Generally, the basic version of a website platform – like phpBB (the popular forum software) or WordPress (the software that powers this blog and countless others worldwide) – generates standards-compliant code (most commonly HTML or XHTML) if it’s not tampered with. Many of the plugins or mods that are written to accompany them are carefully tested to ensure that they work properly within the basic version and don’t mince up the page code. But, on the other hand, many of them aren’t. And even with the ones that are, it may be that your server software exposes a bug that the original script author’s test server didn’t.

So be sure to go back and revalidate your pages whenever you’ve installed a new plugin, to make sure that they still meet the standards. It’s worth revalidating from time to tame anyway, even if you haven’t added any new plugins – your hosting provider may have updated the server software.

The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) have several tools to help you do this – the most useful is their Markup Validation Service, but they also have one for CSS stylesheets among others.

The WordPress default theme

The good thing about the default theme is that it’s very readily customisable – as long as you know what you’re doing with stylesheets and templates. Even if you don’t, there’s still plenty you can do with a little bit of help from the WordPress Codex – a collection of “how-to” guides explaining all about WordPress, including the various template files, functions, and features of WordPress that make it such a flexible blog writing tool.

The only slight annoyance we’ve found with it is when it comes to the stylesheet. As of WP2.8.4 the stylesheet divides elements into:

• basic typography & colours
• structure
• headers
• images
• lists
• forms
• comments
• sidebar
• calendar
• various tags & classes
• captions

This is all very well, as far as it goes – at least there’s some kind of logical structure to it. Unfortunately, there’s a good deal of overlap. For instance, if you want to edit the attributes of a <h2> header in the sidebar, you have to look under “basic typography” if you want to change the font family, weight, size or colour, or under “headers” if you want to change its margins or padding. The one place you wouldn’t look is under “sidebar”.

So be warned – have a good look through the stylesheet before you start editing it, otherwise you may find that your style changes are superseded further down the page.

Other people’s WordPress themes

There are a host of free WordPress themes available for the cost of just a little time and energy spent searching for them. You can find nearly a thousand in the WordPress Free Themes Directory, but a search engine will throw up many more.

These themes are also customisable, of course. The same basic principles apply as for customising the default WP template. However, you may find that it takes less effort to work out how to amend the stylesheet – or considerably more!

Of course, you’ll be one of those wise website owners. But having bought the secondary domain names, you’ll want to make them work for you rather than lying idle. So the question arises: how can you set up domain forwarding on them so that your primary domain gets maximum benefit in the search engines?

Make sure you have permanent (Code 301) redirects

There are several ways of redirecting traffic, but the key point is to make sure that the redirect is handled as a permanent redirect (HTTP status code 301) rather than a temporary one (HTTP status code 302). Otherwise search engines may well penalise you for duplicate content – or at the very least fail to pass on link popularity from your secondary domain to your primary one.

Here’s a quick look at the various ways of redirecting traffic (from a *nix/Apache perspective – Windows servers have their own set of instructions):

Entry in your httpd.conf file

This is probably the neatest way of redirecting as it requires the server to carry out the instruction once only, rather than every time a page request is made. Unfortunately users of shared hosting are unlikely to have access to system files like httpd.conf, but your hosting provider may make the change for you if you ask nicely.

Entry in your .htaccess file

This is the second best option, and is probably good enough unless your secondary domain is attracting heavy traffic. You should be able to find the .htaccess file in your web root directory (often called “www” or “public_html”) – if not, make one and set the permissions to 644 (owner gets read-write permission, everyone else gets read-only). Then add this code:

RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^([^.:]+\.)*secondarydomain\.co\.uk\.?(:[0-9]*)?$ [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.primarydomain.com/$1 [R=301,L]

Any URL at the secondary domain (eg www.secondarydomain.co.uk/mygreatpage.htm) will then be automatically redirected to the primary domain (www.primarydomain.com/mygreatpage.htm).

You can also do individual page redirects if you need to, but that’s a rather more labour-intensive process.

Registrar-provided URL forwarding

Many domain registrars offer you the facility to forward traffic from one domain to another. Unfortunately, they usually use a temporary redirect (Code 302) to do this, so you may dilute your link popularity.

Domain parking

You can get your secondary domain “parked” on top of your primary domain so that when people request www.secondarydomain.co.uk/mygreatpage.htm, they’re actually shown the content from www.primarydomain.com/mygreatpage.htm – although the URL in their address bar is still on the secondary domain. This can lead to search engines listing both pages for the same content (and has been exploited by spammers for that reason), so it’s not a great solution.

JavaScript meta-refresh redirects

You can include a JavaScript snippet in your page header to redirect to a given page within a specified number of seconds. This can be time-consuming to set up if you’re dealing with a lot of pages, of course. It’s also frowned upon by the search engines because people have abused it by creating optimised content for one topic, then forwarding to a page flogging blue diamond-shaped pills or such like.

Checking that it’s all working

Whichever method you choose, you’ll need to check that it’s working properly and that you’re getting Code 301 redirects. There are several server header checking tools around – just do a search and you should find one that works for you. Rex Swain’s HTTP Viewer works well.

About.com: Jennifer Kyrnin

Her  latest newsletter has information about free web development classes on About.com.  Well worth a look!

You can also sign up for her free newsletter from that page.  Give it a try – and if you don’t like it, you can have your money back.

There are all sorts of tools you can use to provide the information you need – and generally the more information you have, the better. Otherwise how are you going to be able to refine your blog so that you’re maximising your income?

GoogleAnalytics gives you a lot of information, of course. But a friend, Adi Gaskell of The Management Blog, recently pointed us in the direction of a WordPress plugin called Analytics360° which integrates GA into your blog so that you can tell what effect your posts have had on your earnings. You can also integrate MailChimp stats if you’re using MailChimp for email marketing or publicity campaigns. (In case you hadn’t guessed, the plugin’s written by MailChimp.)

We installed it on a couple of our blogs to evaluate it. It was moderately useful in that it saved you having to go to the GA site. (We don’t use MailChimp, so that particular plugin facility wasn’t relevant to us.)

However, it had its limitations too. Most importantly, it didn’t provide nearly so much information as GA. But the integration – correlating traffic to posts – was limited to the first post on any given day. So if you’d made several posts on the same day, there was nothing on the traffic graph to show you that.

Verdict: It might be worth installing if you’ve got a MailChimp account. Otherwise, you’re as well to just open GA in a separate browser window and compare it with your post history.

There’s lots on offer in there: as well as key word research tools (obviously!), they have articles and various other resources. I find it’s a very useful resource, and I’ve been using it for years, but you don’t have to take my word for it. The good news is that you don’t have to decide to buy straight away. They’re currently offering a seven-day trial of the full version, so you can go in and test drive the whole thing. Try before you buy!

(Please note: they do ask you for your credit card details at the time of signing up for the free trial. So if you do go for the freebie and subsequently decide not to buy – don’t forget to cancel your subscription!)

By the way, you can also make money by selling WordTracker as an affiliate.

Firefox users might also like to know that WordTracker offers a natty little plugin that enables you to do your research in a sidebar whilst you’re working on your article. (Thanks to Adi Gaskell for that tip.)

I was going to write a little about PageRank including a definition, but there’s an excellent page on Wikipedia with everything you could ever want to know, and more! So, if you want to learn about Google PageRank, head over there.

Is PageRank important?

Hmmm. This is a hotly debated question. Some say that it bears no relation to SERPs (Search Engine Results Page), ie where your site is listed in a search engine. Others say that it does affect SERPs because PR is included in Google’s algorithm. Most people agree that PR isn’t worth fretting about. It’s better to spend your time adding useful content.

One of the best places to go for insider information about what Google is doing is Matt Cutts: Gadgets, Google, and SEO.

Meanwhile, if you want to find out your site’s PR without installing the Google toolbar, here’s a nice little free tool: Free PR checker tool

“Pinging” is a word in general computing use for the sending of a brief burst of information to find out if another computer is live on the network and can “hear” you – if it can, it sends an echo. (Think submarines and sonar, and you’ve got the general idea.) For blogs, it means a little bit more than that: it’s a brief burst of information, but this time it tells various search engines that you’ve just made a new blog posting. They then send their bots to check your site and update their listings with your new posting.

WordPress has a facility in the Writing settings to enable you to ping in this way. You’ll need to check your Privacy settings first to ensure that the facility’s enabled. It may not be a bad thing to disable it while you’re getting the site ready – no point in pinging with posts from a half-baked site. We turned it on today; with a dozen posts we thought there was enough content to justify it.

By default WordPress includes a link to its own Ping-o-Matic facility, which automatically pings several (currently 23) leading search engines including Google Blog Search, My Yahoo, Feed Burner and Technorati.

If you’d rather decide for yourself which blog search engines you’re going to ping, then that’s easy enough. Just go to the Writing page under Settings and add the URLs of all the specific search engines you’re interested in.

After that, all you have to do is hit the “Publish” button – the ping goes out at the same time. What could be easier?