The Best Seo Blogs

Archive for the ‘Yoast’ Category

Vanessa Fox is a seasoned speaker, blogger and now writer. While at Google she worked on Webmaster Central and led the way on creating lots of the great features that make it easier to understand how Google sees your sites. On this week’s show we discussed: her new book on marketing in the age of Google, common SEO pitfalls to avoid, and search engine optimization tips in particular about helping search engines discover your content, using related articles and internal linking and a smart XML sitemap strategy.

Also touched upon is the use of keyword research tools for businesses, bloggers, and basically anyone out there who has a website and wants it to be found. Vanessa points at a great list of keyword research tools she has on her site.

The news section this week included highlighting of a couple videos from WordCampTV from Jonathan Dingman and Daryl Koopersmith. In addition, the BuddyPress update was just released and comes highly recommended.

Plugin picks of the week:

• Better Tag Cloud
• Facebook Comments for WordPress

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Pete Cashmore is founder and CEO of one of the world’s most popular blogs – Mashable.com, which happens to be powered by WordPress! Since 2005 Mashable has been a leader in social media and technology news coverage in addition to hosting events like the recent media summit and social media day. In tip-packed show, Pete shares with us:

• Why he selected and continues to use WordPress,
• The secret formula of success for blogs,
• How to work with and develop teams,
• How to develop communities,
• How to measure growth and monetize,
• How to build a brand

In news:

• The MU forums are moving
• BuddyPress 1.2.5 is out
• Four WordCamps this month

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Today Joost is joined by Chris Coyier, one of the authors of Digging into WordPress and the founder of CSS Tricks. Chris and Joost talk about a lot of different subjects, ranging from their individual history with CSS sites to what Chris dubbed “the big three” updates in WordPress 3.0 (custom post types, menus, multi site) and to how Chris designs a site.

Plugin picks of the week

• Joost picked one of his own, Minimum Comment Length
• Which inspired Chris to pick another comments related plugin: Feature comments

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Marcus just posted the trailer to SEOktoberfest 2010, and it’s going to be another awesome edition of this epic conference / party / network event. I wasn’t there last year (my daughter was about to be born, seems a valid excuse) but I’ll definitely be there this year! Check out the trailer:

Click here to view the embedded video.

You’ve seen it scroll by if you checked out the video, but here’s the speaker line up, and do realize when you look at it that more speakers will be announced later on:

1. Marcus Tandler
2. SEO Blackhat
3. Bob Rains
4. Johannes “Sistrix” Beus
5. Dave Naylor
6. Greg & Barbara Boser
7. rSnake
8. Frank Watson
9. Brent Csutoras
10. Avi Wilensky
11. me, myself and I

There will be 16 experts total, and only 18 attendees. That is what we call attention for our attendees! Now some of you might want to come, but… You can’t buy tickets just yet…

SEOktoberfest 2010: looking forward to it 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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As mentioned in a previous post, recently I have started playing with Video SEO, and found it to be a part of SEO I quite like. It’s a very technical trade so far, so apologies for all the code in the article lying in front of you, but there just is no way around it: you’ll need to know about the technical part of these implementations.

Talking about that, it seems as though everyone is focussing on XML Sitemaps, while there’s actually not 1 but 4 methods of getting Google to recognize your video content.

Video SEO consists of 3 parts: indexation, ranking and click through optimization. While I might cover #2 and #3 in a later article, I’m focusing on the technical aspects of Video SEO for this article, and thus on the methods of getting your video’s indexed. I’ll focus mainly on Video SEO for Google, as I haven’t really looked at other search engines so far in testing.

XML Video Sitemaps

There’s several ways to tell Google you’ve got video on your site. The most well known, and probably also easiest, is the XML Video Sitemap. Just like a normal XML Sitemap, this sitemap contains URL’s, and for each URL it contains a video section, outlining all the details about that video, from its location and / or player location to its keywords.

<url> <loc>http://example.com/video/</loc> <video:video> <video:title>Sitemap Example Video</video:title> <video:publication_date> 2010-06-17T18:00:00UTC </video:publication_date> <video:player_loc allow_embed="yes"> http://example.com/video/player.swf </video:player_loc> <video:content_loc> http://example.com/video/video.mp4 </video:content_loc> <video:thumbnail_loc> http://example.com/video/poster.png </video:thumbnail_loc> <video:description> example description of a sitemap example video </video:description> <video:category>Example Videos</video:category> <video:tag>Examples</video:tag> <video:tag>Videos</video:tag> <video:tag>Xml Sitemap</video:tag> <video:duration>180</video:duration> </video:video>
</url>

Most of the attributes of a video are optional, but you need either a location or a player, preferably both, and a “poster“ image. We’ll touch on the image later on, but remember to add this for each and every video.

Once you’ve created an XML video sitemap, make sure to submit it to Google through Google’s Webmaster Tools. While you can submit it manually, you can also ping Google with the URL of the sitemap every time you’ve updated it. Pinging Google is very simple, just open the following URL (replacing the sitemap URL with your own, of course):

http://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/ping?sitemap=http://example.com/sitemap.xml

Within Google Webmaster Tools you can also check whether Google understands your sitemap, or if it’s missing any vital components.

MediaRSS

Another way of telling Google that your site carries video, that also uses XML, is by adding MediaRSS tags to your RSS feed, and then submitting your RSS feed to Google as a sitemap.

MediaRSS is a standard conceived by Yahoo!, which Google fully supports for the discovery of all sorts of Rich Media, ranging from images to video. Because it’s an add on to your RSS feed, this has one downside compared to XML video sitemaps: usually it’ll only contain your last 10, 20 or 100 posts, while you might have hundreds of posts and pages containing video. The upside is there too: for a lot of sites, their RSS feed get’s indexed very regularly, allowing for fast inclusion of your video in Google’s index.

<media:content 
 url="http://example.com/video/video.mp4" 
 medium="video" 
 duration="180"> <media:player 
 url="http://example.com/video/player.swf?file=video.mp4" /> <media:thumbnail 
 url="http://example.com/video/poster.png"/> <media:title type="html">Sitemap Example Video</media:title> <media:description type="html"> Example description of a sitemap example video </media:description> <media:keywords> Examples,Videos,XML Sitemap </media:keywords>
</media:content>

Yahoo! Searchmonkey

Yes, I said I’d be focusing on Google, and yes this is the second Yahoo! standard I’ve mentioned. The reason is simple: Google supports it. If you mark up your pages with Yahoo! Searchmonkey Video tags, Google will, as stated here, recognize these and list your video in the search results.

Other than XML Video Sitemaps and MediaRSS enhancements, Yahoo! Searchmonkey code goes straight into your pages. This has the benefit that Google will recognize your videos without any additional submission of feeds or sitemaps. Depending on how you embed video, this might be fairly easy to add or might take some more work. The reason is that it starts with attributes on the object element, and some JavaScript based injection methods might not have an object element.

Let’s have a look at what it looks like (example stolen from Google’s example page):

<object width="512" height="296" 
 rel="media:video" 
 resource="http://example.com/video_object.swf?id=12345" 
 xmlns:media="http://search.yahoo.com/searchmonkey/media/" 
 xmlns:dc="http://purl.org/dc/terms/"> <param name="movie" value="http://example.com/video_object.swf?id=12345" /> <embed src="http://example.com/video_object.swf?id=12345" 
 type="application/x-shockwave-flash" width="512" height="296"> <a rel="media:thumbnail" href="http://example.com/thumbnail_preview.jpg" /> <a rel="dc:license" href="http://example.com/terms_of_service.html" /> <span property="dc:description" 
 content="Example description." /> <span property="media:title" content="Example title" /> <span property="media:width" content="512" /> <span property="media:height" content="296" /> <span property="media:type" content="application/x-shockwave-flash" /> <span property="media:region" content="us" /> <span property="media:region" content="uk" /> <span property="media:duration" content="63" />
</object>

Most of these aren’t required, and some are even outright not needed at all. There’s only one valid media type: application/x-shockwave-flash. It’s not required, there’s only one option for it anyway: pretty safe to leave it out. You can easily leave out width and height as well for as much as Google is concerned, and you probably won’t need the regions.

Of course, if you use javascript to embed your video’s and thus don’t have an object tag to add this RDFa to, you could add a <noscript> tag with an object tag in it. This object element in the noscript element would have the SearchMonkey RDFa added to it: this is an adequate (and perfectly legal) fallback, for both search engines as well as people browsing the web without JavaScript.

Facebook Share

Facebook Share is probably one of the simplest methods of telling Google about video on a page. It uses meta elements in the head section of a page to point to a video file, poster image, size etc.:

<meta name="title" content="Example title" />
<meta name="description" content="Example description" />
<link rel="image_src" href="http://example.com/thumbnail_preview.jpg" />
<link rel="video_src" href="http://example.com/video_object.swf?id=12345"/>
<meta name="video_height" content="296" />
<meta name="video_width" content="512" />
<meta name="video_type" content="application/x-shockwave-flash" />

Like with Searchmonkey, the video_type is kind of bogus, as are width and height, so you could narrow this down a bit. The Facebook Share method of embedding has the added benefit that it’ll sometimes allow people to share your video on Facebook and play it directly on Facebook too.

Conclusion: one or more methods?

It’s perfectly possible to mix these methods of telling search engines about your videos, in fact you could even use all 4 of them, and there’d be nothing wrong with that. If you ask me which one to use, I’d say: at least use XML sitemaps, and as many of the other ones as you can. In my tests, MediaRSS has been very fast in indexation, so I’d highly recommend using that if applicable to your situation and if speed of indexation is an issue to you.

Something to keep in mind: independent of which method above you use, Google will try to verify whether the video you claim to have on the page is actually on the page, so it’ll look for an object tag, or at the very least a JavaScript element with the link to your video file and / or player in it. If it can’t find these, it won’t index you video.

Please do let me know in the comments how this works for you, and what you’ve been testing with!

Video SEO: A technical guide 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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I’ve been testing a lot with video SEO lately, and I’ll be doing a whole lot more of that testing, as video SEO seems to be a nice area to play in. Now I noticed my buddy Mark Robertson over at ReelSEO did a short, but nice interview with Matt Cutts on video sitemaps:

Now you’re probably asking: what on earth’s name does this stuff about video SEO have to do with WordPress? Well, it’s quite simple: one of my upcoming WordPress SEO plugin’s features will be to automatically generate video sitemaps, for video’s added with several supported video plugins, like the awesome Viper’s Video Quicktags.

So, for a preview of what will be able to do, check out my video sitemap, and try and search for some of the terms in there, you’ll see my video’s have started ranking nicely. There’s a lot of voodoo involved and this needs a lot more testing, so don’t expect this out tomorrow, but it is possible, and it will be available within a few (I’d say 2-3) months.

Video SEO and 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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Alex King is among the original contributors to the WordPress project (which has almost reached version 3.0) and a prolific plugin developer. As you might expect, over the years he and his team at Crowd Favorite have created numerous freely available products and tools for WordPress. A few of them include:

• Tagaroo: Suggests possible tags and flickr images for people, places, events etc.
• BackupMoxie: A streamlined and transparent backup solution for WordPress sites of any size.
• Analytics360: Bring MailChimp and Google Analytics statistics to your WordPress dashboard.
• Carrington: An easy to use yet powerful template system for WordPress.
• WordPress Help Center: On call WordPress support for tasks of any size.

Upcoming Events:

• WordCamp Boulder
• The Business of WordPress Conference

Plugin picks of the week:

• CMS Tree Page View
• Mouse Eye Tracking Service

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I’ve just published Part II of my WordPress CMS series: Design & development of your WordPress CMS. Enjoy!

Part II of my WordPress CMS series 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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So I think I’ve not said it enough yet: W3 Total Cache is the best caching plugin for WordPress out there at the moment. To illustrate, I’ve made a short video outlining how I usually set it up (if the video is not working for you, check it out on Youtube):

Click here to view the embedded video.

Hope you enjoy it and make sure to install W3 Total Cache on your site or blog!

W3 Total Cache and why you should be using it 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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When you change domains, for instance using my moving WordPress to a new domain guide, you’ll usually redirect your visitors with something looking like this:

Redirect 301 / http://new.example.com/

The only issue with this is that people might not notice that you’ve moved to a new domain, and thus might not update their links to you. As Matt Cutts confirmed a while back that 301 redirects do not pass full PageRank, and they seem to take a hell of a time to kick in these days, that’s somewhat of an issue: we’d rather have people update their links.

The proper redirect

So we want to tell people that you’ve moved to a new domain, but only people who came through old links to your site. And we still want to keep that 301 redirect in place, to preserve as much of the value from the old site as we can.

So, what if we redirected to http://new.example.com/#moved? The search engines don’t care about anything from the hash onwards, so the value of the redirect would still be maintained. We could then use javascript to detect the value of the hash tag, and display a notice to our visitors.

There’s an issue with that as well though: with the redirect 301 / line above, we redirected everything after /, to new.example.com/, so for instance /test/ would be redirected to new.example.com/test/. If we added #moved to the end of that URL, we would end up with new.example.com/#moved/test/ and that wouldn’t work. So we’ll need to make a bit of a fancier redirect:

RedirectMatch 301 /(.*)? http://new.example.com/$1#moved

That should work. Notice though that when you have code in place adding a / to the end of your URL’s if not existent, that code should conserve any hash tags in the URL.

Showing the domain move message

So now, let’s move on to the javascript part to actually show people a “we’ve moved” message, which is actually pretty simple. You create a div with the message you want to show, and put it in your footer, something like this:

<div id="domainmovemsg" style="display:none;"> We've moved from old.example.com to new.example.com, please update your feeds & links!
</div>

As you can see, we default it to display: none; so not everybody sees it, and then you add this tiny snippet of javascript, also in the footer of your page, after you’ve loaded the div above:

if (document.location.hash == '#moved') { document.getElementById('domainmovemsg').style.display = 'block';
}

Example code

I’ve coded an example of this with some more styling etc., which you can find here. If you want to see it in action immediately, you’ll have to click this link.

Change domain, and warn your visitors 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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