If you look at the graph above you will see the nice steady growth of a website. Then suddenly a drop! The site in question dropped from an average of over 100 unique visitors per day down to less than 5 per day. Quite a significant drop! Once I was sure the drop was going to stick, I made a few minor changes and then just left the site alone for a long time. Yes, I was disappointed, but it was not something I had time or ambition to address at the time.

Note: you will see on the chart short regain of traffic, but this seems to be a normal “blip” that can happen as rankings are sorted out across Google data centers.

Fast forward a month or so, and I am looking in through the webmaster tools, and happen to notice the HTML suggestions section under Diagnostics. There I see a line that says: “Short meta descriptions x,xxx”, which is just about every single page of the site. Immediately I fix the problem with the meta descriptions.

The Google Word on Meta Descriptions

Within two days, the traffic is already starting to climb backup again after staying flat for over a month.

My theory is that when the site was new Google eagerly indexed the site and it rose in the rankings, as time went on it got a deeper “analysis” by Google, and thus the problems caused the site to drop way down in the rankings. I am keeping my fingers crossed that the site will continue to climb and eventually gain back the traffic it once had.

30 Day Update

My corrections have made a very big difference. On Dec 22 when I wrote this post, Google’s webmaster tools showed 1,873 short meta descriptions. That number has slowly been dropping over the last 30 days. Now today Jan 24 that number stands at 473. Yesterday I got a big surprise when checking stats, traffic was right back where it was before the drop. Now I will have to see this sustained for at least a week or so to really feel that it is back for good. But it all looks very encouraging.

Keep a sharp eye on the webmaster tools, it is your best peek at how Google is analyzing and viewing your website.

Follow this very simple procedure to schedule your website backups. You will be glad you did.

Download and install the free software: NCFTP

Restart your PC (NCFTP writes a line to the windows path, so this works best upon restart)

Open notepad, and create a brand new document, paste in the following text and save it as backupwebsite.cmd

ncftpget -R -E -u your_ftp_username -p your_ftp_password your_web_ftp_address C:\website backup\ /


replace your_ftp_username with your FTP login name
replace your_ftp_password with your FTP password
replace your_web_ftp_address with the FTP address used for your website

You can change the C:\website backup\ to where ever you want to store your backups, just make sure the folder does exist.

The last “/” is where the backups will start from, if you FTP right into your web files, then you can leave just the forward slash, but some hosts you have to go into another folder to find your web files, like maybe /public_html or something similar.

Once you have this tested and running, then use the windows task scheduler to make it run when and how often you need.

Be sure and check on the backups every now and then to make sure everything keeps working…

“We’re sorry, this video is no longer available.”

Argg.. frustrating right.

Here is how to avoid this problem on your own blog. Each time you embed a youtube video, open up “Any DVD Converter” (or any similar program), and save the You Tube video as a flash file, and then save it, or upload it into a special folder on your blog. This way if your embedded You Tube video is removed, you can place your own copy on the blog (assuming there are no copyright issues). (Any DVD Converter is a free program, make sure you download the freeware version)

Within your themes directory is a file called functions.php. Simply add this line to that file between the php tags (ex: under the <?php tag )

remove_action('wp_head', 'wp_generator');

This will remove the “generator” tag from appearing in the meta head section of your wordpress website.

You will likely also find a generator tag within the theme header file, and it will look something like this:

<meta name=”generator” content=”WordPress <?php bloginfo(‘version’); ?>” /><!– leave this for stats please –>

You can also safely remove these lines also if you’d like.

Why would I want to do this? Well, there is a small security gain to be made, as some malicious scanners will scan accross the web looking for vulnerable or certain versions of WordPress, and it is in your best interest not to broadcast it out.

Smush_it update: Smush_it is now a Yahoo tool and can be found here: http://developer.yahoo.com/yslow/smushit/

Smush_It will smush a few extra bytes out of your images to make them smaller. In my experience it  shaves a little bit off each image, but if you add up  a few “k” off each image, it could add up to 20k in size. This could increase your page download speed by just enough seconds to improve your site. The way I see it is that every little thing you can do to speed up your website will benefit the site.

The best way to use smush_it, is with the firefox plugin. This makes it a snap to use, simple go to your page, click the smush_it icon and it will bring up the smush_it page and start fixing up your images.

You can see the results from this site, shaved 13k off the download size without changing any image quality or removing anything from the site. It’s like getting something for free! Note that sometimes it will change your GIF files to PNG, so you might have to change a few file references in your html.

And yes, it’s very addicting!!

Smush_it is by

http://www.stubbornella.org/content/2008/09/30/new-tool-easy-image-optimization-with-smush-it/

and

http://www.phpied.com/smushit-is-a-smash-hit/

So you have a brand new blog. How do you get your blog indexed quickly? One of the easiest steps to take is to submit it to some solid blog directories. One of the best lists is located at:

http://www.toprankblog.com/rss-blog-directories/

I’ve found that getting listed on blogville (blogville.us) will get you indexed very quickly, as you will show up on their “new” page for at least a few days or weeks.  Blogville is a free blog directory, you can write a blog title, add a description , and add comma seperated keyword list to your blog listing. Not much is free these days, so be sure and take advantage of all the free listings you can get.