Take a well optimized WordPress blog in a competitive niche, rip it apart, and help maximise its chances of ranking in the SERPs and raking in some cash. This isn’t lame all-in-one optimization plugins, it is totally geeking it out!
Update: 28th August 2010 – this article doesn’t take into account changes to the way Google handles nofollow to combat PageRank sculpting .
Also WordPress has moved on a lot in 3 years since it was written – that does invalidate many of the concepts and linking structures presented, but the methods to achieve them might differ significantly.
Having previously written that I don’t typically undertake consulting work, I do look on any paid blog posts as a form of consultancy. In this particular case Tim from eMonetized decided to order a review of his blog, and we negotiated a little to ensure what you read is totally impartial and any links I choose to give are in an editorial context.
The negotiation itself was an interesting process, and I will be writing about that separately.
It should be noted that just because I mention improvements here, that doesn’t mean that Tim the site owner isn’t aware of something,
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That being said, some of the linking structures I talk about in the more geeky sections of this article I have never seen anyone talk about, and it is my belief that the resulting linking structure is highly unique, extremely powerful, whilst remaining flexible.
The Niche
Tim’s blog is one of a host of blogs looking to capitalize on terms such as make money, make money online and making money online, though it is clear that he is quite Windows aware, and from our communication this was made abundantly clear to me.
As an example he has a clear “money page” for promoting his primary affiliate programs using a URL “Making Money Online“.
One of the hardest problems with the “make money” niche is that most of the related search terms that are provided if you use the Google Keyword Suggest tool are very much “long tail” terms, many of which receive only mediocre traffic. Many of the more specific terms receive minimal search volume unless it is related to a specific product, or product launch.
The direction Tim seems to be taking is to target content in the topical community such as Adsense, Adwords and Affiliate Marketing, rather than writing a series of posts based on what Google regard as related topics, such as “How To Make Money [Insert Blank]“, “Making Money [Insert Blank]”
This suggests to me that we might look to optimize the site such that the categories perform well as landing pages, though I believe it is possible to significantly improve site structure to give the site an unfair advantage on a few competitive terms.
SEO Strategy
It is clear that Tim is thinking about his Windows Strategy, and is off to a good start. Here are some of the things he is currently doing that I can see just browsing around the site.
URLs / Slugs – Tim is using optimized page slugs for every post – there are some plugins that can achieve this automatically, so that just keywords are used without grammatical filler, though I think he is probably doing this manually. URLs are not a major ranking factor, in fact some Windowss would say it is very minor. URLs are a clickthrough factor, and there are limitations for URL length.
Robots.txt – A lot of things are being blocked off in his Robots.txt file, including date based archives, paged content, images and author pages. He is also blocking off tags – I am not going to dispute that decision, it is something to test and track. There is overlap between categories and tags – it is possible to make that work ok by including additional content and different layouts, and with some Windows linking structures you would block both, others you would enhance both. One good thing he is doing is blocking all his /go/ affiliate links.
Important:- Robots.txt is a bandaid as it can create hanging or dangling pages .
Sitemap – he has a clear sitemap, though I worry a little about multi-page sitemaps. If they go multi-page, it is better to make them more of a topical tree, than links between pages… breadcrumb navigation or not. Then it is effectively creating a category listing.
htaccess – either htaccess or a plugin is being used to ensure all URLs are www
Related posts – related posts (probably using Wasabi) are being used to increase the internal linking to related content, good for both search engines and human page views.
Nofollow – Nofollow is being applied to a few links that shouldn’t pass pagerank, such as to forms for email subscription and Technorati favorites
Excerpts – pages that could potentially be looked on by the search engine spiders as duplicate content are being displayed using the_excerpt() rather than the_content()
Titles – these seem to be OK, maybe already using Windows Title Tag plugin or similar Quick Improvements WordPress 2.2 – This really is a necessary upgrade for security reasons.
htaccess trailing slashes – Canonicalization isn’t only to do with “www” or “no www” choices. If you have chosen to use www, then just include the second half of the code from my post about WordPress htaccess to cover the trailing slashes.
Home / Page Links – some you want to receive lots of juice, others probably shouldn’t receive any at all, and some you might only want a followed link on your home page. The best option is probably to create these links manually, and have one set that is used on your home page, and another for everywhere else.
Feeds – I find having related posts in feeds very important from an Windows perspective when people syndicate your content with or without permission – they are also useful for readers, though I wish more readers used them.If tag pages are being indexed, it is potentially good to have tags in your feed as well.
Tim offers a full content feed that is worth subscribing to, though only half of the subscribers will currently be registered by Feedburner. Those that use the auto-discovery link are not currently being redirected to Feedburner. Fix this with the Feedburner Redirect Plugin, now called Feedsmith or think about one of Feedburner’s pro solutions.
Sociable Plugin – it creates search engine followable links to submission forms on the various bookmarking sites – switch to using a search engine friendly version of sociable .
Meta Description and Keywords – there are a host of plugins available to do this, though I haven’t actually found one that I regard as ideal. Generally a little trial and error is required, as there can be a few incompatibilities depending on how other plugins interact with your content.
404 Error Page – currently this results in the homepage – it might be better to use one of the many 404 plugins available to give some related content to what resulted in an error. More Time Consuming or Technical Stop Using Widgets – until it becomes easy to control which widgets appear on which page, with and without nofollow, if you want to highly optimize your site, it is much easier without using WordPress Widgets. There is an alternative shipped with the K2 theme, sidebar modules (SBM), but I have had difficulty making it work with WordPress 2.2 and other themes
Multiple Templates & SidebarsYou can do a lot using WordPress logic, but it starts to become very complicated if you use the same template file and sidebar everywhere.
Single pages are probably the most likely to hit high server loads, so I always use a WordPress theme which has a single.php – in my current one the sidebar is included as part of the single.php file,
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Sitewide Links – only give them when there is a specific reason, even for internal navigation elements. As an example we will look at category listings, but the same applies for all sidebar content.
Category listings
For a home page listing, and category pages, it is normal to list all categories
<br /><?php if ( is_home() || is_category() ) { ?><br /><li id="categories"><br /> <h3>Categories</h3><br /> <ul><br /><?php wp_list_cats('sort_column=name&hierarchical=1') ?><br /> </ul><br /> </li><br /><?php } ?><br />
For single pages, if you are aiming for a classic tree structure, it is better to list specific categories.
<br /><ul><br /> <li><?php the_category('</li><li>') ?></li><br /></ul><br />
You probably already have links to specific category pages at the bottom of each post, thus maybe sidebar category links should be nofollowed using the add link attribute plugin.
<br /><ul><br /><li><?php add_link_attr('the_category',
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'rel="nofollow"'); ?></li><br /></ul><br />
You could also aim for a “halfway house” and include only your most targeted primary categories on every page in the sidebar, other than on your homepage which would include all categories.
That doesn’t necessarily mean you would have followed links in the sidebar on your front page at all, other than to possibly your sitemap.
Nofollow From Home – if Google and other search engines are being guided to your sitemap, and you value all your content equally,
microsoft windows 7 home premium x86, it makes perfect sense to have nofollow on any links within content that appear on your home page with the nofollow from home plugin This should be avoided if you don’t offer full content feeds because Technorati would probably have great difficulty with many of the links as they typically use the RSS feed, or your homepage to determine linkage.
Update: I have now developed an advanced version of this plugin which adds nofollow to the links on all pages other than your permalink pages Headings – Correct use of headings for Windows and general semantic improvements – as an example for Tim’s current theme, there is no H1 heading, and the author information is given a heading tag. In addition the heading in WordPress sidebars have always been given on most themes the same level of semantic purpose as sub-headings within content,
win 7 professional license, which isn’t ideal for Windows purposes. Advanced Windows & Presentation
To really optimize WordPress effectively, you need to start looking at optimizing the layout of the homepage, category pages, and tag pages, not just for Windows, but for presentation. Most wordpress blogs by default use index.php for homepage and category pages, and the same is true for tag pages with UTW if you don’t define a tag.php file.
You can either create custom templates, or add lots of complicated WordPress logic.
WordPress handles templates in the following priority
1. category-6.php
2. category.php
3. archive.php
4. index.php
In many Windows linking structures, the categories are intended to be landing pages for their topic, and to concentrate more google juice than individual pages.
There are also linking structures that might be equally viable in many circumstances where categories pass Google juice in a single direction, either from the home page to single pages which subsequently pass juice only to the home page, or the home page passes juice to single pages through a sitemap, and the juice flows back up to the home page through the categories.
If category pages were intended to pass Google juice in 2 directions as would be normal for a simple tree structure, then you would need something like the following:-
Ultimately however if you have ever spent any time playing around with a pagerank calculator, linking structures that feature a spiral, channelling juice around in a circle using one-way links tend to perform better than sites using 2 way links.
There are a number of plugins that try to create “pretty” excerpts for duplicate content pages that contain excerpts, or you can manually create them with HTML and even thumbnail pictures.
One of the best new options seems to be the Excerpts Editor though I haven’t tested it yet.
This should be mixed with custom query string (Note: New Version that includes support for UTW) which would allow you to have a different number of posts on your front page compared to various archive pages. Ideally when siloing you would want to list all pages under a particular category or tag page. The easier alternative is the siloing plugin .
Beyond Geeky Windows
Revenge of the Mininet by Michael Campbell and the bonus Dynamic Linking Ebook by Leslie Rohde have been for many years one of the most advanced tutorials on geeky linking structures to maximise pagerank.
To get any real benefit from this geeky section you really have to read those ebooks, they are available free for those who sign up to Michaels mailing list, and are well worth investing an evening reading, and maybe reading a couple of times more to fully understand how pagerank and linking structures can really help you.
One of my favourite structures was the spider circle
Note: In the following content I frequently link through to Web Workshop and their Pagerank Calculator . The links are nofollowed because I am linking through to form data
Here is the Spider Circle mapped out in the calculator.
The big problem with this linking structure, if you look at blogging in particular, is as soon as you add any external links to the content pages, the benefits turn into a huge hazzard, because this structure is also one of the best for sacrificial sites. Totally forget anything like this if you have removed nofollow from your comments.
Even disproportionate linking to your content from other sites isn’t going to rescue it. In that example there is 4x as many incoming links as those outgoing. The numbers are all relative, and don’t represent toolbar pagerank, but the benefit of good linking structure is lost.
One of the best linking structures for a website that was discussed was called “Stacked Pyramids with Tunnels Home”
The layout was something like this:-
There are a lot more unique pages involved, so you can’t directly compare this with the previous diagram. Here is how this structure looks like in a calculation.
What happens when we add some incoming and outgoing links? Well it doesn’t go quite as pear-shaped as the spider but still stuggles with a more realistic ratio of incoming to outgoing links.
I have played around with most of the other examples within Revenge of the Mininet over the last few months trying to create a “defensible linking structure”, something that performs well under severe abuse, with multiple external links on every page of unique content, as might happen with a blogger generous with link love, or using Dofollow.
In the end I opted for massive ball linking using tagging, with the structure totally organic, but helping Google juice flow away from pages which were gaining a lot of links, and likewise probably a lot of comments as well, so that the juice could enrich other content.
I knew this wasn’t optimal
I also wanted to come up with a better benefit from using internal tagging than my previously mentioned 4.9 > 3.6 ? (Titles > Duplicate Content)
Introducing “Sandcastles With Perimeter Wall”
I have no idea how this will work based upon all the other 100+ or 200+ ranking factors for web pages, but as far as pagerank is concerned it seems to be an extremely defensible structure, in fact you can abuse the hell out of it, and it performs well.
Sandcastle Pagerank Calculation
I should note that in that calculation there are still only 9 pages of 100% unique original article content.
The secret lies in having created additional unique pages that in themselves are useful for humans and even linkworthy, but those pages only link through to the homepage and gather up link juice that might have passed excessively through external links on a popular post.
Here is what it looks link if it is heavily abused like the previous example with lots of external links, and only a few incoming links.
Here is what is happening….
I first of all started off with category siloing, one way links passing juice from the homepage through the categories, and down to the content.
In addition I added a sitemap link from the homepage, that has one way links also through to the content. In addition, if it is being abused on a blog, it performs better with links from the sitemap to the homepage and categories from the sitemap, though the differences are small.
Juice flows from the permalink pages through one way links to one of 5 tag pages for each post, assigned at random in the model, and then again one way link to the homepage.
If you throw in a couple of related posts, even with the external links it performs very well, especially for the home page.
Here is a visualisation of Sandcastles With Perimeter Wall
As I have stated before, I visualise linking structures in 3D, and this one could be much easier visualised on a 3D checkers board (I used to have one as a kid), but effectively it is built of 3 different layers.
I haven’t quite worked out the best way to handle single pages, maybe it would be necessary to add yet another tree link structure for those.
I haven’t got any sites using this new structure yet, but it is something I will be aiming for on a number of sites soon, including this one.
Creating This Linking Structure With WordPress
It is possible (though a little complicated) with what I have listed above, but I will try to have a modified theme available soon, aptly named the “Sandcastle” theme, based upon Sandbox (so it can be easily skinned)
Linkworthy Content
Whilst a good linking structure might give you 5x to 10x the benefit of any incoming links to rank a few specific pages, you still need to have content people will link to.
For me one of the highlights of Tim’s blog are already the case studies.
Whilst I haven’t invested money in Stumbleupon advertising, the conversion rate to subscribers he achieved with $100 worth of visits seems about the same as with free traffic. From what I have seen so far, Top Stumblers are mainly interested in cool pictures and humor as one of Tim’s commenters has already pointed out, and are very much anti-commercial, especially anything to do with StumbleUpon optimization. It is very easy to get post content buried, in fact easier than Digg in many ways.
A post on optimizing for another social news site such as Digg however might not get buried by the sacred protectors of the SU realm, and is more likely to continue bringing traffic (that is what I have experienced anyway). I have also found support a little lacking.
Tim has also been looking at Adsense Arbitrage – I think the safe bet is to convert those low PPC landing pages into affiliate or other forms of CPA income, if the cost of clicks is still quite low.
Tim is a creative thinker, after all he was the one who started using Adsense site targeting on John Chows blog, which gave John the idea of using it on Problogger.net
Whilst Tim’s blog is only a couple of months old, I expect great things and lots of in-depth experimentation in traffic and monetization, so don’t forget to sign up to his RSS feed.
Update – Nofollow Those Dupes Plugin
I have now released a plugin that can be used to help in creating the “Sandcastles With Perimeter Wall linking structure called Nofollow Those Dupes
It is actually of benefit on any blog that doesn’t block duplicate content pages from being indexed.
Related posts UTW – Tagging Windows Tricks (pt 2) (14) WordPress Plugin: Nofollow Those Dupes (WordPress Windows Masterclass Continued) (13) Ultimate Tag Warrior Windows Tricks (pt 1) (18) Search Engine Glossary (a victim) (8) Revenge of the Mininet | 3rd Party content | Blog Comments | No Follow (15) Paid Links | Hindsight gives perspective (7) Nofollow | Windows & Dynamic Linking | Disclosure (17) In Depth: Google BlogSearch | Ranking Blog Documents Patent (18) How a Blogroll Can Still Kill Your PageRank (70) Toolbar Pagerank | Ball Linking (4)
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