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!

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.

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!

DFC: templates for Navigation options

There are several options you can use for navigation in your site.  You can find descriptions of these and images of what they look like in the "Pages" section of your dashboard. Look under the "Pages" section and click on "All Pages" . Now look for pages that are called "Template #......." These are unpublished "draft" entries that only the owner of the site can see when they are in the dashboard.

Each template has an image of what a navigation model would look like. There are instructions on how you can use each  model and suggestions as to how a couple models could be combined if desired.  The model that is used on your site ( the requested model called "big button link") is also there so that if you change the style but want to revert to the old style you can. The requested model is labeled as "Template #5 Navigation: Big Button Link".

Out of all of the models the least complex is "Template #2: Exposed menu". This Template requires one change and to add a new image the owner to the site need only create a new page or post for the material.

The second most simple model is the "The Fake Sidebar" model . This model pushes the video right and leaves "prev" and "next" arrows below left. A menu for the three sections of the portfolio goes right. In the model I've provided there is room to expand the size of the video. The alignment of the arrows can be adjusted by changing the margin of the left most arrow. Remove the arrows and you will have jut a sidebar model for navigation that does not need to be updated when you add a new image.

The most manual is "Template #3: Arrows and Growing Menu". Template #3 is also the most transparent model as the code used to create it is very simple; that is to say it is the slow but steady way.


Remember that with all models you will need to add a thumbnail to the main pages of films, commercials, and showreels that links back to the new individual page you create for your content.

Above: Navigation #1: text and image

Above: Navigation #2: Exposed menu

Above: Navigation option #3: the All Image option

                                          Above: Navigation option #4: fake sidebar

Above: Navigation option #5: the Big Button Link w/ all thumbs 

at bottom as one, big button. This is the design requested for the site.

DFC Custom Notes: Some basic html

As you go through your DFC site you'll see some basic html. It will be helpful if you can start to recognize what some of these mean and here's a bits of code you'll see very often. Go into any post or page and click in the "html" tag to see the code that shapes some of your site.


<p></p>      


...That open and closes a paragraph.
You'll see this for basic text that appears in a site:  <p> hello there! I am your site!</p>




<h2></h2>  
  
...Any tag that has "h" and a number is a bit of text that will appear with a variation in size.  The "h" stands for heading and the number stands for a size. The lower the number the bigger the size!


<iframe></iframe>


...These tags surround Vimeo content.


<p style="text-align: center;"> stuff stuff stuff</p>


...You can "style" text in a variety of ways. Most of the time I'm styling text by aligning it, though there are many things you can do to text with this tag.


<a href= "http://site.com></a>


...<a> stands for "anchor" > Anytime you see "<a href=" used you are looking at code that's pointing to a link. Below is an example of a link that has a lot of extras thrown in. The link below specifies a title for the link (that will appear on mouse over), tells that an image is what's being used in the link, tells where the image comes from in the host directory, and tells how large the image is. Wheh... lots of info in there....


<a title="ZEN ESTILO" href="http://digitalfilmcolorist.com/123-2/"><img class="alignleft size-medium wp-image-19" title="ZEN ESTILO" src="http://digitalfilmcolorist.com/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2011/08/ZEN-ESTILO-300x225.jpg" alt="" width="180" height="136" /></a>


There's a really great source for learning about html and css called W3schools.com
This is a free site and even if you don't go through it in great details it can be used as a quick reference for you to understand what a bit of code is doing in your site. Just cut and paste a sample of code from your site into the W3schools search box!

DFC custom notes: site structure

In Building the DFC site the Fullscreen them Graph Paper Press Template I used posed some pretty interesting dilemmas...

First of all the home page or landing page rules the site. That's core to understanding the site because all organization bows the the restrictions imposed by this home pages which pulls images for display. It;s the first thing a visitor to the site sees so in this case, this page gets to be the big boss.

If you look at the home screen you will see two sets of thumbnails. At top are movie thumbnails, and at bottom are post thumbnails. This segregation of "page" and "post" images feeding into each area allows me to add images and updates to each location and have some sway over where the images go.  Generically this template pulls images from only posts.

The second factor about the home page that has influenced the organization of the site is that the images on the home page appear in order from most rest to last. That means if you put up an image it will pop up on the home page. But what if you don't want the new image on the home page? The nice part is that pages and posts are easy to organize by editing publish dates and in some cases using plugins to order pages.

For more info about how I ordered pages ( with the home page in mind all the while) see the post in this blog posts titled:

Adding order to posts in Wordpress

and

Organizing pages via Wordpress plugin