Theme choice and SEO

[neilv247]

Is it better to choose a theme that is optimized for SEO, when this is
one of the most important criteria for a site,
or can the site be configured for SEO using any theme?

[Azzam Sheikh]

If you can get a theme that is optimized for SEO then that will be better as it requires minimum configuration of codes.

However most themes that do not have a lot of .js functions are well optimized out of the box and require a few plugins like yoast wordpress SEO plugin. 

You just want to ensure the essentials are modified i.e. permalinks, site map, etc. 

Kind Regards

Azzam Sheikh

Social Media and SEO Manager - www.national.co.uk
Mobile: +447903 752 126 [UK]

Become Limitless - Facebook Limitless Community
Collaborative thoughts on Google+ Plus: +Azzam Sheikh
Follow me Twitter: @azzams

Professional connection on Linkedin: http://uk.linkedin.com/in/azzams

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[Roy]

I already have “All in One SEO Pack” installed as a plugin on my WP site.

 

Would there be any advantage in uninstalling this and installing “WordPress SEO by Yoast” instead?

 

Cheers

 

Dr Roy Johnson

MANTEX Information Design

http://www.mantex.co.uk

Phone: 0161 432 5811

Email: r...@mantex.co.uk

Blog: http://mantex.blogspot.com

 

 

 

 

[Azzam Sheikh]

I have not used "All in One SEO Pack" for a while now and only use Yoast SEO Plugin. 

You should be able to export you settings from one to the other.  

There are niggle bits that Yoast's version has taking strongly into consideration to ensure optimal performance and productivity.  This would include the promoting on each post to provide SEO title, description, focus keyword, etc seperately and then providing an exact preview of the results.  The visualisation assists to ensure you habitually putting in best practice for each post.  

It future creates a sitemap, provides strings to include webmaster keys, it even provides breadcrumbs for posts.  Breadcrumbs are important enough according to Steve Krug of "Don't make me think" - A common sense approach h to web usability.  

Have a good read over at Yoast's site as he has plenty of write ups on the site about it.  The updates a frequent and he monitors what is going on with Panda update.  All in all an excellent plugin and service for something that is free. 

Kind Regards

Azzam Sheikh

Social Media and SEO Manager - www.national.co.uk
Mobile: +447903 752 126 [UK]

Become Limitless - Facebook Limitless Community
Collaborative thoughts on Google+ Plus: +Azzam Sheikh
Follow me Twitter: @azzams

Professional connection on Linkedin: http://uk.linkedin.com/in/azzams

--

[Roy]

Thanks for this response Azzam – that sounds like a ringing endorsement for WP SEO by Yoast.

 

I could certainly do with all the help I can get from SEO tools, because my site takes a hammering from Panda every time they run it

 

And that’s even though I play by Google rules, have a content rich site, and don’t use any dodgy tricks

 

Cheers

 

Roy Johson

www.mantex.co.uk

[Mike Little]

On Mon, Jan 30, 2012 at 13:55, Azzam Sheikh <azzam....@gmail.com> wrote:

If you can get a theme that is optimized for SEO then that will be better as it requires minimum configuration of codes.

However most themes that do not have a lot of .js functions are well optimized out of the box and require a few plugins like yoast wordpress SEO plugin. 

You just want to ensure the essentials are modified i.e. permalinks, site map, etc. 

I'm going to disagree with Azzam, sorry.

Assuming a decent, modern theme  that employs all the standard WordPress recommended techniques, then I much prefer to delegate SEO functionality to a plugin. The single biggest reason, is that if you decide to change your theme, you will not have to do all the work again. 

Bear in mind that if you really want to optimise for the search engines, then the most important thing to be aware of is that pages, not your site, are what needs to be optimised. Therefore SEO tweaking has to be done at the individual page and post level, and if a theme is going to do that, it's post meta (used to store such information) will be particular to the theme. Changing themes will potentially lose you all that work. 

Better to keep it all in an independent plugin. The one I most respect and recommend to my clients is Joost de Valk's WordPress SEO plugin http://yoast.com/wordpress/seo/

Mike

--
Mike Little
http://zed1.com/

[Azzam Sheikh]

What you would need to bear in mind Roy is that even with the tools you can not guarantee 'not' to get a hammering. 

Recent algorithm change now takes into consideration above the fold content and the number of ads that are displayed up there. 

Further brands are more and more favourable to Google more the days move forward.  

Aaron Wall of seobooks.com has had suspicion for a while about Googles motives and although Google is showing a lot of hype with social search indicators and giving a lot or favouritism to peer-to-peer recommendations and personalised search it is diverting people's thinking away from brands getting preference and thus increasing the spends in Adwords and what will be a future projection when Google will become a big affiliate of brand products [they bought http://www.viglink.com/ which converts the link into an affiliate link after the click occurs thus maintaining the SEO benefit of the url/anchor text and not therefore Google need not penalise the site for excessive affiliate linking]  

The most important activity in my opinion is to get backlinks from high powered sites across vertically.  This means if they site is not related to your content you get something across to the site that can make it related i.e. an infographic on 'winter tyre safety' that the Telegraph.co.uk can use and provide a backlink to the site.  Maximising the input into these will have strategically a long -term advantage for the site, however the key is 'long term'.

Hope this helps 

Kind Regards

Azzam Sheikh

Social Media and SEO Manager - www.national.co.uk
Mobile: +447903 752 126 [UK]

Become Limitless - Facebook Limitless Community
Collaborative thoughts on Google+ Plus: +Azzam Sheikh
Follow me Twitter: @azzams

Professional connection on Linkedin: http://uk.linkedin.com/in/azzams

[Azzam Sheikh]

Who are you to disagree with me Mike? ooops the co-founder of Wordpress, my bad; lol

All is fair in opinions.  

I do understand the point you make Mike, absolutely and I did not take all the verticals you mention into mind.  

What I was thinking in the back of my mind is the poor optimised themes available out there and a noobie buying into the bling of a theme and then finding out later on what a bummer it is.  If you are thinking of investing one time into a theme then a well optimised theme from the outset is a good investment, however if change could be frequent or even costly then better to keep it all in an independent plugin.  

I guess on that note Mikes opinion is the better one since you can take all the features of a plugin like Joost de Valk's WordPress SEO plugin http://yoast.com/wordpress/seo/  and export and move to another site and then make the necessary basic tweaks to the site i.e. permalinks.  

Kind Regards

Azzam Sheikh

Social Media and SEO Manager - www.national.co.uk
Mobile: +447903 752 126 [UK]

Become Limitless - Facebook Limitless Community
Collaborative thoughts on Google+ Plus: +Azzam Sheikh
Follow me Twitter: @azzams

Professional connection on Linkedin: http://uk.linkedin.com/in/azzams

[Mike Little]

On Mon, Jan 30, 2012 at 15:27, Azzam Sheikh <azzam....@gmail.com> wrote:

Who are you to disagree with me Mike? ooops the co-founder of Wordpress, my bad; lol

All is fair in opinions.  

I do understand the point you make Mike, absolutely and I did not take all the verticals you mention into mind.  

What I was thinking in the back of my mind is the poor optimised themes available out there and a noobie buying into the bling of a theme and then finding out later on what a bummer it is.  If you are thinking of investing one time into a theme then a well optimised theme from the outset is a good investment, however if change could be frequent or even costly then better to keep it all in an independent plugin.  

You do make a good point about the quality of themes: If a theme is badly written then even a good plugin can't help. When looking at any themes, it is always worth looking for other's opinions of that theme, or even asking on this mailing list if anyone has experience of it.

I did have one client who changed themes after a long time setting up a site, and, even though the new theme came from the same people. all set-up, SEO settings, featured posts, and more were lost after the switch!

Mike

[Azzam Sheikh]

This does spark up an interesting thought to me about what would be best practice right from the outset. 

Should we consider passing as much as we can over to plugin's that can assist in easier transitions when switching a theme saving on time, energy, money and other resources. Or are there certain fundamentals that stay with the theme 

Kind Regards

Azzam Sheikh

Social Media and SEO Manager - www.national.co.uk
Mobile: +447903 752 126 [UK]

Become Limitless - Facebook Limitless Community
Collaborative thoughts on Google+ Plus: +Azzam Sheikh
Follow me Twitter: @azzams

Professional connection on Linkedin: http://uk.linkedin.com/in/azzams

[Roy]

Thanks for your response Azzam

 

Your comments seem persuasive to me – because at the same time as the number of visitors to my site has dropped, I get adverts through the post from Goole trying to persuade me to buy AdWords J

 

I put my ads below the fold, but I don’t yet have many links from other sites – I obviously need to do some promotional work

 

Cheers

 

Roy

[Azzam Sheikh]

The backlinking process is still every still the most crucial and important aspect of ranking.  

We allocate £100,000+ per month for Google and monitor everything across our own real estates and competitors using variety of tools and Hitwise.  In case you not familiar with Hitwise, they buy the data directly from the ISP's so no room for mistake on exactly what is going on with a site.  

The number 1 competitor in our niche [in Google] has only a handful of anchor based links but plenty of links for the url coming from players like www.tesco.com, www.bbc.co.uk, www.guardian.co.uk,  www.telegraph.co.uk and it is ranking across the board for 3000+ keywords within the top 3 positions.  We are talking about keywords with a buying intent i.e. those specific to an eCommerce site and not long-term keywords.  These buying keywords give then 16% traffic in our industry which equates in our estimation to approx £10M.  

In conclusion this is £10M from organic search on an ecommerce site that creates very little content for its key converting landing pages. Hopefully food for thought?

Kind Regards

Azzam Sheikh

Social Media and SEO Manager - www.national.co.uk
Mobile: +447903 752 126 [UK]

Become Limitless - Facebook Limitless Community
Collaborative thoughts on Google+ Plus: +Azzam Sheikh
Follow me Twitter: @azzams

Professional connection on Linkedin: http://uk.linkedin.com/in/azzams

[John Logsdon]

Hi all

Some interesting comments on SEO and stuff.

One thing about Yoast etc that has puzzled me though is that since Google etc
see the page and it is the page that needs to be optimised, yet the page is
dynamically constructed in some instances by a series of posts, and we
believe stuff above the fold is more important, how does Yoast optimise
this 'page'?

I have it installed but on the blog I have been working on, there are quite a
lot of posts already and going through each of these is a ****-aching
process. Does Yoast only look at the first post? In which case as you don't
know how the 'page' will be hit by the bots, you really need to construct the
content for each post, even though the lower posts will not be used.

Any thoughts on this?

On Monday 30 January 2012 15:52:59 Roy wrote:
> Thanks for your response Azzam
>
>
>

> Your comments seem persuasive to me - because at the same time as the

> number of visitors to my site has dropped, I get adverts through the post
> from Goole trying to persuade me to buy AdWords J
>
>
>
> I put my ads below the fold, but I don't yet have many links from other

> sites - I obviously need to do some promotional work

> <http://www.facebook.com/pages/Limitless-Community/233287316740233?sk=app_1
>0 0265896690345>

> Collaborative thoughts on Google+ Plus: +Azzam Sheikh

> <https://plus.google.com/117023362235410985497/about?hl=en>
> Follow me Twitter: @azzams <http://twitter.com/#%21/azzams>

>
> Professional connection on Linkedin: http://uk.linkedin.com/in/azzams
>
>
>
>
>
> On 30 January 2012 15:07, Roy <r...@mantex.co.uk> wrote:
>

> Thanks for this response Azzam - that sounds like a ringing endorsement for

> Mobile: +447903 752 126 <tel:%2B447903%20752%20126> [UK]

>
>
> Become Limitless - Facebook Limitless Community

> <http://www.facebook.com/pages/Limitless-Community/233287316740233?sk=app_1
>0 0265896690345>

> Collaborative thoughts on Google+ Plus: +Azzam Sheikh

> <https://plus.google.com/117023362235410985497/about?hl=en>
> Follow me Twitter: @azzams <http://twitter.com/#%21/azzams>

>
> Professional connection on Linkedin: http://uk.linkedin.com/in/azzams
>
>
>
> On 30 January 2012 14:48, Roy <r...@mantex.co.uk> wrote:
>
> I already have "All in One SEO Pack" installed as a plugin on my WP site.
>
>
>
> Would there be any advantage in uninstalling this and installing "WordPress
> SEO by Yoast" instead?
>
>
>
> Cheers
>
>
>
> Dr Roy Johnson
>
> MANTEX Information Design
>
> http://www.mantex.co.uk
>

> Phone: 0161 432 5811 <tel:0161%20432%205811>

>
> Email: r...@mantex.co.uk
>
> Blog: http://mantex.blogspot.com
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
> --
> See the group blog at http://mwug.info
>
> You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google
> Groups "Manchester WordPress User Group" group.
> To post to this group, send email to
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> To unsubscribe from this group, send email to
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> For more options, visit this group at
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>
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Best wishes

John Logsdon

[Mike Little]

On Mon, Jan 30, 2012 at 16:53, John Logsdon <j.lo...@quantex-research.co.uk> wrote:

Hi all

Some interesting comments on SEO and stuff.

One thing about Yoast etc that has puzzled me though is that since Google etc
see the page and it is the page that needs to be optimised, yet the page is
dynamically constructed in some instances by a series of posts, and we
believe stuff above the fold is more important, how does Yoast optimise
this 'page'?

Here is one of the fundamental reasons why Yoasts' plugin, and more particularly Joost's (the author) understanding, are superior to some of the other offerings out there. 

As you are puzzling, how can you optimise a page with multiple posts on it? This applies to not just your home page, but category archives, tag archives, etc. The answer is you don't! At least you don't try to *automatically* optimize a page like that, and so many SEO plugins try to do exactly that.

Have a look at Joost's SEO overview here http://yoast.com/articles/wordpress-seo/ (his WordPress SEO plugin pretty much now covers everything he mentions in there without separate plugins)

 

Basically, as I mentioned elsewhere on this mailing list. You need to be aiming to optimise your individual posts and pages, not your site as a whole. If your pages and posts rank well, they will help the site as a whole to rank well, but most people will land on your individual posts and pages when coming from a search engine for anything other than a generic term. 

 

I have it installed but on the blog I have been working on, there are quite a
lot of posts already and going through each of these is a ****-aching
process.  Does Yoast only look at the first post?  In which case as you don't
know how the 'page' will be hit by the bots, you really need to construct the
content for each post, even though the lower posts will not be used.

Any thoughts on this?

Unfortunately, if you want to do proper SEO, you do need to potentially look at each individual page and post. But, one point of a blog, especially if it is a blog on the side of a website with pages which are the real commercial 'meat' of your site, is to write well structured, keyword rich, regularly updated content to support and promote your main pages. You don't necessarily need to so carefully optimise each blog post, but that feedback you get from Yoast's plugin as you are writing/editing a post is really good for developing the right habits.

Sorry this is a bit rambling and disjointed, there is quite a lot to SEO and optimising your site.. Perhaps one of the mailing list members who does SEO for a living (I think we have at least a couple) could propose a WordPress and SEO talk for one of our monthly meetings.

Mike

[Roy]

Mike suggested:

 

Perhaps one of the mailing list members who does SEO for a living (I think we have at least a couple) could propose a WordPress and SEO talk for one of our monthly meetings.

 

Yay! I second that – bigtime.

 

I have been following the advice of SEO books and pundits for the last year now

 

tweaking the details of every page on my site – (and I have 1300+ posts and 86 static pages)

 

and the net result is that I get about HALF the number of site visitors that I used to have before

 

L

Advice would be sorely welcome

 

 

 

Dr Roy Johnson

MANTEX Information Design

http://www.mantex.co.uk

Phone: 0161 432 5811

Email: r...@mantex.co.uk

Blog: http://mantex.blogspot.com

 

[Azzam Sheikh]

I am more than happy to take on the task at one of the meeting to go into some depth SEO specifically for WordPress if you would like me too.

--

[John Davies]

With regards to Yoast SEO Plugin. My employer wants to be able to
control the Title, Meta description, Keywords etc not only for post
and pages but also for Categories. Although in fairness I've only
spent a couple of mins looking, I couldnt seem to see a way of doing
it through the Yoast SEO plugin. If I am wrong, I would be interested
for anyone to perhaps enlighten me if they would be so kind.

John

--
John Davies

[Mike Little]

On Mon, Jan 30, 2012 at 19:02, Azzam Sheikh <azzam....@gmail.com> wrote:

I am more than happy to take on the task at one of the meeting to go into some depth SEO specifically for WordPress if you would like me too.

Yes please! Do you think you could do, say a half hour (more?) with a bit of Q&A at the end?

February might be a bit short notice, but March?

Mike

[Mike Little]

On Mon, Jan 30, 2012 at 21:06, John Davies <johnamaz...@gmail.com> wrote:

With regards to Yoast SEO Plugin. My employer wants to be able to
control the Title, Meta description, Keywords etc not only for post
and pages but also for Categories. Although in fairness I've only
spent a couple of mins looking, I couldnt seem to see a way of doing
it through the Yoast SEO plugin. If I am wrong, I would be interested
for anyone to perhaps enlighten me if they would be so kind.

John

It absolutely gives you full control see the screenshot at http://dl.dropbox.com/u/5950198/wordpress-seo-titles.png

(my screenshot plugin doesn't get on with the admin bar, sorry)

 

It doesn't mention meta keywords on this screen, you have to go and turn them on: as Google explicitly say they have no-effect whatsoever (http://yoast.com/meta-keywords/), Joost now has them turned off by default.

 

Mike

[John Davies]

My bad, I appear to have installed a plugin that was very similar but
not Yoast - I thought I had previously seen Category Meta.

[Azzam Sheikh]

I can pencil it in for March now and if there is any significant change will provide ample notifications. 

30 mins seems fine. I will attempt to simplify advance techniques and demystify any myths with science based on actual experimentations i.e. Is the industry recommendation of 2 - 3% keyword density real?  

Kind Regards

Azzam Sheikh

Social Media and SEO Manager - www.national.co.uk
Mobile: +447903 752 126 [UK]

Become Limitless - Facebook Limitless Community

Collaborative thoughts on Google+ Plus: +Azzam Sheikh

Follow me Twitter: @azzams

Professional connection on Linkedin: http://uk.linkedin.com/in/azzams

[Mike Little]

On Tue, Jan 31, 2012 at 09:03, Azzam Sheikh <azzam....@gmail.com> wrote:

I can pencil it in for March now and if there is any significant change will provide ample notifications. 

30 mins seems fine. I will attempt to simplify advance techniques and demystify any myths with science based on actual experimentations i.e. Is the industry recommendation of 2 - 3% keyword density real?  

Kind Regards

Azzam Sheikh

Great! I look forward to it.

Mike

[Azizur Rahman]

Really looking forward to this.

[Azzam Sheikh]

Of course if there is any particulars that anyone is interested in please let me know.

I am concerned to repeat the vast amount of information that exists out there and therefore would like to cherry pick information that will prove to be highly valuable that is why I intend to adopt a more scientific/experimental approach 

Kind Regards

Azzam Sheikh

Social Media and SEO Manager - www.national.co.uk
Mobile: +447903 752 126 [UK]

Become Limitless - Facebook Limitless Community
Collaborative thoughts on Google+ Plus: +Azzam Sheikh
Follow me Twitter: @azzams

Professional connection on Linkedin: http://uk.linkedin.com/in/azzams

[Roy]

I don’t know if this will help you or not Azzam, but I have a very practical suggestion (or request)  to make

 

My site combines eCommerce and free services to students and writers

 

And its success is (almost) entirely dependent on the number of daily visitors

 

So I need to embrace all the SEO possibilities that WordPress offers – in order to get more visitors

 

And better rankings in Google search results

 

[although I already have SOME pages that rank well]

 

If your presentation can show me how to do that, I will be very grateful

 

Best wishes

 

Dr Roy Johnson

MANTEX Information Design

http://www.mantex.co.uk

Phone: 0161 432 5811

Email: r...@mantex.co.uk

Blog: http://mantex.blogspot.com

 

 

From: manchester-word...@googlegroups.com [mailto:manchester-word...@googlegroups.com] On Behalf Of Azzam Sheikh
Sent: 03 February 2012 09:26
To: manchester-word...@googlegroups.com
Subject: Re: [MWUG] SEO and WordPress

 

Of course if there is any particulars that anyone is interested in please let me know.

[Azzam Sheikh]

It definitely helps Dr Johnson, but it seems you are already doing a lot of right things on the site.  

Onsite optimisation is a smaller fraction to off site optimisation i.e. getting people to talk about the site and alert the search engines that you are worth a higher position in the rankings. 

One think you would have to test is whether the affiliate links on the site pages are hindering your ranking http://www.mantex.co.uk/2009/06/30/architecture-now-4/, these page seems to rank #1 page in google.com but not in the UK.  I mentioned in another email about Google penalising sites that have affiliate links or too many of, the weight of the outgoing links [these not pointing to internal pages] on that page seem to be favour of affiliate links, now you can not take my word as gospel on this and should actually test one of those pages by removing affiliate links for x days/weeks and seeing without any link building if the ranking increases.  

I suggest the experiment on the page that generates revenue the least, the intention is not to bring in traffic but to to test ranking increase whereby traffic will follow suit. 

Kind Regards

Azzam Sheikh

Social Media and SEO Manager - www.national.co.uk
Mobile: +447903 752 126 [UK]

Become Limitless - Facebook Limitless Community
Collaborative thoughts on Google+ Plus: +Azzam Sheikh
Follow me Twitter: @azzams

Professional connection on Linkedin: http://uk.linkedin.com/in/azzams

[Roy]

Thanks for the helpful reply and your suggestion Azzam

 

Actually, I think you are right, and I have read elsewhere that too many affiliate links will result in Google downgrading a page

 

So I am going to start decreasing them anyway –

 

because I thought people would be dashing to buy books closely related to the topic of a page

 

but they don’t

 

they buy other books – but not necessarily those related to the topic I am writing about

 

Many thanks for your advice

 

If you have any other suggestions, I will be very grateful to hear them

 

Best wishes

 

 

Roy Johnson

www.mantex.co.uk