Now, as you might know, I’ve been in the SEO business for more than 6 years. It took me all those years to find out what it was that I disliked about keyword research and what I was doing wrong. It also took someone who’s actually not in our business, but who’s in the business of business advice, to discover it. The guy that – unbeknownst to him – changed my perspective on keyword research was Doug Richard, at last week’s Made in 48 hours. He graciously allowed me to use some of his slides for this post, for which I thank him.

Doug spent (and still spends, during his small business seminars) quite a bit of time on asking people: “Who are you? What promise do you make?”. Turns out, not a lot of people can answer that question effectively at first. However, the minute you become good at answering that question, you’ll be on your way to being found more easily.

You see, businesses are born out of ideas, some of these are great, some are not. But they’re all born out of the idea that what you have to offer is special, and adds something to the market. That benefit, that advantage, that promise, is bound to also be reflected in the keywords people should be finding you for.

In fact, it’s as Doug put it:

You are a secret waiting to be discovered by customers who are looking for someone to make that promise to them.

He then showed this clip from Mad Men which I’m not going to withhold from you, as it’s entirely too genius. Go watch it on Youtube now, as embedding is unfortunately forbidden. Go on, this post will still here when you get back.

Now let me give you an example. During the event we talked to Dave Fairbairn. Dave is just starting up his new business, and he’s going to sell motor apparel. Now, as it happens, the motor apparel business turns out to be quite competitive. When we went more specific though, we found out that Dave makes motorcycle jeans, jeans that are both well designed and fashionable. Dave doesn’t just sell motor apparel, he sells designer motorcycle jeans. Now there’s something you can both brand, and rank for.

You see, this is not a numbers game. Let me repeat that: this is not about numbers. It’s about relevancy, and relevancy only. If Dave at some point thinks that he should be relevant for motorcycle clothing, he’d better get working on a new business strategy to become relevant for that term. But you know what? He’s better off dominating his own little niche first.

Try and see if you can describe your company as eloquently and succinctly as Dave:

Maple Motorcycle Apparel are a feedback driven, design led, fashionable motorcycle jeans startup.

So, do you have a promise like that? If so, what is it? You might have noticed mine on my homepage:

Tweaking websites is what we do here at Yoast, from search engine rankings, to speed to user experience.

That’s what I do. It’s what I do for my clients, what I blog and speak about, it’s what I’m good at. What are you good at? What are you offering people? Figure that out, and keyword research becomes a whole lot easier. There’s always a niche you can win at, find that niche, own it, and then go up one level if you still want to.

Doug is the guy that runs the mentoring club I spoke about in an earlier post, in which I am also one of the mentors. If the idea of getting advice from him, myself and other experts in the fields of HR, Social Media, Law etc. with the sole goal of improving your business appeals to you, you should sign up, we’re starting in October.

The day to day manager of the mentoring club is Nancy Fulton, one of the best writers I’ve ever had the pleasure of working with, and very experienced at what I’ve just been talking about. For the coming few days, Nancy and myself will be monitoring the comments on this post, and helping you craft your identity. So, fancy some free help? Get into the comments and give us the best you’ve got.

The basis of keyword research is a post from Joost de Valk‘s Yoast – Tweaking Websites.A good WordPress blog needs good hosting, you don’t want your blog to be slow, or, even worse, down, do you? Check out my thoughts on WordPress hosting!

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Downtime of your website can lead to vastly decreased performance in organic search. I’ve been saying this for years, and have had some small examples to show for it. Now though, I’ve got a great example that I wanted to share with you. The client in this case was Independer.nl and they lost a very important ranking (for the word autoverzekering, Dutch for car insurance) for half a day due to unscheduled downtime. It’s a perfect example of why good hosting and monitoring are so important.

What happened was that at around midnight, the servers would start to run a backup. A very smart process to have in place, of course, but for the course of that backup, about 10-15 minutes, a small percentage of visitors would be redirected to a “temporarily not available” page. This page gave a 404 error, causing Google to remove the page from its index, because it thought the page no longer existed. Good thing Google checks pages that have given a 404 error again after a while, so they didn’t loose their rankings forever but just for the course of about half a day.

Several things are wrong here: first of all the page should have given a 503 status code, which means “temporarily unavailable”. If it had, Google would just have come back to it rather quickly and not have removed the page from its index. Second; the page shouldn’t have been redirecting or giving an error at all; your backup process should run without that much influence on your website. That’s the only proper way of not having your hosting affect your SEO.

SEO Hosting & monitoring

Now of course, the minute you see your page has entirely disappeared from the ranking for a word that is getting you tens of new clients a day, you shit your pants. There was something that gave away that it wasn’t a long term issue though: the listing had not just dropped a few places, it had in fact entirely disappeared. Normally, pages don’t do that, the only two ways of disappearing entirely would be either a removal by hand because of spam or a page that had been down.

yoast.com uptime as measured by pingdom

Luckily, we were using Pingdom to track the uptime of the site, and we knew quite rapidly that they were having issues keeping their site up at night. So if you’ve ever wonder why SEO & hosting are two topics I care for so much, it’s because this example shows they’re one and the same.

This is why I love VPS.net so much, I’ve had 2 minutes of down time in August, and those 2 minutes were probably my own fault as I was tinkering too much with my live site again…

By the way, VPS.net offers an add-on service called Server Density, which monitors several aspects of your site including its uptime. You can enable this on the upgrade page, and should then after a short install process, if you have an iPhone, install their iPhone app. Then, if you notice that you need more CPU or RAM, you can now just simply add this on VPS.net without even rebooting your system!

Working on SEO? Hosting is important!

So I guess by now you’ll agree with me, that if you work hard for a client on their SEO, hosting is a very important factor that should not be underestimated. Take care of status codes for error pages, and make sure you monitor their uptime.

SEO Hosting is a post from Joost de Valk‘s Yoast – Tweaking Websites.A good WordPress blog needs good hosting, you don’t want your blog to be slow, or, even worse, down, do you? Check out my thoughts on WordPress hosting!

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Let’s draw an analogy: when you have someone build a house for you, what would you say if they’d say: “oh and btw, we’ll leave a banner up on your roof”, or to make the analogy better, when they said nothing at all and just did it? You’d either be mad and tell them to come take it off, or you’d throw it off yourself, right?

The question is of course: why do web designers and web developers do this? The reasons are simple: they’d like everyone to know that they designed that certain website and they use these footer links (if they’re smart), to increase their search engine rankings. Luckily search engines, most notably Google, have been aware of this practice and are pretty good at making links in footers of pages not work as well, but that doesn’t change the basic fact that the link should not be there.

The reason why this annoys me is that it’s abusing the fact that most people who have a website built either for themselves or their company don’t know the value of these links. It’s basically the web developer taking advantage of the ignorance of their customer. A customer who, in most cases, wouldn’t even now how to take a link like that out. Now what does that make them?

Don’t get me wrong; I’m not saying web developers and web designers can’t have these links, they should just be very open about it and not make it a default. If you’re a customer with footer links on your site, and it hasn’t been discussed with you, nor is it not in the contract with your web developer or designer, feel free to take it off or, better yet, ask for that discount.

If you’re using a WordPress theme or free template that has one of these footer links, and you’ve gotten it for free, I’d leave it there, because that’s how you “pay” the designer / developer. If it has multiple links like that, or really spammy ones like sometimes happens on non-legit theme sites, I’d personally take them out immediately, or not use the theme at all.

“Design by” footer links… is a post from Joost de Valk‘s Yoast – Tweaking Websites.A good WordPress blog needs good hosting, you don’t want your blog to be slow, or, even worse, down, do you? Check out my thoughts on WordPress hosting!

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Doug has just announced Doug Richard’s Mentoring Club, which is a project we’ll be working on together to provide expert advice and on going support for Startups and Small Businesses. We’ll provide practical, pragmatic, effective advice in everything from ecommerce, sales, marketing, web design, raising finance, public relations, social media marketing, SEO, SEM, etc. etc.

Now, here’s the thing: we’re launching with just 100 seats . . . so if you want to sign up (for just £ 95 + VAT/month), do it now!

A quick overview of what we’ll offer

We will deliver new information, resources and support to our Mentoring Club members every week.

• Twice a month we’ll offer a Morning Conference over our Live Learning interface which will allow Doug, and other speakers as required, to address selected questions from members of the group in real time. Group members will also have an opportunity to connect with and support one another during these meetings.
• Twice a month we’ll deliver a Podcast that covers issues and questions not addressed in the live session. The podcast will be authored by Doug and others as required by the topic of their questions.
• Additional support will be provided via email or via an online forum.
• Quarterly, we’ll offer a closed conference for our members and selected guests which will focus on one business critical theme like sales, product development, financing, marketing, working with investors, etc.
• We will be offering more benefits over time . . .

We believe this structure will allow us to meet the needs of our members, and it will allow our members to become sources of support and information for one another. Entrepreneurs and small business owners can do a great deal to give one another the opportunities that build great enterprises, that is why we’re doing this. Now remember, there’s only 100 spots, we’ve already sold a good portion of that to the attendees here, so you should, if you’re interested, sign up as fast as soon as you can!

Doug Richard’s mentoring club is a post from Joost de Valk‘s Yoast – Tweaking Websites.A good WordPress blog needs good hosting, you don’t want your blog to be slow, or, even worse, down, do you? Check out my thoughts on WordPress hosting!

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If you’ve ever heard of this new kid on the block called HTML5, or maybe even consider yourself an expert on it, please note that this post still treats headings in the HTML4 / XHTML1 way of using headings. I’ll briefly talk about headings in HTML5 in the end, it’s a whole ‘nother ball game!

This post will cover:

1. 5 basic principles about headings
2. The headings for your homepage
   1. The issue of full posts on archive pages
3. Heading structure for your single posts / single pages
4. Structure of headings for your category / tag / taxonomy pages
5. Headings and HTML5
6. Conclusion: re-think your blog’s headers

5 basic principles about headings

Let’s get these things straight before we do anything about our heading structure:

1. The most important heading on the page should be the H1.
2. There is usually only one H1 on any page.
3. Sub-headings should be H2′s, sub-sub-headings should be H3′s, etc.
4. Each heading should contain valuable keywords, if not, it’s a wasted heading.
5. In longer pieces of content, a heading is what helps a reader skip to the parts that they find interesting.

Based on headings, there are tools out there that can, and will, make an outline for your content. If you were to make an outline for this article, it would look like this:

• [h1] The heading structure for your blog
  • [h2] 5 basic principles about headings
  • [h2] The headings for your homepage
    • [h3] The issue of full posts on archive pages
  • [h2] Heading structure for your single posts / single pages
  • [h2] Structure of headings for your category / tag / taxonomy pages
  • [h2] Headings and HTML5
  • [h2] Conclusion: re-think your blog’s headers

The most widely known, and probably also the easiest, tool capable of doing this is the W3 Validator.

The headings for your homepage

So while we can (and will) discuss some specifics in the comments, your homepage should probably have a structure that looks like this:

• H1: Blog’s name
• H2: Your blog’s tagline, if it’s “keyword-rich”; if not, all your recent posts should have an H2.
• H3: Your recent posts, or, if those have an H2, this could be used for somewhat older posts.
• H4: related content in the sidebar, like the heading of an “about” widget.
• H5: Unrelated headings in your sidebar, footer, etc.

As you can see, I differentiate between “related” widgets and unrelated widgets. It’s no use at all to have an H3 heading saying “Our Sponsors”. An H4 heading saying “About this SEO blog” could be useful though, if “SEO blog” is what you want to rank for.

The issue of full posts on archive pages

Maybe you’ve seen it, maybe you didn’t yet, but this sort of heading structure creates a problem. If you’re displaying full posts on your front page, your sub headings would be H2′s, just like your post titles. That’s wrong, of course, and a good example of why we should be separating our content and markup a bit more then we’re doing now, but that’s not an easy fix. Basically, if you’re displaying a post on an archive, category, tag or home page, each H2 should become an H3, H3 should become H4, etc.

No code samples yet, but my mind is working on this now, so it might come soon.

Heading structure for your single posts / single pages

This one is simple:

• H1: post / page title
• H2′s and H3′s: subheadings and sub-subheadings
• H4: your blog’s name, and possibly related widgets
• H5: same as above: sidebars etc.

Makes sense right? The most important line on the page is the post or page title, second come the subheadings. Your blog title still has some value because, if the post is good, people will search later on for “Yoast WordPress SEO”, for instance.

Structure of headings for your category / tag / taxonomy pages

If you actually want your category and tag pages to rank, meaning you’ve given them some unique content and are making them interesting for people, the heading structure should basically be the same as the homepage, with this difference:

• H1: category / tag title
• H2′s: post titles
• H3: blog’s name
• Rest: repeat from homepage.

Headings and HTML5

In HTML5 the entire method of dealing with headings changes, and while it’s a bit harder to grasp for people at first, the new system makes a lot more sense for content management systems. In short: headings and heading structures are section specific there, where section could be any part of a page. It would take too long to explain here, but if you’re interested, read the header section of Mark Pilgrims excellent Dive into html5.

Truth be told, Mark doesn’t talk about how search engines deal with HTML5 headers yet. In all honesty: I couldn’t tell you yet. Simply a case of “not enough data to tell”.

Conclusion: re-think your blog’s headers

Now it’s time for you to take some action. Go and use the W3 Validator now to check your blog’s outline. If you’ve read an understood all the above, you should now be able to determine whether your theme is doing a good job. If you’re using a premium theme or a theme that you downloaded from WordPress.org, I’d love for you to share your results in the comments!

The heading structure for your blog is a post from Joost de Valk‘s Yoast – Tweaking Websites.A good WordPress blog needs good hosting, you don’t want your blog to be slow, or, even worse, down, do you? Check out my thoughts on WordPress hosting!

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define(
  'MY_WORDPRESS_FOLDER',
  $_SERVER['DOCUMENT_ROOT']  
);  
define(  
  'MY_THEME_FOLDER',  
  str_replace("",'/',dirname(__FILE__))  
);  
define(  
  'MY_THEME_PATH',  
  '/' . substr(  
    MY_THEME_FOLDER,  
    stripos(MY_THEME_FOLDER,'wp-content')  
  )  
);

That annoyed me, quite a bit. Why? Well because if people write articles about stuff like custom write panels, I expect them to know a bit about the basics of the WordPress API. And well, the WordPress API has constants and functions for these things. So let me introduce you to them in the same order as the author of the articles did his defines above:

ABSPATH constant

Not only is their method inconvenient, it’s wrong for a lot of installs. You see, some people install WordPress in a subdirectory, and depending on what you need, there are two different paths you might need. ABSPATH is a constant that always returns the home of WordPress. So if WordPress is in the wp/ subdirectory, it would give you something like: /home/username/public_html/wp/. If WordPress were installed in the root, it would just return /home/username/public_html/. Now I don’t know how they’re using it, as it’s not used in this particular article, but they’d have to be very cautious with that.

TEMPLATEPATH constant

The second two things they’re doing are possibly even weirder. First they define a constant MY_THEME_FOLDER, which is basically the path to the current theme. WordPress has a very convenient constant for that: TEMPLATEPATH. Since they’re using it in an include, that’s probably what they need. Would save about 4 lines of code. Note that what they call a “folder” is actually a path.

get_template_directory_uri()

This is were they really go wrong. You see, they define a constant MY_THEME_PATH, and then use it as a URL in a call to wp_enqueue_style(), in other words: to enqueue a style sheet. Now paths and URLs are different animals altogether, and they don’t mix well. Take this example:

• My blog is installed in a subdirectory /wp/
• Because of that MY_THEME_FOLDER has been defined as follows:

  /home/user/public_html/wp/wp-content/themes/example-theme

• The code that sets MY_THEME_PATH turns that into:

  /wp-content/themes/example-theme

• The stylesheet is now included with the following path:

  /wp-content/themes/example-theme/custom/book_panel.css

• This causes a 404 (file not found error) because that directory simply doesn’t exist! It should have been:

  /wp/wp-content/themes/example-theme/custom/book_panel.css

The proper way of doing the enqueue would thus have been the following:

wp_enqueue_style(
    'my_meta_css',
     get_template_directory_uri(). '/custom/book_panel.css'
  );

Conclusion

I hope you understand why this annoys me. This is exactly the kind of coding that gives WordPress coders out there a bad name, as 5 – 10% of people out there trying this will not get it to work. If you want to prevent from making such mistakes, there’s plenty of resources to learn about these things, or look them up. Two starting points would be the codex and my own cross reference of the WordPress source along with its very convenient WordPress source search function.

Quick tip: paths and URLs in WordPress is a post from Joost de Valk‘s Yoast – Tweaking Websites.A good WordPress blog needs good hosting, you don’t want your blog to be slow, or, even worse, down, do you? Check out my thoughts on WordPress hosting!

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She told us about feedback loops, and how to use them to listen to your users / clients / audience. She tought us to build our network before we need it, and why and how you should be treating your blog like a business, even if it’s just a hobby. Aren’t you curious yet? Start listening then. You’ll be a wiser man or woman for it at the end of this.

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1. Missing hooks

It annoys the *peep* out of me when I find out that my plugin is in fact working fine, but the *peep* theme author didn’t think it necessary to add a wp_head or wp_footer call. This happens more than you’d think, but in most cases you can’t really blame the user in question, the theme author is just a moron. For your reference: the wp_head() call needs to exist right before the closing call, and the wp_footer() call should be right before the closing tag.

I used to check for this in my plugin, but the code doing the check caused even more problems, so if you have a good solution for this, that’d be appreciated. I personally think WordPress shouldn’t even activate themes without these two hooks.

2. A caching plugin

If you’re looking at a cached version of a page, and you’ve just installed or reconfigured the plugin, chances are the changes aren’t reflected in the output yet. In my Google Analytics plugin, I’ve actually added cache clearing code for W3 Total Cache and WP Super Cache, if you’re a plugin author you might find it useful:

<?php
if ( function_exists('w3tc_pgcache_flush') ) {
  w3tc_pgcache_flush();
} else if ( function_exists('wp_cache_clear_cache') ) {
  wp_cache_clear_cache();
}
?>

This is only necessary to do after you’ve saved settings that would change the output of your plugin of course.

3. You’re not supposed to see anything

My Google Analytics plugin has the option to hide the tracking code for certain user levels. Turns out that, when you enable this feature, you’re actually not seeing anything at all in the code. That’s a good thing, right? Wrong. It meant dozens of emails coming to me in the course of like 6 months, until I was smart enough to add the following message to the output of my plugin for those users:

echo "<!-- Google Analytics tracking code not
  shown because users over level ".$options["ignore_userlevel"]."
  are ignored -->n";

Remember that when people use W3 Total Cache’s minification feature, they won’t even see this. The solution is to wrap it in CDATA tags.

4. You have to actually enable the plugin!

Seems obvious right? Well it doesn’t always seem to be. I get this email about once every 2 months “your plugin doesn’t work, it’s shit. Help me fix it” (sometimes they’re nicer, oftentimes they’re worse ). The best part is when it’s followed, like 5 hours later, by “ehm I actually forgot to activate your plugin”. Happens to all of us, you know.

5. You haven’t configured the plugin yet

There’s a reason my plugins now scream at you to configure them as soon as they’re activated: I got emails saying it didn’t work, when the person emailing simply hadn’t even configured the plugin yet. Yeah I know, my plugin should be able to just guess what your analytics account is, I’d love to be able to, but alas… So, especially for those people who think I have magic skills, there’s now a warning in the admin:

And a notice in the source output:

echo "";

6. You can’t change the settings

Either you’re blind or another plugin is malfunctioning, but you can’t find the settings page for the plugin you want to configure. Luckily, WordPress has you covered (and yes, some people think that emailing the plugin author is the solution for that). Go to the plugins page, and click on the Settings link for the plugin:

That is of course, if the particular plugin actually was kind enough to include that link… For some reason, some plugin authors seem to think these standards don’t have to be adhered to. They deserve to get more email.

7. The plugin is incomplete

When you uploaded the plugin, you might have missed a file, or two. Or the upload went bust. Or the auto install went bust. It happens. I haven’t had to build in a check for this yet, since my plugins aren’t that big usually, but I noticed this in W3 Total Cache most recent changelog:

Added an additional notification to help users identify
  incomplete installations upon activation.

That shows you two things: A, Frederick knows what he’s doing and prevents people from emailing him over issues like that, B, it happens more often than you’d guess.

Your experiences

All the code examples above have been added to my plugin after several support requests for that particular issue. They might save you a fair bit of time if you’ve just started developing plugins, so feel free to use them. I know a fairly large portion of my readers dabbles with this stuff themselves, I’d love for you to share your experiences in the comments!

7 reasons for malfunctioning plugins (and their fixes) is a post from Joost de Valk‘s Yoast – Tweaking Websites.A good WordPress blog needs good hosting, you don’t want your blog to be slow, or, even worse, down, do you? Check out my thoughts on WordPress hosting!

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Joost,

I wanted to pass along a HUGE thank you for pointing me in the direction of VPS.Net.

About 2 weeks ago we decided it was time to move off of our Dreamhost shared hosting. I had remembered visiting your site several months back and seeing your note in the sidebar for a fast WordPress hosting solution. When we decided to move 2 weeks ago, I sought out your site again.

In a matter of two weeks we have:

1) switched to VPS.Net
2) optimized with Litespeed
3) installed W3 Total Cache
4) signed up for Akamai and started delivering via CDN.
5) started to optimize our code every way we can.

Our home page load times are down to less than 4 seconds from 10-11 seconds on Dreamhost. We saw an INSTANT increase in our affiliate conversions on some pages which will make the VPS.Net solution pay for itself in no time…

I’m now on a mission to optimize the heck out of the rest of our code — moving more to the CDN and figuring out how to keep our rich presentation but streamlining the delivery.

Your site speed is an inspiration. I’m looking forward to figuring out ways to squeeze every last drop of waste out of our loads.

I hope to get to meet you sometime and share our story.

Thanks,
Fred

It’s great to see how people improve their sites just by taking my freely given advice. He’s also very right about affiliate money paying for the somewhat more expensive hosting fees. I’ll tell you this time and again: you get what you pay for… If you’ve got a story like this to tell, please do share it with me! Either through my contact form or through the comments below!

A reader story: One Project Closer is a post from Joost de Valk‘s Yoast – Tweaking Websites.A good WordPress blog needs good hosting, you don’t want your blog to be slow, or, even worse, down, do you? Check out my thoughts on WordPress hosting!

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Let me first explain why there are so many ad spots free all of a sudden: we ditched two advertisers because they were advertising things I couldn’t agree with. I have no trouble with advertising things I don’t use myself here, they’re not my ads, but I do have an issue with advertising things I’m actively against, so we bumped those out.

A while back, we also ditched some advertisers that were advertising themes that are not GPL. I don’t want to get into a discussion about this, but I prefer advertisements for companies that either do stick to the GPL, or don’t advertise WordPress related things.

Anyway, as you can see, the ad spots are available. There’s no doubt in my mind that BuySellAds will fill them up over time, but I thought I’d help them a bit. You can go here to buy an ad. In case you’re not convinced why you should advertise, see what Ryan Kelly, the CEO of Pear Analytics, one of our current advertisers has to say, who advertise their free site analysis tool:

“Out of the handful of ads we’re running on SEO-related websites, Yoast is converting at a whopping 92% on average, compared to other ads that range in the 20-40% range. It won’t be moving anytime soon.”

So, if you’ve got something you’d like to advertise, go buy that ad and support my effort of spending more time and money on this site.

Advertise on yoast.com is a post from Joost de Valk‘s Yoast – Tweaking Websites.A good WordPress blog needs good hosting, you don’t want your blog to be slow, or, even worse, down, do you? Check out my thoughts on WordPress hosting!

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