SEO for Digital Film Colorist: Wordpress SEO

This posting is about creating SEO for use in a Wordpress site. This site uses a  Fullscreen Graph Paper Press theme and Wordpress 3.2.1


I've used several SEO related plugins to help with the SEO on Digitalfilmcolorist.com.  SEO can be built in part by adding a few features like a site map, meta tags and validating html which I've done.  Perhaps most important is good content. You can improve your search-ability by having lots of good written text content on each page. That means at some point you might want to think of what sort of text descriptions you could include somewhere in your site. For an all around SEO it also helps to have lots of links on other sites pointing towards your site (browsers read this to mean your site is important) so if you can link from other sites to this site, or ask other friends or associates to link to your site you can improve your ratings.  Wordpress can tell you more about SEO here.

I submitted Digitalfilmcolorist.com to Google and Yahoo. Submitting a site description to a browser helps them find and list your site properly and more rapidly than if it is left to be discovered by browsers over time. I last submitted your site on October 9, 2011- it should not be done more than once a month, and each submission can take up to 10 days ( or as few as two) to show up as changed in a browser.  You can submit your site to Google here.  You can submit your site to Yahoo here.  Read here that it does not make a difference if you submit and resubmit your site often. It is something that should be done when significant changes are made to the site.

Meta Tags have been created for your site. Learn about meta tags here.  I used text from your bio and a definition of color grading from Wikipedia to generate some additional common text so that if someone searches color grading or digital film coloring they will hit on this very popular string of text that is also associated with your site:

"Color grading or colour painting, is the process of altering and enhancing the color of a motion picture, video image, or still image either electronically, photo-chemically or digitally."

This phrase appears only in meta tags and will not be visible in your site, but will show up in the site description when browsers search for you or "digital film colorist" or "color grading".  I used an online tool for taking the bio text of your site and  I gathered basic descriptions of the movies you have worked on and loaded these into a keyword generator. The keywords used in your site are the most popular words that can be used in association with your site. That's a basic description... You can change the text in your site description and your keywords by changing the  description in the Add Meta Tags plugin. Keep reading to learn about this plugin...

The text on digitalfilmcolorist.com is very minimal. Increasing text could increase traffic over time. In particular you may try to use important words frequently that you suspect people will be looking for in your site. For example, the name "Paul Byrne" and the words "digital film colorist". If the name "Paul Byrne" appears 10 times on this site and 3 times on another site,  a browser will take you to the page with ten mentions first.

The meta tag tool used on your site is named in the Plugins section as Add Meta Tags. You can change the info in this section by looking in the "Settings" section of your blogs dashboard. In this 

menu click on "Meta Tags" and you will see all the info that this Plugin manages.  Read more about SEO and  this plugin to 

learn how to manipulate this section.  You'll need to read about how keywords and meta tags work in order to make 

relevant changes to this section.

Another SEO element that has been added to your site is a site map. Read about what a site map is and how it works here.

A plugin has been used to build a site map for your site. Look in the Plugins section of your dashboard. The Plugin in use on your site is Google (XML) Sitemaps Generator for WordPress.  You will need to read about this plugin and about site maps in general to make relevant changes to this plugin. To make changes Click on the "settings" section of Plugin. 

That should get you off to a good start!

Backing up your Wordpress site

Note:  Short and sweet, I've added this to this post as one of the better, really easy examples I found on how to backup your site with Filezilla:

Hello, I'm Dave. How to back up your site using Filezilla FTP

There is a plethora of material written about backing up your site so I'll let the pros do the talking.  You can download your site via an FTP client and I suggest Filezilla- it's fast and free and easy to use. Here's more on the backup process... you'll want to backup your files and your database. Both can be downloaded in about 10min.

Backing Up your Wordpress Site - this link contains many options for continually backing up your site. Choose one that is right for you, or backup your site after you make additions or changes on a case by case basis.

here's a bit about FTP clients and Filezilla

and here's a page about using Filezilla.


Download, save, copy as many times as you like to as many locations as you like.

To download a copy of the MYSQL database I simply logged into GoDaddy and into the FTP file manager. I went to the appropriate folder labeled

_db_backups

I downloaded the folders labeled "dig....." there are two folders with this label. I downloaded them and saved them both after archiving the MySQL databases.

Creating a local copy of your site: setting up PHP or a dummy site

Here is a link to setting up PHP on your Mac. It is a bit of a process but will allow you to try out edits on your blog before you upload them.

Here are instructions for the same process for a PC.

Another option I am fond of is creating a dummy site. I create a dummy site and load stock images and plugins to a site with the exact same parameters to my own site. I test things here before I edit my professional important site.  This Dummy site method has been extremely helpful and allows me to work completely online. This way I can quickly test options live and  run a manipulated page through multiple browsers.

Ghost in the Shell: Visual Editor in posts hides navigation

Posts are funny things. They have a few features that Wordpress keeps enabling and then disabling every few times it releases a new version and this time the "<prev" and "next>" buttons are automatically disabled. Maybe that's for the best. When they are enabled they are hard to customize and move around. The code for manipulating them is buried deep inside the Wordpress core. There have been a number of plugins that try to solve the problem but if you use both posts and pages in your site and want the "prev" and "next" buttons to look alike on each type of publication you are out of luck: plugins add navigation buttons for either posts or pages but I haven't seen any that added the same sort of button for both so  a user is left to manually build navigation buttons if they can't make the menu work as they would like.

In this case though I get the feeling of "can't live with 'em , can't live without 'em". In making my own manual navigation at the bottom of the posts pages I use the words previous and next. Wordpress seems to pick these up and hide them in the Visual editor, making editing a bit of a pain. Here everything must be edited in the HTML view.

One must click "edit post" avoid viewing the "Visual" tab go straight to the "HTML" view and add new links manually there.

I'll keep looking for a solution for this, but until then copy and paste the general code form previous posts into a new post and edit links by cutting and pasting them in place. I've listed this issue with Wordpress codex.


Oh Wordpress.

Ghost in the Shell: Fighting off comments!

Well I've had highs and lows with hiding post comments.  Several plugins failed to do the job and now I've pulled another and added a new one that seems to have 5 star reviews and about 7K downloads which is promising.

This one is called One Click Close Comments and it lives up to it's name.  Install this plugin and look at the "Posts" section. Click on "All Posts" and see that the plugin has placed a small red or green dot in the info about each post. Simply click on this and status will change. Green means comments are GO and red means comments are CLOSED.

Then check your post pages. A default message of "Comments are Closed" will appear.

Now go into the "Appearances" section. Click on "Editor". Go here only if you know what you are doing. Make sure site is backed up before you make any changes.  Look for <p></P> with "Comments are closed." message. Simply remove message! Don't change anything else. This time comments have vanished without leaving a trace and that's something worth celebrating.

Ghost in the Shell: Firefox might hate your .tiff file

While Safari and Google Chrome don't mind, Firefox might not like to show your .tiff file.  Avoid using .tiff files and instead use

.jpg

.gif

and

.png

filetypes. Firefox seems to digest these just fine.  Don't be fooled by the fact that you can indeed upload a .tiff file while using Wordpress in Firefox. When you get to the site, your image won't be there!

DFC custom notes: developing on a subdirectory, hosting on a root

I recently added files to the root of a host site that helps to direct my root web address to the subdirectory folder where I developed it. This is an easy process and takes about a half hour to do.

Visit the Wordpress codex and you'll find this advice. For my own transfer I started at step 7 of this instructional page:

http://codex.wordpress.org/Giving_WordPress_Its_Own_Directory

Then I came back and followed the advice of Wordpress guru Chris Coyier, from his nifty

book Digging Into Wordpress:(he is using "blackmothsuperrainbow" as his subdirectory, cuz he's

awesome, so substitute "wordpress" for "blackmothsuperrainbow" in the
below)

"You’ll now have to log in at
http://mydomain.com/blackmothsuperrainbow/wp-admin/, but WordPress
will be in control of the root just as if that were its actual
location. Once you have installed WordPress and logged in to the Admin
area, go to Settings > General and ensure that the settings for your
WordPress address (URL) points to
http://mydomain.com/blackmothsuperrainbow/ and Blog address (URL)
points to http://mydomain.com/. "

Now visit your site--- and Wordpress is neatly tucked away.  Check all of your links as certain plugins can cause make this switch over read a few links in a different way ( I'm not sure why). When I changed my website I had to update two links. Other than that the switch was a breeze!