Helping You Rock Out Your Site Like A Rockstar!

Yes, I am continuing my SEO 101 topics. My previous article was SEO 101: The Article And Its Content. This time I am covering meta tags.

What are meta tags?

It is a meta element. By Wikipedia:

A meta element is HTML or XHTML used to provide structured metadata about a Web page.

In a webpage, they are usually located before the coding for the body elements, and also before the ending anchor tag for the header. The meta tags for a page in particular allow the webmaster to select keywords best suited to described their site in a way for search engines to efficiently place their site. Yes, meta tags can be used toward search engine optimization.

To use them effectively you must choose keywords that best describe your site. It is best to not choose too many keywords. No more than a dozen will do as you also have the ability to include keywords in your article titles, your content and more. In fact, the All in One SEO Pack is a great little sidekick to have for those running sites with WordPress.

Choosing keywords that are not relevant or choosing too many are abusing the true function of the meta tag, and you would more than likely find yourself dubbed as keyword stuffing. Your title and content should follow your keywords, which all should lead back to your basic focus of your site – for those who have followed my blog, I talk about this from time to time.

However, not all search engines will look at the metadata, while others might. To best understand any search engine, you should read any information they offer that can give you a clue on how they crawl websites. So, in some cases, it may be moot to use meta tags. On the other hand, you will want to use them to increase your sites chances of a possible higher ranking, and above all, the possibility to attract more visitors looking for what you are talking about.

Do you use meta tags? If so, what suggestions do you have for others?

A couple months ago at WordCamp Chicago 2009, Matt Mullenweg had been asked by Dan Schulz on how to make WordPress more secure. Finally what he has said has been written in more detail at WordPress.org in the article How to Keep WordPress Secure.

From the getgo, I had known that the primary way was to keep your WordPress version up-to-date. As a small webhost with Host Solutions, I had seen time and time again hacked versions of WordPress and normal installations. I found that more hacked versions were easily being infiltrated by spammers and the resources used were much higher.

Of course, you could always adjust your .htacess file and “harden” your WordPress installation, but having an up-to-date version allows you to replace any bugs that were found in previous versions right away. I have also found that some users who have hacked their WordPress version so badly have a bit of a hard time tweaking their WordPress to try to upgrade their version.

I did this when I started out using b2. When I went to switchover to WordPress, I had a rough time and had to rely on a fresh Fantastico install of it instead. My version was not only so badly altered, but I was doing more harm to my server.

Like Matt Mullenweg said:

“Upgrading is a known quantity of work, and one that the WordPress community has tried its darndest to make as easy as possible with one-click upgrades. Fixing a hacked blog, on the other hand, is quite hard. Upgrading is taking your vitamins; fixing a hack is open heart surgery. (This is true of cost, as well.)”

If you use a hacked version, carefully follow the upgrade notations made to make sure you do not miss any important areas that could leave your website exposed. A lot of the upgrade notations can be found in the developer documents section of the WordPress Codex or even more specifically the WordPress Trac.

Is your WordPress up-to-date on its version? Do you have a manual install or an automatic install like Fantastico? If you have a hacked version of WordPress, have you ran into any problems?

Every day I see people blog about search engine optimization (SEO) tips. Some are quite similar, and some mix in things that work for them.

However, there are really some basic things that should be played with first before trying to get fancy. Not long ago, I posted about SEO in my article named Search Engine Optimization. It was more of a help article and brushed several points for SEO.

For those not aware, Google actually has a 22 page article in PDF called Search Engine Optimization Starter Guide. I really recommend it if you are a beginner or you know some things about SEO, but could use some extra information.

Some of it I wanted to go through, especially only how to effectively use it within your content. First off, when a visitor goes to see an article, the title is a big key. Making a title that is both short, but unique is a great little trick. Make sure that your article title is easily understandable so your readers will know generally what to expect, especially if they are looking for information you may be able to provide.

SEO is not something you have to try hard and some people come by it naturally. Though there are quite a few tricks, a lot of them really fall to the title and how your article is written. As I have been urging bloggers to be themselves while writing, it is important to do this even when applying SEO. If you get too technical, it may be too much for some of your readers to understand, or your writing style may look awkward. Write in your own words, not for the search engines and SEO “gurus.”

When you get knee-deep in writing your blog posts, make sure not to stuff them to the brim with keywords. It can become quite obvious to others, and may look spammish. (I know, ‘spammish’ is not a word, but I made it up and I like it. ) Make sure when applying keywords, that when you decide to use a few as anchor links that they are effective. Do not make them out to be long paragraphs or sentences. For example, if I blogged about a friend’s site and they had free graphics, I could put in the anchor link my friend’s name, plus ‘free graphics.’ I could even specify what type of graphics my friend has and it will help the search engine document my friend’s pages too.

Of course, there are other SEO tips out there, but what tips do you use or recommend for others concerning your blog content?

If you look up the term ‘#1 douchebag‘ in Google, you will find that Micah Baldwin (@micah on Twitter) holds that spot. This is because he asked people to link to him using that term as an anchor link. Some people would probably shake their head, but after hearing his presentation at WordCamp Chicago 2009, I did not think he was a douchebag. He is very funny and really does have a lot of knowledge in his field. A little extra tidbit about Micah is that he is the #FollowFriday founder. The original intention was allow people to list who they recommended and why… not the long lists that look like spammage.

Anyway, it was his ability to influence his followers into helping him achieve his goal. How did he do this… well, he put it all into the following points:

- became involved in several social media sites
- he was active on those social media sites
- he found content to share and shared it with others
- he remained true to himself

Now, he points are a bit different, but the points mentioned above reflect his own points.

Since hearing Micah’s story, I have been thinking of my own. It is not anything flambouyant, but I would like to rank higher in the key term ‘Nile’. I see all of these other things and when I searched to see if I was even listed… I was not. It is not shocking, but if you put the anchor link as ‘Nile’ on your site when linking Blondish.net, or even blog about it (which is awesome and I will be very happy), I will put your link on a page to thank those who supported the site. Yeah, it is not much, but it is a reciprocal link at least.

If you already link Blondish.net as ‘Blondish’ or ‘Blondish.net’, please change it to Nile.

Note: Thank you to Lisa Sabin-Wilson for the photo.