Most often sites are designed with a graphic header, especially blogs which come with all sorts of funky header images. It is often an image of the company logo occupying the full-page width or a nice looking picture that covers the entire width and stands 100 or 200 pixels high. The reason why people do this is to give that unique look to your blog. There are guys who argue that it even gives your blog that individuality, that visitors can even recognize your blog from that header image. True, even I’ve used it in the old times (remember the green header?)

Well my recommendation is that, don’t do it!

The upper part of a page(above the fold) is a very valuable place. Be it advertisement or placing important content that will get user’s instant attention. You should insert your most important keywords in this area for best seo practice.

In case of a graphic image, that prime position is wasted since search engines can not make good use of knowing your content from the images(except their ALT tags). Sometimes you may come across completely absurd situations: the header contains text information, but to make its appearance more attractive, it is created in the form of an image. The text in it cannot be indexed by search engines and so it will not contribute toward the page rank. If you must present a logo, the best way is to use a hybrid approach – place the graphic logo at the top of each page and size it so that it does not occupy its entire width. Use a text header to make up the rest of the width.

This is particularly effective, if you had to put in a logo or a picture of your’s for that “branding” while wanted to save space for SEO. Try to use the space maximum for describing what your site is about or try a descriptive sitename.

You can use the CSS to make custom H1 tags for the header and this will make text appear like the image, so the same effect of header image can be achieved while you are using the best SEO metrics. But using a header image to cover up the entire header space with just the ALT tags is not at all a good idea, though it looks good, what lies beneath is actually what counts when

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Forget creating..selecting a wordpress theme for your blog itself is a big deal. When you have too many options, it’s just a task tedious. And for non-technical people, tweaking the CSS code, or redesigning the header template is quite hard.
Always wondered if there is a theme builder software available for wordpress. And I had been asking many designers if they would recommend one for me. But in vain.
All of them used two or more softwares like dreamweaver and fireworks mixed with some self coding and CSS to generate their themes. Well, I could not afford to giving in so much time to design a theme for myself. Better said - I’m lazy.
All I needed was a WYSIWYG custom theme builder that will allow me to drag and drop my designs, select the colours of the fonts and background, select a two- column or three column template and just put in the content.
Well, after a good boring research only to find loads and loads of designers who promised to build me themes for very cheap rates, I found this cool tool.

It’s a custom Wordpress theme generator, that makes theme designing for wordpress as easy as playing tic-tac-toe.

All you need is to select the text and background colours…select a template, two or three column, select the text scheme,select the menu layout and presto you are done! (There are more options) It shows a live preview of your theme while selecting the options.

Then it allows you to download the theme in zip format and the files separately. All you need is to upload the theme files to the template folder.

So if you want to design a wordpress theme just at the snap of your finger..try this wordpress theme generator tool.

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Let’s talk today about good and bad menus first. Good menus are those that are SEO friendly, bad ones are those that are not. Simple logic.

When dealing with clients, one thing that’s common to all, is about the use of fancy javascript navigation menus, that troubles me most. If you use one, please refrain from using it. If you are a blogger, there is very little chance that you are using one. But the JS enabled menus are mostly found in portfolio like pages.

A few words about portfolio pages. They are a gold mine for onsite optimization, there would be many wrongs. They are all frills and no stuff. They are stupid. They make lot of noise.

Many a times, they have this animated JS enabled menus that are not crawlable by bots. Big mistake and out subject of talk today.

Crawlers by default, avoid anything that’s Javascript enabled and Ajax. This is one fallback of modern crawlers, even the google one. They haven’t deviced a technology that will help them crawl the contents of JS enabled elements on a webpage and AJAX. They had a problem with Flash, but it is almost rectified now.

• Javascript/AJAX powered navigation menus may look cool and attractive to the eyes, but avoid them whereever possible. Instead use CSS and you could create almost similar spectacular and eye-catching menus.
• Don’t use images for making menu images, instead try CSS, it’s cleaner, quick and easy to manage.
• If it’s completely necessary, keep the JS menus, but submit the linking pages to google.
• Avoid sound effects please, it’s so 90’s!
• Use text to link to pages in the navigation menus if possible.
• Place the navigation menus wither on the top, or the left hand table, or at a place where crawlers won’t miss it.
• Don’t embed them in frames - big mistake!

So the idea is that Navigation menus should be simnple, crawlable, easy to navigate and thus serving the purpose. Let them not be too fancy, complex and JS enabled. It defeats the purpose.

You can find excellent resources on making CSS Navigation menus here
CSS Tutorials on Navigation menus CSS Menu help High quality CSS Menus

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Ensuring that you have a SEO friendly layout is very important because, even if you have great content, and you use a fancy SEO unfriendly wordpress template, then your content may not be highlighted/indexed well on the search engines.

Let’s see what exactly are SEO friendly wordpress templates.

As i had mentioned in an earlier post - a two column template is optimal for feeding food to the crawlers.

Three things to note in the design are -
- What does the crawler see first?
- Does the wordpress template highlight the keywords?
- Does the wordpress template tell the crawler what’s important and what is not?
- Does the wordpress template say “bye” to the crawler?

Enough for creative ideas- let’s go technical!

- What does the crawler see first?

Don’t misunderstand this with what you see first on the page? When a spider crawls your page, it sees the code, and according to the code, what does the spider see first?
It is recommended that the spider sees your articles/post first.And not the category links or sidebar.
To ensure this, there is a neat trick!
Just leave a blank column if you are following a three/two column template at the top.See more instructions here.This way, the crawler will jump to the articles first, and then move to the links sidebar.

Another way to curb this is to use a template with a right hand sidebar.

- Does the wordpress template highlight the keywords?

Okay, so you have a keyword rich title and a keyword rich article. You see yourself on the article that the keywords often repeat, and the ads triggered on Google Adsense too is related to the keyword. Cool!
But do you know if the crawlers see the keywords highlighted?
If you want the crawler to see the keywords highlighted, use the following tricks!
- Instead of BOLD tag, use the STRONG tag to bold the keywords.SE crawlers will ONLY pick up the STRONG tag keywords and will avoid the BOLD tag. So if you are seeing the keywords in bold text, it is only a visual appearance - convert all those BOLD tags to STRONG today, if you want the SE’s to pick up what you want to show them.

- Does the wordpress template tell the crawler what’s important and what is not?

Damn - how do we get that done? Easy. Make sure that your template uses H1,H2,H3… coding for texts.
The idea is such - there are keywords on your blog out of which some are more important and some less important.If you put the text in H1 tag, it means that is the most important keyword and if you use H2…H3 and so forth,the importance decreases accordingly.

It’s like feeding the spider in a course. First the Starter, then the Main course, then the Dessert…you know it’s easy to remember that way.

- Does the wordpress template say “bye” to the crawler?

When the crawler finishes crawling your blog, what does it see(the last thing)? This is your blogs “bye bye” to the crawler.I recommend that you provide the best highlighted stuff at this point. So that the crawler remembers what your site is all about.Unfortunately, many template uses the footer.Big mistake! Use a 2.0 footer with H1 tags and links to your best posts.These will be crawled and indexed with more importance.
Damn - after all why do you want to waste your real estate at the footer?

Now, these four things combined decides if you have a SEO friendly wordpress/blogger template or not.Check today if tour template meets the requirements if not, switch to a new template today. Man, there are lot’s available these days. Isn’t it?

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Google sees your blog through it’s crawlers - you knew it ! But there are differences in how a human visitor sees your site and a crawler like Google. Which is why it’s important for you to optimize your wordpress/blogger blog so that crawlers see what they want and humans too.Neither one should miss a point.

So the questions are

• How does a crawler see your blog?
• What are the things that a crawler looks for in a website?
• What are the things that it tags your blog with?
• What are the things that it’s not supposed to see?

Let’s see. Firstly, let me introduce you to a handy tool that helps you do this task. It’s called the Poodle Predictor. It shows you whichever site you want in diagnostic mode as Google spider sees it. It’s also called the spider simulation test.

- A crawler verifies your meta tags first and foremost, collects information in the CONTENT and DESCRIPTION tag. Also the TITLE attribute, this is very important as this may be the first thing by which Google tags your blog. So make sure you have the best Title and Description tags ready when a google crawler visits your wordpress/blogger blog.

- Links.
Links are the next most important thing that a google crawler looks for in your blog.So everything in the a href attribute will be collected by Google. And it does an analysis there - how many of them in a page? What content is available in those sites? What is the anchor text used?
It’s recommended that if you are really serious about optimizing a particular page, make sure that out of the total number of outgoing links in your blog(probably the blogroll column), at least half of them relate to your primary keyword.
For Example - Your primary keyword is “Search Engine Optimization Tips” then in the outgoing links make sure that the anchor texts used are related to the primary keyword like “Search Engine Optimization” and “Search Engine Optimization blog” etc.
As the number of primary keyword related outgoing links increase, the more the chances of strengthening your primary keyword on the page.

- Textual Content and Headers
Next is your textual content and information contained in your wordpress/blogger blog.There are more subcategories here like the keyword density and header use. The google crawler scans for number of H1 tags in your textual content.H1 tags are considered most important piece of information by Google crawler. So make sure you have the primary keywords in your H1 headers. Importance is also given to other header texts, and the importance decreases with the tags like H2, H3 and H4.

- Spamming/ Keyword stemming
As you know Google is clever in detecting spam, it keeps a keen eye on whether there are any overly repeated keywords on your blog and links. So please don’t link to link farms/spammish websites and don’t use keywords beyond the density of 6%. Anything more than that is pure spam to google.

The Spider simulation tool tells you how many H1..H2 etc tags are seen on your blog, how many ALT tags are available, what are the keywords present in it etc. It colors those particular codes that a crawler sees and marks it up for you. So it’s easy to make out as to what’s seen and what’s not by a crawler. Check it out and have fun!

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Read further only if you are serious about SEO.
Have yo got a footer text on your blog? Most of you do.

What’s a footer text?
The small code of text you see below your blog template.
Well, it isn’t always small text. That was the old times. These days, we have wordpress templates that have large footers.

You thought this is just an “out of the box” thinking eh? Not really.
In SEO, footer text carries some importance.As much as the link density on that page.If you have read my earlier post on what’s a best SEO friendly layout, then you might have noticed what i said there.

- Make sure that the last and the first thing a crawler sees is the most important thing to you.

So the first thing a crawler see is your header image/links/about you url? Well, I’ve also talked about how to keep things in place and without re-arranging how to get crawlers crawl the best portion of your page.

So, let’s talk more about footers and how they will help you rank high?

Footers are of two types(as of now.)
1 - The traditional small text footers(like you see here) mostly with the copyright text and a few email links etc.
2 - The bigger,evident web2.0 style footer text with category links and content.

If you have the first type of footer - nothing wrong.In fact it’s easier to tweak to a crawler and get our stuff done.But if you have the second type of footer(web 2.0 style), then you have an advantage - you attract the crawlers as well as human visitors - the golden rule of SEO!

Be it first or second type, what you should be bothered about are the following things.
- Is your keyword present in your footer text?
- Is there a link with your keyword?
- Is there the right keyword density within your footer text?
- Is it clear and evident to your human visitors?
- Does it look spammy?

Now you’d have got an idea on what’s important in a footer and what’s not.
In the footer text - please avoid special characters and unwanted content.Like the copyright notice.Instead, please add more relevant content.A footer text is as imporant as your body text content.

So i would not recommend a footer text like this - “Yourdomain.com Copyright - 2007, Your Address, and your Signature damn it!”

Instead i would recommend this - “Yourdomain.com, Your keyword or your blog description with your keyword with a link to one of those most important pages in the blog.”

So you get the idea.If possible, keep the category links at the footer, this will help the crawler know what the stuff is on your page.This s because, crawlers give more or same importance to the footer text(or what they see last on the code) than the content on the page.

Now it explains why a web2.0 styled large footer is preferred to a traditional style copyright statement right? But if you have one panic not. Just change it to a well drafted statement embedding your targetted keywords and links or categories even.

So much for an evil tip on How to rank high on search engines.

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