Join 105,411 Programmers for FREE! Ask your question and get quick answers from experts. There are 1,737 online right now! We've got more than 500 tutorials and 2,000 snippets. Join and find out why Dream.In.Code is the #1 programming help community on the internet! Registration is fast and FREE... Join Now!
Alright, so the deal is I, for the most part, started fresh on my site. I wrote a blog of what I have (or think I have) done with my blog on an SEO scale. Lemme know what you think PLZ.
EDIT: for the sake of the featured-ness. I'll post my blog in the topic.
QUOTE
Alright, lately I've been feeling the need to get into some serious SEO. Lately, over at Dream In Code, it seems as though there is a spark of interest with optimising sites for search engines. I'm trying to keep up, but man alive, these kids know how to do it. So here's what I have done... an experiment, have you. I have basically started fresh with my site structure (which goes unnoticed by the average viewer) in an attempt to climb in the Google search queries. But before I can climb with such drastic changes, I must fall at the foot of Google. Here's a few steps I have taken so far:
1. I moved my entire blogs from Blogger.com and Myspace to a home-brew blogging system I have periodically been working on with my free time. I also resurected blogs between 2002-2004 from old home-brew systems I have made. The MSN Spaces era in my life is all that's left. My Blogger account is slowly diminishing in google (when searching for "Nick Davis")
2. I have decided to stick with the domain of http://www.nicholasdavis.info. For the most part, I was sick of the ".org" look. It's funny and all, having the organization domain, but alas, I'm not an organization. I figured .info was alright, as it is information on me. Unfortunately, I believe it kind of puts me at a disadvantage compared to it's .com and .net brothers.
3. I changed all my page titles to something a little easier for google eat up. On Analytics, people do more searches for "Nick Davis" than "Nicholas Davis". I took that knowlege and figured "Nick Davis" was probably better in the title, especially if I want to tackle those keywords more.
4. I created an RSS feed for the mass populace to consume, of which I have created a modified version for Google to eat up, using Google Webmaster Tools.
5.I submitted my site to Google.
6.I reconstructed my blog template so that it will be easier for search engines to pick up on. Technorati seemed to enjoy it a lot.
So far, my Google presence seems to be improving a little since last week. Searching for "Nick Davis", my blog page shows up at the very bottom. I'm hoping the next couple days, it will be my home page and a couple notches higher than the bottom of the first page. I suppose I also need to work on blogging about things that are interesting.
This blog is my personal experience and for the most part very speculative. So if you have any information or tips, please let me know! I'd love to hear from you.
This post has been edited by Thorian: 27 Sep, 2007 - 08:41 AM
1) It's great you've moved off blogger, but now you need to think like an SEO. Don't just focus on ranking for "Nick Davis", blog about cameras that you've used, use the name of the camera in the title and throughout the article. Try to rank for some less competitive keywords so you can further experiment.
2) One of the best plugins for wordpress is the SEO plugin that converts URLs to keyword rich static URLs, not dynamic. Work on getting your URLs static with no ? or & in them.
3) Convert all those image links in your navs to CSS with actual text behind them. Google can't read images.
4) It's good you submitted a sitemap to google
5) Start working on your social media optimization (SMO) . Write controversial, interesting, and other blog posts that could make it to Digg or other social media sites.
6) Make sure in your templates you are using H1 tags around titles and H2 tags around the tags/categories at the bottom
If I remember, I'll try to get you a list of SEO blogs I follow closely.
1. While a code-it-yourself blog is a fun learning experience it's really best to use a common solution like WordPress that's already been tweaked for SEO and has plug-ins that improve it more. I tried the CIY approach at first but I didn't see any search engine improvements until I switched to using WordPress. For example, I was averaging about 10-50 hits a day with my own software but the WP blog gets over 1000 day on weekdays.
2. .INFO doesn't really affect search engine position but it can affect user perception. Many spammy temp sites use .info is the reason why. What's important to Google is the age of the domain and, it is rumored, the amount of time a domain was purchased for. One year renewals score less than multi-year ones.
3. Make sure you use unique title and description tags on all your pages. This doesn't matter so much for external SEO of top keywords but it does have an impact on internal SEO, duplication filters, and long tail search results.
4. RSS Feed is good but you'll want to ping all the major blog aggregation sites. This is something blogging software does for you but you'll need to code this yourself. If you don't ping, nobody knows you exist.
1) It's great you've moved off blogger, but now you need to think like an SEO. Don't just focus on ranking for "Nick Davis", blog about cameras that you've used, use the name of the camera in the title and throughout the article. Try to rank for some less competitive keywords so you can further experiment.
2) One of the best plugins for wordpress is the SEO plugin that converts URLs to keyword rich static URLs, not dynamic. Work on getting your URLs static with no ? or & in them.
3) Convert all those image links in your navs to CSS with actual text behind them. Google can't read images.
4) It's good you submitted a sitemap to google
5) Start working on your social media optimization (SMO) . Write controversial, interesting, and other blog posts that could make it to Digg or other social media sites.
6) Make sure in your templates you are using H1 tags around titles and H2 tags around the tags/categories at the bottom
If I remember, I'll try to get you a list of SEO blogs I follow closely.
Nice tips Chris! I have done some of those lately, and if you Google PsychoCoder my site is the first hit (at least it was in this search), my blog is like hit #4, some of my stuff here is in the first 10 links, so I know those tips work. The weirdest one if when I did a Google search for Richard McCutchen I found an article on Swik.net with is the tutorial I posted here on working with the registry in VB.Net.
I guess my point is this, people, listen to Chris's tips and follow them, they really work!
Sweet, Static URLs and Pinging shouldn't be an issue. I already took a crack at the Static URL over lunch: http://www.nicholasdavis.info/2007/9/26/SEO-ROI-LOL.aspx That link is actually this page and parameters: /Blog.aspx?bID=345&Blog=SEO%3f+ROI%3f+LOL%3f
I'll still have to integrate it into the actual site, however...
One of the purposes of this is endeavor is that I would like to make my own blogging tool very efficient with SEO. The eventual plan is to make a product that could compete with the likeness of dotnetnuke and Wordpress. I program in Microsoft C#, so I believe my tool will have a niche in the Microsoft Developer demographic.
Thanks for your input, bgmacaw. I will put those tips to use.
I've been focusing on SEO a lot lately. I'm using a plugin called "All in One SEO Pack" for WordPress by http://wp.uberdose.com/, its great at creating meta keywords off the content and at formatting the title tags. I like SEO Title tag better but it isn't compatible with the new WordPress 2.3 which is sorta lame.
I just recently got a sitemap going, I actually didn't have one until just recently. Right now I'm using "Google XML Sitemaps" from http://www.arnebrachhold.de/, again make sure to get the newest release as the older ones are not 2.3 compatible.
Share This by Alex King is a great concept for SMO, check it out at http://alexking.org.
27 Sep, 2007 - 06:07 AM
|