Question about SEO and fixing a screwed up blog heading

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9/26/2010 8:32:31 PM
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"All that is gold does not glitter, not all those who wander are lost;" --J.R.R. Tolkien

Question about SEO and fixing a screwed up blog heading

Hey guys ... again,

Just a few questions regarding my web site.  Firstly, I'm really struggling to get my SEO straightened out since our name is so obscure, but I'm aching to have other folks join us.  Where is the thingo on the main page that will allow me to set up the SEO properties so that everyone can see us and that will make our page come up even if someone types something as simple as blindness resources or something like that.  The only way we've been getting out is by folks getting our web address from me.  Another thing that is getting to me is the fact that in our blog section, I kind of screwed up when adding a new blog.  I somehow have it where the heading is the same as the first blog post under it in title.  Is there a way I can fix that?  Thanks for any help you folks can offer.  It is really much appreciated. 

 

Regards,

Katherinebb

9/27/2010 7:08:53 AM
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Re: Question about SEO and fixing a screwed up blog heading

Hi Katherine,

To get google to crawl your site you need to submit your site map urls in google webmaster tools.

See this document for more details:

http://www.mojoportal.com/submitting-your-site-maps-to-google-and-bing.aspx

The Blog has a list of posts and a detail page for each post, it sounds like you are confusing the 2. When you add more posts the list will show the most recent posts up to the number of posts to show configured in settings. If you click the title of a post in the list it goes to the detail page.

Hope it helps,

Joe

10/15/2010 12:22:13 AM
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"All that is gold does not glitter, not all those who wander are lost;" --J.R.R. Tolkien

Re: Question about SEO and fixing a screwed up blog heading

I may very well be confusing the two.  I'll tell you though.  Maybe I should have been more detailed.  The top of my blog; the first post is called "my MySQL mistake and how to fix it". Somehow, the section heading also got titled that as wel.  I want the heading to say something like "technology tips" or something like that.  How can i change the title of the heading/  Thanks. 

10/15/2010 7:58:06 AM
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Re: Question about SEO and fixing a screwed up blog heading

Hi Katherine,

It looks like you used  "my MySQL mistake and how to fix it" both as the title to your blog as a whole and also as the title for a blog post.

To change the title of the blog as a whole to "Technology Tips", look for the settings link next to the blog title, click the settings link, then on the General tab you will see the "Feature Instance Title" which is the title of your blog as a whole. you can edit it from there.

Hope it helps,

Joe

10/18/2010 11:29:49 PM
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"All that is gold does not glitter, not all those who wander are lost;" --J.R.R. Tolkien

Re: Question about SEO and fixing a screwed up blog heading

Oopsies.  Thanks.  I think I did!  I ought to fix that at this moment before folks start catching on to the fact that I don't know one hundred percent what I'm doing LOL.  Administrators aren't supposed to make mistakes, are they?

11/11/2010 8:29:58 PM
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"All that is gold does not glitter, not all those who wander are lost;" --J.R.R. Tolkien

Re: Question about SEO and fixing a screwed up blog heading

I know that this one's been a long time since action's hit it, but I followed the prompts for URL submission on Bing and submitted the URL of my home page to them since they didn't ask for the site map address unless I did the XML configuration file.  That's on my list of things, but I figured that for now, our homepage would give them something to play with.  Well, the bad news is that it hasn't really, or at least not at the top of results for things like blindness accessibility, blind access, blind access and support network (our subtitle), and others related to that.  What did I do wrong?  The only way we come up at least on Bing at the tippity top of the list is for someone to type in our name directly.  I wonder why.  Do you think that if I redid our homepage it might help in Bing finding us?  The only time it mentions blind access and support network is in the subtitle heading. Will search engines look for those?  Thanks. 

 

Katherine

11/12/2010 7:00:19 AM
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Re: Question about SEO and fixing a screwed up blog heading

Hi Katherine,

Just submitting your home page to Bing is not going to do much for SEO.

You really need to submit your site maps to both google and Bing as described here:

http://www.mojoportal.com/submitting-your-site-maps-to-google-and-bing.aspx

Note that there are multiple site maps to submit, one for cms pages and one for blogs.

You should also make sure you use meta descriptions on your pages and blog posts.

Your titles, meta descriptions and actual content should also have the words you are expecting to get search results from.

Accessibility is a pretty generic term and probably a highly competitive one, it may take a while to get any search index placement on a term that generic. It is good to use more specific terms and make sure your titles, meta and article content contains it. For example you have an article about an accessible ftp server but that is neither the page title nor the article title nor is it reflected well in the url since that is based on the title.

http://www.raeder24.org/recommended-ftp-server-at-both-an-affordable-price-and-which-has-a-completely-accessible-interface.aspx

that is a very long url and page name. If the page name and heading was simply "An Accessible FTP Server" and the url was also like that with 

http://www.raeder24.org/an-accessible-ftp-server.aspx

and your meta description also had something like "Our review of an accessible ftp server"

and your article also used those terms a few times in the context of the article. you can mention in the article that it is affordable and any other thing you want to say about it, but it is better to use succinct titles page names and urls that target specific phrases that you hope to get search placement on and don't include much else except in the body of the article.

Then if google and bing are indexing your site you have a ghost of a chance of coming up on  a search for "accessible ftp server", but still not likely to get  placement on a search for "accessibility". 

I will say that I get much more traffic from google than bing though I submitted my site maps to both, and I think this is true in general that many more people use google than bing so I would focus on google first and bing second.

You home page is where you should have the most generic terms that tie together the other related but more specific terms. So if you site is primarily about accessibility you should emphasize it on your home page in headings, meta descriptsion, and article/summary text. Having "Accessiblity" in the title of your site would help as well and if you could get a domain name with the word "accessiblity or accessible" as part of the domain name it would also help. I don't know what is available but ideas like accessiblesoftwarereview.com or something of that ilk would be good, shorter is better but it may be hard to get one that you want.

Hope that helps,

Joe

11/22/2010 8:03:17 PM
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"All that is gold does not glitter, not all those who wander are lost;" --J.R.R. Tolkien

Re: Question about SEO and fixing a screwed up blog heading

Thanks.  A couple of things though.  Firstly, what is meant by the term meta description, and secondly, I didn't know if I could change the URL  titles.  That's interesting.   But though accessibility is very much our primary focus, it is by no means our only one.  We have also general technology tips in our blog, as well as if we see things that are interesting in technology, we'll put it up there, such as latest security and technology articles that we find interesting, or we're planning on having a section for various downloads such as possibly music related things, podcasts and live reviews of programs, live tutorials of operating systems, and others.  All of it though, will have something to do with the blind, whether it's showing sighted individuals that we can do something thought impossible by the sighted community, or just giving tips to the world.  So in essence, we are a support site with an emphasis on blindness accessibility, after all, our full name is Raeder24: The Blind Access and Support Network.  Are theere any other things you would advise for us that maybe don't have as much to do with organizing the site as much as they do with us being legally organized or something like that?  Something like The Blind Access and Support Network LLC or something?  That seems a little out of range, yet who knows.  And how do you find all of the site map addresses for each part of the site so that I can put them in the configuration file, seeing that's how these search engines are wanting me to insert it.  At least Bing is anyway.  I'll try to focus more on making titles more intuitive and more search friendly.  And I'll definitely put in for google.  Basically my hope is that whenever somebody inserts something related to technology into a search engine, we will come up on the blindness side of it.  Remember, we're support as well as accessibility primary. 

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