Corvette Parking - A social networking community
http://www.corvetteparking.com
I do very well in Google and the other SEs with several other blogs I run, a few of which have a PR6. Some use Wordpress others were built from scratch but all are perfectly SEOd. So far my experience with my Ning site is that the main page gets indexed and blogs on that page show up in search results but none of the permalink blog pages are getting indexed.
One thing I've noticed is that the title of the blog post on all of my Wordpress sites uses an H1 tag but the titles on my Ning site blog posts are set up as H2 tags. In my experience Google places a lot of emphasis on H1 tagged titles.
Is there an easy way without modifying the php files to change things so that the blog post titles on the individual post pages use an H1 tag?
I do very well in Google and the other SEs with several other blogs I run, a few of which have a PR6. Some use Wordpress others were built from scratch but all are perfectly SEOd. So far my experience with my Ning site is that the main page gets indexed and blogs on that page show up in search results but none of the permalink blog pages are getting indexed.
One thing I've noticed is that the title of the blog post on all of my Wordpress sites uses an H1 tag but the titles on my Ning site blog posts are set up as H2 tags. In my experience Google places a lot of emphasis on H1 tagged titles.
Is there an easy way without modifying the php files to change things so that the blog post titles on the individual post pages use an H1 tag?
Replies to This Discussion
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Permalink Reply by TheMaster on -
Here's some info on implementing headers.
To change your heading font sizes you would simply add these to your custom stylesheet which is accessed by going to your appearance manager and clicking the advanced tab.
Font sizes in Ning are defined in 'em' which is a relative font size (designed to make it easy for visitors with eyesight difficulties to resize them). The default font size for headings in the Ning common.css are
h1 --> 2.1em
h2 --> 1.5em
h3 --> 1.5em
h4 --> 1.3em
h5 --> 1.2em
So far I have found hacking and changing the code for the blog area of ning the most difficult, so you may be facing some work ahead of you.
Ning SEO is a slow and go process. While you are waiting for your Ning site to catch fire in Google, you may want to use parapage strategies to pump up your membership.
I define a parapage strategy as using a page from another website for optimization while indirectly pushing the traffic to another site.
Here is one of my personal examples:
http://marketplace.sitepoint.com/listings/37118
This page comes up in the top 10 in google for "Free Search Engine Optimization." It has great content on it, but there are also several light pushes for them to go to Sta.rtUp.biz.
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Permalink Reply by Hammer on
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Thanks for the reply. I do have another Corvette related blog set up with Wordpress that does well on Google and I can use that site to drive traffic to the Ning site.
I realize that I can use CSS to control the sizes of the header tags but what I'm wanting to do is to make a change so that the headers on the individual blog post pages use the H1 attribute instead of H2. Without modifying the psp files I don't know if it's possible but for SEO it would be a lot better if the titles of the posts were set to use the H1 attribute.
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What about the lack of SEO benefit we're losing because of Nings oddball url naming system? The blogging tool is great but unless the url contains keywords from the post we'll never see any search engine traffic to our blog pages. I'm working on finding a way to use a Wordpress blog to feed traffic to my network but that means I need to post every blog post I write, twice. What a pain.
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Permalink Reply by TheMaster on
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I would have to agree with you about the challenges of getting Ning sites to rank highly in the SERPs. Fortunately, the overall benefits out weigh the cons.
If you figure out a work around or something that helps get a good ranking on one of your ning pages, then let me know. I am concentrating my efforts on parapage optimization.
Two other parapage strategies that you might want to consider are paying for a sponsored review on other blogs and optimizing them through social bookmarks for keywords. The other would be optimizing the social bookmarks that link directly to pages on your site. Digg works best for this. Then just use your keyword string in the title of the other social bookmarks that link to your digg.
The bottom line is that some sites just do not rank well in Google. I have encountered this with many of my clients over the past years. Some have penalties, other have design issues that they do not want to change, and some are just a mystery that will never be solved.
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Yeah, I realize there are lots of ways to drive traffic to a website but it's just frustrating when a company creates such a nicely done and well put together blogging platform and builds it into a very cool social networking system and then overlooks the SEO benefits of the thousands and eventually millions of blog post pages that could be generating tons of traffic.
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Permalink Reply by SUp.biz, COO on -
The good news is that they will probably figure it out. Gina (CEO Ning) is going to be the keynote speaker at EmTech 08 in September. I plan to pull her aside at some point and pitch her on hiring a top notch SEO person to her development team.
Right now their entire network (every ning network including yours) is only getting 3 million monthly unique visitors. I believe that if an expert tweaked the development code for pages created just to have the title take the place of the number, then the entire network would easily get over 20 million unique visitors a month.
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