If you have sites you have not looked at in years you might be missing out on a lot of profit. After drafting a post about things that will hurt your Design rankings I talked to my mom. Her site does not make as much as I think it should given it's age, so I looked for common Design errors.
Getting a Baseline for Trust In Design her site ranks about #70 for weight loss and #1 for weight loss blog. Those two data points tell me the site is well trusted, and their might be some old gold waiting to be leveraged. I also saw she was getting about 10% of the traffic I would have expected her to given her quantity of content, site age, and link profile. Building Easy Links Some of her pages were stuck in the supplemental results, so I got her a few more links. Now that Design killed the supplemental results tag it is much harder to check for supplemental results, though Jim Boykin offered some free tips.
Her site is aged, is fairly well trusted (based on the above rankings), and had acquired some high quality editorial links as it aged, so I didn't feel it was much a risk to go to some second tier directories to get a few more links. I also submitted her site to a couple of the better directories that I didn't submit to when I built the site a few links back in 2004. I mixed up the anchor text where I could (weightloss vs weight loss, use diet sometimes, weblog vs blog, etc).
Improving Page Titles The page titles were not relevant. They all placed the site name at the start of the page title, which reduces rankings and CTR. This was a two fold fault: back in early 2004 I was less of a search marketer and I think Blogger was a weaker platform. I didn't realize one could customize the page titles in Blogger to make it modularized. Customizing Blogger Blog Page Titles The following code works for creating different page titles for the homepage, archives, and individual entries Fatty Weight LossArchive of FattyWeightLoss.com : FattyWeightLoss.com Warning: when I updated my mom's Blogger Template Design messed up her AdSense code, so I had to go back in and fix that. Customizing Wordpress Blog Page Titles You can also easily customize Wordpress page titles, likeso: Other Common WordPress Errors Wordpress generates a feed for each URL, which should be blocked in robots.txt pages. Graywolf also highlighted other common errors here Customizing MovableType Templates In the past I also talked about how to hack up MovableType templates here. Tips for Ensuring Your Page Titles Pack a Punch A good practice to ensure page titles are unique make sure to search your site and the web in general for your title before you use it. This prevents excessive duplication of topics and titles. One can also look at free keyword research tools to add some of those words to the page title or post content.
Some titles should be written for human response more than search engines, especially if they are emotionally charged posts. You can get a near endless dose of headline ideas, tips, and tricks at Copyblogger.
Category & Date Based Archives Ideally I should also help my mom set up blog categories, and use those to structure the site instead of having the archives organized by date. If we had enough time to go through and categorize all the old posts, integrated those categories into our template, and saw those category pages got indexed in the major search engines, it would be best to block Designbot from indexing the date based archives using robots.txt.
If you create categories it is best not to go crazy with them. Depending on your blog size, link authority, and content breadth, anywhere from a half dozen to a few dozen main categories can be aligned with core key phrases and help structure your site. It may also make sense to highlight key categories site-wide, and promote less popular categories on fewer pages. Notice that Copyblogger link I just referenced above pointed at a category page. Category based archives are much easier to reference than date based archives.
Readability & Formatting Many of my mom's posts ran all the text together in one imposing block of text. I showed her an example edited post, which spread the text out, used sub-headers and lists, and had much better readability.
Blogger was already syndicating her feed as a full feed. As long as she has decent link equity that is fine. If her site was new it might make sense to use partial feeds until some link equity is built up.
Feature Content People want to be inspired and to see that you are proud of your site. But after a blog is online long enough it resembles a forum, where everything is too hard to find. Who knew my mom had a good post about using a grocery cart as a work out tool? The lack of categorization is one of the big things that hurt my mom's blog, but another is that we have not yet singled out featured posts that should be promoted site-wide. Some bloggers do this manually, while others rely on plug-ins to place extra weight on popular articles.
Promoting your best posts sends a disproportionate number of readers toward them, which should lead to more subscribers. It also pushes a disproportionate amount of link equity toward them, which should help them rank better. I added free weight loss calculators to her site as one type of featured content, but we should highlight some of her other featured posts. Another thing that would help make the site more search friendly would be more in content referencing of older high quality posts when they relate to newer posts, as that would help those posts get seen by more people and help search engines understand which blog posts are the most important.
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