Robots Meta And The PR Bleed!

Published August 5, 2012 | By R & D Art

In a world where the competition for search engine dominance is fierce, achieving and keeping a high Google PR (Page Rank) is of the utmost importance. PR is an indicator of your site’s placement in search queries; how high you come up on a given Google search. Achieving a high PR is not something that happens overnight. The algorithms used to determine PR change on a regular basis and are secret and proprietary.

There are things that anyone can do to increase PR. Writing content (blog posts) of at least 100 words per post on a regular basis is one of the best ways to increase your PR. Using keywords in your post, words that relate to your post and your business, is another way to improve your PR. These are two simple tools in that often used SEO acronym that can help you to increase your PR; there are many SEO tools that should be used. Once you have achieved a respectable PR, you want to do what you can to maintain it.

One of the best tools in helping to maintain your PR is the Robots Meta. The Robots Meta plugin is active on all R & D Art websites. This excellent plugin prevents PR bleed. You may be wondering, what is PR bleed? PR bleed occurs when all the pages connected to your website are left as ‘index,follow.’ The problem with leaving all your pages as ‘index,follow’ is that your PR from your main site is bleeding into other pages and sites. For example, you may have noticed that sometimes a person’s profile page or login page may have a PR. Most of the Google juice that is creating this PR is from the bleeding of your main page. In essence your pages, which are what a profile page, login page, and any other page that is not your main page is considered, are using your main page’s PR to increase their own PR. This should sound similar to linking and backlinking, which is beneficial, except that this bleeding is internal and is not beneficial. Linking is good, bleeding is not. To prevent PR bleed use the Robots Meta tool to allow you to decide how your PR is concentrated and used on your website.

If you use the Robots Meta plugin,then when you are finished writing your post or creating a page, but before publishing it, look to the far right just below the categories tab and you will see the Robots Meta tab. This tab has four options with the default being ‘index,follow.’ For the blog posts you write this is the option you want to select. What this means is that Google will index your post and your links and will create follow tags. This is the most permissive of the settings which allows your PR to bleed onto your links, this creates quality internal and external links in your post. The second option is used quite often when you are creating pages, a bio page for example. While you want the page to be indexed in Google you don’t necessarily want it to be leeching the PR from your main site. The third option is the ‘noindex,follow’ which does not allow a particular page to be indexed by Google but does create quality internal and external links. And the last option is ‘noindex,nofollow’ which basically creates a page that is only accessed by a direct method. This direct method may be by clicking on a menu tab on your website or a link you provide. These pages are not searchable and do not provide links.

In conclusion, I would highly recommend utilizing this feature. You work hard to generate and keep a good PR. This is an easy way to concentrate your PR on your main site. Stop the bleed, use Robots Meta.

Posted in Blogging, Linking, Pages, Posts, SEO, WordPress | Tagged follow, Google, index, links, no follow, no index, PR, PR bleed, Robots Meta, SEO | 4 Comments

Make Your Links Open In A New Window On Your WordPress Website

Published June 9, 2012 | By R & D Art

One of the best things aside from the versatility of a WordPress website is the ability for visitors to do virtually everything without ever leaving your site. This eliminates the need for the back arrow on your browser. This also allows you to have numerous tabs or windows open at once for ease of movement between those tabs or windows. *Let me clarify: tabs are multiple sites opened in a single browser window while windows are opened in their own browser window*

To make pictures or text that you are linking within the body of a post open in a new window rather than directing a visitor away from your site there is a simple but important step that you must remember when creating the link. To link pictures you must select the image by clicking on it. You are then able to insert the link by using the For text, you highlight the text you wish to link and then click on the to attach a link. NOW FOR THE STEP THAT MAKES YOUR LINK OPEN IN A NEW WINDOW! When you click on the link icon a window will open in the middle of your page. This window is where you put your link’s URL. This is also where you can make your link open in a new window. Directly under where you put the link’s URL is the ‘Target’ field. This field has a dropdown arrow that allows you to make your link open in the same window or in a new window. Select ‘Open Link In A New Window’, hit insert, and you are done. Now your link will open in a new window.

Posted in Linking, tutorial, WordPress | Tagged links, new window, wordpress | Leave a comment

A Facebook Slight Of Hand

Published April 17, 2012 | By R & D Art

I am a big proponent of Facebook. I use it all the time for both business and personal reasons. With commitment to the different blogsites/websites that I maintain, it is important that I maximize the productive benefit of my online efforts.

To this end I have been using the share this tool or button . Do not misunderstand, I think this is a great tool for sharing your posts across many different platforms. I have been using this as opposed to an RSS feed because not everything I write I want fed to every network or platform I belong to. The people who come to view one of my photo posts might not have any interest in my local restaurant review. For this reason I selectively share some but not all posts. So back to the share this tool.

I noticed something interesting the other day when I had used this tool to post to my Facebook wall. The way that Facebook has integrated the share this tool makes it appear that when your article, posted on your Facebook wall using the share this tool, is clicked the visitor is taken to you to your actual blog or the site where the article actually appears. This is not the case. As you can see from the four images below there is a definite and important difference. The first image utilized the share this tool and the second two images used a direct link.

In the direct link (see image below) that I posted on Facebook, when the reader clicks on the link they go to my post’s actual location. If they choose to comment on the post, they actually comment on the post and not on my Facebook wall. This important difference is a big deal because a visitor to my Facebook page who is interested in the article and clicks on it becomes a visitor to my website and is counted in my site’s statistics, otherwise my website’s stats might be kept artificially low. Another very important thing is that when a visitor comments on the post from the Facebook page it goes on your wall whereas a comment on the post’s actual location goes into the comment section of that post.

I am writing this post because I know a lot of people use the share this tool and in many applications it is a very good tool. I in fact intend to continue using it for many applications other than Facebook.

Posted in SEO | Tagged facebook, links, SEO, share this, sharing | Leave a comment

WordPress Web Design

R & D Art offers WordPress web design on a per project basis. We build a custom theme from ground up based on the specifications that you provide. ALL of the custom themes that R & D Art builds are designed with the full approval of our clients and are specific to that client and may not be reused without the consent of that particular client. During the design process we also setup the WordPress platform on your server or ours, based on what you needs are. You can always use our Maintenance and Training or Hosting, Maintenance, and Training products if you need. Once the platform is correctly structured on your site, we will build up to 5 pages for you. This will be the main page, an about page, a contact page and any other 2 pages that you desire. All of the content has to be provided by you. While we will spell check the verbiage, we will not optimize it for SEO under this basic service.

*All pictures for the website need to be provided by you and either you need to own them or have permission to use these images.*

WordPress Web Development

R & D Art offers WordPress Web Development on a per project basis. This product envelopes many of our individual projects in one. We custom price each project based on the needs of the client.

With WordPress Web Development, we combine the basic WordPress Web Design with our WordPress SEO, WordPress Security, WordPress Performance, adding plugins that are tested to work great for SEO, performance, and security, up to 10 pages built with your content added and optimized for SEO as well as spell checked. There are other processes that we do not share out.

We also offer branding for social media FaceBook and Twitter accounts.

*All pictures for the website need to be provided by you and either you need to own them or have permission to use these images.*

WordPress Web Performance

Web performance deals with the speed of your website. We utilize a tool from GTmetrix in order to run a detailed report of your website. With this report we can determine all the issues that keep your PageLoad Speed and YSlow Speed scores low. Once we review the report we sit down with the site owner to review the report and formulate a plan of action for your site and needs.

If you would like more information or would like to hire us to test your web performance, then click on the link.

WordPress Webmaster

R & D Art now offers WordPress Webmaster as a monthly or yearly option. As a WordPress Webmaster, we basically take care of everything that is technical with your website. When we first take the site over, we go in Google Webmaster Tools and Bing Webmaster tools to make sure that your site is setup correctly in both. We then monitor your site once a month to make sure that everything is performing how it should. In addition, we do a review of the SEO of your website and then make suggestions based on your goals. We then work with you to implement the processes that you want to use. We also help to optimize any blogging post or new pages that you create for optimum SEO.

We also provide our full Security package to your website. This will provide any clean ups to your site from malware or from being hacked for free as long as you are current with our services. (Once you leave our Webmaster service, we no longer support the security of your site).

If there is conflicts with plugins or themes, we work directly with the creators to help to resolve this matter. If you are looking to add new plugins or change your theme, we actually test each one for you to make sure that they are compatible to your site and will not have an adverse effect.

As your WordPress Webmasters, we handle issues that clients have in using your website. If you have an eCommerce store and people have issues ordering, then we look into those issues for you. (In the beginning, we review your entire site and go over potential issues and the cost associated to fix them if this is not a site that we created.) If you have a static or blog site and a visitor has an issue with accessing portions of the site, they will be contacting us. You will still be copied on the contact form so that you can follow any issues.

In a nutshell, any and everything that deals with the technical side of your site is handled by us. Also, anyone that chooses this product will not have to carry our Maintenance and Training and this will be part of our service to you. However, if you do not have your own hosting, there will be a charge for being on our server.

WordPress SEO

Search engine optimization (SEO) might be one of the most important services in the internet business today. While there are many tactics webmasters use to get their site or those of their clients found in the search engines, R & D Art only employs white hat tactics in our web SEO services. With that said, we do require a minimum 6 month commitment for our Web SEO service.

If you are interested in getting more information about hiring R & D Art to manage your WordPress Web SEO then click on the link.

WordPress Web Security

In today's Internet environment, the possibility of your website succumbing to malware, viruses, or even a hacker is increasing every day. With the fact that powerhouses like the D.O.D., GoDaddy, Yahoo, and numerous other major players face the same issues, this webmaster knows that if a hacker wants in, they will get in. It is my job to make that as difficult as possible.

If you would like to learn more about our WordPress Web Security, then click on the link.

Hosting, Maintenance and Training

R & D Art Hosting, Servicing, Support package basically provides you with top of the line hosting, servicing and support. We provide the server space, run all the updates included the WordPress Platform updates, backup your site daily, run a database optimization each time we upgrade to clean out the "dead" files out of the database, and provide unlimited support in order to teach you how to use the WordPress platform.

Hosting - With our hosting portion of the Hosting, Maintenance, and Training package, we offer you 1000 MB of storage for your site. We don't allow for multiple sites on the same CPanel. You are also limited on the bandwidth for the month, however, there is ample enough bandwidth for your site to perform adequately.

Maintenance: Our maintenance of your site is done Monday through Friday and entails us performing any plugin, theme, or platform updates. We also optimize your database each of these days as well. This helps speed your site up. Lastly, we delete any spam messages on your website.

Training: When someone first starts using WordPress, there always seems to be tons of questions. We believe that you can go to many different places to get the answers that you need. While there are a lot of answers out there, they are not always right. While we will never lead you to believe that we have ALL the answers, we will make sure that you understand if we do not have the right answer, we will find the correct one for you. The great news is that training is always provided when you subscribe to our Hosting, Maintenance, and Training package.

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