Yahoo searches and blogs
One of the many signs of Google’s increasingly strong position as the number one search engine in the world, is witnessed in the lacking ability of Yahoo to make blog content searchable for its users.
I have just looked into the stats for my blogs. This is always interesting. But the single most interesting finding this time was that Google has delivered about 150 times as many hits to my blogs as Yahoo has. This difference is so large that it blows my mind. It really seems Google is running in circles around Yahoo as far as blog content is concerned!
I am unable to understand why. That is, I can see some explanations for it, but they only explain part of the difference, I think.
First off, I am using the XML Sitemap Generator for WordPress plugin. This automatically notifies Google and Ask about updates on my blogs, and they are both quick to index the content. But in order to update Yahoo I need an application ID. And the links in the plugin takes me to the Yahoo developer Center. And since I’m not a developer, I don’t register there. And no other info is provided by Yahoo either. So I dropped it.
I have tried to find out how to automatically ping Yahoo, but I am unable to find it on their pages. And info I have found elsewhere, doesn’t work because Yahoo have move their pages with no info about where it is now to be found. This, to me, is arrogance.
Second, Yahoo don’t seem to read sitemaps well at all. Both on my sites and on my blogs they serve up old versions of pages to users.
So, to me, it seems Yahoo is losing the battle because they simply are not adapting to the changes in cyberspace fast enough, and because they are arrogant. They expect site owners to go through a lot of trouble to find out how to best use them. Instead, they should recognize that they probably need us more (as a collective) than we need them, and be a little more humble and flexible. As it is, I think they deserve to loose the search engine war against Goggle.
WordPress’ support of foreign languages not good enough
Overall, I am very satisfied with WordPress as a blogging platform. The platform itself is relatively strict and stiff, even awkward to use, but all the plugins, widgets and improvements from the user community makes it great.
However, my relationship to WordPress is not unproblematic. Our relationship is not one of peaceful coexistence. In some regards, I am very dissatisfied. I have written before about lacking quality control with templates and plugins that are downloadable even from WordPress’ own site. Templates where columns drop down, widgets don’t work properly, and so forth, translates into grief and dissatisfaction with WordPress itself. I suspect I am not alone in feeling this way when I lose time and get annoyed because something is not working properly.
Lack of proper support for foreign languages is probably the one thing about WordPress that annoys me the most. I have a Norwegian language blog. Here is what happens: I publish a new post entitled “Nye bøker våren 2008″ (translated: New books spring 2008). Now, when this is saved using the title as URL, WordPress saves it as “Nye bker vren 2008″. In other words, it drops the Norwegian characters “ø” and “å”.
This may seem like a small thing. But then there is Google. Google supports foreign characters. Thus, when somebody searches for “bøker våren 2008″, they will not find my post, because my post (as far as Google is concerned) is about “bker vren 2008″.
Now, this really is annoying. How would American or English bloggers feel if their “books reviews” got listed as “bk rviws” or something similar? For a guy that takes search engine optimization seriously, this is so bad I can hardly even begin to describe it!
I really don’t know where the problem lies – in the code for the WordPress platform, the widgets, the plugins, the templates, or PHP itself. I am not enough of a programmer to know. But I do know that if WordPress wants to capture a part of the growing blog market, something needs to be done. WordPress ought to commit to supporting foreign languages, as well as doing something rapidly with respect to quality control.
– Peter
Still problems with apdproxy.exe and Dreamweaver
Yesterday I lost about half an hour of my work time, thanks to Adobe. As I have stated before, I am a great fan of Adobe. I love the functionality of their software – Flash, Dreamweaver, Fireworks, Photoshop, and so on. All excellent software.
But all is not well in my relationship to Adobe. A little program that comes with the Adobe software, apdproxy.exe, is really annoying. When I boot up my machine (a new Dell XPS with 2 Gb RAM, running Windows XP), this little program sometimes makes my machine grind to a halt. When this happens, and I eventually get into the Windows task manager (this takes a while because all CPU is taken up by this annoying program), I most often can observe that apdproxy.exe is eating between 95% and 99% of my CPU. Then it is a matter of closing it down. With this done, my PC comes alive again.
Also, I frequently experience Dreamweaver crashes when I am working on my Web sites. In the middle of editing something, often simple copy and paste operations, Dreamweaver simply freezes. Sometimes it recovers, sometimes not.
I wonder why Adobe doesn’t do anything with these problems. They are well known. I am not the only blogger who has expressed dis-satisfaction.
I am getting quite grumpy over this. At this point I have started to wonder what to do? Should I discontinue using software I otherwise love? Or should I simply start sending bills to Adobe for my lost time?
– Peter
Search Engine Optimization and the Title Tag
Here are two good resources on the proper use of title tags to drive traffic to a site:
The first article discusses both title and meta-tags:
http://www.searchbliss.com/seo-tools/search-engine-optimization.htm
The second article is more narrowly focused on titles:
http://www.seomoz.org/blog/best-practices-for-title-tags
The articles are good introductions to this topic. However, the advice to include you company or site name in the title tag of your pages is a bit too strong. My thinking is that usually it is best not to include it – simply because it is a waste of very valuable space! I would say that the ony exception to this rule is where you are willing to invest a lot – including your valuable title space – in building a brand name. For most purposes, say for blogs and most web sites that do not sell branded products, I would, as a rule, say that the name should not be in the title. For these types of sites, it is usually sufficient to display the name of the blog or site prominently on each page.
– Peter
SEO and proper use of titles and meta tags
One way to learn about search engine optimization (SEO) is to learn from successful sites. I have found an example of good use of the HTML “title” and “meta”-tags.
If you search using Google, with the keywords “books” and “reviews”, you will find that the number one spot is occupied by http://www.reviewsofbooks.com/ . Why this site, you may ask, and not, for instance, New York Times Book Review, or Amazon, Barnes & Noble, or some other large corporation.
Well, there may be several answers. However, one part of the answer is good use of title and meta-tags. Look at this:
meta name="description" content="Links to free and publicly available professional reviews of recently released books"
meta name="keywords" content="book reviews, reviews of books, book review site, professional book review, fiction, nonfiction"
title>Reviews of Books - Book Reviews
So part of what is happening is that the site uses title and meta tags very, very efficiently! They have chosen an extremely narrow range of keywords, and optimized for just two words – namely “books” and “reviews”.
Now, when I said “part of what is happening”, I did it because another reason they score so well is that the site also is frequently linked to – checking with Google I found 1710 links to the site (please note that this is a relatively low number for a site ranking at the number one spot – the New York Times Book Review, which is ranked number two on the same search, by comparison has 10500 links to their site).
So, what’s the lesson: Decide what to optimize on for a given page, and use title and meta tags efficiently!
Search Engine Optimization on Web Sites
Search Engine Optimization (or SEO) in my experience is 5% smartness, 95% work. Being smart involves having a strategy, basically a goal and a set of principles or rules about how to best achieve the goal. I try to implement the least time consuming and most important rules first, and then to do the more demanding tasks later. Regardless of all the books written on the subject and all the advertisements by consultants claiming to have more or less scientific knowledge about SEO, I do not view SEO as a science. Search engines are based on science, but SEO is mostly art. The reaon, of course, is that the search engines don’t want us (or their competitors) to know exactly what they are doing. Therefore, there is far too much uncertainty and far too many unpredictable elements involved for anyone to know anything with much certainty when it comes to SEO.
Consequently, I think, I examine, I formulate rules, and I implement them, and I study the results. Then I try to learn from my mistakes and build on what seems to work. So far, from what I can see using my site statistics, is that using page titles with the most important keywords in them works well. The same is the case for the use of semantic URLs – that is, URLs for my web pages that use natural language and contain keywords. For example, a page saved as www.mydomain.com/bk1xxx1222.htm does not get as many hits as one called www.mydomain.com/nokia9920.htm
So for the moment I am spending at least an hour, sometimes 2 hours, each day implementing these simple rules on my web sites. And it does help. Over the last month or so, I have observed considerable increases in the number of hits, both from Google and other search engines, on the pages that I have worked with. But it takes time to do the work, and it takes time before I begin to see the results as well.
– Peter
Bad templates for WordPress
I am a big fan of WordPress. I like its versatility and power. Also, I love the fact that there is a big and lively community of people using it, with great discussion sites. Furthermore, there is a huge number of people that develops templates (or “themes”), plugins, and widgets. A lot of the stuff people produce is marvelous!
What I don’t like is the near total lack of quality control on the WordPress site. There’s a lot of stuff being published that simply does not work they way it should. Plugins that don’t work, themes that may look alright, but have severe flaws. I run several blogs, and have tested out a number of themes. I have encountered a number of different types of bugs and problems. Sometimes I report these, sometimes not. When I do, they are usually not fixed anyway, so it doesn’t much matter one way or the other.
The most annoying to me is themes where columns simply drop down. This happens with a lot of the templates. I’ve tested them using IE 6, IE 7, Opera, and Firefox. Some produce the same errors in all of these, so it simply isn’t possible for the authors and WordPress to not know about the errors. The only guy that I have found so far, that seems to be able to shore those columns properly up in his designs, is Brian Gardner.
So, that leaves me – grumpily, I admit – wondering why? To me it would seem that a little bit of quality control would benefit all of us. For developers, it can’t be all that good for their reputations to publish flawed designs. For WordPress it can’t be advantageous to be competing for users with stuff that doesn’t work right. And for users, a little quality control would save a lot of time. Finally, for readers of the blogs, columns that drop down look annoying and displeasing.
Does anybody else know of stable, reliable and good WordPress themes? And have links?
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