From the category archives:

It's technical

How can the Thesis theme for Wordpress help with your website’s SEO?

by Stephanie A. Lloyd on October 26, 2009 · 3 comments

in Branding, It's technical, Social Media

Cartoon by Hugh MacLeod

Cartoon by Hugh MacLeod

Recently my He Said, She Said co-host, Todd Schnick, asked me if Thesis helps with SEO for blogs and other websites.

He’s been monitoring the Alexa rank of blogs and other sites he frequents and had noticed that the sites built using the Thesis theme had noticeably lower Alexa ranks than others.

Since I am an affiliate for Thesis I felt like a complete idiot for not knowing the answer; in fact, I had never even given it any thought.

DUH.

So, I did a little research and came across this blog post which explains that, in fact, “The SEO reason to buy Thesis is also clear – it rocks.”

The author explains the SEO benefits of the Thesis theme.

“The arrival and growth of Thesis has presented novice bloggers, designers, and enthusiasts with the single most powerful and intuitive SEO tool to date. It’s an extension of building content that helps your content get “found” by searchers.

Thesis, properly used, allows everyone a chance to maximize their visibility, traffic, and online brand presence. This has been proven, time and again, by myriad users of the theme, experts and “newbies” alike.

At the time of this writing, self-hosted WordPress 2.7.x and Thesis 1.4.x are the current best-practice method to leverage Thesis fully. Self-hosted means having your own domain [www.yourdomain.com] along with PHP5 and mySQL.

Hosting on WordPress or other “free” sites can work at a rudimentary level, but not to full advantage. As that gets into off-page SEO, we’ll ask you to take our word on that.

There are, have been, and will continue to be decent “plug-in” modules that can assist basic WordPress themes in allowing for varying amounts of SEO control by the end user (that would be you).

So. Why should you buy Thesis, which presently costs either $87 for a single domain or $164 for the “every domain I personally own” developer membership option?

A number of reasons.

While we focus here on how to use Thesis and SEO to grow traffic, subscribers, and organic search rankings, Thesis is also – unlike plugins – a highly flexible design theme that offers users limitless capability to create “unrecognizable” versions of the default Thesis construct.

These customizations are unaffected by updating versions, as they are maintained in a folder specifically intended for this purpose.”

To learn more you can read the entire blog post – which includes a basic yet thorough Thesis SEO tutorial – here.

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Tagged as: Alexa, Blogging, Social Media, Stephanie A. Lloyd, Todd Schnick, Yes I am actually being serious

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My interview with Cliqset CEO Darren Bounds

by Stephanie A. Lloyd on September 30, 2009

in It's technical, Social Media

cliqset home-page

Yesterday I had the opportunity to interview Darren Bounds, Cliqset’s CEO, who launched their new beta site today!

How did the idea for Cliqset come about?

Our goal at Cliqset is to enhance the social connections that happen on the web. We do this through our real-time community (our private beta launched today) and, by providing third-party developers with the resources, APIs and social information to inspire creative and innovative apps.

Over the last few years, conversations on the Web have been dramatically changing to become more similar those in real life – centered around topics, location and audience – and in real-time. The Cliqset founders wanted to build a platform where people could easily have engaging conversations across the web. And by sharing our APIs, we’re giving developers the ability to build social apps faster without recreating the wheel.

Tell us about Cliqset. What is it, and what differentiates it from Twitter, FriendFeed, and others?

Cliqset is an online real-time community that lets users share, discover and discuss online. The difference lies chiefly in ease of use and number of services that Cliqset is integrated with. Cliqset allows users to engage in all of their current social networks and services in real-time so that their conversations (and all the content that colors them) are instantly updated and filtered through activity streams letting users keep tabs on the content that’s most interesting to them as they happen.

How can Cliqset help job seekers?

Cliqset helps job seekers by making it easier to engage and connect to others. Our community makes sharing their blogs, links, and creating conversations around interesting topics very easy allowing them to present a strong profile to potential employers. Job seekers can make themselves irresistible showcasing their keen abilities and intellect in real-time.

How can Cliqset help employers?

Employers will enjoy the ability to engage potential employees. They can easily filter their feed to quickly discover candidates and engage them. Our real-time conversations allow employers to get a real feel for a candidate and connect to them prior to an interview.

Business owners and marketers?

We believe business owners and marketers will appreciate the ability to filter in and  follow conversations around their business or related topics in real-time. This will make it easier to seek out potential evangelists as well as address customer concerns quickly. We also think they will like the ability to share their blog posts and other interesting content across 70 other social networks with the push of a button. Our real-time commenting means that brands can connect 1:1 to their constituents, making their interactions more engaging.

What’s next for Cliqset?

As the web changes, we’re going to stay one step ahead and continue to put user engagement at the forefront of our efforts. We want to make sure that we feature breaking technology so that all aspects of your digital life are socialized and enhanced – whether that’s online video or making the Cliqset experience more mobile and diverse.

We want to be everywhere so that you can be too!

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Tagged as: Cliqset, Darren Bounds, Social Media, Stephanie A. Lloyd

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Using Hubspot’s Website Grader to learn how to optimize your website

by Stephanie A. Lloyd on August 29, 2009 · 2 comments

in Branding, It's technical

Today I ran a report on Hubspot’s Website Grader for Radiant Veracity.

Finally, I now have some insight into my blog stats and what I need to do from an SEO (search engine optimization) perspective – and I recommend running this report for your blog so you can learn more too. They also have a blog grader.

Oh.

Bonus.

It’s free.

Cartoon by Hugh

Cartoon by Hugh

Following is what I think is some of the most valuable information provided by the report. To see the report in its entirety click here.

HubSpot’s Website Grader

Report for www.radiantveracity.com
August 29, 2009 at 10:23 AM

A website grade of 98.1/100 for www.radiantveracity.com means that of the hundreds of thousands of websites that have previously been evaluated, our algorithm has calculated that this site scores higher than 98.1% of them in terms of its marketing effectiveness. The algorithm uses a proprietary blend of over 50 different variables, including search engine data, website structure, approximate traffic, site performance, and others.

The website www.radiantveracity.com ranks 25,010 of the 1,371,012 websites that have been ranked so far.

The software is constantly being upgraded and the algorithm enhanced. The number of potential recommendations provided by the tool is also increasing frequently. Please check back often.

I. On-Page SEO

On-Page SEO is the process of placing your selected keywords in the right places on your web pages. On-page SEO involves changing page titles, headings, content, and URLs to improve search engine rankings.

Metadata

Metadata tags allow you to tell the search engines what your web page is about. Learn more about metadata and why it’s important.

Page Title: Radiant Veracity — Where Talent Strategies + Social Media Intersect
Meta Description: Where Talent Strategies + Social Media Intersect
Meta Keywords: hr,human resources,recruiting,recruiter,sourcing,sourcer,job,jobs,talent,talent
acquisition,social media,humor,office,workplace,employee retention,employee
communication
High Number Of Meta Keywords
The web page has 16 keywords in its metadata.

We believe that though the search engines don’t weigh keywords as heavily as they used to, they’re still important to get right. By using a high number of keywords, it is possible that you are diluting the effect of your most important keywords. We would suggest keeping the keywords to 10 or less. Currently, this page has keywords in its metadata.

Font Tags Found in HTML
We found some HTML font tags on this page. While this is not a critical issue, you should use Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) to separate your website’s content from its appearance.

Heading Summary Similar to how newspapers and magazines use headings and sub-headings to help readers, websites can use special tags in their HTML. These tags not only help human readers read the content, they also help search engine spiders better understand the content on a page and what is most important. It is generally a good idea to use heading tags to help signal to the search engines, what the web page is about.Total headings found: 19. See details.

Image Summary Images are a great way to enhance a website from a user’s perspective. However, it is important to note that search engine crawlers cannot really “see” images. So, if you have lots of images that contain textual content within the image itself, this content will not be seen by the crawlers. HTML helps address this issue by providing a way to specify the textual content for an image using the “alt” attribute. The alt attribute allows web pages to assign specific text as the “alternative” content for images for those that cannot view the images themselves. This can be search engine crawlers or text-only web browsers.Total images found: 44.  6 images don’t have ALT text. See details.

Too Many Images Found.
Having many images on the web page means the user has to wait longer to view your page. This web page has 44 images.

It’s usually better to have fewer or smaller images. Sometimes simply resizing your images will make them smaller in size, and your web page will load faster.

Interior Page Analysis: 3 Pages Processed We looked at a few other pages on your website to see how well they are optimized. This sort of interior page analysis can reveal exciting opportunities for you to target specific keywords or visitors. You can then create landing pages optimized towards converting those visitors into customers.
Page Keywords Description
For Companies – missing – – missing –
For Individuals – missing – – missing –
http://www.radiantveracity.com/meet-the-autho/ – missing – – missing –

Readability Level: Primary / Elementary School This score measures the approximate level of education necessary to read and understand the web page content. In most cases, the content should be made to be simple so that a majority of the target audience can understand it.

II. Off-Page SEO

Off-Page SEO includes all the things you do to promote your website outside the design of the website itself. Getting more inbound links to your site, registering with directories relevant to your industry, and getting more pages into the search engine indexes are all parts of Off-Page SEO.

Domain Info Most experts agree that you should register your domain for a long time, because search engines factor domain “stability” when looking at your pages.
Congratulations! This domain is registered for more than one year.
Google and other search engines like to see domains that have been registered for extended periods of time as this shows a commitment to the domain name. It also is an indicator that this website is not a temporary spam site.

Google PageRank: 4 “Google PageRank relies on the uniquely democratic nature of the web by using its vast link structure as an indicator of an individual page’s value. In essence, Google interprets a link from page A to page B as a vote, by page A, for page B. But, Google looks at more than the sheer volume of votes, or links a page receives; it also analyzes the page that casts the vote. Votes cast by pages that are themselves important weigh more heavily and help to make other pages important.” – From Google Learn more about Google Page Rank and Internet Marketing…

Google Indexed Pages: 91 This number is the approximate number of pages on www.radiantveracity.com that have been stored in the Google index. The Google web crawler will visit the website periodically and look for new content for its index. Generally, the more pages your site has within the Google cache, the better.

Last Google Crawl Date: August 28, 2009 @ 03:04 PM (GMT) Google will periodically crawl websites looking for new and updated content. In general, you want Google to crawl your site as often as possible, so your new content shows up in Google search results immediately.

Traffic Rank: Top 1.43 % Alexa is an online service that measures traffic for millions of sites on the Internet in a similar way to Nielsen television show ratings. Your website has an Alexa rank of 400,083 which is in the top 1.43 % of all websites.

Inbound Links: 1,720 One of the most important measures for a website is how many other sites link to it. The more links the better. Having links to your website from authoritative resources on the Internet helps you rank higher in search engines since these links are an indication that your website is trustworthy and contains good content. Learn more about building inbound links to your site.

DMOZ Directory: No Entry Found radiantveracity is not listed in DMOZ. DMOZ, The Open Directory Project, is the largest and most comprehensive human-edited directory of the Web. It is constructed and maintained by a vast, global community of volunteer editors.

Yahoo! Directory: No Entry Found radiantveracity is not listed in the Yahoo! Directory. The Yahoo! Directory is a web directory which rivals the DMOZ Open Directory Project in size. We recommend that every business have a listing in the Yahoo! Directory. Read this blog article for more information about why it is important for your company to be listed in online directories such as Yahoo! Directory and DMOZ.

ZoomInfo: No Entry Found radiantveracity is not listed in the ZoomInfo directory. ZoomInfo is a business directory and search engine, with profiles on more than 37 million people and 3.5 million companies.

III. Blogosphere

Blogging makes sense from a marketing perspective. You’ll be leveraging the shift from outbound to inbound marketing and interacting with your customers in new ways. A blog lets you meet your customers more directly than sending out brochures or an email campaign. It changes your website from a brochure that most people look at once to something that people interact with and come back to.
Learn more.

Blog Analysis Blogging is a great way to reach your target audience with your thoughts, opinions, and offerings on relevant topics.

Blog Ranking: Top 0.49 % Technorati is a popular blog directory service. It measures the popularity of a given blog as compared to all other sites that have been submitted to its system. This blog currently has a Technorati rank of 340,343, which puts it in the top 0.49% of blogs tracked by Technorati.

IV. Social Mediasphere

Making sure that your company has an extensive web presence outside of your own website is important. It increases the chances that your prospects will find your company when they are online since there are more web pages that contain information about your company. Learn more.

RSS Feed: Found

An RSS feed was detected in this web page. The feed link was correctly setup so that it can be auto-detected by feed readers and contemporary browsers. The feed URL for this site is http://feeds.feedburner.com/feedburner/Radiant …

Keyword Grader

Keyword Estimated Monthly Search Volume www.radiantveracity.com rank
hr 16,932 100+
human resources 19,862 100+
recruiting 4,388 100


Score Summary

Section www.radiantveracity.com
Website Grade 98.1
Google Page Rank 4
Google Indexed Pages 91
Traffic Rank 400,083
Blog Rank 340,343
Inbound Links 1,720
del.icio.us Bookmarks 2
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Tagged as: Blogging, Cartoon by Hugh, Social Media, Stephanie A. Lloyd

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The Alexa ranking demystified

by Stephanie A. Lloyd on August 24, 2009 · 2 comments

in It's technical, Social Media

Until a few months ago I’d never heard of Alexa. Since starting my blog I’ve learned from other bloggers and Alexa rankings kept coming up in conversation. I checked out the Alexa website, found their site widget, and installed it. I recently discovered their toolbar and installed that too.

I’ve become more and more intrigued with Alexa as I’ve watched my ranking drop from more than 12,000,000 to 460,416 in exactly 60 days after moving my site from wordpress.com to self-hosted. In the last week alone it’s dropped by more than 400,000.

(When it comes to the Alexa ranking, the lower the better. For example, Google is #1. You can see a list of Alexa’s Top 100 sites here.)

the better your blog

Cartoon by Hugh

I decided to learn a bit more about it and found “How to Improve Your Alexa Ranking” on The Daily Anchor:

“Alexa – an Amazon.com company – ranks websites based on the level of traffic they receive from visitors with the Alexa toolbar installed; the lower a website’s Alexa ranking, the greater their traffic. Alexa rankings are most useful to webmasters and advertisers who use Alexa rankings to determine the worth of a link from (or banner ad on) a given website (e.g. The Wall Street Journal can claim to be ranked #386 out of 300,000,000 websites, which is a pretty huge value statement.) While webmasters have access to web analytics tools that show them incredibly detailed visitor information on their website, there is no way for you or me to gauge the traffic to their website without using a service like Alexa.”

Upon installation of the Alexa toolbar it collects data on browsing behavior and transmits it to the Alexa website where it is stored and analyzed for the company’s web traffic reporting service.

There seems to be quite a bit of controversy over how representative Alexa’s user base is of typical Internet behavior. Assuming that Alexa’s user base is a fair sample of the Internet user population Alexa’s ranking should be accurate. However, not much is known about possible sampling biases. A known source of bias is the self-selecting, opt-in nature of Alexa traffic tracking software installation, but the significance of this bias on the rankings does not appear to be reported.

Alexa traffic rank was originally based on three months of aggregated data and was a combined measure of page views and users. On April 16, 2008, many users reported dramatic shifts in their Alexa rankings. Alexa confirmed later that day that they had released the new Alexa ranking system, claiming that they now take into account more data sources beyond Alexa Toolbar users.

On March 31, 2009 Alexa.com got a complete redesign and new metrics including: pageviews per user, bounce rate, and time on site. They later added new features including demographics, clickstream and search traffic stats.

Why should you care?

If you’ve got a website you’d like to monetize then you might want to pay attention. Your Alexa rank will increase your bargaining power when it comes real estate on your site (i.e. ad pricing). Even though Alexa rankings are not a thoroughly accurate depiction of traffic, prospective advertisers will look at your ranking in order to assign a dollar value to your site.

For example, the difference between an Alexa ranking of 1,000,000 and 50,000 can translate to thousands of dollars for an ad on your site.

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Tagged as: Alexa, Blogging, Cartoon by Hugh, Social Media, Stephanie A. Lloyd

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