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Thinking I was an “SEO hobbyist,” and certainly no guru, I downloaded the Bing SEO Toolkit recommended by DiTesco. Setup was pretty intuitive, and within minutes, it was chugging through my site, identifying all my SEO boo-boos. I wasn’t really expecting it to find as many as it found.
SEO Toolkit, first summary results for http://jahangiri.us/news
SEO really isn’t all that important, is it? Really? I felt overwhelmed by the sheer number of “violations” reported by the toolkit. I mused aloud that maybe I should just find all the offending posts and delete them. Then again, that would result in broken links for someone else. And I don’t want my content buried under mountains of splogs. I’m just competitive enough that I want to know how I can improve this, if not fix it. Maybe there’s something between 10,857 violations, and zero. So when DiTesco offered to take a look at my results and explain them to me, I gladly snatched the opportunity and sent him these two screenshots:
List of SEO violations for http://jahangiri.us/news
Full site analysis report from Bing toolkit
Even before looking at the results, though, he offered this advice:
Stay with your blogging and do not worry too much about it. One thing though, do not delete any post (at least yet) as they will be worse than broken links and cause a lot of 404s jumping all over the place. That is not only bad for SEO it is also grounds to get your whole domain banned.
After looking at the screen shots I sent him, DiTesco came back with the following advice:
You are right about one thing and that is the warning for the ALT attributes.
I’d said that was pure laziness on my part, but I did know it was important for accessibility and I figured it was something I’d need to fix. Maybe not in a day, but over time, it has to be done. It turns out that the routine that resizes images for display on the front page does add ALT tags to match the post title; however, it seems to be throwing the “excessive query string parameters” into the results. I decide it’s something I can live with.
First, we tackled the easy stuff: broken links. Now, these weren’t broken internal links, but dead links over which I have no control. If you are running WordPress, you’re in luck: the Broken Link Checker plug in makes fixing these errors easy. You can format them with strikethrough automatically, or you can edit, delink, or delete them, all from one convenient page under Tools.
DiTesco wrote:
You need to see why you have 273 items without a title. I am not sure what it is, but my guess is that they are links that have anchor text and no title tags. If this is the case, ignore it also. Again it will not hurt you, but it won’t help you either for SEO purposes. If you can fix it, I suggest you do.
It turns out that all of these have /trackback/ after them, so I’m going to assume they neither help nor hurt. My posts all have a title and most have a hand-crafted excerpt for the description. Throw
Next, we tried to figure out the “unnecessary redirects” listed.
Unnecessary redirects often are caused because of RSS feeds redirection, so no major problem there. The 6 unexpected errors can be looked at and you can see what they are, but at first glance, they do not appear to be a major concern.
A few days later, David Doolin offered to take a look at my SEO challenges and give me a consultation. I’d actually won a free consultation from him months ago, but asked if I could collect on it at a future date, when I could figure out what I needed most. Good timing, Dr. WordPress!
David immediately homed in on the missing <H1> problem. It only took a few minutes of brainstorming to figure out that this was actually a feature of the Arthemia theme I’m using. For some reason, it uses <H2> where it ought to use <H1>. It’s a fairly simple fix involving editing each of the theme templates (“Be sure everything’s backed up!” Dave said, several times, but I’ve got a copy of the theme on my hard drive and I love flying without a net, so I just went in and raised every <Hx> and </Hx> by one. <H2> became <H1>, <H3> became <H2>, etc. Then I went into stylesheet.css and changed the H1 font to Times New Roman and got rid of the funky letter spacing. I tweaked all the header font sizes a bit, while I was in there. I made them slightly smaller. Suddenly, everything that needed an <H1> had an <H1>. Or not.
The SEO toolkit was still throwing errors on that, but the number of errors had been roughly halved by this simple fix. When I delved into this further, I found that everything still showing a missing <H1> has ‘/trackback/’ at the end of the URL. I can only assume this is somewhat akin to the “excessive redirects” coming from the RSS feeds, and put it into the “stop worrying about it” pile.
Dave agrees, though, that the image tag issues are worth worrying about. Maybe not so important that I need to lose sleep over them and fix them overnight, but certainly worth developing some organized plan of attack to deal with them over time – and, as I said, to “go forth and sin no more” as I write new posts that include images.
Gravatar images don’t seem to have alt tags, either, but if you locate the get_avatar function in the comments.php template, you can add the parameter $alt. I’m not sure how much it helps to have an empty alt tag, but I tried. It seems there are many errors caused by themes and plug-ins, and I’ll fix them as I figure them out, but some may not be fixable.
Dave recommended a step-wise process for “fixing” currently displayed images, using the internal WordPress Media library to maintain image metadata. He’s promised to share that process in a near future blog post.
If I could figure out where my “media library” is, and how to make it point to where my images are actually stored, I’d consider that. But I use Windows Live Writer to author most of my posts, and I have it configured to load all images to my FTP server. I sure as heck have no interest in reinserting all the images on 200+ posts. For right now, I’m going to concentrate on ensuring that the main images used in my most recent and popular posts have meaningful alt attributes.
There are other violations that merit the same approach, and I am making a checklist in Excel, to keep track of what’s fixed and what’s not. For example, I get a little wordy on post titles. I have 300 titles that are too long. Wait a second…
300 titles that are too long? I only have 280 posts! So, digging deeper, I see why – well, sort of:
Finding long title error from Bing SEO Toolkit
It’s like the ‘/trackback/’ thing. For most pages with wordy titles, there’s a corresponding ‘/comment-page-/’ and ‘/comment-page-1/’. I would assume that fixing it on the main post page would fix it for all – but then again, what about “What a Bunch of Twits” up there? The only place it’s too long appears to be on the ‘/comment-page-/’, so for now it’s getting filed under “don’t worry your pretty little head about it.” Because, as I’ve said so many times – there’s a part of me that just doesn’t care. Where SEO conflicts with who I am and the way I naturally write, SEO is going to have to take a back seat. In fact, it can go ride on the back porch of the caboose.
My daughter’s boyfriend makes fun of me. “Who uses semicolons in text messages?” I warned my daughter that she’s perilously close to becoming her mother; one of her friends called her the other day, worried that she’d been mugged and had her phone stolen, just because she was tired and wrote “u r” instead of “you are.” Makes a mother proud. I’m not about to start hacking away at my post titles, but I’m willing to consider that I could tighten up a few of them. SEO analysis as part of an editor’s toolkit? Makes sense. I did say that Twitter was good for forcing users to compose a complete thought in 140 characters.
You can see from the first image in this post that my “violation count” has steadily improved since the first time I ran it, twelve days ago. That little blip where it looks like I’ve dramatically cut it to under 3000 occurred when I noindexed my tags. That caused other problems, though – like broken links. So I set everything back to the way it was and slowly started chiseling away at what I could understand and fix, however slowly. I have about cut the violations in half, even as I have increased the number of posts and links the SEO Toolkit has to check. Not bad, for two weeks’ worth of work, and I now have a much better understanding of what is and isn’t “important” in terms of SEO. I’m certainly no guru, yet, but thanks to my friends DiTesco and Dave Doolin, I’m steadily improving!
Holly Jahangiri is a professional writer with over twenty years’ experience in technical writing, freelancing, fiction, poetry, and editing. Holly blogs at It’s All a Matter of Perspective: Mine (http://jahangiri.us/news)
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{ 21 comments }
Dave, thanks for inviting me to share my bumbling (but increasingly effective) efforts to masquerade as someone who has a clue when it comes to SEO! Most of all, thank you for all the help that made it possible!
Holly Jahangiri´s last blog ..Wordy Wednesday
Whew! This totally blew me. Sounds all Greek to me at first, Holly. But I could understand a little bit after reading your article. For now, I don’t have the patience though of doing all that tweaking.
When I will have my own self-hosted site and domain, then I’ll be using all your pointers.
Does this SEO tool work on blogger templates too? Just wondering because I use blogger.
Thanks for sharing.
Jena Isle´s last blog ..The Kreativ Blogger Award from Holly
That’s a good question, Jena, but I don’t see why it wouldn’t work – well, hmm. It should work… maybe I’ll give it a try and report back!
It is a bit daunting. At some point, you probably do have to say “Okay, enough, but I’ve learned something and will try to do a better job in the future.” I think that’s true for most large corporate web sites, too, though, so I really wouldn’t worry about anything but the glaring issues.
Not adding alt tags to images is probably one of the worst things, because – never mind SEO here for a minute – alt tags make images somewhat accessible to the blind, and more inclusive of all your readers, if you describe the image well using the alt tag. So be sure to use descriptive text: what would a sighted reader see here? It’s just the right thing to do, you know?
Holly Jahangiri´s last blog ..Wordy Wednesday
I think I will have to slowly learn how to use and interpret these codes. I am usually very careful when copy pasting them as I might inadvertently delete an item or two…lol… It’s like I’m holding something fragile it might break if I make a wrong move.
I’ll try now to be conscious of using alt tags in my images. I wish you could create a video instead for a dumbo like me- “SEO for Dummies” , would be a hit video.
Jena Isle´s last blog ..The Kreativ Blogger Award from Holly
Great idea, Jen! BTW, it’s still processing…
Holly Jahangiri´s last blog ..Wordy Wednesday
Thanks, Holly. I’m serious about the video.
Jena Isle´s last blog ..The Kreativ Blogger Award from Holly
What’s so irritating about blogging is that it doesn’t matter a bit if you’ve logged 20 years worth of experience in writing. You also have to pay attention to such codes. I wish that in my lifetime I’d be able to witness the search engines being so smart to know good writing when it sees one.
That’s funny. You’re using semicolon in text messages? LOL! Well, in my first year of using sms I refused to mangle words. I’d spell them out come what may. And now here I am a full pledged ax murderer of the English language in sms. Ahehehe.
jan geronimo´s last blog ..Surefire – But Often Ignored – Trick to Superb Writing
Jan, there are hundreds – thousands – of excellent writers who probably still get a blank look if you say “Internet.” So it has nothing to do with the writing, and everything to do with promotion, publicity, marketing, and sales. It’s helping readers connect with writers. They can’t read your work if they can’t FIND your work. Search engines can’t really figure out what’s “good” beyond recognizing some basic syntactical rules. “Good” and “bad” and “mediocre” are subjective values based on human experience and personal tastes.
Holly Jahangiri´s last blog ..Wordy Wednesday
You got me running to my admin page and I immediately looked at my broken link plug-in. Trying to fix them now. I just hope that I get them to work properly this time. he he he
I knew I had to learn those codes some day. There may be time for me to do that – soon.
@Jan I used to abbreviate text before, notice that I don’t anymore. he he he. Don’t want to lose my spelling capabiliyt. LOL
Z
@Doc Z: Come to think of it, you just did. LOL!
@Holly: Well said. There’s no getting around it huh? Okay, it’s good though we have Ditesco and Dr. WordPress [hopefully] with us. And Bing SEO tool kit – I’ve a feeling I’d trash your total of violations. But maybe not – you have 300 posts!
Anyway, doesn’t Google have an SEO tool kit of its own?
jan geronimo´s last blog ..Surefire – But Often Ignored – Trick to Superb Writing
Jan,
I knew you’d catch that. he he he.
Holly,
I have just finished unlinking the broken links in my site. Uhm… was that the right thing to do? Yikes! Too late if it’s not. Waaaaaaaaa….
Z
Zorlone´s last blog ..A Mother’s Magic
Wow!
I just learned something really interesting about WordPress, and probably why all the “pro-bloggers” post guest authors under their own WordPress user names.
This article is getting some pretty good traction in stats… but I didn’t notice *any* of these comments… which I presume are being sent Holly’s way. Then I looked at the number of comments listed in the byline, had to check it out.
Very cool.
Dr Wordpress!´s last blog ..How Yoga Improves Productivity While Using Computers
@Jena – Video. Noted.
Yes on both:
1. You do need to move to a self-hosted at some point.
2. A large chunk of what makes for good SEO is independent of WordPress.
Dr Wordpress!´s last blog ..How Yoga Improves Productivity While Using Computers
@Jan –
SEO “optimization” decreases in importance over time. Good content floats to the top over time.
Quite a bit of the current froth in SEO is about getting content to the top of the SERPs as fast as possible, regardless of content.
That being said, given everything else is equal, properly structured text will be found and indexed more efficiently by all search engines. It’s no more difficult than learning to write for any other audience. The rules are fairly well understood, and easy to follow.
Dr Wordpress!´s last blog ..How Yoga Improves Productivity While Using Computers
But, but, but…Dave! “Rules” take all the FUN out of it.
Holly Jahangiri´s last blog ..Wordy Wednesday
How did I miss this excellent post, I don’t know, but my sincerest apologize for arriving here so late. Anyway and as they say, better late than never, right.
Holly, thanks for the link love and for introducing me to Dr. Wordpress here, or should I call him Dave:) I have “flagged” him now as one of my “must read” blogs and I have this slight feeling that I will like it a lot.
I’m not sure if the processing of Jena’s blog is still on going, but the answer to her question about the SEO Toolkit working on blogger is yes. Actually, it does not have anything to do with the platform you are using. It will work on any URL.
DiTesco´s last blog ..DiTesco’s Weekly Echo #3
DiTesco! I thought you’d have picked up the pingback and been here in a jiffy!
Wondered when you’d get here – but yes, better late than never.
The processing finished and I sent Jena the summary screenshot. I think her initial reaction was on a par with mine.
Holly Jahangiri´s last blog ..11 Ways to Get 6 Billion – Well, OK, More Twitter Followers Than You Have Now
This SEO Toolkit is then worth a look. It sounds pretty useful, it might be the hook–that brings all the surfers to feast on each post. The thing that all writers would ask for the most.
Luke´s last blog ..Spyware Removal
Hmm… Did not know that Microsoft has this tool. I am using Google Webmaster Tools for the moment.
Jayce´s last blog ..How to hack Facebook account profile
Honestly the most important thing you can do and I would expect this to be the first recommendation from any SEO expert is to optimize the amount of URLs to be crawled, and for wordpress based sites it means always having a robots.txt excluding wp-content and wp-includes, so make sure to drop a robots.txt at the root of your site: /robots.txt with the content at the bottom of this, it will reduce a large # of violations:
User-Agent: *
Disallow: /news/wp-content/
Disallow: /news/wp-includes/
Disallow: trackback
Disallow: /*favicon.ico
Allow: /
Carlos, I just caught this coming through my comment admin while deleting some spam from elsewhere. Hasn’t shown up in email yet. I’ll reply via email as well.
In any case, this would make an excellent starter for a guest article!
Dave Doolin´s last blog ..How To Unlaunch Your Ebook
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