SEO puzzler

zero · 2008-03-16 17:51:01

I’ve tried to optimize txpq.com for ‘textpattern’ and ‘txp’. There’s an h1 with Textpattern and sometimes an h2 as well as several mentions in most articles. Meta description and keywords also include the terms. Page rank has been at 5 for some time.

However, txpq is not in the top 200 for textpattern or txp on google or msn live search. It comes in at about 120 on Yahoo.

Anybody know what’s going on?

Bloke · 2008-03-16 18:00:46

While the meta descriptions and keywords match the content well enough, and the “technical” things like H1 tags, position of content on the page etc all look fine to my semi-untrained eye, the most damning thing against the site is probably the number of external links in articles. Each one of those counts as -1 (err, probably, if I remember my PageRank 101 correctly). Though the algorithm’s probably changed since I last investigated it.

Perhaps if you balance it out by adding more internal links to other articles on the site (or cut down on the externals a tad) it’ll improve the ranking a little. Past that I’m not much use in this area. Gocom’s your man.

EDIT: oh, the other thing is to get relevant referrals from other sites to increase the perceived importance of TXPQ. I’m doing my bit from my site but whether I’m regarded as “relevant” is another thing entirely :-) You’d think the posts in this forum would help, but I don’t know if forums carry much weight because of the number of sigs and stuff.

Last edited by Bloke (2008-03-16 18:10:52)

zero · 2008-03-16 18:32:08

PR5 is not bad. We Love TXP also has PR5 and lots of links going outwards but it manages to get quite high. I’m aware that the forum, the txp weblog and welovetxp are good inbound links but there aren’t many more (thanks for yours btw:) so am now wondering if inbound links affect search results more than page rank?

Bloke · 2008-03-16 19:25:04

zero wrote:

PR5 is not bad. We Love TXP also has PR5 and lots of links going outwards but it manages to get quite high.

Maybe I’m wrong then. been a while since I delved into PageRank.

wondering if inbound links affect search results more than page rank?

Entirely possible. I thought it all went towards the final score; shows how much I’m out of touch with the system. Where’s an SEO guru when you need one… Gocom!

Last edited by Bloke (2008-03-16 19:25:43)

Gocom · 2008-03-16 19:31:22

Bloke wrote:

Entirely possible. I thought it all went towards the final score; shows how much I’m out of touch with the system. Where’s an SEO guru when you need one… Gocom!

Heh, I’m not guru :D – just usual old SEO “student” of real sensei. There is quite a lot of reasons. Simple list is probably the best:

There is too much code before main header, h1. It should be right at the top – use CSS for positioning.
Don’t use inline-script tags. Put them to head.
There is multiple h1 tags. Use only one, and then h2 for sub-headers and article titles. H1 is for site’s name.
Move content to up, and move those style changers, search forms to the bottom.
Keywords are nowdays kinda useless.
Metadescription have to be different for every page, so that it matches the content.
Site’s title is quite bad currently. First letter has the most value, so move the txpq.
More incoming links would be 100% awesome. They mean lot.
PR is just something relevant, not the wishdom nor truth. 5 is something kinda usual for English site.

Hope that helps to keep the good work up :)

Last edited by Gocom (2008-03-16 19:37:18)

zero · 2008-03-16 19:56:49

Thanks, Jukka. I’ll have to get to work! Some questions about your points:
1 there’s not much code before the h1 but I agree you’re probably right
2 Which inline-script tags?
3 Lots of people now believe h1 should be for article title. Also if you can have multiple h2 or h3, then why not h1 also? Are you sure google penalises multiple h1?
4 Already done on home page but will have to work on article pages
5 Grrrr…
6 metadescription is already different on every page
7 Don’t get you. What should the site’s title be?

Thanks for your help.

Last edited by zero (2008-03-16 19:57:33)

Gocom · 2008-03-16 20:08:01

Thank you Peter :) Here is my reply for those:

Yes, there is. – there should be near to zero code. Also the h1 doesn’t include site’s name.
Example: <script src="http://digg.com/tools/diggthis.js" type="text/javascript"></script>
It’s because semastic model, h1 cuts old h1. So yes, use h2 for those others.
Good :)
Yeah.
That’s good too :P
Example: <title>Article title | TXPQ</title> / Section | TXPQ etc.

No problem :)

Bloke · 2008-03-18 00:11:21

Sorry to hijack your thread Peter (I’ll start a new thread if needs be), but it’s kind of related — I think — in terms of good page layout and structure that might affect SEO: what about meta tags/js/css/etc?

Is there any preference as to the order such things appear on a page for a “better” user experience that is also not going to affect SEO placement (not that meta tags hurt much — I use keywords even though I know they’re kinda useless these days).

I mean, should the first thing in the <head> be the Content-type declaration so the browser can “prepare” (or “check” in the validator’s case) the page and see it matches the HTTP header? Or can it come waaaay down since TXP uses ob_* anyway? What about <title> … first? Last? Somewhere in the middle? And the rest of the meta tags like description, copyright, author, etc?

In people’s humble opinions, is it better to kick off the stylesheets first to try and get their threads over with quicker and prevent “flashes” of unstyled content (IE6 notwithstanding), then start the javascript threads so they can be downloading while the rest of the page content is starting up, thus the rest of the meta info can wait a bit, towards the bottom of the <head> tag? Or does putting all the styles/JS first mean that crawlers get bored waiting and are less likely to index the page content favourably? Or do they ignore <script> and <link> tags, thus their position is of no importance to crawlers?

Does it matter a jot — generally — in terms of page render speed and good practice? Is there an accepted, or pseudo-standard? There are so many conflicting opinions on the interweb, I just wondered if there was a general order-of-tags-in-the-head that people adhered to in TXP sites that works well for humans and search engines.

Last edited by Bloke (2008-03-18 00:18:33)

jm · 2008-03-18 02:05:05

There’s no need for the http-equiv tag, since TXP sends header(). External CSS and JS files should be ignored (at least by Google), so they shouldn’t affect load time. However, placing your JS before </body> may speed up load time for end users. JS seems to load the slowest, so it’s best if that’s loaded last. You can also send CSS via header(), so that might speed up your site by a minute amount.

As far as head order goes, I’m strictly alphabetical. Back when I had a site, it had a PR5 with this order (still does, despite a robots.txt preventing indexing). Some say it’s best to have your title at the top, but I doubt spiders would be like “Oooh this guy’s got 3 nodes before his title. For shame! -1000 points” :P.

I do think meta tags are pointless, so take my experience with a grain of salt.

Last edited by jm (2008-03-18 02:05:16)

zero · 2008-03-18 12:31:48

Thanks for hijacking the thread bloke, I had hoped some more general seo advice would come out too. I think we are talking microseconds for order of stuff in the head. Occasionally I see sites keep jumping around the place when they are loading and some of it might be javascript but also it’s simply that they haven’t put any dimensions on images so the browser has to keep trying to get it right, sort of thing.

Re metadescription: this is used in the text you see on a search results page so good wording is important.

Re inline scripts, the page won’t finish loading till after the script is finished. Re external scripts such as Digg, they take time to load too. Thanks for the help with that, Jukka.

I eventually got all pages except the home page optimised as per Jukka’s guidelines, with the h1 coming first. It took quite a few positioning changes. I am stuck with the home page with h1 coming after an image and featured. It’s because of position:fixed for the bars. They only work in IE if there is no relative or absolute positioning elsewhere on the page. So I can’t yet think of a way to get the h1 to the top of the home page, but thank very much to Jukka. It makes semantic sense.

Bloke · 2008-03-18 13:13:12

jm wrote:

As far as head order goes, I’m strictly alphabetical.

Hey, I like that idea. I’m always “losing stuff” in my meta form because I can never remember how far down the form it is.

And I hear you about content-type (and meta tags in general); they’re a pain sometimes. Feels like duplicating content for the sake of it. The (strict) validator is the only thing that complains if you omit content-type because (I think) it has to assume the charset and hates making assumptions… I might be wrong there.

Clearly if you omit the meta description you can still get indexed — Google probably just uses bits of the body as a result set instead. It’s unclear how much effect making your meta description match the content makes; I’ve heard exactly duplicating part of the content into your meta description isn’t a great idea but, again, may be wrong on that nowadays. Perhaps not bothering is the best option after all!

zero wrote:

I think we are talking microseconds for order of stuff in the head.

I figured as much.

sites keep jumping around the place when they are loading…they haven’t put any dimensions on images so the browser has to keep trying to get it right, sort of thing.

Yeah, like days of olde when everything was in a table and you didn’t tell the browser how many columns it had…

Re inline scripts, the page won’t finish loading till after the script is finished.

True to a point, I believe (though you may well be right, in which case I’ll need to re-think a lot of things).

I figured that since HTTP requests are multi-threaded (up to server and client connection limits – two by default but I guess hardly anyone leaves it that way nowadays) and js is generally a few kB and up, I wondered if starting them off “in the background” so-to-speak might enhance the overall perceived load time. Especially if the site relies on jQuery or something. Images and such like can wait — but for javascript execution, the quicker the browser can trigger “DOM ready” the better.

Starting them off first may, however, “choke” the bandwidth and cause lumpy rendering. I’ve not benchmarked it. Has anybody got any results on this sort of thing? Maybe it depends on the site; a heavy JS site is perhaps more important to get the Javascript loaded sharpish whereas other sites might not. I would probably relegate “unimportant” javascript like GoogleAnalytics (bleurgh!) to just before </body> because they waste a connection and the page can suffer while it’s waiting for a response. Not sure if that’s the best idea but I think the convention of forcing all javascript into the head is no longer enforced.

So that just leaves the <link>ed stylesheets. With them tending to be small, I’m inclined to put those at the very top so, again, the HTTP threads can be started and the styles hopefully loaded before (or at least in parallel with) the document body. In all but IE6 the stylesheets should be cached anyway; IE6 may cache them but it sure doesn’t look like it when it flashes white at you every page. Grrr.

I may have got this all backwards though and it’s better to get the content on its way down first and worry about styles and scripts further on. Any thoughts anyone?

I eventually got all pages except the home page optimised as per Jukka’s guidelines

Sweeet. Now we play the waiting game…

Last edited by Bloke (2008-03-18 13:20:51)

jstubbs · 2008-03-18 18:56:32

For SEO – can we conclude what MUST be in, and what can be left out?

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#1 2008-03-16 17:51:01

SEO puzzler

#2 2008-03-16 18:00:46

Re: SEO puzzler

#3 2008-03-16 18:32:08

Re: SEO puzzler

#4 2008-03-16 19:25:04

Re: SEO puzzler

#5 2008-03-16 19:31:22

Re: SEO puzzler

#6 2008-03-16 19:56:49

Re: SEO puzzler

#7 2008-03-16 20:08:01

Re: SEO puzzler

#8 2008-03-18 00:11:21

Re: SEO puzzler

#9 2008-03-18 02:05:05

Re: SEO puzzler

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