Thanks a lot!

Thanks for very detailed response!

I’m planning to develop my own theme framework (just for me), so I’ll try to work your advice into that. I guess it’s possible to make the first link (ie the header image) dynamic. Ie:

if (is_home())
{wrap in H1 tags and use keywords plus blog name as anchor}
elseif (is_single())
{forget H1 tags (wrap them around post title lower down via single.php) and use post name as anchor}

and other cases for Category pages etc.

Maybe I could use the tags or the slug (with dashes replaced with spaces) instead of the post name as the anchor for is_single?

If I were to do something like that, there’d be no need to put the header image link lower down in the source would there?

Lots for me to think about – thanks again!

However in theory single posts should be using the short title for the h1, as it is more specific, and if we are going to listen to the guys from Stompernet, each page should be optimized for only a single keyword, especially as every niche becomes more competitive.

I know Headspace has mass edit of tags, in some ways it works as an alternative to the Simple Tags method, where you can edit an individual tag, and it is changed for all occurances, but neither are perfect when you are editing lots of tags.

Simple tags probably needs to add some ajax, or remember which page you are currently working on. As it is, you make a change to one tag, and the whole page refreshes and you are back to the first listing of 50 tags – if you were working on the 20th page of tags, that becomes a major issue.

Looking at the source of your site, you’ve actually got the first link as your site/blog name, followed by your “subscribe” link and then your navigation. This is a problem that most WordPress themes suffer from in terms of SEO – to make matters worse, your main blog name is also inside an H1 tag (and is a link to your homepage). That’s not good f or SEO.

One of the aims of good SEO is to ensure that each *Page* is as tightly keyword focused as possible. The goal here is to try and get your keywords and content prominent on the page and not your blog name. This is done by ensuring that your Post/Page titles appear at the top instead of the blog name.

What tends to happen with most WordPress themes is that every page has the H1/link (the site name) is given priority and appears on every single page. This is probably because most theme Developers don’t actually know about SEO and simply copy the default Kubrick theme as the basis of their own theme.

While HeadSpace 2 can help to SEO your pages and add tags, keywords, meta titles and descriptions, it still doesn’t help you with the basic underlying data structure of your theme. There are some key elements (that I’m sure Andy will be demonstrating on his course) which need to be in place to really help your pages in terms of SEO.

What that boils down to is changing the way the code appears in your headers, index, sidebar and footer of your site theme and to precisely position various tags (like the first link and H tags) so that keyword prominence on the page is maximised.

Is this easy to do?

I’d love to say it was a simple matter of shifting things round. From experience, there’s issues with cross browser compatibility when it comes to CSS and stying things properly. Being a bit of a WP theme tinkerer myself, I’m pretty pleased with the overall data structure of my latest site (see the code for the posts/pages) as it’s taken quite a while to get the balance between positioning code and making it work for IE6, IE7, FireFox 1.5, 2 and 3.

If you’re using FireFox and are serious about SEO, then you should get the Web Developer toolbar – just so that you can strip away all styles and see how your site actually looks without any CSS.

So, basically, hiding links using CSS doesn’t change the source of your page. This is really the important point to understand when it comes to SEO.

Cheers,

Zain
PS: … and that’s just the beginning… just you wait – when Andy gets started on things like siloing and contextually related content or how to use different linking structures… Sheesh… that’s mindblowing!