after all!).
Digging into the Code
Much as a adore the Arthemia theme, and should really pop for the paid version, it’s an older theme and doesn’t have native SEO built in. SEO Doctor showed me that the biggest crisis was there was NO H1 TAG!!
Cardinal rule of SEO: have an H1 tag on every page. So I searched until I found a plugin that would tale care of it automatically, but unfortunately, on some pages I ended up with double logos. If you were on my site at that time, you may have thought you were drinking too much, but no, it was just me fiddling with the code.
I got rid of that plugin quickly, did some more research, and finally went to a site that I really admire and stole borrowed their code. Now I have an H1 tag, but still haven’t figured out how to make the titles on the home page H2s. (Let me know if you know how to do it…I’ll take you to lunch if you can make it to Phoenix.)
Too Many Outgoing Links
The next thing the Doctor showed me is that I have over 100 outgoing links. I didn’t understand that until I added in the all the links in the footer widgets, and then I also have a ton of categories. It’s not a serious problem, but Google stops at 100…that’s okay by me, I’ll take the 5 point ding.
Alt tags are good, page rank flow is very good on the home page thanks to no-following sites like Facebook and Twitter, but not so good on post pages since comments are no follow. I can live with that too. The page is indexable and URLs are friendly. Loading time is 6.5 seconds, which I’d like to reduce, but although they explain how to do it, I just don’t get that part.
Even More SEO Tools
SEO Doctor is like the Swiss army knife of SEO. It’s a great little tool that rests at the bottom of your screen, in fact, it rested at the bottom of my screen for two months until I remembered what is was. Besides all of the above info, it will tell you how many daily visitors the site gets, and a plethora other amazing stuff besides:
- Domain registration details
- Google indexed pages
- Yahoo backlinks
- Alexa ranking
- Compete visitors
- Quantcast visitors
- Google website trends
- Link diagnosis
- SEMRush analysis
- IP neighbors
- Open Site Explorer
- Back Tweets
- Duplicate Content Checker
- Page load time test
Best of All It’s Free
SEO Doctor is a free plugin for Firefox. Free is always good, and Firefox is all I use (well, until I discovered that IE rendered all the content on a client’s entire site centered, so now I at least check IE). Try it out and it may have you up all night, too, trying to make your site perfect.
My site is now a healthy 90, and would be 95 if I can get those pesky H2 tags coded in. I feel much better and can now go to bed with an easy mind.
Tags: alt tags, content, facebook, free, links, SEO, seo tools, titles
Build Your Website with the Right Foundation
August 19, 2010
When you build a website in WordPress it’s important to lay the right foundation. Get the basics right and your site / blog will have a much better chance for success.
A checklist of the most important steps would be a helpful asset, and guess what – I found a great one for you! MaxBlogPress has a featured article Laying the foundations for a successful WordPress website that not only has a comprehensive list but also explains why these steps are important.
One of the items on the list is to set up 7 auto responder emails to go out to new newsletter optins. I have to admit, I’ve been very bad about following up with regular newsletters on SEO Diva. I’d like to write a complete newsletter, with lots of information, photos, etc. but can never find the time.
Well, perhaps I should just keep it simple and send you great SEO tips that you can use to increase site rankings. Sound like a good idea?
Article Marketing via SEO LinkVine
August 19, 2010
There are many ways to obtain inbound links, but article marketing has been a very effective of getting targeted keyword links for a long time.
It’s a time consuming process though…you have to decide on a topic, research and write the article, create an optimized title that contains your keywords, write an effective resource box that contains keyword links and a call to action, submit it to various online resources, and make any changes they request (EzineArticles.com is particularly picky). Whew! All that for 2 links.
But wait, what if you could write one article, get many variations of it, and get 100 links from relevant sites, instead of only 2? A couple of months ago I wrote an article about SEO LinkVine as a fast, easy and effective method to get inbound links to your site. The site closed its membership shortly after that, but since it’s now open for awhile, I decided to give you an update of my experience with article marketing through them, using spinnable articles.
There are two areas of SEO LinkVine, and I’ll discuss each of them in turn.
Submit Articles and Get Links
This is my favorite part of the service. Yes, you still have to take all the steps listed above, along with the additional step of spinning the article (click the link <– to learn how that’s done). The site has an article spinning function; the last time I checked it didn’t do as good a job as I liked, but I’m very picky, and the spinner on the site is a good way to start out.
Here’s the best part – you choose the categories your article fits in, decide how many times a day it’s available for publishing (I usually choose 2 or 3) and sit back while others post your article to their sites, complete with keyword links that point back to your website. I have found this method to be very effective at building inbound links from relevant sites, and is alone worth the monthly membership fee.
Get Free Content
I’ve had mixed results with this portion of the service. I have several sites listed, but rather than have articles post to them automatically, I review each one. Thank goodness I chose that option from the beginning, because I reject 80-90% of the articles submitted for my sites. Reasons include the articles not being a good fit with the blog topic and/or poor writing (or spinning) ability.
That said, I’ve also received some truly excellent articles that I’ve been happy to publish on my sites. (Let me be clear here – SEO Diva is always written by me or a guest author.) It takes only a few minutes to scan those awaiting approval, and the gems are worth the time spent rejecting the other articles.
Articles on Demand Feature
I haven’t utilized this feature as much as I should. Here’s how it works:
The brand new “articles on demand” feature allows you to add to your existing blog content by telling the SEOLV members the exact articles you would like written. It’s like having your own personal team of article writers at your service, at no cost.
To get started, simply select the blog you would like the article added to. Next, select the category you would like your article assigned to. Next, write in a short explanation of the article you would like written. And finally, write a more detailed description of the article to make sure the article writer knows specifically what to write about. Click the “Request Topic” button and you’re done!
As soon as an article writer selects your topic, writes the article, and submits it, it will be sent directly to you for approval (or if you’ve set your blog to auto-accept, it will be automatically added to your blog).
The few times I’ve requested articles I’ve been happy with them, especially since they’ve improved the process. I learned more specific you are, the better the results.
Conclusion
With many sites to build inbound links for, SEO LinkVine is well worth the expense to me. If nothing else, you may want to consider registering for the free Get Free Content. But if you’re working to build inbound links, you should take a look at what they have to offer. It’s one more tool to get your site ranking well in Google search results…which means more traffic and better conversions.
