When you flip a website go for the quick wins first
Monday, December 14th, 2009 at 6:16 am
One of the dangers when flipping a website is the will to be too good. You purchase the site with a view of all the things you intend to do with it. You would gladly chain yourself to your computer, work like hell preparing everything all and then, when everything is ready, release your new beautiful baby to the world.
Well – that would be a mistake and here is why:
1. Time is money
With websites, just like with any other business, time is money. The longer you wait for the result, the more money you lose or at least – the less you earn. Either way, your investment is less profitable than it could be.
Really big changes will take time. They may not be ready for many months during which your new purchase will not be at it’s best potential. To get the best benefit in the shortest possible time, apply all the small changes you can and do it as soon as possible.
If you can enhance functionality, design or seo of the site just a little bit and thanks to that get just a little bit more traffic or revenue, your investment will pay back quicker and the additional traffic you’ll get will create a better base for growth when the really big changes are ready.
2. Many small changes are better than one big change
Design changes of almost all big websites show that people are not really into revamps (Facebook is a good example).
Imagine if I came in and completely changed all of the Blogsolid beautiful design – how would you feel? You’d probably feel that the new guy does not really know what he’s doing and has no appreciation for the fantastic looks of the blog. Hey – you might even unsubscribe not to watch further devastation.
The way to go around this problem is to do many small changes. These will go more or less unnoticed, but in the end can add up to a big change you want.
(Disclaimer: Blogsolid design will also have to change a little to enhance it’s SEO friendliness and allow for additional functionality, like an email subscription, but I will not do anything drastic. )
My quick changes to Blogsolid
Now let me show you what changes I already made.
Easy SEO optimisation changes
In the starting post I wrote that Blogsolid has fantastic external seo (lots of links from good websites), but has ‘opportunities’ when it comes to internal on-site seo. Some of these can be introduced with just a few clicks and these I introduced almost on day one.
Before I begin though, I would like to show you how I think a website should be optimised from the SEO perspective. You can skip this part if you’re a SEO expert.
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The super quick seo guide
To rank high in google a blogger has to:
- Provide content to which people will link (Blogsolid is already successful here)
- Help google understand what each webpage on the website is about so that google displays it in search results when someone looks for it – here we might just pull a few tricks out of the hat.
The easiest way to tell google what the site is about is to structure each to deliver a consistent message. Starting from the meta tags, through the headers dow to the paragraph the page should have a clear message saying what it is exactly about.
Say you have a website about oranges “tasty-oranges.com” and on that website you have a page about green oranges. This page should look like this:
META TAGS
<title>Green oranges – tasty –oranges website</title>
<description>Green oranges – learn about the tasty green oranges. How to peel green oranges (and some more stuff which corresponds to what is in the actual content</description>
CONTENT
<h1>Green oranges</h1>
This site is about green oranges which are tasty and all…
<h2>How to peel green orangesh2>
Peeling green oranges is easy there are 3 techniques:
<h3>Peeling oranges technique 1</h3>
….
….
<h2>Next thing about green oranges</h2>
Here goes the next thing about green oranges.
..and so on
The whole site from top to bottom is about green oranges. No mixed messages, no confusions. Good semantics (h1, h2, h3) with the major keyword for the page in each meta tag, in first heading and then in further headings. Even a robot cannot be mistaken as to what this site is about.
Of course google probably no longer uses meta tags to determine search rankings but in my opinion it’s best to play by the best rules, because:
- it makes all the important elements of each website as relevant to it’s content and as convincing as possible.
- Google still uses meta tags to display the results. What you put there often appears in the google results. Therefore, even if tags didn’t influence your rankings, they will still influence the way your results presents themselves what can have an impact on the click-through rate.
End of the quick seo guide
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Before my changes, Blogsolid meta tags looked like this
- Title tag: Blogsolid >> Blog Archive >> Title of the post (not pretty and not encouraging to click. Who wants to read the archive – we want up to date info!)
- Description tag: Ideas for better blogging (On all the pages across the blog the same short description)
- Keywords: blogsolid, blog, solid, blogs, blogging, tips, tricks, advice, how, ideas, better, basics, growth, power (on all pages across the blog)
In general – not too great.
First quick change I introduced– All in One SEO Pack
wordpress.org/extend/plugins/all-in-one-seo-pack
All in One SEO Pack helps us solve the title tag problem and organize the websites title tags the way they should be:
- Title tag: Title of the post – Blogsolid
- Description tag: Will be added manually to each post once it’s written. It will summarise the content of the post, preferably including a substantial amount of keywords. Maybe even starting with the exact words from the title tag.
- Keywords: Major keywords for the particular post – you can set this to automatically display post title and forget
Second quick change – corrections to html semantics (the content headers)
This error is a common case for many, even great blog themes – they give the h1 (header 1) attribute to the blog title and then h2 to each particular blog post title even on the single post pages.
Instead, the h1 attribute should go to the title of the post as I showed it in the example above. It should emphasise what the particular post is about. Big guns have it this way: Darren Rowse, Yaro Starak, Daniel Scocco. I will not reinvent the wheel and will set Blogsolid the same way.
The blog title should be a picture only. If you want, you can use this code, which will add h1 attribute only on to the homepage of your blog:
<?php if (is_front_page()) { ?>
Your code for the front page (with H1)
<?php } else { ?>
Your code for all other pages (without H1)
<?php } ?>
This change is not as easy as installing a plugin because it requires editing the theme itself. You have to correctly change the code in header.php and then edit your stylesheet to make sure that the site and post titles still look good. But if you know how, it takes 10 minutes.
Further quick changes – additional plugins
WP Super Cache
wordpress.org/extend/plugins/wp-super-cache
This is an absolute must have plugin. It allows your blog to load quicker and survive more traffic. It allows you to use more plugins and lets you host more blogs on the same server without crashing it.
It makes your blog better and hosting it cheaper.
WP-DB-Backup
wordpress.org/extend/plugins/wp-db-backup
Another must have, especially if you get a lot of comments. You may be doing regular manual backups, but lets face it – these will not be daily.
This plugin lets you set even hourly automatic backups and send them to your email. This uses a little of your bandwidth but is much better than loosing a weeks worth of comments on your blog.
Yet Another Related Posts Plugin
http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/yet-another-related-posts-plugin
As a quick fix, this plugin can only be introduced half way – into the RSS. Introducing it on the blog in a good-looking fashion requires a bit of coding and I will do it later.
The related posts plugin has 2 goals:
- It encourages people to interact with the blog a bit more. It will show some older posts, what encourages people to click through and have a look. This is particularly useful in case of people reading the blog via an RSS – they would often never visit the site itself. But if an older post grabs their attention, they might just get curious enough to visit – there, they will increase the statistics (important if you sell display ads), but might also just click an ad or buy something via a referral link from your sidebar. My experience shows that with each post you publish, you will get 1 to 4 visits per each 100 of your RSS subscribers.
- It is good for seo. This plugin adds internal links between posts on your blog what hels to spread Page Rank from more popular posts to the less visited ones.
I would recommend setting the matching threshold to as low as possible. What you want to have is 5 links under each post even if they are not really exactly similar. They are all on the same blog what means they are on the same subject and might just interest the reader.
RSS footer
wordpress.org/extend/plugins/rss-footer
This is solely a small step to combat copyright violations. If someone automatically republished this blogs feed on a different page, he will do so with the link pointing back.
Does it work? I am not confident. But it does not hurt to have it there. And it always reminds everyone what they’re reading… in case they’ve forgotten. 
One thing you will notice is that the plugin adds a feed from Yoast.com (creator of the plugin) to your wp dashboard. Quite a smart way to promote yourself I would say.
Introducing all the described changes takes about 30 minutes, including editing the template files and the impact may in some cases be substantial.
More to follow soon.
Jasha Says:
December 14th, 2009 at 3:58 pm
Good suggestions, these plugins are really a must-have, thanks for the backup suggestion, i used that plugin before but i was right now looking for it and forgot the name.
Matt, all you wrote is gold but still something fundamental (at least for me) is missing in this blog: content sharing options!
I was looking for something to tweet-out this post, a retweet button or a share on facebook but i couldn’t find it!
Matt Says:
December 14th, 2009 at 5:26 pm
You’re right Jasha.
Blogsolid is not really optimised for social media. When it was launched, bookmarking sites were “the big thing”. I will definitely have to look into adding tweeter and facebook buttons. Thanks for the suggestion.
I also got a suggestion via email to make the font bigger so that it strains eyes a little less. It looks nice right now, but is not really geared to make reading easy. Does anyone else have any views on this?