Blogging with Wordpress

Those of you who read my Marketing Karma newsletter may remember that back in January I mentioned that one of my resolutions was to try blogging with Wordpress, but on a self-hosted site rather than the free hosted version. Well, I've set up my Wordpress site and thought that this blog would be a good place to document my progress.

This is what I've done so far and I'll be expanding on some of the points in other posts:
1. Bought the domain name I wanted for the blog - www.toutefrance.co.uk
2. Bought 'Wordpress for Dummies' by Lisa Sabin Wilson, which I've added to the books page on Marketing Karma. This book has been a great help as it's meant I can sit down away from the computer and read up about Wordpress and what I need to do. Everything is laid out in a step by step way, but although it says you don't need to have technical knowledge, it certainly helps to have some for the self-hosted Wordpress sites.
3. Choose a hosting company - this was more difficult as there are so many web hosting companies and in the end I went with the existing web hosting company I use for Forty First and Marketing Karma. I emailed them asking all sorts of questions that Wordpress suggested but on retrospect, things may have been easier if I'd chosen a web hosting company who specialise in Wordpress sites.
4. Choose a Wordpress template. I thought this would be easy, but it was really hard! I've decided to go with a free template for now and when things get going properly I'll get a professionally designed template. Wordpress.org has loads of free templates but not all of them worked or had the features I wanted, and not knowing exactly what I wanted in the beginning made the task of finding a decent template much more difficult.
5. Download the Wordpress files. As I went with a web hosting company that didn't have a 'one click' Wordpress set up, it meant downloading all the Wordpress files from Wordpress and uploading them to my web hosting account. I also had to set up a MySQL database which I've never done before and if I'd chosen a different host, this could have all been done for me!

I'll continue with my experiences with Wordpress in another post along with the techie bits, but it's been quite a learning curve so far. The above doesn't even include starting to write posts, so you can see how long it can take to set up and manage!

Typical SEO Problems

Over the years that I've been doing SEO I've come across all sorts of problems that have hindered the success of an optimisation project. These hindrances aren't just a question of typical optimisation meta tags etc, but often technical issues that can cause real problems in the search engines. Here are some examples:

1. Meta Refresh tags - these have been used to redirect one page to another as a 'refresh'. It's a bad use of html as generally if you want to redirect one page to another, you should use what is called a '301 redirect' (a techie term). Search engines hate meta refresh tags as often they were used to trick them, and they can't follow the refresh. If you're using them, I would advise removing them.

2. Frames - frames have been around for years and years, since the first websites were put up and are a very out dated way of designing websites. Basically sites designed in frames consist of 3 pages made up as one - a heading which contains the logo, navigation and the central content. Search engines can't read frames, and even if you direct them to the content pages within the frame, your site will be found in the search results with no navigation and no logo, sending visitors to a dead end web page. If you're still using frames, find a designer who can build you a brand new site using stylesheets, which cuts down on code and makes it easy for the search engines to index.

3. Duplicate content - duplicate content can appear for all sorts of reasons. Perhaps you have two pages showing the same content for one reason or another, you have more than one domain so have copied the same content over onto your other domains, or you may have been victim to someone pinching some of your content. Either way, search engines don't like duplicate content and if you're using the same content on multiple domains, you can get yourself into trouble and find your pages being kept down the rankings. Choose one domain to promote and direct all your other domains to this one. Alternatively, make sure your content is unique on your other domains. Google has a useful article on duplicate content which you can read here.

4. Impatience - yes, being impatient can hinder a perfectly good optimisation campaign. Website owners eager to see their site ranking days after it has been optimised have been known to 'make a few changes' in the hope that the pages will suddenly rank higher. Optimisation takes time, you need to wait a couple of months for a reasonably established site to see if the optimisation is working before you start making changes. Making changes too early stops you from having a picture of whether things are working or not.

5. Website re-designs - I've known some well established brands to re-design their website without taking appropriate precautions and thinking about their existing search engine rankings. If you're going to re-design your site, the first thing you must make sure of is that there is what is known as a '404 error page' in place. This page automatically appears if someone arrives on a website via a broken link or there is a broken link within the site navigation. A nicely written error page telling the visitor that the page no longer exists with helpful information to help them navigage to where they want is all that is needed. Many site owners fail to put up any 404 page at all. What happens when the site is re-designed? The old pages ranking well in the search results send visitors to those horrible browser error pages. The visitor has no option but to press the back button and choose another site in the search results. You might as well send traffic to your competitors!

6. Failing to understand how the search engines work - I thought I'd add this in because although website owners don't need to know how to optimise and promote sites (that's what we're here for!), they do need to understand the basics and what they're letting themselves in for by having a site designed for them. A basic understanding of how search engines work (e.g indexing sites, ranking sites) and other issues such as the ageing delay on new domains can alleviate problems later on.