Replies to This Discussion

Permalink Reply by Greg Thomson on April 10, 2011 at 11:41pm

I am a big fan of Woothemes. I use their themes as frameworks and build child themes from them. Within the framework is some pretty good SEO functionality. It does lack the XML sitemaps. But after watching a video from the guy managing hosting for Envato I don't use sitemap plugins anymore as he found them to be a huge resource hog.

Permalink Reply by Greg Thomson on April 10, 2011 at 11:50pm

This one seems pretty good for on page SEO http://scribeseo.com/. Though kind of pricey.

Permalink Reply by Jeff Sebring on April 11, 2011 at 5:37pm

I would be wary of anything that is checking keyword density. Yoast's plugin checks some key areas to make sure they contain your focus keyword like title, heading, etc,. 

 

I tell authors to write naturally, but use good headings. Links, good markup and site architecture should take care of the rest. When writers start looking at keyword density, the quality of content goes way down.

 

Sitemaps have never been a problem for me. They aren't going to rank your website any higher, but good to tell google what your most important pages are on a deep site with less than optimal architecture. They can also be a way to ensure that Google knows who the originator of your content is, if you are being syndicated.

 

If building a sitemap is hogging too many resources, I would get a bit better server.

Permalink Reply by Greg Thomson on April 14, 2011 at 12:04pm

I fully agree with staying away from focusing on keyword density. Getting people to a site is only part of the equation, and this is where many SEO pros need to vary their approach. What is the point of getting tons of people to your site if most bounce?

 

Scribe is a bit pricey, and I have never used it. But, it was one that I was aware of that added functionality outside of the theme framework I typically use. Otherwise, everything but the sitemaps is taken care of.

 

One thing I have found with Wordpress vs other CMSs I also use is that Wordpress is a bit of a resource hog. We can always say, ratchet up the server, and  increase memory available to PHP. But I have also come across issues with this too. The CMS my business partners and I now focus on for small businesses has a much smaller footprint, and thus requires less brute force (which results in lower cost for price sensitive businesses).

 

I do agree that sitemaps is a very good idea. I wish the current plugins could setup on a CRON job rather than update whenever content is changed. In most cases, resource use is likely minimal for the existence of the XML sitemap plugin. I best approach might be to use the plugin until resource use becomes an issue. Then evaluate it.

 

I am in the process of deploying a hosting platform based on Wordpress Multisite. I have been very focused on the scalability of this system, hence why I weight resource use so much when it comes to Wordpress. The install has been split into 256 databases and we have heavily modified one of the caching plugins to make the thing move along fast. But then it is also set up on a scalable VPS, so we can brute force it too :).

Permalink Reply by Jeff Sebring on April 18, 2011 at 5:56pm

Caching should take care of all of this without need for that many DB's. Even maybe using a caching proxy so the only thing your server is doing is creating the cache and running back end stuff like analytics.

 

In an extreme traffic situation, you could just put the db on a different dedicated or virtual server. MySQL can handle quite a bit of data. The only time I've heard of it having issues is when a friend of mine was trying to random sort with 9 million rows.

 

What is this other CMS you are using? 

Permalink Reply by Greg Thomson on April 20, 2011 at 3:48pm

Where the multi-db comes into play is to isolate sites from eachother. So that one site doesn't slow way down when another is getting heavy traffic.

 

The other CMS is PyroCMS. What is emerging so far is really good. Seems like the creators took the best of Wordpress and combined it with the best of Expression Engine. Pyro is written with the Codeignitor framework, uses object oriented programming, and uses AJAX in a lot of places on the backend. We are impressed so far with how smooth and fast it runs, and that it can be a good starting point for web applications like Expression Engine can. Our backend developer is currently working on sets of modules to extend it for various industries and to integrate it with more social networks.

Permalink Reply by Jeff Sebring on June 19, 2011 at 6:54pm

Interesting Greg. I would love to check out PyroCMS, however I have taken on Ruby on Rails for more custom applications. I have enough trouble limiting my intake of new technology. Maybe I'll pick your brain about it sometime.

 

A new CMS for Rails recently hit 1.0, RefineryCMS. This is basically an extention of Rails, that allows theming like Wordpress, and engines like plugins. The engines can be their own Rails apps, run from within Refinery.

 

They have some decent SEO functionality, though I have been helping them to improve the markup to make it more semantic and search friendly.

 

 

Permalink Reply by Greg Thomson on July 5, 2011 at 3:19pm

Another choice to add to the growing list. Node.js paired with mongoDB is supposed to scale very well. There is now a CMS built using node.js http://calip.so/. I haven't looked into it much, but am in the beginning stages of planning a project with a couple backend guys where we are going to try and learn node.js together.

Permalink Reply by Chris Reilly on July 8, 2011 at 1:44pm

I don't really technically get how MongoDB totally works, but I understand its performance benefits. If calipso gets more mature it could be a great option.

Permalink Reply by Chris Reilly on July 8, 2011 at 1:41pm

PyroCMS looks rad! I love the flexibility of EE- but lordy it can be a project and a half to work with. The 3rd party modules alone can drive project costs through the roof. I'm going to play : )

Permalink Reply by Chris Reilly on July 8, 2011 at 1:23pm

I'm a big fan of All In One SEO from Semper Fi Web Design - contrary to it's name it isn't the only SEO plugin you need, but it does a great job taking care of the duplicate content issues in Wordpress. I have to tell you, there are plenty of other CMS's that are more intuitive, lighter weight, etc that WP, but none are so effective at SEO out of the box except for $$$$ systems like Pixelsilk. You can't find another CMS that builds 301 redirects when you change permalinks without some serious hackage. 

Permalink Reply by Jeff Sebring on July 12, 2011 at 10:57pm

@Chris - Welcome to the group. 
I've used AIOSEO, but I don't really agree with how it handles the meta descriptions. From what I remember (its been about 2 years since I used it), it generates the meta description from the content before the <!--more--> tag. In my opinion, you are better off either writing them yourself, or letting Google pick a snippet. They have been doing a better job lately of that.

If you are the tldr; type, I'll a few of the things Joost's plugin does.

- Headspace2 style title/desc templating

- Robots Meta- RSS links

- Google, Bing, Yahoo WMT Integration

- XML Sitemap Generator

- Facebook Opengraph

- Canonical w/ SSL options

- Breadcrumbs

- Advanced Permalink settings, like stripping the category slug on archives

- Snippet Preview

- Focus Keyword checking of title/desc/copy

- Keyword ideas & Links to Adwords, Insight, SEO Book keyword tools in the admin bar

- Import / Export settings

 

For me, this eliminated 5 plugins. It is also very efficient code, written by a pretty nice guy.

 

I agree that WordPress can be very SEO freindly, but it still completely depends on the code the theme generates. As you well know, markup is critical to designating the importance of elements, anchor text, etc. There are some really nice looking premium themes out there that have horrible markup, and will clutter your code with garbage embedded JS, or even replace text links with images.

 

I'm sure you have seen sites that you've got to re-theme or hack before even thinking about link building or further investment in content.

 

@Greg - I haven't really looked in to any DB's other than MySQL. Have you run into scale issues with it? The only time I've heard of it failing is when a freind of mine had it random sorting 9 million rows. 

What do these other DB's offer?