Affordable blog Design fresh from Bristol, UK

Over at ZDNet, Larry Dignan has written a great post about how the media sector is addicted to custom building Content Management Systems where Wordpress is more than powerful enough.

Having built a massive amount of sites ranging from standard blogs, shops and even social networks on the Wordpress platform, it’s my starting point for all projects that need rapid development on a tight budget. The reason I find developing web applications on top of Wordpress so easy is because it already has tools such as user management and templating in place, all accessible through a well documented API.

That’s not to say that Wordpress is suitable for every project, the templating system can be quite restrictive when you’re building “non-editorial” websites and the dashboard can become somewhat wild for the end user.

In these situations, Code Igniter is my choice because, like Wordpress, the basics are taken care of meaning I can focus on the code that really matters to the project, saving the client time and money.

This is the second part of my series of articles examining how to practically and ethically improve the search engine rankings of your blog. In this installment, I’m going to look at how links of an external and internal nature can help your blog climb the dizzy heights of .

Everybody knows that back links to your sites, from other sites, are the major factor in determining a sites page rank. Google’s philosophy is that the more links you have coming from other sites the more reliable yours is. The problems with this method are innumerable, but the one that applies most in our case is the question of how new sites accumulate back links and make the most of them.

There are so many ways to establish link backs that I could write for months on the topic, but there are certain methods which really stand out in the context of blogging, the foremost being Social Bookmarking. Sites like Digg, Del.icio.us and StumbleUpon have long been the staple of traffic for a mass of techy blogs, but recently they’ve been diversifying their models to include topics which suit a much broader audience.

Submitting new posts to these sort of sites should be the first thing you do once hitting publish. They provide you with ample room to include a keyword rich title and description which Googlebot can harvest and dine out on and also provide a healthy traffic boost themselves. The key thing about this method is that it pivots on the strength of the community, if you submit an article to Digg and it makes it onto the front page, it’s much more likely to be indexed and assigned a higher Pagerank than if it lingers in the ass of nowhere without getting noticed, so make sure you’re promoting your best content to ensure it’s liked. It’s also worth pointing out that a lot of social bookmarking sites don’t appreciate you submitting your own content, so try to get your friends, or better still readers, to do it for you

Another method often used that hangs on the idea of reaching communities is commenting on blogs. This has been a favourite method for ages, blog spam is rife these days, but guess what… It’s absolutely pointless and just plain annoying. The majority of blogs now use nofollow links, so while you may get a bit of traffic from people reading your comment, it will have no SEO benefit as Google has been instructed to ignore the link. I still recommend leaving genuine comments on blogs though as it’s a great way to establish a bridge between your blog and someone else’s, leveraging their blog to extend the audience of your own.

Something else I’d advise against is paying for text links. Google has recently by dropping their PageRank and have publicly announced a vendetta against PayPerPost. Rather than buying blog posts, why not send out press releases when you do something notable, you can load the press releases up with relevant keywords and back links, making it prime for Google to crawl through and index and get in front of the eyes of hundreds of journalists and bloggers looking for something to write about. Mashable has a fantastic round up of Press Release tools, free and paid, that allow you to distribute your own Press Releases to numerous online resources.

When you’re including links to your website, it’s good to include a description of the site, rather than the name, inside the link, for example: <a href="/">Affordable blog design</a> by the449. This helps Google establish what the website is about and can rank you higher for the terms your website is most commonly linked with.

When you’re writing blog posts, try and link to as many other blog posts as you can as you can establish trackbacks this way. While these are often nofollow links, just like comments, it gives you a chance to get your websites name out there and a few keywords indexed by Google. If you’re adding something notable to the conversation, you may also receive a link from the author of the post in later follow up posts. If you’re selling a service, the majority of your potential clients/customers are going to Google your name, so if the leading results are good reviews and intelligent comments it’s going to help them make that leap from potential lead to signed client.

If you don’t get a mention as the result of a trackback, sending a short email to the author to let him know what your doing may persuade him to link you up, likewise emailing blogs in your niche may get you a few linkbacks and at the very least help you establish a few useful connections.

Whenever possible, try to link to your own blog posts aswell. Googlebot uses links to discover content, so by linking to posts in your archive you’re helping Google find something it may have previously missed (especially if you have a fast paced blog). Linking around your website also helps Google level out the page rank of your internal pages, meaning you can get your individual articles better rankings and achieve much higher traffic from the long tail.

The bottom line is that you need to be proactive in obtaining back links and the ultimate way to ensure success is to network and make friends. As I’ve told numerous potential clients in the past, you’re likely not going to find yourself at the top of the Google in less than 6 months, unless you’re doing something highly unethical (in the eyes of Google) in which case you’ll probably be banned from Google within 6 months

This is the first in a series of posts I’m going to write about making your blog more search engine friendly. There are a lot of ways to boost traffic to your website, but the method with the most “longevity” is definitely Search Engine Optimisation. So without further a do, my first article in the series, how to use headings to get better search engine results.

Headings are XHTML tags (<h1>,<h2>,<h3>,<h4>,<h5> and <h6>) that are used, funnily enough, to define headings. Because headings usually contain a thorough and dense summary of a page, in very few words, Search Engines love them. So, they’re perfect for defining the terms you want , and other search engines, to index your site under.

The problem is, semantically headings are normally used to define “section titles” such as the name of your blog, “Latest News”, “Tags” and other generic terms. While this is semantically correct, it means that Google’s going to be indexing your site for generic terms that are non-specific to your site. People aren’t going to link to your site for the quality of it’s “Tag Cloud” are they? And how likely is someone to go searching for “Links”? So why waste a header on these generic terms?

The approach I’ve adopted is to place generic terms like these, which people aren’t likely to search for, in a standard <p> tag, using a class as a hook for styling. I do the same for the name of the blog, leaving me with a <h1> for the description of the blog and <h2>’s for the titles of articles (both bound to be keyword rich). I’m also left with <h3>’s to use wherever rich data is going to appear.

Heading tags below <h3> don’t hold much beef with Search Engines, but I recommend still using them to ensure your site remains as semantic as possible. There is hope that we can live in a world where both semantic and Search Engine Optimised markup can live hand in hand, but we’ll need the additional tags being released in HTML 5 for that.

David just put up a great post on Devlounge about making your themes client friendly. What this encompasses is making sure the theme can be moved around across domains, the title of the blog can be altered and basically avoiding hard coding details which the client may want to later change.

It’s also a great read if you’re producing themes for sale/free release as you need to be extra vigilant in catering for a mass of possible usage scenarios.

Making themes Portable/future-proof is a topic I’ve been promoting quite a bit lately. Our motto has always been to leave the client with total control, we don’t want to lock you into retainers and other such nasties so empowering you to make small changes like this yourself without a steep learning curve is what we’re all about.

David’s running a series of posts on this topic, today’s just focuses on Wordpresses header.php file. Looking forward to the rest.

Microformats have been around a while now, but they’ve recently started to become popular, with some big names adopting them. Essentially, a Microformat is a standard format for marking up data (the way it’s coded) so that information from one website to another can be interpreted by various pieces of software.

The benefits are huge, better screen reader support, future support for search engines and numerous other ways of re-purposing your content easily and effectively. This is why all 449’s now come with support for the hAtom and hCard format.

hAtom is a great way of marking up blog posts so that they can be extracted from the page via software like the , it’s kind of like having your RSS/Atom feed inside your webpage.

hCard on the other hand is a method of marking up contact details so that they can be easily downloaded from any webpage and imported into a vast array of address book software. There’s even websites out there that extract hCard’s from webpages and convert them to vCard’s for download.

The beauty of us offering support for these two Microformats is that you don’t need to worry about them. We build them directly into your Wordpress template so that they’re automatically generated whenever you create a post in Wordpress. We take care of the technical stuff, all you have to do is write great content