WordPress is one of the most powerful blogging platforms in the world, and of course WP is also the most commonly used open source blogging tool in the world. Considering this it will be no surprise that I know many people who use the system (I help bug fix and build templates for some of them), and also it is no surprise that I get bombarded with questions about the system. The most common of which is, What plugins can I use to help SEO on my wordpress blog?
Well, given there are a huge number of so called SEO plugins for wordpress this isn’t the easiest question to answer. Having played around with wordpress for several years now and become something of a WP geek I have of course played with many SEO plugins. However, As the title of this post suggests I do have a number of favourite plugins to use, and they are listed below
All In One SEO
This plugin is by far and away my favourite, not only is it simple to use and install but it is also customisable in the key areas that matters. Along with several other plugins by the great Micheal Torbert All in One is an utterly superb tool that I advise all wordpress users to implement. – Get the Plugin
Google XML Sitemap Generator
This plugin creates (and updates) a Google XML sitemap, pings various services (including Bing, Ask & Yahoo), allowing for your blog/website to be better indexed by search engines. This tool is created by another great wordpress plugin developer Arne Brachold. – Get the Plugin.
Similar Posts
This plugin compares your posts, and creates a list of what it considers to be the most related or relevant similar posts – this can then be outputted with your posts and in your feed. This is a valuable internal linking mechanism, developed by Mr Rob Marsh. – Get the Plugin
WordTwit
This plugin generates a tweet output direct from wordpress, and also includes bit.ly and Google (analytics) Urchin integration. This is a light weight tool and works amazingly well – so much better than many of the bulkier plugins I’ve seen and played with. WordTwit was developed by BraveNewCode. – Get the Plugin
Well earlier this week (13th July 2010) ComScore released it’s June 2010 search engine statistics. ComScore release these figures once a month, they use an ever changing formula to create more and more accurate results. The statistics are in essence related to the number of searches conducted by each search engine. So what did the results say?
Well as expected, Google top the chart – with 62.6% of the current market share, a loss of 1.1% from May 2010. Google was then followed by Yahoo! (18.9% up 0.6% from May). In third place was Bing (formerly MSN) with a growth of 0.6% taking Bing to an ever growing market share of 12.7%. In fourth remains ASK search network, at 3.6% and with no change from the previous month. Finally, in fifth is AOL who suffered a loss of 0.1% taking them to just 2.2% of the search market.
So what does this all mean?
Well clearly it means that the search market is changing, no longer is MSN (now bing) the stick in the mud that wouldn’t change. But the important thing of note here is that Bing continues to grow, and with Bing taking over the search functionality of Yahoo! later this year, Bing (using todays figures) would have a market share of 31.6% – a truly staggering thought and something that I believe means now is the time to take note of Bing (and not to wait several months) for SEO’s. So with this in mind, it is now time to Love the Bing.
But it isn’t just SEO’s that need to take note it is other search engines, and this is something Google are already doing (almost in fear it feels). With lasts months role out of background images, Google made a move to be “more like” Bing – but after much uproar in the first few seconds of being live, Google decided unlike Bing having a default image wasn’t a good idea and it is now optional.
The one thing the results do not show is that the world is showing an exponential growth of mobile search. With the advent and influence of the iPhone, Blackberry and Android’s of the world this isn’t going to slow down any time soon and is a huge target market. However, without specific results we can only presume that search is in the same proportions – though I know at least in the UK blackberry (and anyone on the Three mobile network) searches are defaulted to Yahoo!, android in 90% of cases I believe are pointed at Google (the creators) … as for apple I also see these guys using Google … So sorry bing but you need to get up and make some deals – message here is if your mobile focused target Google mobile and Yahoo mobile.
Now before we begin, you must read the warnings below.
This page is NOT advice.
These tactics are NOT legitimate, you will be banned if caught using them.
Do NOT use these tactics or let your SEO use them on your site.
Black Hat SEO refers to the tactics used by some nasty SEO companies in order to “trick” search engines into ranking part of or a whole site illegitimately. There are many black hat SEO techniques, now I will only be mentioning the major few below – but there are many many others, so if your not sure ask me (@andykinsey on twitter). One little thing of note, sometimes these tactics will see you rise in the rankings for a matter of minutes, hours or days, but if you get caught you will be penalised or banned (your other sites may also suffer the same fate due to their relation).
My reasoning for this post is not to enable you to “trick” the search engines, it is simply to warn you of these tactics and to tell you that if any SEO ever recommends these actions (or maybe claims a “special relationship” with a search engine) … tell them to “go away” otherwise you may pay a very high price.
Note: Many of the tactics below have been simplified by many SEO/webmasters for implementation, many have also been made more complex to avoid easy capture of the tactics by search engines – I’ve decided to explain the principles and not how to implement them.
Black Hat SEO is No GO!
Keyword Stuffing
This I would say is the most commonly found form of spamming search engines. Generally you will find 3 forms of this: hundreds of meta keywords, highly stuffed content (keyword density 50%+) & footer spam (hundreds of keywords and links in footer). As you can tell Keyword Stuffing is essentially the use of a large number of keywords in any given area, primarily in the hope search engines will believe this is relevant content. However, I can tell you most search engines (especially the big ones) use 2 forms of checking for real content 1) human content reviewers 2) algorithms to check for similar words and anything that maybe considered “odd” language – generally point 2 will flag a link to a reviewer (1). Of course, Keyword Stuffing also goes hand in hand with “hidden text”.
Hidden Text
Hidden Text refers primarily to the hiding of text by changing it’s colour to match the background, however this is not the only way to achieve the effect of text not being visible (for instance hiding the text millions of pixels off a page or hiding text with CSS display notes). Most webmasters and SEO’s will know that if you hide something with the tactics above are easily detectable by search engines, this is good, what isn’t so good is that they still think some tricks around hiding text with images won’t be caught. It will it is blatant spam! and the search engines will catch you. Also if you are in a highly competitive industry and your site is under any real scrutiny you will find you will be reported for both hiding text and stuffing your keywords by competitors (usually within days).
Cloaking Content
In essence cloaking refers to the dark art of showing one piece of content to the user, and another piece of content to search engines. Generally this tends not to be whole pages as this is extremely easy to detect but rather in general the replacement of elements such as adverts or images on any given page, so where a user see’s an advert Google may see extra textual content. There are of course many many other methods of cloaking but this is the most common form.
Doorway Pages
Doorway pages are simple pages added to a website to target a specific keyword or keyphrase, generally they offer little or zero value to the user – they are simply a link-through page. As said above they target a specific phrase or term which is targeted in the hope that users will land on the pages from search engines, they will then proceed to the homepage or some content which may or may not be relevant to the user (indeed this is how a lot of malware gets onto peoples computers). This can be a very dangerous practice. Not only are many of the methods of injecting doorway pages banned by the search engines but a quick report to the search engine of this practice and your website will simply disappear along with all the legitimate ranks you have attained with your genuine content pages.
Redirection from a Doorway
Now generally redirection in itself can be dangerous for SEO, do it incorrectly and you cannot only appear spammy to search engines but you can also see any valid rankings you’ve gained lost through lack of using the right type of redirection. However, this is not the redirection I wish to talk about, no this is the redirection of users from doorways pages to various bits of content (usually you may find this is random, but not always). In essence you are again cloaking, allowing search engines to see your keyword rich doorway page but redirecting users to some content. For as many ways of finding redirections search engines you will find even more ways are being invented to avoid this detection – it’s like a dog chasing it’s tail.
Conclusion
So with these 5 major black hat techniques highlighted, I hope that you will steer clear of them and those who offer such techniques. Do you know any more common-place or not so common black-hat techniques you would like to share? leave a comment below or tweet me (@andykinsey)
Our hosting partners UKHOST4U have today announced a huge summer sale.
UKHost4u.com is offering a 25% discount on all web hosting products including Shared Hosting, VPS Server and Dedicated Servers. You can also use the 25% additional discount to the already discounted products including products with Free Domain names or 3 Years for the Price of 2.
Paul Hughes Managing Director – “With this new 25% discount code you can now have a Budget Hosting account with a domain for as little as £14.99 per year!”
To take advantage of this offer simply enter the code ‘SUM25‘ at checkout.
Now there are so so many resources out there, but I want to share my top 5 online resources for web designers, developers and website owners.
Articles & Blog Resources
1 – Smashing Magazine
These guys are simply superb, renowned for the “top ten” lists they role out on a regular basis and of course the experts whom right for the blog, Smashing Mag is always worth a read. Add to this recently they added the Smashing Network of blogs, so now it’s not just Smashing Mag updates you get but also those from other related blogs in the network (only the best blogs). – @smashingmag
2 – Boagworld
Although based around a world famous podcast, the Boagworld website also offers some amazing articles from designers, developer and marketers (including myself) – On top of that you get to see paul boag (the father of web design) rant a little about what is often a nothing subject, but it brings a new non-techie angle which is good. Also the site offers a fairly active forum where all sorts of discussion go on from design discussion to how something works in php. Boagworld is for website owners & recently Paul released “the website owners manual” – a superb reference guide if you have anything to do with a website. – @boagworld
3 – Think Vitamin
From the guys and gals at Carsonified, Think Vitamin is a superb resource for all kinds of things. With topics including business, marketing, design, development, mobile and web apps there is something for everyone here. Also with Think Vitamin radio you can consume materials on the go. The guys at Carsonified also arrange a number of great conferences each year including various future of events. – @carsonified
4 – 37signals
This is a resource I’ve only just began reading on a regular basis, but it’s well worth spending a few minutes taking a look here each week to see if there is anything of relevance to you. 37signals are all about productivity and making things work properly, they are the makers of the now infamous BaseCamp software and amazing web designers working with clients like threadless. – @37signals
5 – A List Apart
This is primarily a designer and developer blog, it isn’t in any way formed for a website owner (it’s far too techie). However, if you are a website designer or developer I seriously advise you subscribe to the RSS and twitter feed, some big names post here and it’s superb. – @alistapart
Top Web Related Tweeters
Here are all the webby type people i suggest you follow if you have anything to do with the internet. Not all will be relevant to everyone but they all have something great to offer!
This list has been formed and outed for you, because I was asked by a fellow designer for my list (and here it is), but now I want to go a step further and want your ideas! so tweet me @andykinsey the resource you favour using, from blogs to css galleries to books, let me know. – Or leave a comment.
WordPress is one of the most powerful blogging platforms in the world, and of course WP is also the most commonly used open source blogging tool in the world. Considering this it will be no surprise that I know many people who use the system (I help bug fix and build templates for some of them), and also it is no surprise that I get bombarded with questions about the system. The most common of which is, What plugins can I use to help SEO on my wordpress blog?
Well, given there are a huge number of so called SEO plugins for wordpress this isn’t the easiest question to answer. Having played around with wordpress for several years now and become something of a WP geek I have of course played with many SEO plugins. However, As the title of this post suggests I do have a number of favourite plugins to use, and they are listed below
All In One SEO
This plugin is by far and away my favourite, not only is it simple to use and install but it is also customisable in the key areas that matters. Along with several other plugins by the great Micheal Torbert All in One is an utterly superb tool that I advise all wordpress users to implement. – Get the Plugin
Google XML Sitemap Generator
This plugin creates (and updates) a Google XML sitemap, pings various services (including Bing, Ask & Yahoo), allowing for your blog/website to be better indexed by search engines. This tool is created by another great wordpress plugin developer Arne Brachold. – Get the Plugin.
Similar Posts
This plugin compares your posts, and creates a list of what it considers to be the most related or relevant similar posts – this can then be outputted with your posts and in your feed. This is a valuable internal linking mechanism, developed by Mr Rob Marsh. – Get the Plugin
WordTwit
This plugin generates a tweet output direct from wordpress, and also includes bit.ly and Google (analytics) Urchin integration. This is a light weight tool and works amazingly well – so much better than many of the bulkier plugins I’ve seen and played with. WordTwit was developed by BraveNewCode. – Get the Plugin
Well earlier this week (13th July 2010) ComScore released it’s June 2010 search engine statistics. ComScore release these figures once a month, they use an ever changing formula to create more and more accurate results. The statistics are in essence related to the number of searches conducted by each search engine. So what did the results say?
Well as expected, Google top the chart – with 62.6% of the current market share, a loss of 1.1% from May 2010. Google was then followed by Yahoo! (18.9% up 0.6% from May). In third place was Bing (formerly MSN) with a growth of 0.6% taking Bing to an ever growing market share of 12.7%. In fourth remains ASK search network, at 3.6% and with no change from the previous month. Finally, in fifth is AOL who suffered a loss of 0.1% taking them to just 2.2% of the search market.
So what does this all mean?
Well clearly it means that the search market is changing, no longer is MSN (now bing) the stick in the mud that wouldn’t change. But the important thing of note here is that Bing continues to grow, and with Bing taking over the search functionality of Yahoo! later this year, Bing (using todays figures) would have a market share of 31.6% – a truly staggering thought and something that I believe means now is the time to take note of Bing (and not to wait several months) for SEO’s. So with this in mind, it is now time to Love the Bing.
But it isn’t just SEO’s that need to take note it is other search engines, and this is something Google are already doing (almost in fear it feels). With lasts months role out of background images, Google made a move to be “more like” Bing – but after much uproar in the first few seconds of being live, Google decided unlike Bing having a default image wasn’t a good idea and it is now optional.
The one thing the results do not show is that the world is showing an exponential growth of mobile search. With the advent and influence of the iPhone, Blackberry and Android’s of the world this isn’t going to slow down any time soon and is a huge target market. However, without specific results we can only presume that search is in the same proportions – though I know at least in the UK blackberry (and anyone on the Three mobile network) searches are defaulted to Yahoo!, android in 90% of cases I believe are pointed at Google (the creators) … as for apple I also see these guys using Google … So sorry bing but you need to get up and make some deals – message here is if your mobile focused target Google mobile and Yahoo mobile.
Now before we begin, you must read the warnings below.
This page is NOT advice.
These tactics are NOT legitimate, you will be banned if caught using them.
Do NOT use these tactics or let your SEO use them on your site.
Black Hat SEO refers to the tactics used by some nasty SEO companies in order to “trick” search engines into ranking part of or a whole site illegitimately. There are many black hat SEO techniques, now I will only be mentioning the major few below – but there are many many others, so if your not sure ask me (@andykinsey on twitter). One little thing of note, sometimes these tactics will see you rise in the rankings for a matter of minutes, hours or days, but if you get caught you will be penalised or banned (your other sites may also suffer the same fate due to their relation).
My reasoning for this post is not to enable you to “trick” the search engines, it is simply to warn you of these tactics and to tell you that if any SEO ever recommends these actions (or maybe claims a “special relationship” with a search engine) … tell them to “go away” otherwise you may pay a very high price.
Note: Many of the tactics below have been simplified by many SEO/webmasters for implementation, many have also been made more complex to avoid easy capture of the tactics by search engines – I’ve decided to explain the principles and not how to implement them.
Black Hat SEO is No GO!
Keyword Stuffing
This I would say is the most commonly found form of spamming search engines. Generally you will find 3 forms of this: hundreds of meta keywords, highly stuffed content (keyword density 50%+) & footer spam (hundreds of keywords and links in footer). As you can tell Keyword Stuffing is essentially the use of a large number of keywords in any given area, primarily in the hope search engines will believe this is relevant content. However, I can tell you most search engines (especially the big ones) use 2 forms of checking for real content 1) human content reviewers 2) algorithms to check for similar words and anything that maybe considered “odd” language – generally point 2 will flag a link to a reviewer (1). Of course, Keyword Stuffing also goes hand in hand with “hidden text”.
Hidden Text
Hidden Text refers primarily to the hiding of text by changing it’s colour to match the background, however this is not the only way to achieve the effect of text not being visible (for instance hiding the text millions of pixels off a page or hiding text with CSS display notes). Most webmasters and SEO’s will know that if you hide something with the tactics above are easily detectable by search engines, this is good, what isn’t so good is that they still think some tricks around hiding text with images won’t be caught. It will it is blatant spam! and the search engines will catch you. Also if you are in a highly competitive industry and your site is under any real scrutiny you will find you will be reported for both hiding text and stuffing your keywords by competitors (usually within days).
Cloaking Content
In essence cloaking refers to the dark art of showing one piece of content to the user, and another piece of content to search engines. Generally this tends not to be whole pages as this is extremely easy to detect but rather in general the replacement of elements such as adverts or images on any given page, so where a user see’s an advert Google may see extra textual content. There are of course many many other methods of cloaking but this is the most common form.
Doorway Pages
Doorway pages are simple pages added to a website to target a specific keyword or keyphrase, generally they offer little or zero value to the user – they are simply a link-through page. As said above they target a specific phrase or term which is targeted in the hope that users will land on the pages from search engines, they will then proceed to the homepage or some content which may or may not be relevant to the user (indeed this is how a lot of malware gets onto peoples computers). This can be a very dangerous practice. Not only are many of the methods of injecting doorway pages banned by the search engines but a quick report to the search engine of this practice and your website will simply disappear along with all the legitimate ranks you have attained with your genuine content pages.
Redirection from a Doorway
Now generally redirection in itself can be dangerous for SEO, do it incorrectly and you cannot only appear spammy to search engines but you can also see any valid rankings you’ve gained lost through lack of using the right type of redirection. However, this is not the redirection I wish to talk about, no this is the redirection of users from doorways pages to various bits of content (usually you may find this is random, but not always). In essence you are again cloaking, allowing search engines to see your keyword rich doorway page but redirecting users to some content. For as many ways of finding redirections search engines you will find even more ways are being invented to avoid this detection – it’s like a dog chasing it’s tail.
Conclusion
So with these 5 major black hat techniques highlighted, I hope that you will steer clear of them and those who offer such techniques. Do you know any more common-place or not so common black-hat techniques you would like to share? leave a comment below or tweet me (@andykinsey)
Our hosting partners UKHOST4U have today announced a huge summer sale.
UKHost4u.com is offering a 25% discount on all web hosting products including Shared Hosting, VPS Server and Dedicated Servers. You can also use the 25% additional discount to the already discounted products including products with Free Domain names or 3 Years for the Price of 2.
Paul Hughes Managing Director – “With this new 25% discount code you can now have a Budget Hosting account with a domain for as little as £14.99 per year!”
To take advantage of this offer simply enter the code ‘SUM25‘ at checkout.
Now there are so so many resources out there, but I want to share my top 5 online resources for web designers, developers and website owners.
Articles & Blog Resources
1 – Smashing Magazine
These guys are simply superb, renowned for the “top ten” lists they role out on a regular basis and of course the experts whom right for the blog, Smashing Mag is always worth a read. Add to this recently they added the Smashing Network of blogs, so now it’s not just Smashing Mag updates you get but also those from other related blogs in the network (only the best blogs). – @smashingmag
2 – Boagworld
Although based around a world famous podcast, the Boagworld website also offers some amazing articles from designers, developer and marketers (including myself) – On top of that you get to see paul boag (the father of web design) rant a little about what is often a nothing subject, but it brings a new non-techie angle which is good. Also the site offers a fairly active forum where all sorts of discussion go on from design discussion to how something works in php. Boagworld is for website owners & recently Paul released “the website owners manual” – a superb reference guide if you have anything to do with a website. – @boagworld
3 – Think Vitamin
From the guys and gals at Carsonified, Think Vitamin is a superb resource for all kinds of things. With topics including business, marketing, design, development, mobile and web apps there is something for everyone here. Also with Think Vitamin radio you can consume materials on the go. The guys at Carsonified also arrange a number of great conferences each year including various future of events. – @carsonified
4 – 37signals
This is a resource I’ve only just began reading on a regular basis, but it’s well worth spending a few minutes taking a look here each week to see if there is anything of relevance to you. 37signals are all about productivity and making things work properly, they are the makers of the now infamous BaseCamp software and amazing web designers working with clients like threadless. – @37signals
5 – A List Apart
This is primarily a designer and developer blog, it isn’t in any way formed for a website owner (it’s far too techie). However, if you are a website designer or developer I seriously advise you subscribe to the RSS and twitter feed, some big names post here and it’s superb. – @alistapart
Top Web Related Tweeters
Here are all the webby type people i suggest you follow if you have anything to do with the internet. Not all will be relevant to everyone but they all have something great to offer!
This list has been formed and outed for you, because I was asked by a fellow designer for my list (and here it is), but now I want to go a step further and want your ideas! so tweet me @andykinsey the resource you favour using, from blogs to css galleries to books, let me know. – Or leave a comment.
Well as expected, Google top the chart – with 62.6% of the current market share, a loss of 1.1% from May 2010. Google was then followed by Yahoo! (18.9% up 0.6% from May). In third place was Bing (formerly MSN) with a growth of 0.6% taking Bing to an ever growing market share of 12.7%. In fourth remains ASK search network, at 3.6% and with no change from the previous month. Finally, in fifth is AOL who suffered a loss of 0.1% taking them to just 2.2% of the search market.
