Drakenhart Studios

No tips, no tricks, no insider trader info, just facts. Common sense facts!

SEO. I’m sure plenty of you have heard of the term. Even better some of you may know what it is and how to go about doing it. Some may only know the “old way” that most search engines are rejecting for better and more exacting options. For those that don’t read on. For those that do skip down a bit.

What is SEO?

SEO is a short form acronym for “Search Engine Optimization”. What this is or does, is offer the search engines information to try and get your site to the top of the lists. Most search engines have different algorithms for trying to find the best sites that match the terms being searched for and then return that list to the end user. Knowing the tricks of these algorithms is what SEO is all about.. or was.

Yes I said was.

Many of the Search engines are changing their tactics. Why is that? Spam, spam-ad-sites, scam sites, people who abused the system in order to get to the top of the charts and then shared those tricks for money. Sure business is about money, but not about dishonesty. Dishonest business eventually get caught and go under! Don’t be one of them and you’ll do just fine!

No really!

Changing Winds, New Practices

So how is SEO changing? You want to know the trick to it do you? Sorry there is no real trick because the search engines and their programmers are just getting smarter. The key to ranking high and ranking well is really attached to content.

Content may be “King” and design “Queen” but the rest of the court has come into their own and are being considered as a way to rate your sites. Yep you heard me. It is about the network you’ve developed and how it relates to your content.

No, not social media. That’s a part of it, to be sure, but it isn’t the end of it. It is about how your content, meta tags, titles (header, links, etc), image description, and the other aspects of web usability all interlink into your end-user’s experience. No kidding.

End-User is my word for ‘God’

Okay it isn’t actually, but I think I got my point across whether your initial reaction is a knee-jerk “WHAT! Blasphemous!” or a hearty chuckle as you get the “joke”. It is about what the End User wants and how they interact with your web site. The key to good SEO is about what you are offering to the greater whole, and how relevant it is to what the end-user has asked the search engines to find for them.

How many times have you written in a search engine for something and found…, nothing. Or Ultimate Crap! (echos like a bad horror movie) Or what’s worse, you end up with sites that try to sell you stuff in that patented single column, center-justified, giant RED LETTERS!!!!!!! With lots of little exclamation marks! All of the text talking about how awesome their product is and how it will change your life!!

Crap. You know it and I know it but they were “Optimized” for the search engines to find. So the search engines got sick of it, got working on it, and got smart, real smart.

You see each search engines for the most part (sans a few I may not know) are a business in and of themselves. Google stock is actually traded! Their business relies on satisfying the end-user. You, me, and everyone else that uses search engines to find what we are looking for online.

So it isn’t about “what is the newest trick”. Good, solid SEO is about the correct procedures to follow as well as what NOT to do!

DO

• Meta Tags:Meta tags may not have the same importance or weight they did years ago, but they are still important in declaring what your document is about. Pick a handful, not too many, and avoid repeating words.
• Titles Tag: Use these as often as you can. Where ever they need to be use in an area that you have content. This helps to describe what it is the content is about, be it a link, and image, or other media!
• Links: Popularity and links go hand in hand. Whether is it because of negative feed back (ie. people saying ‘Oh wow take a look at THIS crap!’) or positive feedback (ie. ‘Wow how cool and useful this is! Check it out!’) people will link to your site. This is noticed by search engines. The more important the site that links to yours, the more relevant a site that links to yours, the better your chances at gaining page rank!
• Link Relevance: Only link to, or try to garner links from, sites relevant to your own. It is a logic pattern that improves your ranking. A search engine looks at irrelevant links as someone would look at a dog for sale in a food store. It makes no sense to them.
• Content: What is your site about? Is is a broad beast with a lot of information (about.com), or is is a specific creature with refined tastes and requirements (elfwood.com). Perhaps it’s a hybrid of both (tutorial sites that have strict requirements), or a community site based around one topic (ConceptArt.org).
• ** Notice that most of the sites I’ve listed here are also art-related… because my content is primarily art-related. If my site were more tech-centered I might link to Wired, or the Food Network site were I making a more food-centric site.
• Use of Robots.txt: ‘Nofollow’ and ‘follow’ rules help the sites know what pages to crawl. This can be used smartly to limit the amount of repetitive links, or to offer the engines a broader range to crawl through your site. If you have a “links” page with a LOT of out going links, so much so that it is hurting your site, try this: make it a “nofollow” and then blog about some of these sites instead. This way your links get their attention but the engines get CONTENT.
• Write: Yes write new content. If you site is very static (basic art gallery styled site) add a “professional twitter feed”, or if you don’t want to add a blog to your site, grab a free one from any of the various providers and have it’s rss feed show up on your site as a “news” section.
• Giving: Whether it’s a blog entry, a review of someone else’s product, or a partnership link, share the love. The links given out to others may reciprocate links back to you. In the Blogosphere, often when an author finds out he’s been written about, they may write about you or make a note in their journals about the article. People love attention! Give them some love!

DO NOT

• Meta Tags: No stuffing meta tags in your header. Don’t use the same word over and over again in different forms, spellings, or formats. That will penalize you!
• No Link Farms: DO NOT become a link farm! Do not link to everything in the world, especially if it doesn’t relate to your site content! This reduces the power of your out-going links, and makes you look like a link farm to search engines.
• No Link Farmers: Like Link-Farming do NOT farm for links. It is spam, it annoys people, and eventually leads to people not believing your authority or authenticity!
• Link Relevance: I cannot stress this enough. Do NOT link to that which has no relevance to your site. Don’t bother with links from sites that are not Relevant to your site.
• Out-links-In: In other words what links to your site and from where? Confused? Okay, in short the engines also look at where links are coming from that point to your site! So those links that are relevance are equally as important!

Simplify if you can. Keep the main links on a front page to between 3 and 6 if at all possible.

• Content: Do not fill a site with dirbble, crap, or otherwise un-useful, unhelpful tripe. Be mindful of the focus of a site and try to keep that focus fresh in your mind always as it is updated.
• Affiliate Links: Are they hurting your rankings? What you didn’t know they could hurt your rankings? It really depends on the search engine you are optimizing a site for… yes the same way a designer must keep in mind different browser types. Ironic? I think so. Go read the different engines’ policies.
• Masking links: Some Browsers penalize your site for having affiliate links. In some cases people offer you ways to “get around this issue” by masking the links. There are a number of ways to do this, but can in the long run hurt your site. So I suggest that folks do not do this. See above. I would suggest limiting the links instead to the highest payouts, or those that are specifically relevant to your site.

Shocked?

I hope not. This is very common sense. People want content. They want to learn or share that content if they are impressed by it. So write good content and as your popularity grows so too will your engine rankings. Give something back to the net then just spam. The more focused the site the better off you are.

If you find out that you are interested in a lot of different things, take the risk to start a blog, a second, or third site based on these other hobbies. Link to them from your other sites. Just again, don’t over do it.

Content in moderation that educates rather then entices. Don’t sell, share. ~ Drakenhart

One of the problems I had with AdRotate was that the widget form doesn’t allow for multiple widgets to show different groups of banners in a sidebar. (At the time of this writing.) At least, not using the WordPress admin panel.  But, after reading through the site I realized you can ad banners everywhere. No really…, everywhere!

Thinking about that I realized we can even add them to our headers, or better yet use it to replace the header image entirely! *shock*

Now one thing I’ve always wanted to do is to have my “skins” change for the seasons. More over the images (that would be an amazing plugin!) would change while the structure of the site remained the same. I’m sure this could be done by using a PHP script that changes a CSS document per a certain time period. But I’m not PHP wizard… yet.

But then I got to thinking, and that is a dangerous thing as I begin to experiment. I may not be able to use AdRotate that way straight out of the box, ( although with the new “timed” ads it -may- be possible to at least change the header per season, there is an experiment to do to be sure) but it can be hand-coded into the theme of the site. The Plugin’s support website offers a list of code snippets. You can even add individual or random rotating ads to a post or page, inside the post or page! It doesn’t have to stay inside the widget!

Amazing.

How so?  Easy!

First you’ll need to install the plugin. You can either do this by hand by downloading the plugin, or if you have WordPress 2.7 installed you can go into the Plugins Panel and do a search for banners, ads, adrotate, or other such words and look for it in the list. Installing it through the Plugins panel is a lot faster.

Now the next thing you may want to do, if you can, is add the \banners (<– note the ’s’) folder to you wp-content folder. (wp-content\banners ~ don’t forget that ’s’). This is where you can put all kinds of banners that you will want to use.  How ever, sadly, you cannot organize them into sub-folders in order to keep like-images together. You must label them in a way that you will be able to distinguish them.

What’s this do? AdRotate can attach images to the banner rotate code so you don’t have to type out a huge line of code. Not to mention you can -change- what the image is with a simple few clicks if you use the %image% inside of you image tag. (<img src=”%image”>) All you have to do is upload the images into the banners folder and then pick the image from the Banner Admin Panel.

Sweet.

Next you need to log into WordPress and add your banners and links. These can be affiliate links, or they can be general links, it doesn’t really matter.

Set up your groups first, this is done under the mainPlugins Panel under the Manage Banners link. Create groups to help keep yourself organized.

Then under the Posts Panel you can find the Write Banner link where you can start adding your banners!   So, next is to start adding banner code and images!

Under the Settings Panel is an option for AdRotate. This is the opt-in / opt-out to help the creator with determining how the plugin is being used and what the creator can fix it to be more beneficial. It’s a study, nothing more. But, you can opt to not have your specific information sent. None of the information is sold and may only be shared in a stsitical analysis. Make sure you set these settings to what you are most comfrotable. Me. I left myself opt’ed -in.

Once this is done then you need to decide where your banners are going to go. Doing a quick design prior to this will help you get an idea of what it will look like. If the banners are too big, you’ll need to re-size them and re upload them. Far as I know AdRotate doesn’t re-size banners for you, you still have to do that by hand in general.

Each of the tags or PHP snippets goes into specific locations. The first number in the PHP code displays banners from a specific group, where the the second is the specific banner ID number. In the shortcode the group and banner numbers are a bit more obvious as you have to type them out.  You can find these group and banner ID numbers in the Manage Banner link in your main Plugins Panel.

Make sure you book mark the install list for future reference!

~

Side note: In the most recent update (as of this posting) the creator has added a CTR (Click Through Ratio) to give you and idea of how your banners are doing!

Suggestion: Donate to this man if you use this Plugin and make money from it. It’s such a powerful and useful plugin, even a dollar or two is a nice thank you. It’s kind of like tipping your waiter. ~ Drakenhart

WordPress got wise, real wise. They’ve started to populate their new domain, WordPress.tv, with videos. This tickles me in ways I can barely begin to describe.

First: I’m a person who is very much supportive of people using the proper ending to their domains. The endings were created to help differentiate between content types. This way people would know from first glance just what the company is, does, and it’s intents.

• .com –> Commercial Business (Drakenhart Studios.com is being held by a friend currently. Lost contact.)
• .net –> Network (We are in our own way a network. Rather then just offer you our business end and sales pitch, we offer a form of community and continued service. Links to places that benefit our clients and viewers, and connections to our clients’ sites for people to check out!)
• .org –> Organization, like the World Wild Life Fund or the Red Corss, etc.
  
• .tv –> Television of other form of video media. (Thus WordPress.tv offering a site Full of helpful, online walkthroughs and tutorials. Bonus!)
• .biz –> General Business
• .us –> General Web Site located in the United States
• .info –> Informational site, often like a wikipedia and the like.
• .me –> No joke, this is a website that is about you.
• .mobi –> Mobile phones. Yep.

And so forth…

Why else? Video Tutorials rock in my book! Reading a manual and jumping back and forth between pages, versus  actually seeing what is being describe are two very different ways of learning. “Visual” people learn best by watching or interacting. “Abstract” people learn best from reading or looking at diagrams. I am a visual leaner rather then an abstract-text learner. So watching the videos as they -show- me what to do is exceedingly more helpful then slogging through pages after pages of Codex – of which some of it is not up to date!

Down side / Up side: It is not a “community” per say. Only certain people are allowed to post videos, unlike YouTube. This means a greater quality. This also means slower wait times as they put up more and more specific tutorials. They have to put the basics up first!

Go check it out!

Welcome and thanks for stopping by to check out my site. Secondly I’m glad to see you are intrested in this little side service of Drakenhart Studios. We try only to promote services and resources we think are greatly beneficical to our viewers and clients. To do so we offer personal reviews, check out the product, site, or service, and act as a filter for the junk so that our viewers and clients don’t waste their time or money.

We prefer honesty and forthright opinions in our reviews, and do not like to sugar coat our dislike of something if a product or service isn’t what it claims. But we do strive to be professional about our reviews as much as possible to keep away from unwanted slander. In some cases the site mascot may insert her more vibrant opinions, but this if for comedic value only.

The reviews themselves, if beneficial, can act as a form of advertisement. In some cases if we like a product, service, or site well enough we might choose to join their affiliate program. This is a bonus, for all concerned, and shows we truly do enjoy what has been offered!

Quality is key, and we only join and thus promote affiliate services we believe in and feel will help our clients and viewers! If the product, service, or site is not of a quality, that damages our reputation first and secondly will eventually reduce the in-flow of any affiliate monies. Neither is then beneficial to us, and it does not actually help our viewers and clients! What good is that?  The money is a bonus that helps us to earn more profit, yes. But they are not how-ever our primary service. (See Articles on running a business and why this is actually important!)

Our intent is to do honest business -as- we do our business, and thus to serve our clients’ and viewers best interests.

If someone feels they have a product, service, web site, or such that would truely and honestly help our viewers, clients, and others you may ask for a review. Be aware though that there is a difference between a polite request and spam. We do not tolerate spam, nor harrassing emails requesting reviews for products we have previously politely declined.

We only review services, sites, or products that offer our viewers and client’s useful help, information, or such – As it is related to our site’s content! Thank you for understanding.

In the Beginning….

This has been a rather educational experience and then some. Suffice to say everyone is trying to sell something, and often they are trying to sell you convenience wrapped up in a pretty little package. Not here. My services are by far much different, though I too can offer you that same convenience by doing much of this work for you for a fee.

Instead I would rather share with you the information and sites I’ve discovered that helped me. Yet as I do this I hope I do not “shoot myself in the foot” in the process of sharing what I’ve learned. I am a Web Designer after all.

So with a little bit of extra work, a lot of searching, and carefully selecting my keywords in the search engines, I’ve dug up quite a bit of information. This is my Journey into Word Press to CMS conversion.

Wait. What?

CMS? For the non-tech-talk savvy, a CMS is short hand for “Content Management System” among other acronyms. What “Content Management System” means, to put it simply, is the back-end code that makes publishing web pages easier. It does the work of the monotonous tasks that normally must be done by hand. It does all of the of coding each page, for every page, in a site. All you have to do is create content!

It takes most of the repeated tasks, like coding the header and footer that are the same for every page, and does it for you while yet making sure it looks the same for every page.  Well that’s a “Cliff Notes ™” version of the idea. For a clearer and more specific definition, here is a Wikipedia Article on CMS for your perusal.

General Overview

So the idea here is that we are using WordPress to facilitate website building by changing the Blog software a bit.  To some this may be “cheating”, but to others it is a form of efficiency and speed. To be sure, one should always give credit where credit is due. So here is a cheerful ‘hats off’ to the various creative minds that have put in the work and effort to make WordPress what it is today!