New Book: Search Engine Optimization in PHP
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Thanks to Jaimie Sirovich (SEO Egghead), I’ve just received a preview copy of the new book he co-authored with Christian Darie.
I’ve got a few more books to finish before starting this one, but can’t wait to learn from it - SEO and PHP are two of my major interests in blogging, and I’m always keen on discovering new tricks in the field.
I’ll be sure to post a review later on, but just wanted to let you know that the book is already on Amazon, in case you want to have a look and buy one.
Blogging Tools: Introducing 103bees
I've been using the 103bees.com service for a couple of weeks now, and it's definitely a must-have search engine traffic analysis tool for any serious blogger.
From the 103bees official website:
What is 103beees.com?
It's a real-time online tool for webmasters and bloggers that is highly focused on natural search engine traffic analytics. It provides tons of detailed statistics and in-depth information on the search terms that drive visitors to your webpages.
103bees is an indispensable tool for search engine optimization and internet marketing - everything you need to know about your search engine traffic in one place!
This tool allows you to easily get various views of your search engine traffic in real time. At any time, you can view a list of the latest searches which brought visitors to your pages, as well as see your top landing pages, top keywords used or SERP rankings of the all search requests which generated traffic. All this is provided for free, and you get a 30 days of historical data to analyze for as many websites (you call them projects in your 103bees account) as you like.
I'll write a review for it in the coming few days, but for the moment just wanted to share this tool with you and point you to a great review by Darren Rowse at ProBlogger: 103bees: Search Term Analytics Review.
Moving To or Launching A New Domain
I've switched my Personal Development Ideas blog from greyspk.com domain to a new one - personaldevelopment.ie. It was a planned event and I do know what to expect from such a move - for instance, my Google rankings will inevitably drop and will be regained in 3-6 months, after most of my newly located pages will be indexed and available by Google search.
But SEOmoz have just posted a great article on Expectations and Best Practices for Moving to or Launching a New Domain. What I really liked about this article is not only the realistic expectations set for both scenarios, but also truly the best practices for achieving your goals.
Here are just some of the really good advices given in the article:
- Submit and verify your sitemap to Googe's Webmaster Central.
- Get as many links to your new domain as possible
- Update all your own links to reflect the new domain and not the old, redirected one.
- Monitor your logs and contact major resources linking to you to update their links
An excellent article, Rand! Thanks a lot for sharing!
Ms. Dewey: A Sexy Search Engine
If you haven't seen this search engine yet, go check it out: Ms. Dewey is a fairly interactive search engine with a sexy girl sharing her wisdom based on your search queries.
Try searching for some general yet very deep topics like love, life, work or woman. I'm sure it's only a matter of time before there's a list of the best search queries for Ms Dewey is posted on one of the websites, but even now search is fun and interesting.
It's not a new idea, but definitely a successful, witty and funny implementation.
Ms. Dewey is definitely worth a look!
Linkbaiting Roundup
Linkbaiting seems to become a hot topic once again. Having enjoyed reading quite a number of really interesting posts on the topic in the last few days, I thought you would benefit from looking through them.
So here it is, the linkbaiting roundup for you:
- SEO Advice: Linkbait and linkbaiting - the first interesting post on linkbaiting I could find. Matt Cutts gave us few examples on what linkbaits are and also demonstrated that linkbaiting doesn't have to be a bad thing at all.
- 20 Linkbaiting Techniques by Darren Rowse from ProBlogger is the latest post of his recent linkbaiting series. In the series, Darren gives you an introduction to linkbaiting and explores the possible motivations for linkbaiting.
- Link Bait - Aaron Wall of SEO Book gives you a few pointers to successful link baits.
- Forget SEO! Why Link Bait is Worth 50k a Pop - Jamie Sirovich from SEO Egghead shares his thoughts on why link bait is a great way to generate traffic.
This should be enough to get you started, and if you come across another useful article or two, please let me know! In the meantime, I'll probably get busy creating a Blogging Glossary entry for linkbaiting.
Archives page added
I've just added a PerfectBlogger Archives page, where you'll be able to find every post I've made on this blog.
Archives page is one of the basic pages each blog should have. Not only does it help your visitors navigate around your older posts, but it also servers SEO purposes: it helps search engines get to each of your pages with content the quickest way.
If your WordPress theme doesn't come with a built-in archives feature, or if you don't like it for some reason, I strongly suggest you download and install the SmartArchives plugin by Justin Blanton.
Google Analytics is Finally Open
Great news!
Starting yesterday, new users can get an instant registration with Google Analytics service. Previously users had to submit their request and wait for the Google Analytics team to get back to them with an approval of the registration and a special invitation code.
According to the official blog, from now on the Google Analytics service is fully open to the public and you can get started in a matter of minutes.
I'm working on a Google Analytics page in the Blogging Tools section of PerfectBlogger, and I'll be sure to let you all know as soon as I update this page.
Simple Ways To Get Out of Google Sandbox
Everyone faces this problem when starting a new website: how to get your website indexed by search engines as quickly as possible? This post will show you a quick way to get out of Google Sandbox with minimum efforts on your part.
Two Months To Fully Index Your Content
My access logs show that it took Google just about 2 months to fully reveal the contents of one of my newly created blogs. This obviously takes the usual lag of a few days it takes Google bots to index the most recent content.
Impressively enough, Google bots start indexing your new website in a matter of just few days. My blog was indexed for the first time when it was only 3 days old! Bear in mind though, I've pointed Google to it using its website submission form.
Easy Tips For The Best Results
Below are just a few really easy tips for your website optimization which will help Google index your content as quickly as possible:
- Use Permalinks
Permalinks are definitely the first thing to do. There's been a lot of talking about it on various SEO sites, and the general knowledge I've gained is that Google is likely to pay attention at how people would access your pages.Important: make sure your permalinks structure is well-thought beforehand, as it will be hard to change it at a later time.
If you're using a recent enough content management system or blog engine, you probably have no real directories with your articles and blog entries, but instead all the content is stored in a database, and nice URLs are made using permalinks. It's a simple enough concept: do some planning and make sure your URLs look the best.
No dynamic URLs - it's really important that you have as less variables in your URLs as possible (none ideally). Again, because it is important that your URLs are simple and easy to read and follow.
- Google Sitemaps
Google Sitemaps are the easiest and quickest way to let Google know what pages your website has. Not only can you provide the list of all the pages you want indexed, but you can also specify the importance of each page so that Google bots pay more attention to it.Google Sitemaps is quite a flexible service, and since it's fairly popular too, there are already tons of freely available tools out there to suit all your needs. I really liked the SiteMap XML script in PHP - you specify a link to it in your Google Sitemaps account, and every time Google accesses this script, it automatically scans your website and provides a ready SiteMap in XML form. Very convenient and pretty easy to configure.
- Have As Many Pages Of Real Content As Possible
All I had was 10 articles to start with, because I didn't want to put too much content online just yet. I wanted to see if it's possible to get out of Google sandbox with such a small number of pages. And here's the answer: yes, it is quite possible!.What make your content real? Here are just a few things to keep in mind:
- Write your articles yourself: DON'T grab texts from any online resources - this will not give you much weight in terms of Google search engine, as Google bots will be more interested in a fresh, original content
- Be unique: you need to be as original as possible - because only really unique articles and ideas will get the most interest. This is mostly to do with human readers of your blog and not Google bots, but I still think it's a good advice.
- Put Google AdSense ads on every page with the content
Luckily I've had AdSense account activated beforehand using a rather popular project of mine, so it was not a problem at all for me to stick a square block of AdSense ads onto every page with useful content.There is an opinion that having AdSense on your pages urges Google bots to come and index your pages more quickly simply because Google really has to have your pages indexed before it can provide meaningful content-targeted ads.
While it's not 100% accurate, because AdSense also is capable of scanning your pages on-the-fly and provide meaningful ads for the most obvious keywords in your content, I certainly see no harm in placing ads.
My ads became meaningful in just a couple of days, but I had to wait for another 2 months before my pages got visible in Google search results.
- Trackback to popular sites
I've only trackbacked to one site again because I wanted to see if it would be enough. It sure was enough! I got only 10 visitors or so from that website, but the point was made - I've been visited through an external link. A trackback is a great and simple way to let others know about your content. - Link to other projects of yours
There is definitely no harm in linking to other projects of yours, especially to the long-established and popular ones. If you have only a handful of projects (not hundreds), then it's also okay to link back to your project - it will not add much of a weight to your new project from the search engine point of view, but it would not look like you're trying to earn a better PageRank by linking from tons of your own projects neither.
As you can see, it's all been about letting Google know your site is out there and really has to be indexed fully at some stage. Sitemaps help Google find its way around your website, and AdSense could also be a useful hint to get your site indexed as Google cannot serve content-targeted ads without having indexed the content first.
But the best advice is to never stop experimenting! Some things might work for my projects, but will not for yours. Similarly, you can as easily come up with the most brilliant solutions to getting your site indexed in the least time possible. Just don't forget to share the knowledge! ;)
ProBlogger: A Very Useful Blog
The more time I spend reading Darren Rowse's ProBlogger blog, the more I realize there's so much learning to be done!
I like ProBlogger a lot. It's one of these resources you know you'll find something useful on, so I sometimes just start reading through a series or a category of posts, and it's incredible how much stuff I've been thinking or worrying about is already explained and covered on ProBlogger's pages!
I can hardly find a blogging-related topic which isn't covered there (although this probably means I'm very new to the blogging and simply have tons of stuff to learn): general blogging tips, SEO, WordPress customization, AdSense - you name it! It's like a book (hey, that's an idea! It'll be a bestseller for sure!).
For some blogs, you enjoy the reading so much that you feel almost scared as you dig deeper and deeper into archives, because you know that someday you're going to reach the bottom of the posts archive, and that will the end. But with Darren's resource it's much better - not only it is a very comprehensive guide, but it's also a very dynamic one, so there is lots of useful and relevant information added daily.
I think I'm a fan of ProBlogger. After all, it is such a pleasure to learn from someone who grew knowledgeable in the field simply by trying all the steps you've already taken plus hunders more which you're only planning to take.
Ever More Videos from Matt Cutts
Apparently, Matt Cutts has just posted 2 more videos with his answers to readers' questions about Google.
So here they are:
- Matt Cutts: SEO and Google Answers (sessions 7-8)
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