My Blog Review

SEO Toolbar A Must Have For Any Serious Blogger !

SEO Toolbar from SEO Book is one tool you are definitely not going to want to miss when considering search engine optimization,  & the best part is, it is FREE!

The easiest method of showing you how important some of the tools are, that are available on this toolbar, is to run some checks on My Blog Review as an example.

Now I know that My Blog Review already ranks pretty well with Google & Yahoo and enjoys many top 10 rankings with both search engines, but just because I already have some great ranking, it does not mean that everything is fine and that I can now sit back & chillout ! SEO is constantly changing and as such it is an unwise man that sits back and believes everything is hunky dory!

My Blog Review Home Page:

Ok now at first glance you may think that the My Blog Review home page has very little in the way of problems, there are numerous keyword rich headings, keyword rich links, easy navigation, reasonable page loading time, so what’s the problem ? or for that matter is there a problem..?

The above image is a screenshot of My Blog Review, using SEO Toolbar’s Xray feature, using this tool has highlighted & shown me all the heading tags on the page, which as I have mentioned in previous articles, are extremely important !

Now I wonder how many of you can spot the major error on this page..? Well let me tell you, the home page clearly lacks a H1 heading tag for the title of the site eg ” My Blog Review ” at the top left of the screenshot is a logo image and not text, therefore it is not possible to use a H1 tag for the title. Now I do realise & I’m sure you can clearly see that there are other H1 tags in use on the page, in fact the Xray feature clearly shows me that the heading tag usage on my home page is completely wrong. What I should have for optimal SEO on this page is ;

H1 tag = Title of the site

H2 tag = Titles of categories (the ones in red)

H3 tag = Title in white under the red category titles

H4 tag = Sidebar titles

 

The above method of tag usage would give search engines the correct structure of importance for the various elements on the page & as such would also improve ranking.

WhoisDomainTools – Text Browser:

Now in order to double check the theory, lets use another tool accessible from the SEO Toolbar, first we select whoisdomaintools from the competition menu on the toolbar;

Once we arrive at WhoisDomainTools, we then select “site profile” & then scroll down untill you find the heading “Search Engine Preview (View details)”. By clicking the “View Details” link on the page, a new window will open which is a SEO Text Browser, this basically shows you what the search engines will see when crawling your page.

Now this clearly shows again that there is no H1 title being shown at the top of the page, in fact what it does show is that the first thing the search engines are reading is the navigation bar on the header, luckily the first thing in the menu bar is “Blog Reviews” but as this is simply plain text with no weighting applied to it, then the search engines will also see it as not all that important.

This then, as far as I am concerned, is a major flaw in this theme! I am now faced with either changing my theme yet again, or attempting to hack the theme in order to achieve what I want with regard to the heading tags. I was pretty satisfied with this theme up till now & as it has fulfilled all my other requirements, then I guess I will attempt to hack the theme before deciding to trash it!

I hope this little excercise has shown you how important it is to have a good selection of SEO Toolsat hand and had it not been for the Xray feature on SEO Toolbar, I may never have noticed this problem with my theme. This is yet another example of a designer focusing on aesthetics as opposed to SEO!

Steve Nickson | Create Your Badge