seo – JayAre

How to make your standard WordPress titles more attractive?

Most WordPress themes have the same, SEO-unfriendly, standard titles. Although the times are changing little by little, a lot of blogs still use those unattractive titles. They don’t look good in the SERP‘s and when you add a post to a social bookmarking site, chances are real those strange looking characters (« and ») will be transformed into something unreadable. Time to make a change…

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Checklist for an SEO friendly Content Management System

When you’re looking for a Content Management System or CMS, don’t just accept the first proposal made by your familiar web designer or developer. There are tons of great and easy to use content management systems out there, but most of them aren’t search engine friendly. And if there is one thing you don’t want to be behind on your competitors, it is your online visibility and findability. By presenting your web designer or developer a checklist of requirements the CMS should meet, you can avoid a lot of problems regarding rankings in the search engines up front. Adjusting the CMS later on can cost you a lot of time and money.

I’m going to present to you a list of requirements a search engine friendly CMS should meet. This list is not exhaustive and your additions and comments are more than welcome. Whether the content management system runs on PHP or .NET, whether it needs Apache or IIS, it doesn’t mind, these are some main criteria for a CMS you won’t regret : Continue reading Checklist for an SEO friendly Content Management System

How the big ones implement their 404 page not found error pages

Yesterday while browsing on YouTube I ran across a 500 Internal Server Error. Never happened to me before on YouTube, but I didn’t mind. The YouTube 500 Error page seems to contain a funny message, and if there is something I like it is funny errorhandling.

A team of highly trained monkeys has been dispatched to deal with this situation. Please report this incident to customer service.

And that reminded me of something I learned when I started SEO : one of the first things you should implement when setting up a new website are user friendly AND search engine friendly errorpages. Especially the 404 Page Not Found error page is one that should be perfect. For the search engines it should return a 404 status code. For the users it must contain a clear message that says their browser asked for a non existing page and they should be able to click through to the home page or search for another page. You can find more on The Perfect 404.

So I decided to take a look at the 404 error pages from big guys like Google, Yahoo!, YouTube, Live Search, LinkedIn, … And what I found wasn’t always exactly perfect on the usability side …

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LinkedIn is more than just a networking website, use it for SEO

LinkedIn, the business networking website that allows you to stay in contact with your professional contacts, can do more than just that. It also can be used as a location to plug relevant links with relevant anchor text to your websites. So when you’re building links for your website (very important these days in SEO), don’t forget LinkedIn. How to do it ? Read on…

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Discovering the World of Search Engine Marketing

Last night I stumbled across this really nice presentation by Pure Visibility, a Michigan internet marketing company. In this presentation, they really give a great introduction to what Search Engine Marketing is all about. Search Engine Optimization, Pay-per-click, Social Media Optimization, Web Analytics, Universal Search, … it’s all there. So if you’re looking for a beautiful, clear, not too technical explanation of what Search Engine Marketing is, read on.

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How to optimize your WordPress blog for the Search Engines?

Fact 1: WordPress in the best and easiest blogging system in the world.

Fact 2: search engines like Google, Live and Yahoo! really like blogs.

The reason behind the success of blogs in the Search Engine Results Pages (SERP’s) is that they really fit in the way search engines and their algorithms work today.

I’m going to show you how you can get your WordPress blog loved even more by Google and other search engines.

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