8×10Gallery.com

Archive for the ‘Maintenance’ Category

In making restructuring changes to the site I went through and made modifications to the discussion forum. I started the forum some months ago, but I haven’t given it my full attention. I have of course been working on the picture galleries and this section. I have decided to try and pull the forum from the ashes so to speak and make it worthwhile.

I’ve deleted most of the original content and boards and created new discussion areas which I hope you will find interesting and informative. I’ve included topics I find interesting such as camera discussions, lens discussions, software, favorite places and even a place to post some your favorite pictures. I figure you get to look at my photos, so I made a section where you can post your own.

To start things rolling I’ve posted a couple of topics that I’m personally curious about, such as commission from people who buy your photos online and whether it would be better to get the Sigma 50-150mm or the 18-200mm. If you have a few minutes maybe you can stop by and offer me your thoughts.

I would really like to see the discussion area grow. If there is a topic you would like to see please let me know, I would be happy to create it.

You can jump straight to the forum by going here:

http://www.8×10gallery.com/forum

Over the past few months (since I decided to start this site) I’ve been studying the art and craft of Search Engine Optimization (SEO). It’s a fascinating subject, but truly does reveal that the Internet really is just smoke and mirrors. Aside from that, it lead me to make all sorts of changes to the structure and format of the site. None of the things you normally see, more of the filenames, the image tags, the keywords and descriptions associated with the pages. It’s an ongoing process, but my work has finally started to bare fruit.

With the help of the CoffeeCup Google Sitemapper and UltraEdit, the site has well over 1,000 pages indexed and is now beginning to show up in Google searches for certain keywords. Many of the pages began to disappear after I made several critical errors (spaces in the names of files, incorrect titles for pages) as I described previously. All those pages have finally been purged out and the correct pages are now being indexed. I have also found the magic PING commands to let the search engines know when I’ve done a major update. Now I can coax all the “bots” to come and pay me a visit without having to manually submit everything.

I’ve been working on the site for about 5 months now and things are moving along quite nicely. There is steady growth within the site and I can see more pieces of the site becoming available through searches. It’s said it takes about 6 months before a site is really even visible through Google. If that’s the case then I am right on track and things should continue to flourish from here.

I do have to say that Google makes it so easy to submit and update a site, whereas Yahoo! makes things a little more difficult. We won’t even discuss MSN. They have so far to go before I will even recognize them as a search tool.

After going through the code of the template and dissecting it as best I can, I believe I understand what went wrong. I just wanted to document the problem in case someone else ran into it.

In short, the problem was every blog entry had the same title. For example, they would all say “8×10Gallery – Amateur Photography Blog”. The title I gave each article was nowhere to be found. This really doesn’t help anyone trying to find information. It basically means that every blog entry in Google would have the same name and you couldn’t tell what the article was about. Not good.

In Wordpress, each article is supposed have the name of the site, the name of the blog and the name of the article. This is controlled through the template you use and is located in the file Header.php. The actual code looks like this:

This is where the problem comes in. The Header.php file for the template I was using didn’t have this code in it. I’m not sure if this was an old template or I downloaded a test version or what the deal was, but in the end, just wasn’t working right.

After realizing I didn’t even have the right code in my template I quickly went to the Web and looked for a new one. The first step was just to try a new template and see if the blog titles changed. They did. So I knew it was the template and not the way I set up the blog; always a good sign! A bigger plus, it was easy to fix.

With a new template in place, everything was working again. Next it was time to make the actual change I went to the Web for in the first place. The default Header.php should be changed to:

This gets rid of the words “Blog Archive” in the middle of each entry and gives you a blog title of:

8×10Gallery.com – Where did the title of my blog go?

This optimization is all over the Web so you should have no problem in finding more information on this. You can do a search on “Wordpress Blog Title” and find plenty of tips on optimizing your blog. I bookmarked a great site in my previous entry if you want to jump straight in. This site even shows how to change the “About” text that I posted a few articles back. I wish I would have found this site sooner!

As with all the other SEO tips out there, you want to make sure your Blogs are getting indexed correctly; otherwise no one is ever going to find what you’re writing about. For me, the problem was a template that just didn’t parse the data correctly. Now each entry should be different so you can find me easier!

You can find more info at both of these sites:
http://www.downloadsquad.com/2007/01/15/wordpress-the-complete-post-install-checklist/
http://www.johnwiseman.ca/blogging/wordpress-seo/brilliant-wordpress-seo-tips-for-bloggers-and-webmasters/