Trying to improve

Anything I can do to better improve SEO or anything in general. Keep in mind my members are mostly women.

Forum: GlobalPaw - Dog Communities and Dog Forums

I tried to link to the CSS but it is still placing the style on the code, I have the option enabled in admincp.

I have been getting crawed by google and yahoo constantly, but MSN for some reason is very low. I have gone up one space on the google rankings for one of my keywords since I installed vbSEO. site:globalpaw.com is very low in the google API, but is doing well outside of the API.

Anyway thanks in advance for any help

In order to get the CSS linked you need to CHMOD to 777 both your ./clientscript/ and ./clientscript/vbulletin_css/ directories.

your site falls apart above 1280 resolution. I run 1440 on my widescreen laptop. This is due to the header logo, http://www.globalpaw.com/images/GP-m...eader-bckg.gif

You should create 2 images, one for the curve stuff on the left, and another which is 1px wide, and the height on the blue, and apply a repeat-x property to it so it will expand all the way to the right on ANY resolution.

You have a bunch of html errors.
Result for http://www.globalpaw.com/ - W3C Markup Validator

by using images as your navigation, it makes it unreadable to SE's. SE's don't have eyes, so they can't SEE your site, they READ it.

search under my name, i've put together a couple people massive lists this week, most of which apply to you as well.

However whilst search engines will read your appropriate ALT tag texts, they wont be assigning as much importance to this content as they will your actual text content. Which is why as Brain stated using a text based navigation is much more beneficial.

It looks like most of your xHTML errors are pretty basic. Such as using the incorrect format for ending a linkbreak, and image. Try checking out HTML Tutorial for more information on how to write conventional HTML.

Thanks for the tips. I will work on my HTML, and I will add text links to the nav bar for guests. I will also fix the header image, only 2% of my users use a resolution above 1280, but I should fix it anyway.

Thanks

no need to use a different nav bar per user group- you just need to apply an image technique, using background images and text Above the image.

for example,

Code:

<ul>
  <li id="homelink">
    <a href="/index.php"><span>Home</span></a>
  </li>
  <li id="forumlink">
    <a href="forums/index.php"><span>Forums</span></a>
  </li>
</ul>

and in your style sheet:

Code:

li#forumlink {background url(/path/to/forum.jpg) no-repeat; }
li#homelink {background url(/path/to/home.jpg) no-repeat; }
ul li a span {visibility: hidden; }

you will need to apply the propper padding on your li's too make sure all of the image displays (as a background image, the area will only hold for the text, which is set to hidden... so it won't show up at all, so make sure your padding is correct.)

I have made most of those recommendations, but I am still having trouble validating to W3C. Can someone take a look and make a suggestion on how to fix those table errors.

I also didn't add the hidden text, for my navigation images. I was under the impression that google does not like hidden text, and is bad SEO, but I may be wrong.

Thanks for all the suggestions so far.

the majority of your errors are simple.

Error Line 174 column 11: an attribute value specification must be an attribute value literal unless SHORTTAG YES is specified.<div align=center>

needs to be quoted, and better, should remove the align attribute and use a style="text-align:center;" for more future readiness. align is depreciated.

All of your table errors are because you are missing one tag some where. I don't have time to dive in right now and look though.

for the sgml errors, you need to use the Unicode replacements instead of the actual character.

Originally Posted by doozy

I also didn't add the hidden text, for my navigation images. I was under the impression that google does not like hidden text, and is bad SEO, but I may be wrong.

yes and no.

there's ways to hide text without hiding it at all, such as

<div style="postition: absolute; top: -99999px; left: -9999999px;>
This won't display on any monitor.
</div>

it IS bad seo to add hidden tags for the sake of adding hidden tags. i have yet to hear of bad feedback from running image replacement techniques though.

Originally Posted by briansol

yes and no.

there's ways to hide text without hiding it at all, such as

<div style="postition: absolute; top: -99999px; left: -9999999px;>
This won't display on any monitor.
</div>

it IS bad seo to add hidden tags for the sake of adding hidden tags. i have yet to hear of bad feedback from running image replacement techniques though.

Right On. I will add hidden text links to my image navigation.