Search Engine Optimization 101
I love my traffic. I spend a good portion of my time just watching traffic pour in with my mint stats tracker. Up until now I have pretty much exhausted every avenue for gathering traffic except SEO. Search Engine Optimization is the delicate art of optimizing your website so as to be search engine friendly. Through the application of several rules of SEO thumb, one can gain a higher ranking in search engines and gain more indexed pages. Currently, search engines provide this site around a third of its traffic but that’s mostly people searching for my misspelled name to find my domain (I really need to get paul.com). That equates to anywhere from 600 to 1000 hits just from search engines everyday.
After a brief scour through some of the new 9rulers, I found Neil Patel’s blog Pronet Advertising (very slick design btw). Going through many of his posts I learned a ton about how to increase my traffic through SEO and the whole marketing 2.0 concept. Things like properly using alt tags for pictures and title tags for links can dramatically help the search engines let people find you. Using dynamic meta names for each post, enabling permalinks, utilizing XHTML valid code and putting titles in headings tags (h1, h2..) instead of bolding them can boost your traffic over time.
I also learned of things such as keyword density within posts from the Pronet blog. In a nutshell, if you have a post about a PDA you will want to say the PDA’s name and related terms a few times. The search engines can tell what words are related to PDA and will index your page and rank it higher for PDA searches. Just don’t say the PDA’s name too many times or the search engines might think your site is some kind of splog. Also, you will want to pay attention to the title of your pages. The SEO way to configure your titles is to have the name of the article first, then the name of your site. This way the search engines don’t have to go all the way to the end of the page title to see what the page is about and you’re more likely to get accurately indexed.
Neil, whom I’ve met recently, has told me it can take anywhere from a few days to several months to see the effects of any SEO work. Some extreme SEO results have doubled traffic, so I’m anxious to see if and how my traffic changes. It has only been a few days, but I think my work is paying off. I haven’t been linked by any major sites today and am already at 2,300 uniques which is unusually high for this time (4pm). If this trend continues I might beat my own record for traffic last month; 138k page views and 74k uniques. If you want to pick up on some tricks of the SEO trade, definitely subscribe to Pronet Advertising’s feed. Also, 9ruler Thomas Silkjlr has some SEO tips for WordPress users. Update: take a look at the SEO for Firefox extension.
Hey Stammy,
I just wanted to clarify one thing about keyword density; you should write for your visitors and not keyword stuff. If your content is on a PDA, then you will naturally mention the name of that PDA.
Glad to hear that you learned something from my blog. :-)
Man, when did this blogging stuff get so complicated? I reemember when people would just write to write. No worries of SEO or any of that jazz. Now all I hear in the banter box is how to do this or that concerning content publishing. Blogging has gotten so damn serious. Shoot ;) Nice tips though. I’ll make sure to try not to keep my posts too dense with keywords for the sake of readers.
You mentioned placing the articles title before the sites name. Would you mind maybe showing how that would be represented in the code?
Viperteq, something like the following in your header file:
I see. Thanks for the tip!
Semantic markup and accessibility suddenly becomes a serious consideration when you realize search engine spiders are essentially in the same boat as those with disabilities.
Search engine rankings on my bands gig calendar increased dramatically when I started populating the description metadata with upcoming performance info. I highly recommend paying attention to that part.
I’ve been meaning to do this for a million years (three months) thanks for giving me the reminder. Even with all of the SEO magic in the world it is unlikely that I’ll ever appear above Lean Cuisine or Healthy Choice in Google. Now MSN is a whole different story…
Good stuff there Paul. I will give a few of these a go on my site and see what happens.
I’ve nuked my blog name on all pages of my blog and it’s worked quite well to my advantage over the last two years on my blog. Every page title just has the name of the entry, and that’s it.
Hey… Nice tips there…
Hey I know paul.com isn’t available but what about these:
paulsworld.us
paulsworld.ws
paulsworld.name
paulrules.net
paulrules.org
paulrules.info
paulrules.ws
paulrules.name
paul9rules.com
paul9rules.net
paul9rules.org
paul9rules.us
paul9rules.ws
paul9rules.name
paulsreviews.net
paulsreviews.org
paulsreviews.us
paulsreviews.ws
paulsreviews.name
Hahahah Chris, thanks for the searching. The attraction of a domain like paul.com is that it’s short and easy to spell.. and I would only consider an established .com TLD.. none of that new .name stuff for me.
Well waiting for paul.com might be a very long time.
You might want to consider other avenues with easy to remember domain names.
I know Bryan eventually lucked out with his “domain backorder” process but he didn’t have the most pleasant experience.
In addition to the SEO benefits of the title-before-blog-name format, it is better for usability too. If I bookmark one of your articles in either del.icio.us or the standard browser bookmarks, I care much more about the title of the specific entry than the blog it’s from. Seeing a bunch of links of “PaulStam….”, “PaulStam….”, “PaulStam….” is useless, but “Search Engine…..” lets me know more quickly which article the bookmark points to. (Plus, the origin blog is easily deduced from the usually-visible url, at least in delicious and the like.)
Likewise, if I have many pages from your site open, the title of the post is the differentiator that makes finding the window or browser tab I’m looking for possible.
thanks,
nate
FYI, if you use K2 as a wordpress theme, it already puts the title before the blog name on single-post pages.
Ha, keyword density. If you’ve ever read the content at cssliquid.com, then you can see that I knew about this a long time ago :)
Thanks for the tips. But I have to say, I long for the days, when blogging was a lot simplier.