Wordpress offers owners key requirements for SEO, however like all websites, SEO shouldn’t be something that you bolt-on, but instead should be something that build into the design from day one. In terms of Wordpress this equates to not only turning on various modules, but also deciding on your page and article structure in order to enhance your SEO.

Clearly if your pages, categories, and tags are not relevant to you main keywords then clearly this would pollute the SEO you are trying to achieve. Often before starting your website, be it Wordpress or otherwise, you should think clearly about what you want to achieve and even, perhaps, take a good long look at your competitors. What have do done well, how effective has it been; what have they done badly, and what has been the results of this.

In our opinion Wordpress offers some of the most effective SEO add-on’s available for any CMS or Blog, with many other being developed independently as we speak now. It also offers you the tools that you need in order to plan and implement effective SEO for your website (tags, categories, fancy-URLs, etc).

 If you have a website and need to know how many people are visiting, where they are coming from, and what areas they are viewing (etc) then you need Google Analytics. There are some other metrics available but with Google being the world’s number search engine it makes sense to use Google metrics, especially if you use or intend to use Google AdWords.

Screenshot of Google Analytics

 In order to setup Google analytics on your website, just follow this guide for full details.

• The first thing you need to do is sign-up for a Google Account at: https://www.google.com/accounts/ManageAccount
• Once you have an account setup, log into it and find the section called ‘My Products’.
• In the ’My Products’ section, Click the link called Analytics.
• Once in the ‘Google analytics’ area, look for (and click) and link called ‘Add Website Profile’
• In the ‘Add website profile’ area, fill out the ‘Website Address’ and ‘Time Zone’, then click Finished.
• In the next page you will see a lot of text very similar to this below:

<script type="text/javascript">
var gaJsHost = (("https:" == document.location.protocol) ? "https://ssl.” : “http://www.”);
document.write(unescape(”%3Cscript src=’” + gaJsHost + “google-analytics.com/ga.js’ type=’text/javascript’%3E%3C/script%3E”));
</script>
<script type=”text/javascript”>
try {
var pageTracker = _gat._getTracker(”UA-1110811-25″);
pageTracker._trackPageview();
} catch(err) {}</script>
 

• This code will then need to be added to every page in your website; If you are a programmer then this will offer no problems and would probably be placed in footer.php or some similar type of included file.
• If you are using a Blog, CMS, or other ‘prebuilt’ application, then you will need to find out where the footers are, or perhaps look out for a module, component, etc which adds Google analytics to your website; You will need to put the code above into this.
• If you’re website has been created from scratch the you will need to look for the following tag: </body>, and place the code above it, on every page that needs to be monitored.
• Once you have done one of these, then check the Tracking Status (on the same Google page as the analytical code, at the top of the page).

Once the Tracking Status shows that Google is receiving Data then you can be confident that Analytics is fully setup and ready for you to view your metrics (after around 24 hours of setting it up).

I first came across Magic SEO for OS Commerce around 8 months ago whilst looking for an add-on S.E.O module for OS-Commerce. After doing a bit of research it seemed as if this module not only did more but also had less conflicts with other modules; Not that we actually use other modules but that’s not the point. Additionally this module offered a free dynamic site-map which is obviously key for search engine optimisation (s.e.o) into the major search engines.

So what has been the result? If I were to tell you that we have now purchased 5 modules then you should get an idea of how effective we feel that this has been! Additionally, if you were to know that I myself have created bespoke PHP5 code to handle search engine friendly URLs (SEF URLs) and yet have still have advised purchasing this module (mainly because we are using OS Commerce) then the answer should be beginning to take shape.

Magic SEO (for OS Commerce) is clearly not only effective but well written, and I guess, more importantly well supported. If you contact the owner and author, Jiri, within a very small space of time you will confirm the excellent level of support and help given to get this module up and running.

Jiri, was not only helpful and advised on un-related matters, such as Zend Optimiser (or Optimizer, for you Americans!) but also on support to get the module installed on your hosting setup. Indeed, the initial hosting that we were using was causing problems; the solution, Jiri fully supported and helped us to get this module successfully installed and setup on our e-shop.

Now after installing and setting up this module a number of times, I am pleased to say that in 99.9999% of all cases in takes just around a couple of minutes to get going. So, I personally would recommend this module, and have, and would definitely rate this as ESSENTIAL!

For years we used nothing but shared servers, not through choice but rather cost and lack of technical (inter-networking eg Linux) abilities. On some providers they were issues, such as security; we once wrote a script which managed to display ALL username cpanel logins for the server we were on, not on purpose but by complete accident whilst playing about with new PHP functions.

On other hosting providers, we found other problems such as when we did a lookup on the amount of domains on our shared server - some had over 1,000 cpanel accounts running! This is fine, unless alot of sites require access to some core services such as MySQL etc. For instance, most providers that over-quota (as above) will not allow the same amount of DB accesses - which basically means at some point some of the DB connections will fail for some accounts.

For a client that I worked for this was clearly unacceptable as they had over 25 E-Commerce websites, and one lost connection could lose the customer and potentially hundreds or thousands of pounds.

Another factor for this client was using very modern applications such as Magento, which basically crawled to a halt under a shared server. Both of these problems were solved by a dedicated server, managed and setup by DataFlame, who are clearly the best hosting providers in the UK, in our opinion.

There are of course other reasons why a Dedicated Server is very useful, including SEO - such as setting up similar content websites under different IP addresses - although with google recognising links from the same Class-C, this is become less so.

But the greatest benefit, of course, is the fact that you get complete control over the whole server as well as the software that it is running - from my point of view, think Zend Framework!

If like us you have say 5 or more log-ins per domain (hosting log-ins, email, social sites, applications, etc) and have so 10+ accounts, then trying to remember passwords is a complete nightmare.

Now rather than use insecure, easy to remember (and easy to hack) passwords, we would instead recommend the excellent, free, open source password manager KeePass.

By being open source you can download the code and check it is not doing insecure or unsafe things with your essential log-ins!

Also if you currently use E-Wallet, AnyPassword, Oubliette, PINs, or PasswordSafe - you can now import your existing password database straight into KeePass.

Now with a new beta version, as well as many very useful modules or add-ons, not to mention ports on to other operating systems - including PocketPC or SmarthPhone,  now is definitelythe time to utilise this ESSENTIAL software.