| Jere Matlock Blog

I made a lot of notes while attending the SEM PDX conference, held 2/22/2013 at the Governor Hotel in downtown Portland.

I confirmed again that we are already using SEO best practices, but we do need to implement some things to continue in the vanguard of effective white-hat SEO.

The main take-aways from SEM-PDX, for SEO professionals (at least for me) were:

• Need to change the coding of the many websites for which I am responsible, from HTML 4.01 transitional (the easiest to code) and XHTML1, over to HTML 5 and CSS 3.
• Use the open graph meta information on sites—which apparently only really works well on HTML 5 sites, hence the previous item
• Start implementing the schema.org “breadcrumb” coding on sites that already have breadcrumbs in them.
• Use the “organization” and “address” tags from schema.org wherever there is an address in one of the sites. (Have to go back and put this in on all sites – it’s simple but time-consuming)
• Don’t use the “micro formats”—instead, use the schema.org coding.
• Make sure the “author” tags are in place for all sites, tying it in to the G+ author bio pages. The “Publisher” tag doesn’t work the same way, so don’t use it.
• Implement “twitter cards” on all sites that are active socially.
• Implement the “video” tags from Schema.org on all sites that have videos on them.

I have recently finished a fairly big project moving Christmasgifts.com over to WordPress.

It was an interesting project, but it took a long time to do. WordPress is not my favorite kind of platform for an ecommerce site (this particular site sells advertising) and it used to rank very highly for the search term “Christmas gifts” at Google. It ranked #1 for years, helped by EMD (Exact Match Domain name) and by having thousands of links to it from websites linking to the free Christmas Clipart and free Christmas music there. Several attempts to re-optimize the old site (which I built in php and mySql originally in 2003, I think) were made over the last couple of years, to no avail. Suddenly the thousands of links to the site looked like an “unnatural link profile”, although they were completely natural!

So we have completely changed the way the site works and looks, with a very nice new graphic design in the WordPress theme created by Matteo Galbiati of www.webandseoguru.com. He also found and modified some plugins so they work for our purposes. We used the Simple Ad Manager, which is kind of clunky but seems to work okay.

Matteo was a joy to work with – very responsive and he always had a solution for some fairly difficult technical issues within WordPress.

The new site is much better for shoppers now because it shows actual products and prices. It works better from an SEO perspective because visitors are not being send off to other sites through ads — they click on products and can purchase them right away. The site continues to offer great advice on what Christmas gifts to give to various kinds of people, but now you can SHOP! which is a much better user experience.

We’ve done yet another request for reconsideration at Google, and are looking forward to being back on page one of the search results for our search terms once again.

My server is getting old and all 35 websites on it need to be transferred to another server. I’ve been working on little else for the last week. I expect another three or four weeks of this and I’ll have all the sites moved. It would be easy if the sites were simple; but few of them are simple. For the last ten years I have specialized in hosting complicated database-driven websites that use php and mySQL to do some amazing things. A lot of these sites rank very highly at Google for their search terms (keywords) and when the sites move, I have to make sure that nothing I do will affect those rankings.

In the meantime, I have found a couple of new quotes I like and put them on my permanent “quotes” page. Enjoy.

Yoost DeValk (the hopelessly nerdy guy pictured at right) is the guy who wrote the SEO plugin for WordPress. He’s someone whose SEO advice I listen to with rapt attention.

Last week I listened to a live webinar of Yoost talking about how to actually use his SEO plugin for WordPress, and it was very informative and helpful.

The kind folks over at SEO Brain Trust who sponsored the webinar originally, have put the webinar up on a web page so anyone can listen to it now and learn the techniques Yoost recommends for optimizing a Word Press website. Here’s a link to the Yoost Devalk SEO Plugin webinar.

If you use WordPress, you’ll want to listen to it so your WordPress site can rank better.