| What do you think??? |
[eluser]boltsabre[/eluser]
Hey markonamission, Thanks very much for your feedback, and welcome to the forums! I hope you enjoy your CI experience! I'm glad to hear you didn't find any bugs, good to see my hours of testing wasn't in vain! And yes, you're completely right with the other points about display, it's a mess. I'm looking at launching a cleaner version of the site this weekend with luck, although we are already at Wednesday :-s Luckily it's just a few css changes, and alter the RHS social "$this->load->view()" view file and the changes are applied site wide! Just need to test the entire site for any edge cases where inline css may cause display issues. Thanks again feedback!!!
[eluser]Otemu[/eluser]
Not sure if you received this message as nothing was in my sent box, so thought I post here. Are you using VPS or shared hosting for your site or something else?? I just wondered as I been using shared hosting for all my personal sites as it so much cheaper.
[eluser]Ckirk[/eluser]
Hi mate, The functionality and look of the sight have been covered already so I bypassed that and had a brief look at your SEO. I ran some SEO spider software against your site and here's what I found: URIs There are some URIs with underscores. You should always use dashes instead of underscores but I think you know that as most of your site complies. Page Titles and H1 Tags You should keep these below 70 characters in length so that they can be read on search engine results pages Meta Description Again for SERPs you should keep these below 157 characters (including spaces). External Link http://www.wentworth.nsw.gov.au/ times out so get rid of it or find the updated version if it has moved Backlinks To rank up in the search engines you should have blog articles written which link back to your site. No blackhat stuff but sensible informative articles. The more websites linking to yours the more "interesting" you become to the search engines Blog After mentioning blog articles it worth mentioning that you should consider having a blog on your own website. Blogs are the king of the SEO world at the moment so to have a website without one will leave you at a serious disadvantage, unless your keywords are unique to you, which I doubt in this instance. Want your crawl data? I've saved the crawl data of your website so if you want to view it yourself let me know and I'll arrange for you to download it from one of my servers. I'll also let you know the software I used. There's a trial version but I don't think it would do a complete crawl of your site, however it should allow you to open my full crawl data file. Hope that helps
[eluser]boltsabre[/eluser]
Hey Ckirk, Thanks very much for the seo feed back. Yes, you're correct about the redesign, it's coming soon, but I've been pretty sick the last 3 days and haven't touched the code, hoping to have it finished by next weekend. Yeah sure, I'd like to have a look at the report, if you can send me the url in a PM so I can download it I'd appreciate that, it will make interesting viewing. But I thought I'd comment on a couple of your points, and clarify the potential seo impact. >> URIs That is a worry, I have code in place to do 301 redirects of all underscored urls to hyphened version. I'm hoping it just some urls in my assets folders (I have the odd image with underscores). As for the seo impact of rankings, having underscores instead of hyphens causes absolutely no seo problems. Back in the 90's it had some impact (google used to read underscores as "code", rather than a word spacer, but not the case now). The problem lies in "duplicate content" issues... if a url and be accessed by either version, and they both get crawled by google then it's seen as duplicate content, and excessive amounts of this can cause you problem. But thank you for pointing that out, I'll certainly be looking into your report and see what's come up. Perhaps the software is reporting urls before the 301 redirect kicks in (I thought I'd caught all underscores in my code, but it's possible some slipped under the radar). >> Page Titles and H1 Tags Yes, there will be some title tags over 70 characters in length due to the dynamic nature of some of the content, and some of the static content does have titles that go a bit over 70 characters. And why??? Google stills crawls keywords after the 70 character count, and they still help in ranking, even if google doesn't display them in the SERPs. Some pages it was simply impossible to get a "natural non keyword-stuffed" title under 70 characters. It's better to have a title 80 characters long that reads naturally then one that is 60 - 70 long, but just looks keyword stuffed. Having the odd longer title wont hurt, and will even help in the above mentioned situation, but yes, you certainly wouldn't want a site full of huge long titles. As for <h1> tags, all evidence shows that their ranking impact if absolutely minimal. And sure, yes, you should only ever have one (although html5 markup makes for some interesting situations, but that's another kettle of fish), and the more characters you have in your h1, the more diluted it becomes, but considering the minimal ranking boost of it, having 60 or 80 characters, in my opinion, is not going to make a difference worth worrying about. Time could be better spent on other tasks rather than analysing each <h1> tag across the site. >> Meta Descriptions Not even a SEO ranking factor - they don't help your search result placings at all (although I speculate that a keywords stuffed/spammy one may lower rankings, but that's just speculation). They simply help (or hurt if you've got a bad one) with your click through rate. My opinion that having the odd description over the magic "157" character (and each search engine displays a different number of characters) is not a problem at all. >> External Link Great, I'll look at that link. My broken link software (which I run every weekend) Xenu didn't pick that up on Saturday, but I'll have another look at it tonight. >> Backlinks Yes, well, enough said on that one... I'm fully aware of the complete lack of backlinks, about the start on them this week, I've got some contacts in several universities, looking to get some backlinks from their employment and "come to Australia" pages (extremely high quality and highly relevant backlinks, worth more than their weight is gold as the saying goes). Also got to hit up several friends and get them to post it on their blog, and some other stuff that I won't go into detail here. But thank you for your concern on this, it certainly is a worry at this point of time. Feel free to drop me a backlink from your blog if you'd like :-) You can even make it rel="nofollow", I'm more concerned about long term branding and exposure more than anything. Any website model that is solely based around rankings in google is bound for failure! >> Blog You'll have to explain this one a little better please, I'm not getting your point, specifically this line "unless your keywords are unique to you, which I doubt in this instance." Blogs are a good way of "getting new content" on your site, but honestly, google (specifically Matt Cutts) has stated on several occasions that this "new conent" thing is specifically related to several niches (ie, news sites, ticket booking sites, etc), not across all sites. A blog is something I'll consider later (I have more urgent pressing matters at this time), but to be honest, I don't think that they help all that much with ranking... so I'm sorry, but I'm going to have to disagree with your "Blogs are the king of the SEO world at the moment so to have a website without one will leave you at a serious disadvantage" statement. However, if you have any reference material on the subject of blogs and their impact of SEO performance, I'd be more than happy to read it, I'm always like to read SEO related materials. So, Ckirk, thanks very much for your feedback, and I look forward to reading over the report you generated (and in the PM can you let me know what software/service you used). If you feel any of my points above are invalid/incorrect please feel free to post back, SEO is such a vague area full of nothing more than speculation, I think that it is healthy to engage in rigorous debate and to keep an open opinion to other peoples perspectives and take on things.
[eluser]Ckirk[/eluser]
I'll get the file uploaded later today and PM you the link. As for underscores in the URI - unless you've seen something more recent than 2011 here's Google's Matt Cutts and his take on underscores. http://youtu.be/AQcSFsQyct8 According to him they still matter so it's best to adopt hyphens as a best practice method. H1 tags and Meta Descriptions - I meant these more as a visual thing than ranking. When each page is shown in google SERPs your target audience will see the content of each and google limits how much of it will display - hence trying to keep the character count below the figures I mentioned - or at least getting the human readable message across within those figures. Blogs - Not directly a page ranking thing either but it can help your rankings in the short term, when you have fresh content. The main reason for blogs though is to connect with your target audience through social media. You want to drive traffic to your website and search engines alone aren't enough to do that. Blogs will indirectly help your rankings through people sharing/retweeing your content etc. It's more Digital marketing than SEO but you'll have to forgive me for leading you to believe my last post was all about SEO. I rushed my post a bit - It was late and a nice aussie chardonnay was involved 
[eluser]boltsabre[/eluser]
>> According to him they still matter Yes, in a tiny way, he mentions things like "second order", "minimal impact" and such. Of course every bit help :-) And that's why I'd like to see that report (thanks for that, I look forward to your pm later)... I shouldn't have any! Interested to know if it's some images it's picked up, or it it's reporting urls before a 301 redirect has happened... I'll chase 'em down ;-) H1 tags are not displayed in SERPs to the best of my knowledge, unless you're talking about in preview or something??? I get your point about having un-truncated descriptions in the SERPs, but to be honest, I'm not that fused about it, the amount of truncating google does automatically anyway (so that the search keywords are displayed in bold with a couple of words before/after it) it's almost getting rare you get your own description displayed in the serps anymore! Re blogs, that's a fair enough point. It's something I'd like to do (for the engagement aspects you've pointed out), but have more urgent and pressing matters at this time... the bane of being a sole developer who works a full time! But yes, it's on the cards somewhere in the medium term. >> ...but you’ll have to forgive me for leading you to believe my last post was all about SEO.... Not a problem at all, nothing to forgive! Chardonnay eh, yes, we do do a pretty good "chardy" as we call it. Check out the Shiraz if you like reds, they're even better! Thanks for the input Ckirk! Looking forward to your PM/report. On a side note, why are you here on the CI forum / what are you building with CI?
[eluser]Ckirk[/eluser]
You have a PM I prefer the reds too but the girlfriend is a lover of white wines & being a scotsman I'm not fussy As for why I'm in CI - I've been using it for a couple of years now. Firstly just as a mess around but I fell in love with the framework & now use it to make administration systems to handle invoicing and integration with third party web apps etc. My latest project acts as a hub for Highrise,Freshbooks,Authorizenet and a couple of other 3rd party apps. He was tired of having to spread out his administration across them all so I've brought them together under one app, which automates a lot of his workflow. I've been proactive with this one in that I've replicated the data that all the third party apps use so that if for any reason one of the third party APIs falls over then no data is lost and background processing (cron job) will pick it up and sync the data with the 3rd party API when it's back up. With a bit more work the system will be able to run independently of the third party apps, making it useable on its own - that's the long term goal. My client may prefer to use the third party apps but I know at least one other client who could use this as a stand alone system - and probably will. The extra work should pay off. Either way I've enjoyed developing it.
[eluser]boltsabre[/eluser]
Hey thanks a million for that file, I'll check it out when I get home from work tonight! >> & being a scotsman I’m not fussy hehe, I like people who can laugh at themselves! But you should tell your gf to work on her palette, reds a amazing once you get a taste for them! That's a pretty interesting project you've got going on there, sounds pretty involved. Considering the complexity of the project, and that fact you've only made 10 posts on the forums, I'm guessing you're a pretty advanced programmer? Anyway, cudos to you, hope you get the stand-alone version up and running soon!!! And thanks again for your input, greatly appreciated!!!
[eluser]Ckirk[/eluser]
I joined not long before you, when the codeigniter forums weren't built on this new snail site (bad ad for EE, if you ask me) but I was on a different name. I forgot my login and after a couple of failed attempts at retreiving my password CKirk was born  Think I'd only made around 50 posts so I'm not as active as you here. Anyhoo. glad to have helped, even if it was just a tiny bit |
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