SEO | YourWealth.org: Tips for Creating Your Wealth Online

Archive for the ‘SEO’ Category

Being Off-Topic, Off-Message, Or Off-Brand Can Be Good For Your SEO!

Written by Brandon on March 27, 2008 – 4:02 am -

"Ok, perhaps I’m being a bit provocative here, but sometimes it’s the off-topic, off-message, or off-brand content that earns you the most valuable links—links that you wouldn’t have otherwise gotten. Those links can really pay the bills, in terms of the extra search traffic and resulting sales. The brand police within your company may pitch a fit, but heck, it’ll be worth it! Here’s how it’s done:"

Being Off-Topic, Off-Message, Or Off-Brand Can Be Good For Your SEO!

Posted in SEO | No Comments »

A New Tool From Google Alarms Sites

Written by Brandon on March 25, 2008 – 3:37 am -

"Retailers and publishers have fought hard to work their way up in the ranking of Google’s search results and refine the search features of their own Web sites to help users once they arrive. Now, Google is taking a greater role in helping users search within particular sites. And some of the same retailers and publishers are not happy about it."

A New Tool From Google Alarms Sites - New York Times

Posted in SEO | No Comments »

Essential Wordpress Plugins: Google XML Sitemaps

Written by Brandon on February 3, 2008 – 7:15 am -

One of the first key items that builds traffic to your Wordpress blog is to have the major search engines index your web pages. It may seem as simple as writing pages and the search engines will find you, but there is so much more to the nuances of search engine visibility. Google, for instance, allows you to build a sitemap that reports the title and location of each web page of your site directly to Google on a daily basis. Fortunately for Wordpress users, there is a powerful Google sitemap plugin that you can install that will almost immediately increase your traffic by drastic amounts. This plugin is aptly called: Google XML sitemaps. The XML in the name refers to the data format which is the standard for all Google sitemaps. But fortunately for less technical people, you don’t need to know what XML is or how this data format works. You simply have to install the Wordpress plugin and report the plugin to Google. Here’s a more detailed explanation of the process:

First, download the Google XML Sitemaps.
Then, upload the plugin into your plugins folder on your site as you normally would. More detailed instructions can be found HERE.
Configure the plugin and generate the sitemap. There are tons of options on the sitemap. Most of the sitemap options you don’t need to touch, but I’d read through the options anyway.
Sign up for Google Webmaster Tools. These tools allow you to point your sitemap directly at Google which assures they will index new content. Webmaster tools also does so much more such as tell you what the most popular search terms for your site are, which in turn help you decide what type of content to focus on. You will need to prove to Google that the site you are adding a sitemap to is actually yours by adding a line of code to your template, but the setup is relatively painless.

Admittedly, these steps can be complicated for someone who is completely non-technical, but the traffic increas you will experience is going to be great which will hopefully build your revenue.

Tags: Google, search engine optimization, SEO, sitemaps, webmaster
Posted in Building Web Traffic, SEO, wordpress | No Comments »

Building Blog Traffic: Optimizing for Google Image Search

Written by Brandon on January 4, 2008 – 5:15 am -

Here is something I noticed a year ago that completely blew me away: blogs that have lots of images get half or more of their search traffic from their images. This means if your images are not indexing on your image rich site, then you may be potentially missing an opportunity to double your search traffic. But, getting your images indexed by Google is a complete mystery even to the most seasoned webmasters as the forum chatter suggests. So, in the next few paragraphs I will help you figure out if your images are indexing on Google, and if they are not indexing then how you might get them indexed on Google, so you too can be well on your way to doubling your search traffic.

google image search costume

The geekiest Halloween costume ever: A Google Image Search (photo by Jacob Lodwick)

First, be aware that Google has a separate image crawler that crawls your site for images. You cannot include an image site map on your site telling Google when and where to find new images like you can for the written content. The image crawler just comes buy whenever it can which is not very often. Images are much more data intensive than text, so Google really takes its time getting around to your site. Also, if your site is slow, then the Google image crawler will skip over your site completely and not come back for a long, long time.

But before we get in too deep, let’s see if your images are indexing. It’s as simple as going to images.google.com and typing in “site:http://yoursite.com” ( replace yoursite.com with your blog’s own URL) . If no images come up then you’ve got a problem.

There are a few things you will need to do to make sure your images are indexing.

First, you should make sure that there is no meta tag in the head of your web page that tells the web crawlers to exclude images from being indexed. If there is, then get rid of the tag.
Next, you should make sure that there is no line in your robots.txt file telling web crawlers to exclude images from being indexed. If there is, then get rid of the line that excludes images. For more about robots.txt check out the links I’ve included.
Then, you will need to make sure each image has a very descriptive title attribute in the <img> tag. The title want to be very descriptive in 10 words or less.

If you have done all of this, and you’ve waited a few weeks for Google’s extremely slow crawler, then you have a much more difficult problem to troubleshoot. But, there is still hope! Chances are that your site is too slow for Google to efficiently crawl. I know it may seem OK to you, but to Google it is just too slow. What you are going to have to do next is speed up the delivery of the site to Google. I’ve found that the simplest and most effective technique is to cache the web pages. Caching pages is essentially a technique where your blog software creates a temporary copy of a web page that does not change too much so that the blog does not have to go back and forth to the database. Caching can dramatically speed up your site, and if your use a Wordpress blog, a there is a great caching plugin called WP-Cache that is a must for your site. After I installed the caching plugin for Wordpress on one of my own sites I very soon got major traffic from Google Images. I also tried turning it off and on for a few days at a time and found that there was a definite correlation with caching and the Google image crawler indexing my site.

If none of this works, then it may be time to start from scratch on another blog software that will guarantee image indexing. I’m afraid I’m out of ideas.

Finally, I want to point out an interesting way using Google Image Search to find out where you stand in blog domination. I run an interior design blog which is somewhat popular but no where close to the most popular design blogs such as mocoloco.com. I decided to see how I stood up to the big guys by doing a simple test to see how many images of chairs each of us had indexed. So I put in “site:designcrack.com/v2 chairs” and “site:mocoloco.com chairs” . What I had found is that I had a total of 120 different chair images which I thought was a very respectable amount of chair posts for little old me. But, mocoloco.com had a total of nearly 13,000 chair images to choose from. This immediately said to me that I will not be playing with the big blogs unless I make a full time commitment to my blogging craft. A couple of posts per day simply cannot compare.

Tags: blogging, google image search, image crawler, mocoloco.com, robot.txt
Posted in Analysis, Blogs, Building Blog Revenue, Building Web Traffic, Fundamentals, SEO | 2 Comments »

Blog Titles and Meta Data: What Benefit’s Do You Get from Optimization?

Written by Brandon on December 30, 2007 – 5:48 pm -

Back when I started my very first blog in 2004, I was not terribly happy with the amount of traffic I was getting from Google. I had set up my sitemap and done all of the things that I thought I should do. Then one day, I realized that I had never created meta data in the head of my blog template. After I changed this data to properly describe my site, I got double the amount of traffic from Google the very next day. Recently though, I’ve wondered how much optimizing meta data really matters on a site that is already popular. The answer I’ve come up with is it does not matter one bit. But before I tell you why it doesn’t matter, let’s get back to basics.

library card: An Early Form of Metadata

The Library Card: An Early Form of Metadata

If you don’t know what meta data is, then read this awesome article on searchenginewatch.com to get an understanding. In its simplest form, meta data is just data that quickly describes what is on a particular web page. This meta data can describe a number of things on your site, but for the purposes of this article, let’s focus on three tags found within the head of every web page: <meta name=”keywords” content=”some,keywords,here” /> , <meta name=”description” content=”some description here” />, and <title>The title of the page</title>.

What each tag does is pretty self explanitory. Good Search Engine Optimization practice tell us that:

<title>The title of the page</title> = You would write a short title that might be the blog name and a less than one sentence description.

If you have small amounts of traffic, and you have not done what I’ve subscribed above, then you will double your traffic pretty quickly once you’ve done this.

Optimizing blog titles and meta data in Wordpress, for instance, becomes more tricky. You should consider getting one of the SEO plugins for wordpress that I list at the end of the article or visiting the Wordpress.org web page on SEO. Also, check out this link on Meta Tags in Wordpress. Remember that in a wordpress blog you have 4 types of pages that you have to optimize: the homepage, the archive, the single post, and the page. Rather than going on about this, let’s just say the end goal: Every page in your site should have different meta data tailored to that page. Most sites that have been lazy about meta data use the same meta data throughout the site and only change the titles. This is not what you want. You want to use Wordpress’ flexible Template Tags to build just the right data. (If you want more specifics, you’ll have to hire me).

If you remember at the beginning of the article, though, I said meta data does not matter one bit for very popular sites. Then why did I spend so much time on this subject? We’ll most sites aren’t really popular, so I think you’ll benefit from considering meta data on your site. But, how do I know that meta data isn’t all that important for popular sites? From an experiment I conducted in my blog sector. I write a design blog, so I took ten of the most popular design blogs as defined by Alexa, and I viewed their source to see what their meta data looked like. I thought I would find some meta data oracle that would show me the way to instant popularity, but I found the exact opposite. And, here is what I found:

None of the five blogs had any consistency with keywords or descriptions between them. They were all completely different even though the subject matter was quite similar.
A couple of the blogs did not have meta data at all. There was nothing to speak of to describe their data, and yet they remain amazingly popular.
Most of the blogs had no consistency between the home page meta data and the single post meta data.
One site even did not have meta data related to their subject and it seemed that it was a placeholder that was meant to be changed.

What should all this mean to you? There are other much more major areas where you should spend your time increasing traffic for your site. At the very least, you should definitely go to all the major search engines to see what your page results look like. If they quickly describe the results well, then you’re done. If they don’t describe what the page is about then go back to the boards immediately because either your title or your meta data needs work. Now, for a list of SEO Plugins: