Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Very cool!  Sounds like you guys are doing some awesome stuff. I'd like to learn more!

Google is now indexing embedded youtube videos as rich snippets.

I did a search on your site and you can see you have lots of these rich snippets showing up. Good job.

https://www.google.com/webhp?sourceid=chrome-instant&ie=UTF-8&ion=1#q=site:betheboss.ca/&hl=en&prmd=imvns&source=lnms&tbm=vid&sa=X&ei=OgA4UIKqDYPy2QWfkoGICg&ved=0CAoQ_AUoAw&bav=on.2,or.r_gc.r_pw.r_cp.r_qf.&fp=11e613fc21dc669b&ion=1&biw=1312&bih=1079

Thanks for the reply, very helpful info.

As far as server monitoring I don't think I have anything in place. Any suggestions?

Intresting.

I know that searching for upper case and lower case keywords do bring up different results. But that is keywords, I wasn't sure how url's were effected by upper / lower case.

@Paul,

Thanks for your very helpful post! It was great!

I never thought of selecting the option to auto delete spam comments on posts older than a month old. Once I did that, it cut down on 80% of the spam I was getting! So thanks!

Quick question on that. Does enabling that option cut down on the server resources? In other words, let's say it cuts down on 200 spam comments a day because they are auto deleted, do those 200 spam comments still get entered in as comments and therefore use server resources? Does this just save me the step of having to go through and delete them / clear the spam folder? Or does this save a huge amount of server resources? Either way it's a huge win!

I've read the info about how Twitter's bad seo effects ability to rank well for our twitter profile in some cases.

I've been unsuccessful at getting my twitter profile to rank higher than it does, even though all metrics on OSE seem to indicate that it should.

I've been linking to the non !#, non https, and non www, version of my profile, however it still is ranking as high as I'd like. I noticed today that the link URL has each letter of my name capitalized. I'm almost certain when I link to it I write out the name in all lower case.

I was curious if you think this has any effect on it ranking? I'm wondering what the best steps would be moving forward. I could start linking to the url showing up in google (with upper case letters in the url) or I could go into my twitter profile and change my name to all lowercase and see if that changes the url in google, thus fixing all of the other backlinks to the profile. (At least I think it would.)

What's everyone's thoughts on this? Thanks!

[IMG]]([IMG]http://i.imgur.com/vGIbf.jpg[/IMG]) vGIbf.jpg vGIbf.jpg

I've learned a lot through this site (and the community built around it) about everything SEO related. It's been extremely helpful in helping us help others to learn that all people (even those with a "disability") deserve respect and integrity. (Wow, that's a lot of helps!)

So I wanted to give a quick thanks to everyone on this site who has helped, supported, and encouraged us. We really appreciate it.

One thing I've been trying to do on my site is look at my categories and over all site structure. I've pruned a lot of things from the menu bar; pruned away and tightened up the categories, and even rearranged the navigation of the site. As you can see, I have several drop down categories up top.

I wanted to see if I could get some feedback on how what I'm doing looks thus far, specifically as it relates to my categories / menus / navigation. Although any feedback you'd like to provide would be more than appreciated.

One thing I'm curious about (and not sure how to tackle it) is regarding the top most item in the main menus. For instance you'll see I have a top level category called "Down Syndrome Resources" which takes them to all of the posts in that category. Under that, there is a drop down menus that gives them other categories, and even some pages that fall under the topic of Down syndrome resources. I'm not sure if people would know the top most item is a link, or just look at the ones below it. (If that makes sense.)

(On a side note I have therapy as a category as well as parenting, the truth is those could all be sub-categories I guess since everything on my site pretty much could fall under "down syndrome resources." Maybe this is a huge FAIL I made when setting up my categories.)

I'm also not sure if I should use some sub-categories as well. For instance I have a main category for Therapy. Under that I have posts about speech therapy, physical therapy, and occupational therapy. Right now they are all grouped into therapy. Do you think I should use sub-categories on those 3 terms, leave as is, or perhaps another option?

Another question I have is regarding landing pages. It seems like I need to have  a landing page for my top "key words." For example therapy. Now if you visit my /therapy you get the category index page, not a "landing page." Same would go for the sub-categories if I were to create them. So I'm not sure if I should make a new post or page naming it something else (maybe "Down syndrome therapy" another named "Down-syndrome-physical-therapy" etc) or something else. (Although therapy isn't really the keyword I want to rank for, I'm thinking more along the lines of children therapy, pediatric therapy, therapy for children with Down syndrome, etc. So maybe I need to rename my categories? I was going for shorter names, so I very well may have done this incorrectly.)

All of these questions are things I'm not to sure about, so I'd appreciate any feedback or advice you can give me. And since I'm learning, I could be doing things wrong that I don't even know to ask. So feel free to tell me what you see that's wrong, you won't hurt my feelings. I promise.

Thanks in advance.

I have akismet installed on my Wordpress blog, and it does a great job of filtering the spam comments, but for some reason my site (and server) gets slammed by the amount of spam comments akismet blocks. If I check my spam folder there will be over 100 spam comments in an hour. (which in turn puts a load on my server.)

Does anyone have any thoughts on how to put a stop to this? (Or at least slow it down?) I know I could use a captcha, but I really don't want to put any barriers on people commenting and I don't even like using those captcha's myself.

Thoughts?

By the way, does anyone know how spam like this works? This has been going on for sometime now. Are spammers just using automated software to do this?

I'm looking for a good way to run contests on my blog. I've seen a lot of blogs use Rafflecopter. Has anyone used it before? Any other suggestions?

Thanks man. I'm certainly check it out.

Thanks man. Do you know of any sites like that off hand?

I'm wanting to get a few things designed for our site, and I was curious if anyone has any experience using any of the companies online where you can hire graphic designers.

It looks like a lot of these companies use people over seas, and although some of them are talented, I don't think their styles are the same as I'm used to here.  (Hope that doesn't sound bad...I'm not meaning it like that.)

Does anyone have any suggestions for a good company to use online? Thanks.

Paul,

Thank you very much for all the feedback. Such great info.

I've been working on improving many of these items over the weekend. I'm only using total cache, I set up a CDN, i took off on of the tabs on the activity widget and just let the popular posts. I'm trying to figure out how to resize the images better on the sidebar tab as you're right they are using css to rescale the images.

I'm actually saving up to have the site designed by a designer instad of my non-design self. But that's down the road as having something designed professionally isn't cheap (although it is worth it.)

I'm going to be working on your suggestions for the rest of the site. Thanks again for the feedback and for the kind words about our site. I'm really trying to help people through this site, and from the feedback we are getting it looks like it's been doing that.

Now I'm on the journey to make it an even better experience for people.

No problem. Be sure to let me know if you end up trying one.

Yah, I read up on CloudFrare, but it looks like a lot of people don't like them / suggest them. Some people even saying they lost a lot of rankings after using them.

I'm trying to decide if I should use a CDN to speed up my site. I've never used one before, but I do know that there are a lot of images on my site and I think that could help a great deal.

Are they hard to set up? Are there any down sides? And are the pricey?

Also I'm not sure even sure if it would make a difference for me, but I want to work on getting my site faster.

Thanks.

Few questions:

1. When do you know if you have out grown shared hosting?

2. Who do you suggest for shared hosting for a med sized blog? (At least I think I'd define our stie as. Any ideas what sort of traffic qualifies as small-traffic / med-traffic blog? )

This question is directly related to SEO, but I wanted to see if there was any wordpress / php pro's out there who wouldn't mind helping me with a few quick things.

The biggest one is I'm trying to move this facebook like button from where it is to the line of sharers above it. The sharers are being put in by the digg digg plug in, and the facebook button is being put in by the facebook plug in.

You can see it on my site, or on this plug in.

Thanks!

gEOa

Hmmm...what's interesting is that many folks suggest hosting it on youtube since google is now indexing youtube videos on your site. This way you get the traffic spike from youtube search, and google indexing the video.

Here's a link to see all the videos google has indexed for my site.

https://www.google.com/webhp?sourceid=chrome-instant&ie=UTF-8&ion=1#q=site:noahsdad.com&hl=en&prmd=imvns&source=lnms&tbm=vid&sa=X&ei=R3P3T5q-A6eL2AWYmrz_Bg&ved=0CEEQ_AUoAw&bav=on.2,or.r_gc.r_pw.r_qf.,cf.osb&fp=386d21ff68b140c&ion=1&biw=1289&bih=762

Thoughts?

Thanks. I guess what's confusing for me is that the images are still getting indexed with that option on or off.