Fitzy’s Business Blog Review

Writing by Brick Marketing on Tuesday, 23 of October , 2007 at 3:03 pm

I made a post the other day about doing six free blog tips. You can read that post by clicking here.

Fitzy, or Brian Fitzpatrick asked me to review his blog so here we go. Now understand, this isn’t a review so it may sound negative at times because I focus on what can be improved. There are several things being done very well, but to give you 6 blog tips to improve your blog I have to focus on what needs to be improved.

1. Brian, it might be just my computer, but the blog hangs when I first visit. Maybe there is a little too much to load, but it was frozen while something loaded for too long.

Load time is important to both seo and your visitors, so maybe you could have a friend or two go there and test it. Make sure they hit shift+refresh if they have been there before so it doesn’t just load from the cache.

You can remove one element at a time until you find the culprit and remove it.

2. Permalink structure. When I click the headline of a post, the title of the page I go to reflects the blog post title, then your blog name rather than the other way around. Good job on that. The default is usually blog name, then title of the post which is not as good.

But permalinks are the same. The title should be first. Your post about stumbleupon for instance. The url for that post is http://www.fitzbiz.org/2007/10/17/stumbleupon/ so the keywords or keyword in this case is at the end. This will hurt you on posts with much longer titles.

Here is a sample permalink structure that will improve your seo. I have to change the same thing on this blog so don’t feel alone. Choose custom permalink structure and put this into it.

/%category%/%postname%/%monthnum%/%day%/%year%/

Now the url would look like this;

http://www.fitzbiz.org/internet/stumbleupon/10/17/2007/

Now since you have been blogging for awhile there are likely trackbacks and search engine listings pointing to the urls you already have in place. You don’t want those links to go to 404 pages just because you want to change the permalink structure. So you can set up a 301 redirect for all 404s to go to your home page or actually have a programmer put in a redirect that takes all of the old urls the way they are structured and points them to the right post. Not sure exactly how to do that, but there are scripts that can be written to make it happen. maybe a reader here can help us on that one.

3. Now going back to that post about stumbleupon. There is an element in the page where a user can make a comment that says “page cannot be displayed” so whatever that is needs to come out or be repaired. It’s on all of the pages where a comment can be made. That’s in IE7. In Firefox it doesn’t show that.

4. Your stumbleupon image at the top of each post on the comment page is not displaying either so need to fix that one too. I’m using IE7. My friend in firefox said there was no image at all there.

5. This blog tip is for everyone who has a wordpress blog. Take out the css and xhtml validation links. I haven’t found a wordpress template yet that will validate. Those links are useless. Anyone who does click them will see that your blog does not validate. None of them do. So why even leave those links in?

W3C Compliant is important to web designers that want to prove they are better than another web designer. Yahoo and Google are two bigshots on the Internet and their home pages don’t validate. So obviously not too important to them, so not important to me either. I know that might get some comments from the guru section, but try validating some of the top ranked websites for your key phrases in google and see if they validate.

6. I don’t really have a 6 for you. Most of what you are doing here is very good. You use good keywords in your titles, the posts are interesting. The blog looks good. Your anchor text for links is good. Most everything I see is done well.

Most of the stuff I mentioned is just technical. You do have some issues with IE compatablility, but they should be easily fixed.

Good blog Brian.

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