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Category Archives: Website Design
Adding SEO to WordPress
Technical SEO’s meta tag components can be added to a WordPress website by installing a plug in like “Add Meta Tags” by George Notaras. A short tutorial on adding WordPress plugins can be found here
The three technical component that matter most are
- Title Tag
- Description Tag
- Keyword Tag
Page Title Tag : The <title></title> tags must describe the page accurately. Many engines use it to compose the site’s heading in their listing so include your primary keywords. It is the description used at the top of your browser window. It may also be used as the text label describing your page in a bookmark/favourite list. Use 6 to 12 words and keep it less than 64 characters in length. Try and repeat sensibly important keywords – “Cakes from the Cake Company.” “Cakes Cakes Cakes Cakes Cakes” will be treated as spam and ignored. Avoid ego titles – your or the company name for example. New customers are more likely to search for “car repair UK” than “Bloggs motors” The page title is
the most important SEO tool available.
The title for this page is “WordPress Training: Adding WordPress Plugins”
Description meta tag: use by some search engine listings to describe your website’s page. This may be what people read in the engines’ listings and thus can be used to tempt them to look and visit your site. Write one for each page – use at least one keywords near the beginning and up to 11 to 20ish words in total or 200 to 250 characters.
The Description for this page is “Basic WordPress Training Part 4 – adding useful WordPress Plugins.”
Keyword meta tag: though not so important these days, but list your most important keywords or key word phrases for insertion into each of the pages. Important words first. Just repeating keywords or adding irrelevant words is not going to work. Use between 7 and 48 words.
e.g.:“performance car exhausts, car exhausts, performance exhausts, exhausts”
covers both keywords and keyword phrases.
The keywords for this page are “basic wordpress training” and ” adding wordpress plugins”
Note that the keyword emphasied in this page’s tags is “WordPress”
For a fuller account on general SEO techniques read these posts.
What about free WordPress.com sites?
Well they are cheap are they not? The answer is yes for the simple blogger, but for a business?
For the technical, you can’t customise the themes, no access to the PHP theme code, the theme’s CSS. You cannot add a new plugins so features like e-commerce are out. Just with those alone missing you can see why it’s ok for a blog, but nothing much more. Anyway consider this, I provide WordPress with hosting and email accounts for just £30 per year and it is totally configurable. They also provide a paid upgrade so I consider that too. What you lose to save £30 is crucial, so apart from a dabble and ‘look and feel’ investigation I would not bother with it frankly if you are in business to make money out of your WordPress website.
WordPress, SEO and robots.txt
Robots.txt – file.
Robots.txt tells good search engines which pages are to be included and which to ignore and not index. For example the simple lines:
User-agent: *
Disallow: /
In a text file called robots.txt in your WordPress root folder will stop your site being included in indices like Google.
The following however is good for WordPress:
User-agent: *
Disallow: /wp-admin/
Disallow: /wp-includes/
This tells engines to index the site but nor the two folders you can see. These two shouold be kept private. SImply make up a fiule and save it in your website’s root folder in a file called robots.txt.
Robots.txt as a WordPress setting
Edit your WordPress-based robots.txt file from the WordPress Admin using a WordPress Website plugin such as:
Christopher Davis’s, WP Robots Txt.
It’s a plugin that adds an additional field to the “Reading” admin page. With this installed and activated, simply go into the WordPress menu option for website settings: Settings/Readings and scroll to the bottom and change information in the window below
Robots.txt Content
| User-agent: * Disallow: /wp-admin/ Disallow: /wp-includes/ |
|---|
Website’s Design – purpose
This is the first thing I ask people and the most obvious qustion, but sometimes we are so focus on ‘image’ we lose sight of the primary function of a website. This ultimately affect the website design. So number one is what are you trying to do in descending order of importance.
What to look for in a good Freelance Website designer
A good freelance designer will address all these points for you:
Fit for the purpose websites
Website designers must be creative, technical orientated and understand how to use pages as a marketing tool to produce a site that is fit for the purpose. In the final analysis, having got someone to view your page it must quickly convince them that they are in the right place. Visit to buy conversion must be excellent, whether its a product or just something you want say.
Spam-bot safe websites
A sure sign of naive development is exposure of your email address to harvesting bots. Your email address will soon be spammed mercilessly. All our sites come with a contact form.
Browser and screen friendly websites
How often have you seen a website and thought “why on earth have they published this? It’s a mess.” The obvious reason is the website lack’s testing with different screen sizes and/or browsers.
W3C compliancy mean anything?
W3C compliant websites are less likely to have problems with different makes of web page browsers or search engines.
Search Engine Optimised Websites – Google and Bing ranking.
A good web designer does not add this on to your website at the end of the development as an after thought. All our websites have this important aspect built in to the bedrock. Browse our page on SEO to find out a bit more about optimising a website for search engines. This website is currently on the highly competitive first page of Google for “Search Engine Optimisation UK”, “Freelance php designers”, “Freelance Flash designers.”
Fast downloading of pages from your website.
People don’t like waiting, so if the pages is are in Google and they are kept waiting they soon click on another link.
Website Statistics
We always set up a Google Analytics account for your website so you can analyse your websites performance.
Responsive Web Design: PHP, JavaScript and jQuery
A professional web designer can use responsive web design RWD or alternatively adaptive delivery AWD as a web design paradigm aimed at providing the best “viewing experience” for your audience. Site navigation using these techniques should also be possible without resorting to resizing, especially panning, and scrolling when downloaded by different platforms such as phones, laptops, tablets etc. Read more here
Finally
A web designer should be aware of third party embedding issues. For example, advertising that is not sympathetic