Webmastery 101: How To Cut Fat And Build Muscle

You’ve taken great care to present your website to the internet. You tweaked and fine tuned until you were satisfied that your design and layout showcased your content in the best possible way. Are you done? Do you just sit back now, churn out content and watch the traffic grow? In a word, no.

There’s a lot more going on with your website underneath the hood than the superficial skin the viewing public sees. I am not trying to detract from the importance of quality content and good web design, not by any means. I’m just saying that if you stop there you’re not giving your site the full attention it deserves to be successful.

Equally, if not more, important than the impression you make on your readers is the impression you make on the countless spiders that will crawl your site. Machines don’t care about your tasteful design or your thoughtful, well-written content. If you’re serious about your site’s success, you need to spend some time making sure that Google thinks as highly of you as your readers do. Otherwise, the task of building that readership will be a much steeper hill to climb. Great content is first and foremost, but great content that no one sees isn’t going to get you or your site anywhere.

You’re thinking “Geez, I just want to blog. I don’t know anything about html and all that under the hood junk.”. Don’t worry. You don’t need to be fluent in PHP to do some fine tuning that makes your site more legible to bots and gives your content it’s best shot with the search engines.

Here are a few things that won’t take a lot of time, will make your site cleaner and more legible for the bots, and with any luck, just may improve your SERPS:

• Use robots.txt to trim fat In the public html directory of your website there is a file named robots.txt. This includes a list of directories within your website’s ownership that should not be crawled by the spiders. Got a directory named downloads full of files that your content links to? How about your template directory? Got a test installation of some CMS you were wanting to try? You don’t need that stuff included in the Google search results. It brings no value to your site, dilutes your content in the eyes of the search engines and gums up your search results with crap that no one needs.

  Here’s a sample robots.txt:

  User-agent: *
  Disallow: /administrator/
  Disallow: /cache/
  Disallow: /components/
  Disallow: /downloads/

  Got a directory you want excluded? Just add another Disallow line. The goal here is to have the briefest, cleanest listing with a search engine that you can achieve. You want the emphasis on your site to be the content, not the arcane hierarchy of directories contained by your CMS.

• Put your sitemap on a diet The tendency is to think that the bigger your sitemap, the better, as Google is going to have more of your pages indexed. Bzzzzzzt! Wrong. You want the emphasis to be on your content, not how many superfluous pages your site generates. Trust me, 150 strong entries in a sitemap will make a bigger splash than a bloated 500 link sitemap. Include the links for all of your articles, but DO NOT include the links for all your category pages.

  Example:

  YES
  www.yoursitehere.com/seo/your-great-article

  NO
  www.yoursitehere.com/seo/8

  On top of that, category pages are constantly changing as you add content. You don’t want that surfer to go to the second example looking for that article, because now it’s on page 10, and most people will just bounce instead of looking for the content.

• SEF urls Search engine friendly if you were wondering, but more sensible to humans too. A slight detour, as this is human-related and not an issue for spiders. If you’re using WordPress, and a lot of you are, the default SEF url generation adds the article date to your SEF urls. Like this article, www.connectedinternet.co.uk/2009/02/24/webmastery-101-cut-fat-build-muscle/. My only cause for concern with this naming scheme is that you may lose some readers on older material. If I am a surfer looking to read about a given subject, as I scan the search engine results I may or may not notice the date on your article. I do when I’m surfing. If that article is a year old, I may fly past you down to the next results because I am looking for something more current. Maybe, maybe not. Why give people a chance to bail? That is one potential affiliate or Adsense conversion lost. I don’t think having the publishing date in the article url is a positive, and it may very well be a negative.




• Fix all your broken links Use a third party service like LinkTiger to scan your site for broken links. You wouldn’t drive a car with a dead spark plug, don’t let your site fill up with broken links. Google and surfers will both find them, and it doesn’t make your site look good to either.




• Valid HTML and CSS Does anyone really notice if you’ve taken the time to eliminate all the errors and warnings in your site’s code? Yes, they do. People and spiders both. Not because they’re so impressed with your leet web skillz, but because everything is going to work for them. As in life, sometimes you win by not drawing attention to yourself. Use the validators at W3C to check your pages. Checking verbose output and source include will show you where your problems are, and with a little digging in the PHP files for your particular template a lot of these simple errors can be resolved. Not up to it? Not the end of the world. Try anyway. You just may learn something about HTML and your CMS in the process.

These tips aren’t going to quadruple your RSS subscribers or Adsense revenue. Not by themselves. They are, however, important facets of your site’s success, just like content, design and monetization. It’s the little things like this that can distinguish the great from the good.

Scrape around under the hood a little. I bet you’ll find some unsightly flab you weren’t aware of. Time to cut some fat and get lean.