Free SEO advice – book your slot now!

July 31, 2007 by Leave a Comment

It’s been a while since I offered this service, so I figured it’s time for the next round of free SEO advice from PerfectBlogger.

If you have a website or a blog, and you would like to…

  • ensure your WordPress is fully optimized for SEO
  • have your site structure maximize the search engines exposure
  • get as much natural traffic from search engines as possible
  • have your website rank better in SERPs

… then you want to use the contact form to reach me. I will be back from my holidays mid-August, and will contact you by email to confirm how I can help you.

What you will get:

  • A chance to ask any technical questions regarding your website
  • A single-page report of your website structure and setup
  • Action list for improving your SEO

Feel free to spread the word, and I’ll talk to you in two weeks time!

Filed Under: perfectblogger, SEO

Great blog on SEO

July 24, 2007 by Leave a Comment

Just wanted to share with you all a great blog I’ve recently discovered: Ireland SEO Marketing. Run by a talented SEO enthusiast, this blog offers plenty of useful hints and directions for successful search engine optimization and marketing.

The most recent article, How To Optimize WordPress Blogs For Search Engines, is a comprehensive guide to making sure your new WordPress blog is doomed for a great SEO start. Everything from SEO-friendly permalinks to optimizing your robots.txt file, from Google Sitemaps to fighting the spam in your comments, is thoughtfully explained, which makes it much easier for you to go through the best practices of SEO.

Visit the Ireland SEO Marketing website, and you’ll probably want to subscribe to the feed after reading just a few posts.

Filed Under: blog, SEO

New Book: Search Engine Optimization in PHP

April 26, 2007 by Leave a Comment

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.

Filed Under: blog, SEO

Blogging Tools: Introducing 103bees

January 17, 2007 by 3 Comments

 

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.

Filed Under: analytics, blog, SEO, tools

Moving To or Launching A New Domain

January 10, 2007 by Leave a Comment

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:

  1. Submit and verify your sitemap to Googe's Webmaster Central.
  2. Get as many links to your new domain as possible
  3. Update all your own links to reflect the new domain and not the old, redirected one.
  4. Monitor your logs and contact major resources linking to you to update their links

An excellent article, Rand! Thanks a lot for sharing!

Filed Under: blog, google, promotion, SEO, sitemaps

Ms. Dewey: A Sexy Search Engine

October 18, 2006 by Leave a Comment

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!

Filed Under: perfectblogger, SEO

Linkbaiting Roundup

September 20, 2006 by Leave a Comment

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: 

 

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.

Filed Under: blog, promotion, SEO, traffic

Archives page added

September 5, 2006 by Leave a Comment

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. 

Filed Under: blog, perfectblogger, SEO, wordpress

Google Analytics is Finally Open

August 16, 2006 by Leave a Comment

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.   

Filed Under: analytics, blog, google, promotion, SEO, traffic

Simple Ways To Get Out of Google Sandbox

August 5, 2006 by 1 Comment

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! ;) 

Filed Under: adsense, blog, google, SEO, traffic
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