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Rate my sites Usability, Readability, SEO, Etc.

by mrgr33nw3ll
6 replies
  • WEB DESIGN
    • |
Hello all,

I am a new member, but not a new reader. I decided to register today after years of reading this forum. Anyway, to cut to the chase, I would like your opinions on our sites usability, readability, SEO, and whatever else you might decide to review. Looking forward to your reviews!

Site: mytechteam.net
#rate #readability #seo #sites #usability
  • Profile picture of the author stormyweather
    I think you could improve your on page SEO a bit. The title tags need to be more like search terms IMO, and the meta descriptions should reflect the search terms again. Also on the page, sub-headings are in strong tags rather than in h3 tags.

    Also I don't think the canonicals are working properly - each of your blog repeating pages each has itself as the canonical which means you are getting the same title/desc multiple times in the index. But then I often get all this wrong and usually only go back to fix it once I've got a site launched. There's a lot to do to set up a WP site well.
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  • Profile picture of the author mrgr33nw3ll
    Thanks, stormyweather, for the insight. Yes, WP does take a bit to set up beyond just the usual settings. Although, Im not sure what you mean by blog repeating pages. Do you mean pages which have older posts and new posts? The subheadings are in H2 and H3 tags. Do you mean the service features?
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  • Profile picture of the author raxe
    URL Canonicalization is a way of defining a preferred URL. As you probably know a website can have a URL with or without www prefix. In both cases it usually takes you to the same location, however in reality these can be two different pages. If you don't specify canonical URL, google will see duplicate content because your www and non-www sites will be identical and therefore repeated.

    The best way to specify canonical URL is to create a permanent 301 redirect on your web server to a preferred domain using .htaccess which will allow you to permanently select the canonical URL (.htaccess is in case of apache server). Regardless of which address user types in, it will automatically change to canonical URL. The page rank is also transferred. Be careful while using this kind of redirect tough. It is a powerful SEO tool, however if not used properly it can have catastrophic results.

    There are also other ways of specifying canonical URL:

    - Maintain consistency of URLs across your entire site and when asking people to link to your website, provide them with your preferred URL.
    - Create link rel="canonical" attribute in the <head> section containing canonical version of your URL. It prevents Google from indexing duplicate content, but most importantly it transfers the ranking to the canonical URL. This tag is now recognised by all major search engines (Google, Yahoo, Bing, Ask).
    - Include only canonical version of your URL in sitemaps. The more clues search engines will get regarding which domain is canonical, the better.
    - Specify canonical version of your URL in Google Webmaster Tools (also Yahoo and Bing Webmaster Tools). Under 'site configuration' click 'settings' and choose 'preferred domain'. By doing this, search engines know which URL is canonical, and even if they encounter non-canonical version, they will automatically convert it to canonical.
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    • Profile picture of the author newmediavideos
      Originally Posted by raxe View Post

      URL Canonicalization is a way of defining a preferred URL. As you probably know a website can have a URL with or without www prefix. In both cases it usually takes you to the same location, however in reality these can be two different pages. If you don't specify canonical URL, google will see duplicate content because your www and non-www sites will be identical and therefore repeated.

      The best way to specify canonical URL is to create a permanent 301 redirect on your web server to a preferred domain using .htaccess which will allow you to permanently select the canonical URL (.htaccess is in case of apache server). Regardless of which address user types in, it will automatically change to canonical URL. The page rank is also transferred. Be careful while using this kind of redirect tough. It is a powerful SEO tool, however if not used properly it can have catastrophic results.

      There are also other ways of specifying canonical URL:

      - Maintain consistency of URLs across your entire site and when asking people to link to your website, provide them with your preferred URL.
      - Create link rel=”canonical” attribute in the <head> section containing canonical version of your URL. It prevents Google from indexing duplicate content, but most importantly it transfers the ranking to the canonical URL. This tag is now recognised by all major search engines (Google, Yahoo, Bing, Ask).
      - Include only canonical version of your URL in sitemaps. The more clues search engines will get regarding which domain is canonical, the better.
      - Specify canonical version of your URL in Google Webmaster Tools (also Yahoo and Bing Webmaster Tools). Under ‘site configuration’ click ‘settings’ and choose ‘preferred domain’. By doing this, search engines know which URL is canonical, and even if they encounter non-canonical version, they will automatically convert it to canonical.
      This is great. Thanks for posting this. I've always wanted to understand this properly! Will do this when I get a minute
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  • Profile picture of the author mrgr33nw3ll
    Thanks raxe, that is set up properly on the site unless you guys are seeing something else I am missing. WP has the functionality built in.
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  • Profile picture of the author mrgr33nw3ll
    Would have loved to have gotten more reviews, but thanks anyway.
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