Free Blog SEO Review
Note: I've discontinued offering this service, but I hope you'll find something else useful on this site. Thanks for stopping by!
You've probably heard a lot about search engine optimization (SEO) and the important role it plays in bringing traffic to a web site. The good news is that there are some basic things you can do to improve your web site — SEO 101 if you will.
Most people writing about SEO will simply list a bunch of generic suggestions, but I'm going to go one better. For a limited time you can have me review your blog to make sure that at least the fundamentals of SEO have been applied. After the review, I'll provide you with a list of suggestions specific to your blog. And if you happen to use WordPress, I can even help with the PHP code. Note that I'm just going to cover the basics and not do the kind of comprehensive review that clients pay the big bucks for.
This service is free, but in exchange I would like you to promise you'll put a link on your site back to this one. Sound like a fair trade? If so, just leave your web site URL in a comment below and be sure to subscribe to receiving comment updates (there's a checkbox at the bottom of the comments form). Also, I'll require that the e-mail you provide be from the same domain as the web site you want reviewed.
Entries (RSS)
You see, this is why this is one of my favourite blogs to read! It would be great if you took a look at my site. I can always use more SEO tips.
Thanks!
Hi Marios - family company site.
Lucas,
I'll add your site to my list and get back to you soon.
Matt,
Sorry if my post wasn't clear, but I'm targeting blogs only. My reasons are 1) they're template driven so I my recommendations can be easily implemented 2) it's easy to get a relevant link back to my site and 3) bloggers will hopefully tell other bloggers.
I don't know much about the SEO, but that sounds interesting. I would like to join.
Raf,
Your blog seems to be hosted by Google's blogging platform. I don't think you're able to make the necessary code modifications when you have your blog hosted with Google. I think all you can do is choose your template. Do I have that right?
Lucas,
Sorry for the delay, but better late than never, right
Note that to make sure everything display correctly, I've include a period at the beginning of HTML code. I hope you find the suggestions useful. These are presented in no particular order.
1. You category list uses fairly generic title attributes in the anchor tags e.g. < .a href="http://www.lucasmcdonnell.com/category/blogs/" title="View all posts filed under Blogs" rel="nofollow" >Blogs. This probably means that you haven't provided description for your categories in WordPress. I like to provide a sentence or two describing the category.
2. You include the date in the URL e.g. http://www.lucasmcdonnell.com/2007/01/10/rewarding-comments-with-show-top-commentators/. Unless you're worried about having posts with the same name, it's better to not include the date as it dilutes the value from the other keywords in the URL. In addition, you end up telling users that a particular post is old even though it still may be relevant.
3. This next one is personal preference… Data-based archives have a good chance of creating duplicate looking pages unless you happen to be a prolific blogger with multiple posts per day.
4. I think the homepage should display excerpts and not full posts. Again, this will prevent internal pages from appearing as duplicate content. From a user's perspective, excerpts make it easy to scan the latest posts. To specify an excerpt, click on the more button when writing a post.
5. You don't use tags on your posts (Technorati or otherwise). I don't use the Technorati site myself, apparently others do so tagging your content might bring you some additional traffic.
6. Your header code is pointing to a non-Feedburner feed, but you point to Feedburner on your site. I'd adjust your header to match your site. Here's one of the lines of code for the RSS feed: < .link rel="alternate" type="application/rss+xml" title="RSS 2.0" href="http://www.lucasmcdonnell.com/feed/" / rel="nofollow" >
7. None of the pages use the H1 tag. Some go straight to H2. Ideally, every page should have the H1 tag around the post title(s).
Great stuff Marios, thanks for taking the time to do this. Just to recap on these:
1. I've added descriptions in to the categories.
2. I read somewhere (can't remember where now) that you shouldn't drop the date because it would cause some kind of problem (I know, that's pretty generic — I'll see if I can dig up where I read it).
3. Not sure what you mean here by 'date-based archives'.
4. I've thought about this one quite a bit. I originally started with only excerpts, but then switched to full posts on the front page. Maybe I should switch back.
5. I actually use a keyword-generating plugin, but just hide the keywords because I figure no one really cares what I'm tagging stuff with. Do you think it would be better to display them?
6. This is one I've been meaning to do for a while, and just need to install the Feedburner plugin.
7. I'm having a tough time locating where to change this in the php. I figured changing it in 'Single Post' would do it, but no dice. Any suggestions?
Thanks again for all the great suggestions.
Lucas,
2. Having dates in the URL add some protection should you have a post with the same title. The date, in such cases, would make the URL unique. I prefer to just make sure my titles (post slugs) are unique.
3. Typo. I meant DATE-based, not data.
5. Tags should be visible on the page or else they're considered spam by the tag-enabled sites like Technorati. I agree though that users don't care about them so stick them somewhere not so obvious like at the bottom of the post.
7. The files you need to edit will depend on the theme you're using. You may need to edit home.php (represents the home page), single.php (for single posts), page.php (for pages), and index.php (which is the catchall page). To find the spot look for something like the_title() which is the PHP code to retrieve the title.
Hi Marios,
I would love to review my blog.
Thanks,
Martin
I don't think unique URLs are too much of a problem with my posts, nor do I anticipate them to be. My real concern is with the redirects — I have a plugin installed that redirects from old URLs to new, but it doesn't seem to want to do a redirect when I drop the date from the URL. Do you know of any easier way to do this?
I also enabled the tags to be visual. Very interesting that Technorati treats it as spam otherwise. I had no idea.
I managed to change the h2s to h1s. The tags need to be changed in the main index template as well as the single post pages.
Thanks again for all your help!
Martin,
Here are a handful of tips to better optimize your blog for search engines.
1. Your landing page and post pages have no H1 tags. The titles for each post should be surrounded by H1 tags since they are the most important elements of the page. In addition, some people think that using H2 and H3 tags like your site without H1 tags results in them being ignored.
2. In addition to surrounding the post titles with H1 tags on the home page, they should also be made in to links so that the keywords in the post titles will be associated with the actual post. I know you have links on the right, but it would be better if they were in the main body of the page.
3. I think displaying the full post on the landing page is not as effective as displaying partial posts. Of course, your posts would need to be long enough to support partial posts which many of your current items aren't.
4. I would add rel="nofollow" on the e-mail post links. There's no reason for search engines to follow these links.
5. Your sub-pages point to the home page with a URL that includes index.html in it. Better to remove this from the URL since you otherwise seem to reference the blog without it.
6. All of your HTML titles start with Martin Kulov's Blog. This should actually be moved to the end of the HTML titles or not included at all.
If you find these suggestions of value, please consider spreading the word with a link on your blog. Thanks!
Matt,
1. The site you submitted suffers from one of the more common SEO mistakes — all the HTML titles are the same. You want them be unique and keyword-rich.
2. Your best bet is to sign up for one of the keyword research tools such as WordTracker or KeywordDiscovery and investigate what the general population calls the products that the online site is promoting. Then make the titles and content match those words.
3. Each page seems to have the same meta description and meta keywords. These should be cleaned up and made to match the content of the page.
4. Each page should get a keyword-rich heading and make sure the heading is surrounded by h1 tags.
5. Remove the slashes in between the elements of the address. Use commas instead. A clean address may get the site listed appropriately for local searches.
6. The header image on all pages except the home page points to a page that doesn't exist.
I hope those give you a good start!
Another quick question about redirects:
I've been attempting to set up hard 301 redirects in .htaccess without any luck.
The code I've been using for this has been:
redirect 301 /old/old.htm http://www.you.com/new.htm.
I know that you mentioned you've been using PHP redirects in the header of the page, Marios, so here's my question:
How do you insert the header redirect into a page location that no longer exists?
For example, if I change my permalink structure to just %postname%, how do I insert the redirect into the header of 2007/01/01/postname? I hope my question makes sense… let me know if this needs clarification. Thanks!
Lucas,
WordPress posts don't actually exist as web pages. They're created on the fly based on the URL. Several php files are pulled together dynamically to display each and ever post on your site. So you can't edit the 2007/01/01/postname web page because it doesn't exist except as a database record.
However, every post on your blog makes use of the header.php file that is part of the theme. If you put the redirects at the top of this file, the redirects will be executed before the post is displayed to the user.
Hi,
Would appreciate if you can review my site. Thanks
Hi Mark,
Here are some SEO suggestions for your blog:
1. Your theme is using the H1 tag for the site title "markkie dot com", when it should be used for the post title such as "Happy Birthday Australia".
2. Your posts don't have meta descriptions of meta keywords. There are plugins that can help you add these to your posts.
3. The title that appears at the top of the browser window starts with your site's name. It should start with the post or page title. There's a plugin that can help you change what appears first.
4. Your URLs aren't ideal. That is, instead of having something like markkie.com/happy-birthday/australia/ you have markkie.com/?p=46. Making this change will require also setting up redirects which might be more work than you want to do.
5. It doesn't look like you're using Feedburner. I think you should sign up for Feedburner.com and configure it to automatically ping various search engines whenever you publish content. You'll also need to look for a Feedburner redirect plug for WordPress.
I've just gotten started after falling off for more than 1 year. I would love to hear some suggestions.
Moses,
Just wanted to let you know that I didn't forget about you. I'll get to your blog on the weekend.
Marios
Hi Moses,
Your blog doesn't look too bad from an SEO perspective. You've got friendly URLs and a fairly clean design. Here are some tweaks I would make.
1. Pages titles should start with the post title rather than your blog title and URL. I believe there's a plugin that can help you with this.
2. The H1 and H2 tags are used around text other than the post title. There should be only one H1 tag on a page and it should be around the post title.
3. There's a bunch of commented HTML code. You should remove this.
4. I would go with snippets for the home page and category pages. This'll ensure that the actual post pages aren't considered duplicate content.
5. Your category pages could use a strong title than Archive for XXXX Category. Consider including a keyword rich introductory paragraph for the category too.
Good luck with your blog!
Just a quick update on my battle with permalinks migration: I finally found the answer! Instead of doing manual redirects for all the 404s I was getting, I just used this permalink migration plugin, where you just enter your old permalink structure, and it will automatically create the correct redirects for you. If you're changing permalinks and are getting 404s, this plugin is a must!
Hi Marios! Lucas put me in touch with this site, what a neat little idea.
I would love it if you'd run a little SEO review on http://northxeast.com - my blog. I'll write up a review of this blog in return, quite frankly i'd do it anyway as this is a very neat little idea!
Thanks
Collis
Lucas,
A most excellent find with that permalink migration plugin. Thanks for sharing.
Collis,
You've chosen a very clean design for your blog. I like it. And it looks like you've already taken care of some of the more common mistakes such as not using search engine friendly URLs. Here are some things that I recommend you change.
1. I think your category pages could benefit from an introductory paragraph that contains some keywords specific to the category and your blog. This paragraph will be static so it should server as a nice anchor for the search engines.
2. I suggest that your home page and archive pages display snippets rather than full posts. This often conflicts with the design ideals that many bloggers have. But the idea behind snippets is that it keeps the post pages from looking like duplicate content.
3. Every page on your site seems to have the same meta description. Although the meta description doesn't play as big a role in SEO as it used, it's still important because it is often the text that search engines display in their results. In that regard, it can serve as a compelling reason for people to click through to your site rather than moving on to the next listing.
4. I found some URLs in Google that don't work and don't redirect. I'm assuming these articles still exist just with a different URL. Ideally you should have redirects for these URLs.
5. Create a sitemap. I use the Dagon Design Sitemap Generator plugin. A sitemap will help search engines find all of your content by making every post from a single page.
I hope some of the above is helpful!
Hey Marios! Collis showed me this site on his (very clean) blog and I've tried to follow some of the tips you've already pointed out here.
I too, would like to take this generous offer of yours to review my site for a linkback (and anything else I can do for you if I can).
Thanks a lot.
Arjun,
I'm glad to hear that word is getting out. Here are some tips specific to your blog. There are a couple of new items here that I haven't mentioned for previous reviews.
1. You have the H1 tag around your blog's title rather than the post title. The ideal is to have the post title surrounded by the H1 tags to re-enforce the topic of the page with search engines.
2. I'm also not sure why you have the CupOfChai.net link in your header. Although you're using a 301 redirect, you might as well just use the final URL to eliminate any chance of confusing the search engines.
3. I found several URLs in Google that are likely being treated as duplicate content. Here's one example: http://www.kamu.ch/blog/?p=41&akst_action=share-this. If you're still using this sharing feature, you need to find a way to add a robots noindex meta tag to this version of the page. Otherwise you run the risk of being penalized for having duplicate content. Duplicate content in this case means two different URLs with the same content on the page.
4. It's good to see you have a sitemap (i.e. archives page). If you want to take one more step, sign up with Google's Web Master Tools and submit an XML sitemap (there's a plugin that can help with creating this XML file). In addition to helping Google crawl your site, you will also be able to check out some diagnostic reports about bad URLs, errors, etc.
5. It looks like you've been making some tweaks to your template. Some of these tweaks are causing HTML validation errors. To fix this make sure that img and link tags all end with a slash. For example, < img src="..." />. Note the slash at the end. Having valid HTML is a "signal of quality" to search engines. It's not a big item, but SEO sometimes comes down to many, many small incremental improvements.
Good luck!
Thanks for the great tips! The site validates now, the MyBlogLog Widget was causing so many errors I decided to chuck it away. Ifixed the header, removed the redirect link and disabled that Share function I hardly use.
I'll make sure to check out Google's Webmaster Tools. Thanks a lot, I'll add you to my links.
Would you review my blog?
http://theprizeblog.com
Hi Marios,
Would you review my blog?
Hi Brian,
Here you go…
1. You should be careful with your reciprocal links. If you are linking to sites that aren't related to yours, your site may be perceived as being untrustworthy from a search engine's perspective.
2. As I've mentioned in other reviews, consider not showing entire posts on your home page and archive pages. This may be problematic to fix in your case because your posts are short, but I'm throwing it out there for you to think about.
3. You don't have a sitemap. A sitemap can help search engines find your content with ease. I suggest using the Dagon Design Sitemap Generator.
4. I would adjust your permalinks to NOT include the date. The short the URL the better as long as it is descriptive.
5. It looks like your redirecting people from http://www.theprizeblog.com to prizeblog.com. It's good that you've settled on one URL. The problem is that your redirect is issuing a 302 code which tells search engines that it is NOT a permanent redirect and that they should continue to use the www version. Change this redirect to a 301 and that'll tell search engines to update their databases.
Please consider linking to my site if you find my tips useful. Yes, I know this is a little contradictory to item 1.
Welcome Gauravonomics!
I just go through looking at your blog.
1. Look in to how you can have meta descriptions added to your WordPress theme. A meta description will help search engine results "look" better which can improve click through. To see what I mean, type this command in to Google site:gauravonomics.com/blog/ and look at the descriptions that appear. See how they're not descriptive?
2. A lot of bloggers like to have their posts appear in full on the home page and in archives. I recommend against this practice and instead suggest that only the first paragraph be shown. You can use the more tag to accomplish this.
3. You should add a sitemap to your site. I like the Dagon Design Sitemap Generator plugin.
4. Your post titles are wrapped in H3 tags. These should be changed to H1 tags. This tag helps search engines determine the topic of your page. Right now you have the H1 tag around your blog title, Gauravonomics, which is not ideal.
5. You may run in to duplicate content penalties with some of your pages. In particular, when a tag has only one post the tah page is pretty much the same as the post page itself e.g. http://www.gauravonomics.com/blog/tag/television/. Duplicate content can result in search engines ignoring one of the copies. They may choose to ignore the one you want them to pay attention to. To fix this, you'll need to look in to how to restrict search engines from crawling these duplicate pages i.e. using meta robots tag or modifying the robots.txt file.
If you found any of the above useful, please consider linking back to my blog. Good luck!
Hi Marios,
Came here via Gauravonomics. Was wondering if you could give my site a look too. Thanks.
I read about this on Gauravonomics. Can you please have a look at my blog too. I am actually a beginner and i don't know much about coding so would you help me with SEO thing. Thank you.
Patrix,
I just took a look at your blog and here are some recommendations. Note that your template looks pretty good and your site is not suffering from the most common mistakes I see. I see that you've even got a Google Sitemap which most people don't. Good job! Make sure you've submitted it to the relatively new Yahoo sitemaps program.
1. Your meta description, "Nerve Endings Firing Away - Personal Weblog of Patrix." repeats for each page. Meta descriptions are still important because they often appear in search results under the link. A good description can increase clicks. If you go to Google and type in site:ipatrix.com you'll see what I mean by repeating descriptions.
2. Although your post titles are surrounded by H1 tags (good), you also use H1 tags on other parts of the page like the blog title, archives title, and other titles on the page. These should be changed to H2, strong, or anything else that looks right. You don't want to confuse search engines regarding the topic of a post by using more than one H1. The exception to this is on category pages where it's ok to use the H1 on each post title.
3. Some of your category pages are resulting in duplicate pages. For example, check out the "I" and "I, me, & myself" category pages. They are the same and search engines don't like duplicate pages. You also have two duplicate categories called World Wide Web.
4. Although your heavy use of categories make it easy for search engines to find your content, I'd still create a sitemap page. Use the Dagon Design Sitemap Generator, for example.
5. And my last item is not SEO at all. It looks like you've made an error with the Google section targeting code. The tags need to use two dashes (–) and not one (-) like you have.
If any of these seem useful, please consider linking to my site. Thanks for stopping by and good luck with your blog!
Thanks, Marios.
I've implemented your changes. I am planning to write a post on SEO changes that have worked for me. I'll link to your site in that post.
I would be thrilled to have any input you would care to give me. What a generous offer. Thank you.
Writer Chick
Hasit,
Thanks for stopping by. I have to be honest though and say I see little potential from a search engine optimization perspective for your site. The main reason is that it doesn't look like you plan to write enough about any given topic to be able to compete with other sites. With every entry being too short and on a different topic, there's no topic theme for the search engines to key in on. In addition, every post links to a site that probably has more relevant content than the short blurb on your site.
Sorry to be the bearer of bad news. Still, blogs aren't all about search engine traffic so if you think your idea is sound, don't let me be the reason you stop.
Writer Chick,
I see that you're using the Cutline theme. Great minds think alike!
Chris is a great designer, but he missed out on some SEO best practices.
1. The H1 tag which can help search engines determine the topic of a page is wrapped around the blog name — Writer Chick Talks. Ideally, the H1 tag would be used only around the post title e.g. Chicks in dah Hood.
2. On a related note, the theme uses the H2 tag, but then jumps to the H4 without using the intermediate H3. Might as well stick with the standard header hierarchy.
3. It's a typical feature of blogs to use date-based navigation, but it's not something that helps with search engines. The problem with it is that you end up with duplicate pages from a search engine's perspective. For example, ignoring the comments, the March 8 page is the same as the Magic of Chalk page. Search engines will opt to ignore one of the pages and maybe they'll ignore the "wrong" one. So I prefer to eliminate these duplicates either by not having such navigation or using code/plugins to add the meta noindex tag to the version of the page I want the search engines to ignore.
4. You should look up Chris Pearson's sitemap solution or install the one from Dagon Design. Both solutions create a page with links to every one of your blog's pages. This can help search engines find everything.
5. Look in to getting a plugin or making the necessary template changes to improve your meta descriptions. This description, which is hidden from users inside the HTML code, is often used by search engines in their results. Take a look at this results page from Google. Notice how the description under each title is the same and not very descriptive? You may be missing out on some clicks because there's nothing compelling users to check out your site.
6. I would cut down on the number of tags used on each post. Each time you link somewhere you are in effect giving an endoresement to that page whether it is internal or external. When you link to 100 places all from one page, the value of each endorsement is diminished. So each tag which links to wordpress.com is diminishing the value of the other links pointing deeper in to your site.
7. I always recommend snippets instead of full posts on the home page and category pages. This keeps pages from looking like duplicates since the content doesn't appear in more than one spot.
I think I'll stop here. I hope these items made sense. And if you've found them useful, please consider linking back to my site. Thanks and good luck with your blog!
affliate marketing website to generate passive income for my family.
Nice deal! I'm going to share this with someone who is new to blogging and could benefit from your expertise.
Hi Walt,
My offer is restricted to blogs. Mostly because in return for the review, I ask for a link back to my site. I'd rather restrict those links from blogs which at least have a chance of being related to this site. Your diamond affiliate site is way outside the realm of related content. In addition, doing SEO for free for a business runs the risk of devaluing the services I charge for to make a living. Sorry.
Can i get you to review my blog? Thank you very much!!!
Hi Markkie,
I just got through looking at your site. It looks like your site has some of the same shortcomings that some other sites I've looked at had. Here the items I recommend you look at first:
1. Your blog is relatively new so I would consider reworking your permalinks. At the moment you include the date in the URL, but that's unecessary information so I would just include the post name. If you do decide to change your permalinks, be sure to set up redirects so that old URLs point to the new URLs. There's a plugin that will help with this that you can find with a search or two in Google.
2. People can access your site using www .markkie.com or markkie.com. You should pick one format and stick with it. Again, there's a redirect plugin that will automatically take people from one version to another based on your preference. This will keep links to your site consistent as users will only ever see one version.
3. Get Dagon Design Sitemaps plugin. With this plugin you can create a single page that contains a link to all articles. This will help search engines find your content without having to go deep and follow many links.
4. I would write descriptions for each category. WordPress gives you this functionality. I'm not sure if your theme will display this description or if you'll need to tweak it a bit. A category description is static and will help search engines identify the content of the category. The possibility is that you'll then obtain rankings for your category pages.
5. Your theme uses h1 tags around the blog name, Life Snapshot. However, the h1 tags should actually be around the post title to tell search engines that the topic of the page is related to the post title and not the blog title. If you use other heading tags such as h2 or h3, make sure you use them in the proper order i.e. one h1 tag, following by one or more h2 tags, followed by one or more h3 tags. Think of them as a hierarchy.
I'm curious as to what your suggestions for my blog would be
Hi,
I would appreciate if you could provide your inputs on my blogs http://www.indibloggies.org and http://nullpointer.debashish.com. Thanks for your time.
Hi Marios,
I came here through Patrix's blog.
Could you recommend some SEO tips for my site?
Thanks.
A wonderful post. Would love to here comments on my site.
I guess that reading through all your recommendations to others itself would be invaluable
If you have time, pl go through my site. and btw, though i have domain for close to 2 yrs now, I am yet to configure any email on that.
For all those that recently requests a blog review, hang in there! I'm on vacation so I'm a little behind.
The Piker,
Here are 5 things I would modify on your blog…
1. Modify the date archives page to include the meta robots noindex tag or update the robots.txt file to exclude these archives. Date-based archive pages are of little value to search engines and can look like duplicate content. The topic-based archives are more effective at describing your site to search engines.
2. Use meta descriptions that are specific to each page. At the moment it looks like your tag line is used in a lot of places. While meta descriptions don't necessarily help rankings, they can encourage more clicks for when a page of your does rank.
3. You have the h1 tags around your blog title. These should be moved to the post title to help re-enforce the topic of each page.
4. Keep the number of categories small until you have more content. For example, you have a linux category and an open source software category. Both are close to each other in content.
5. Use WordPress's more tag to have snippets of each article appear on the home page and category pages. This way you'll have unique content on these pages AND the actual article pages.
I hope that helps! If it does, please consider linking back to my site. Thanks.
Great content! Will find some time to read all of your reviews.
I would like to change the link (remove the dates) but I am afraid it will screw-up every incoming links. Will search for the plugin you mentioned.
Thanks for your help
That seems like a really good idea..will add you link on my site
I would gladly link to your site, if you would peruse mine.
thanks,
-JJ
JJ,
I just took a quick peek at your site. I'm still looking around, but the first thing I found is that the original Blogspot URL has been dropped rather than "redirected".
The ideal is to set up a redirect from the old URL to the new URL. I'm not sure if you can do that with Blogspot URLs, but it's worth looking into. If you can't redirect users, consider putting up a page with a link to your new site.
I'll take another look soon…