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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)