Hello Robot » seo http://www.hellorobot.se/blog Tobias Gärder, en frilansande webbformgivare, om design, webbutveckling, inspiration och mjukvara. Tue, 28 Sep 2010 11:46:34 +0000 http://wordpress.org/?v=2.9.2 en hourly 1 Google’s Guide To Search Engine Optimization http://www.hellorobot.se/blog/googles-starter-guide-seo-search-engine-optimization/561/ http://www.hellorobot.se/blog/googles-starter-guide-seo-search-engine-optimization/561/#comments Thu, 09 Jul 2009 08:04:42 +0000 Tobbe http://www.hellorobot.se/blog/?p=561 Google's Starter Guide To Search Engine Optimization

If you’re new to search engine optimization (SEO) or just wondered what Google thinks is the best way for your site to rank higher there’s some interesting stuff to read in Google’s Search Engine Optimization
Starter Guide [Google.com, PDF]. There’s no magic formula to reach that first place for a search on a specific keyword (of course), but it does contain 22 pages of sound advice for anyone wanting to make it as easy as possible for any search engine to crawl your site.

If you’re too lazy to read the document we can boil it down to:

  • Unique page titles for each page: Keep ‘em short, detailed (and descriptive) and unique.
  • Unique “description” meta tags: This tag is often kept static through-out a site, but if you make sure it contains valid and useful information (as in accurately summarizing the page content) Google can use instead of a snippet from the body text. A great way to lift up keywords that are valid for the page.
  • URL structure: Having nice URL:s with keywords in them (as in http://www.thefruitshop.com/fruits/bananas/greenones/”) does make a difference, and keywords matching the search query will be shown in bold text.
  • Sitemaps: Provide both HTML and XML sitemaps (former for human visitors, latter for search engines)
  • Write good anchor texts: Descriptive links wins.
  • Don’t forget the alt-attribute for images!
  • Make use of Google’s free tools such as Webmaster Tools, Website Optimizer and of course Analytics to see what works and what doesn’t.
Originally posted at Hello Robot]]> http://www.hellorobot.se/blog/googles-starter-guide-seo-search-engine-optimization/561/feed/ 0 Handling Canonical URL’s With Wordpress http://www.hellorobot.se/blog/handling-canonical-urls-with-wordpress/65/ http://www.hellorobot.se/blog/handling-canonical-urls-with-wordpress/65/#comments Mon, 23 Feb 2009 08:19:35 +0000 Tobbe http://www.hellorobot.se/blog/?p=65 Up until now a constant SEO issue has been dealing with duplicate content, pages that can be reached through different url’s and therefore regarded as dupes, like the following:

http://www.mydomain.com/mypage.html

http://www.mydomain.com/mypage.html?category=misc


http://www.mydomain.com/mypage.html?sessionid=1234

These three url’s all point to the same page but would be looked at as three different pages with identical content by the search engines. To help us deal with this Google, Yahoo! and Microsoft now supports the link rel=”canonical” tag.

Just put it in your <head>-section along with the url you prefer to inform them which address they should use instead of eventual dupes.

<link rel="canonical" href="http://www.mydomain.com/mypage.html" />

The search engines considers this a strong hint, not a directive. This means that they’ll most probably use the information you provide but they reserve the right to ignore it if it looks like it’s misused. You can refer to an url that redirects but they don’t allow you to redirect to another domain, and you can define relative paths.

Joost de Walk has put together a simple install-and-forget Wordpress plugin to handle this automatically, available for download here. Just put it in your /wp-content/plugins/-path, activate it and you’re set.

Read more about it at Google Webmaster Central and Robert’s Talk.

Originally posted at Hello Robot]]> http://www.hellorobot.se/blog/handling-canonical-urls-with-wordpress/65/feed/ 1