The Maine SEO Blog

• Theme: a collection of files that work together to produce a graphical interface with an underlying unifying design.
• Themes alter the look and presentation of material

Understanding your site (Knowing what you’re looking for)

• Information architecture: the structure and organization of your information
• Kinds of information
  - Posts
  - Links
  - Media
  - Pages
  - Comments

Things to think about

• Homepage
  - An informational page with information about my business
  - My recent posts
  - My best posts
  - All of the above
• Primary buckets of information
  - Top level nav should incapsulate your 5(ish) most important buckets of information
• Building a sitemap: outline of content on your site intended to organize the information so people who visit can understand it (love this definition)

Understanding your site: Vocabulary

• (Photo/Web/Video) Blog
  - focus is a chronological diary of posts
  - homepage showcases recent updates
  - has navigation elements, but often understated
• Magazine theme
  - think blog, on steroids
  - content freshness important, but quality has value too
  - home page usually showcases “best of” content
  - content often fits into clear categories (navigation)
• Content management system (business)
  - CMS
  - typically refers to complex, page centric sites
  - audience usually comes for static information, not “fresh” content
  - common for business & non-profits
• Portfolio
  - not an individual showcase
  - may or may not have “blog” component
  - typically a large focus on media
  - often a small, media-centric CMS

3 Types of Themes (from a Licensing perspective)

• Freely available, GPL (General Public License) compatible
• Commercially supported GPL
• Proprietary (non GPL) – doesn’t have to mean commercial
• Premium = NOT a type of theme

What comes in the box

• Default, pre-installed WordPress theme [Kubrick]
• Best place to find themes: Official WP Themes Directory
• Other resources: Smashing Magazine, ThemesPreview.com, WPHacks, Premium WP, StudioPress

Things to consider

• Price – think about time spent after purchase
• Support
• Quality of Design
• Features
• Ease of use

Tips for finding a consultant

• Show, don’t tell (see examples of themes)
• Ask for referrals
• Look behind the curtain (ask for examples for “out of the box” features)
• Be realistic about price expectations
• Have they given back to the community?

Customization

• Look for theme specific settings under “appearance” menu

Jake Gold, C. Murray Consulting
@jakemgold

You’ve launched a great new website and you’re awaiting patiently for it to be indexed.

You Google. Relentlessly.

Your homepage could be indexed within a week or so. Unfortunately, it’s not uncommon for it to take an entire month (or even two) for the deeper level pages to be indexed.

But if you’re not careful, you’ll never see your website in the search results. Why? It could be a few things…

If you use WordPress

You have an option during development to stop search bots from crawling your site. You should take it. The option is in a small space in a deep corner of your Admin: the privacy settings.

If you use the setting, great; just make sure upon launch, make your site visible!

NoIndex, Nofollow, Robots.txt

Not to get too geeky, but when you check the privacy setting above in WordPress, what you’re doing is adding a robots.txt file and noindexing the site.

However, you don’t need WordPress to do this. You can add a robots.txt file in any website – and there are certain pages you might want to use it for like your Privacy policy.

That being said, don’t nofollow, noindex your entire site after launch…

…or add any pages deeper than the homepage to your robots.txt file. In this case, that little backslash can make a world of difference.

How to make your site index faster

So you’ve launched. You’ve gotten rid of your noindex, nofollow tag and you’re ready to be found. Here are some ways to get found faster:

• Add Google Webmaster Tools. By adding this simple (and down the road, helpful) tool, you’re killing two birds with one stone and also submitting your website to Google.
• Add the Bing Toolbox. Like Webmaster Tools, this automatically submits your website to Bing, along with some other added benefits.
• Create a sitemap and submit it to your Google Webmaster Tools and Bing Toolbox account. While it may not help your site be crawled faster – it will certainly help search engines find those deeper pages a little quicker.
• Get links. Lots and lots of links. The links from quality, established websites you have, the better! Think about it: those websites get crawled on a regular basis, follow a new link to your site and voila! Not to mention…now you have a link to establish expertise.
• Along the same lines, submit to directories.
• Submit yourself on social sites websites like Digg, Reddit, StumbleUpon, etc. Then have friends/colleagues help you go “hot” on those sites.
• Create a presence on Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn. Then link to your new website.

Nicki Hicks
Get indexed

Flyte recently relaunched a website for a local Bed & Breakfast that we converted onto a WordPress platform. The Elms Bed & Breakfast, located in Greater Portland, is a gorgeous little Inn right on the riverbank in Westbrook, Maine.

I’ve had the pleasure of working with the owner, Scott Balfour, who’s shared many wonderful stories on his new blog: mainly covering tales of the trials and tribulations of being an Innkeeper.

Scott has already seen the benefits of being on WordPress – with the ability to update his site (and blog) whenever he pleases. For the benefit of his guests, this means that Scott can upload up-to-date photos of every room.

So if you’re looking for a great place to stay in Southern Maine – with all that’s exciting in Portland, with the peaceful ambiance of Maine – look no further than the Elms Bed & Breakfast. If you’re looking to convert your website to a WordPress Platform, look no further than flyte.

Nicki Hicks
Maine SEO

Last week, we finished another SEO project: for Michele Hernandez, a college consultant who helps students get admitted to Ivy League Schools. Hernandez College Consulting is the second site that, while we’ve been doing SEO work, has been ported over to a Content Mangement System (CMS).  In this case, it was WordPress.

WP is such a functional platform for SEO – I can’t say enough good things about it.  All of the great plugins are what makes my job so much easier (especially in a world where you no longer have to know HTML).  This is especially good for a business owner like Dr. Hernandez, who now has the ability to go in and change her copy, add pages or links without having to call up her developer.

Plus, there’s always the matter that search engines like content management systems.  They use CSS and are incredibly easy to crawl with all that nice, clean code.

There are a ton of benefits to have your site built on WordPress, just as there are having a college consultant.  If you want to help your child get and Ivy League education, give Dr. Michele Hernandez a call!

Nicki Hicks
Maine SEO

More and more, we’re using WordPress here at flyte as our CMS of choice.  Not only is it an easy platform for our clients to learn to use and update themselves, but it’s also incredibly search engine friendly.

As always, there are way to increase search visibility even further.  With WordPress, that way is by adding SEO Plugins.  WordPress has an extensive collection of such plugins, but I thought I’d take a look at two: one for the WP beginner, and another for the more advanced WP user.

For WordPress Beginners: All In One SEO Pack

• Quickly and easily change title, meta-description, and keywords for your homepage, specific pages, or posts
• Edit your title formats on your homepage, specific pages, posts, archive pages, category pages, etc. (Making them “Page Title – Blog Title” vs. “Page Title”)

For the Advanced WP User: HeadSpace

• Everything from the All in One SEO Pack, including the option to import and support All in One SEO (as well as other related plugins), PLUS….
• Ability to more easily add (without getting messy with HTML) Google Analytics and Webmaster Tools
• Add cool tools and tracking devices, like CrazyEgg

Nicki Hicks
Plugins with something for everyone