SEO

I stumbled onto a site called Website Grader which is a site that grades your blog or website using SEO guidelines. It gives you pointers on things you can do to improve the search engine rankings of your site. I was surprised to see what it said about some of my sites.

It all ends up with you entering in an email address and you get a pitch for professional SEO services. But the tool is cool enough, to make me overlook their pitch. Check out Website Grader, you may get some useful information regarding your site.

You have to submit your blog to all of the blog submission directories out there. You also have to submit your feed to the RSS submission directories out there. There is a growing number. I found this site that has a ton of links to great RSS submission sites. Check it out...it's a great resource.

If you know of any others that are great, post them in the comments.

With the web evolving it's important that you stay in touch with the Web 2.0 sites. Most of the Web 2.0 sites are social networking sites. I've created a list of essential social networking sites below...A to Z of Social Networking:   read more »

Tropical Seo did created a nice list of Social Media Sites that will actually send you traffic. Check out their list, I plan on diving into this more tomorrow. Gotta watch The Shield tonight.

Sage Lewis from Sagerock.com put together a really informative video called Introduction to Search Engine Optimization. It is a primer on SEO. It covers the basics to give newbies a better understanding of off page and on page search engine optimization.

Take the time to check out their site if you’d like some more information. I hope to bring you some more informative videos to help you with blogging in the future.

You can watch the Introduction to Search Engine Optimization here.

I’d like to share with you how to get 100,000 unique visitors. I run several blogs. One of which just reached the 100,000 unique visitor mark, at just over one year. This is all organic traffic. This site is on American Idol, and I have a 16 year old writer coming up with the content. We split all the profits.

Here’s what we did:

* Find an active niche
* Research the niche
* Find out who your competition is
* Find someone who is passionate about that niche
* Build a blog using WordPress
* Setup ads with Adsense
* Write often and passionately  read more »

I always find great information in forums. They are a great place to go to find help. There are always people willing to answer questions and point you in the right direction. The forum, in my opinion, is the best thing about the web. If you are intersted in blogging, SEO, advertising, etc. you need to join these forums.  read more »

I found an interesting thing the other day. I clicked on one of my post’s and went to the page and viewed my source. Uh-oh, two sets of meta tags!! I checked some more posts, same thing.

I know what caused it. I have meta tags defined in my header file and I also use the custom tags of keywords and description. This creates two sets of meta tags for each post. Ugh. Google hates that.

I wonder how far this has set me back? I’ve resolved the issue by removing them from the header.php file. I’m hoping my traffic improves now.

Have you ever noticed when you are posting in WordPress there are those mysterious “custom fields?” You can use those to your advantage. Everyone will tell you that Meta Tags are dead. I disagree.

I like to use the WordPress Custom Fields for meta information. Basically, a meta tag for each post. One custom field would be titled “description.” Then in the value I put descriptive data regarding that post.  read more »

There are several ways to drive traffic to your blog. Obviously, the best way is good ol fashioned TIME. But there are lots of things you can do to speed up the process.

1. Keyword Rich Content
2. Incoming links
3. Sitemap
4. Related articles plugin
5. Keyword rich permalink structure
6. Meta tags, alt tags and title tags
7. Technorati tags
8. Relevant category titles
9. Only 2 or 3 articles per page
10. 200-400 words per article
11. Bold keywords, break up long articles, bullets
12. Ping list
13. Submit your blog
14. Write often and regularly  read more »

Often times when I’m checking my awstats, I’ll see Yahoo! and MSN showing some high numbers. Until lately, I used to just check to see where my terms were ranking on Google.

But now, I’ve discovered the importance of checking the other search engines. For instance one of my sites won’t come up on Google until around 100, but when I check on MSN, I’m number one!

Several of my sites are doing this, great positioning on MSN and Yahoo!, but twenty pages back on Google. Why is this? All my sites have been optimized for Google. To be real honest, that’s all I thought mattered.  read more »

Wondering what the 8 Magical SEO Tricks are? Well this thread http://forums.devstart.com/showthread.php?t=1508 claims they have it figured it. I read the article it had a few things that were good advice but nothing “Magical.”

They touch on:

:: Submit to quality directories
:: Submit articles
:: Getting link backs
:: Don’t Spam
:: Avoid link farms
:: Use keywords in your tags
:: Use a sitemap
:: Fresh quality content  read more »

Mr. Seo did a great article covering some of the myths of SEO. The myths he covers are:

All meta tags are of equal importance
You should submit your site to search engines weekly or monthly
SEO is too expensive
PPC is more effective than natural SEO
Hiring an SEO specialist “in house” is cheaper
I can only optimize my homepage for keyterms
All I need to do is write content with the correct keyword density and my site will rank well
I shouldn’t aim for the most competitive keywords and phrases
Only work with companies that give you a guarantee  read more »

Ever wonder what the quickest way to tick off your visitors is? Hostway’s national Pet Peeve survey assembled a list of 15 irritating website practices:

1. Pop-up ads
2. Requiring the installation of extra software to view the site
3. Dead links
4. Requirement to register and log-on before viewing the website
5. Slow-loading pages
6. Content that is out of date
7. Confusing navigation - hard-to-find pages, too many clicks
8. Ineffective site search tool  read more »

Sometimes you want a static webpage. I’ve recently discovered a nice third party tool to help create a Google sitemap for static sites. This tool assumes your server supports PHP.

:: Click on the link http://www.softswot.com/sitemapinfo.php
:: Download the Sitemap XML file
:: Unzip it
:: Upload the Sitemapxml.php file to the root directory of your static site
:: Now use your browser and go to http://www.yoursite.com/sitemapxml.php
:: Type in the URL of your site
:: Adjust the options as necessary
:: Click on Generate Sitemap XML  read more »