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Yesterday I had the profound pleasure of reading DailyBlogTips’ Check how Search Engines see your website.  A long-time SEO enthusiast, I used to focus upon this concept years and years ago (anyone remember when Infoseek would index your site in real time back in 1996?).

The years passed and writing SEO-optimized content became second nature to me.    And over the past few months at my FabFitMom Journal (I lost 45 pounds during 2007 and wrote quite a lot of content; it’s now retired and I post my personal insights over at BarbaraLing.com), I found that I could easily get into the first page of SERPs (search engine results) for just about any keyword I wanted that was related to my niche. 

Well!  With that as an intro, let me dive into the DailyBlogTips article.  They refer to SEO-Brower, a nifty site that shows you how search engines view your webpage. I plugged in this site, AskOwlbert, and immediately noticed something unusual - the category list showed up BEFORE the page content.

Now, if you’re familiar with SEO, you know that having your original content showing up as soon as possible is rather important.  You really don’t want to waste your first 300-odd characters with identical content (ie, every page shows the list of categories before your story appears). 

But that was exactly what was happening!  Which was megaweird to me, as the category list is in the middle column and not the first thing shown.

Odd, thought I.  Let me poke around my theme and see what ’s going on.   I got out my trusty Website Template Advanced Deconstructor  (okay, I visited the site and viewed the source), and saw that yes indeed, the category list was ahead of my content.  But being the intrepid adventurer I am, that didn’t faze me - I figured, ahhh, it must use one of those super-neato-ninja type CSS constructs in which the middle column is viewed first!.

Nope, turns out…that wasn’t the case.   But I kept tweakizing my template and was suddenly hit by a brainstorming idea worthy of someone whose coffee maker didn’t a die a painful death early that morning, leaving me adrift without caffeine that was alert and astute - I decided to remove the categories display all together, just to see what happened!!  And you know what?

The category listings - they still appeared in the source!

But that was impossible, because I had just deleted the category listing from my template.

An interesting development, eh?  A shimmering memory then resurfaced in my mind.

Sherlock Holmes (and Data of ST: TNG) is credited with the following sayings.

Once you have eliminated the impossible, then whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.

It was impossible for the categories to be displayed in the source for the page display (index.php, second.php, etc), as I had deleted them.  Therefore, it must show up someplace else…and show up in such a way, it’s invisible to the user unless something is clicked.

And that’s what I found was happening.  In my header.php (not the index.php), the category list was being generated…but in such a way it didn’t show up in my browser window.   It’s for an archives display instead.

After poking around more, I found out what was happening - the Grid Focus theme allows you to have your archives up on the top bar.  Zolton.org uses this option wonderfully - visit the site and click on Archives, and you’ll see all 30 categories displayed via a javascript dropdown.

And the ability to display that is added in the header.php.  That’s why all the categories were displaying, even though I had removed them from my main display.

So!  I:

• removed from my header.php the following lines because I will display the archives in a different fashion:

<div id="archives" class="fix" style="display: none;">
                <ul class="fix">
                <?php wp_list_cats(’sort_column=name&optioncount=0&exclude=10, 15′); ?>
                </ul>
</div>

• put back the categories listing in my second.php template

voila, my content is now showing ahead of the categories.

Now, because I didn’t activate the archives option, I had no idea my categories were displaying twice in my source code, and no idea that that was what was being seen first by search engines.   I take complete ownership of this, mind you - as a blogger, it’s my responsibility to investigate not only what visitors see on my site, but also what the search engines encounter as well.

Thus, I would highly recommend that you visit SEO Browser and see how your content displays.  You might see something you never realized was included that might affect how search engines index your site.

If you’d like to learn more about SEO and wordpress, check out:

• Why SEO Blog Templates
• Free SEO Wordpress Themes
• Top free SEO wordpress themes

And if you’d like some SEO plugins, enjoy:

• Free WordPress Plugin: “100 SEO tips”
• All in One SEO Plugins
• SEO Boost from 404 Plugin? Focus on humans

ThankYouVeryMuch!

Owlbert

#BEGIN highlights of this blog writing post:

Beginners blogging tips:  Look at a single post of your blog and see where the categories are, where the post is, etc.  Then go to SEO-Browser.com and see how search engines view your post.  What comes first?  Is it what you expected?  Are you comfortable enough to dig in the code to see what needs to be changed?

Intermediate and/or Advanced blogging tips:  Modify your single.php to make it more SEO-friendly.

#END highlights of this blog writing post

ps - want some more SEO goodies?  Consider:

My SEO eGuide - make your site #1 ebook cd

Advanced SEO eBOOK

My SEO eGuide - make your site #1 ebook cd

7 Days to MASSIVE WEBSITE TRAFFIC eBook CD! Improve SEO

Advanced SEO eBOOK

Related posts:

1. Google to reveal the Deep Invisible web
2. A public thank you to DailyBlogTips.com for the SEO blog theme tip
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4. Make your readers weep with joy - keyword-rich glossary creator plugins
5. Screw Google Adsense - get real money FROM eBay

(By the way, if you have any questions about the topics in this posting "Invisible Content - What your blog theme ISN’T showing (SEO, SERPs and Optimization, oh my!)", do comment below - I'll try to clarify any issues).

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