The owner of a self-described Seattle-based search engine optimization company, Wesley LeFebvre, writes on the “about” page of SEO Rankings that he created the blog to offer you strategies to increase search engine traffic to your website.
With one blog post so far, I wait to see what he does with it.
I raise Wesley’s name and SEORankings.com in light of an article a few days ago written by British blogger David Bradley about improving SEO ranking, describing the process to seduce search engines robots to find your website or blog.
If a robot can’t see your data, the search engine won’t display it, and someone typing in your company name or keywords that describe you won’t see you. Make sense? Grasp the importance of SEO?
There are many factors to achieve SEO, from contextual linking and internal linking to H1 tagging and writing viewable content for multiple web browsers.
David wrote his blog post as a unilateral experiment in reaction to an earlier SEO ranking improvement guide by Wayne Smallman, wherein Wayne provided steps to use Google Webmaster Tools to increase the likelihood of search engine robots to index your site.
Google tools aside–including Google Analytics, which I’ve written of several times, such as how one blog post quintupled my blog visitors–neither Wayne nor David wrote about the importance of blog plugins to further improve so-called Google Juice.
My friend Josh Fialkoff comes to the rescue, with an appropriate article written last fall about Wordpress plugins for SEO, including using relevant title tags and creating sitemaps to boost search engine rank.
I love a good mystery; and I’m chalking this post up to the enigmatic future. Let’s give it a few days and we’ll see who makes number one for search engine optimization on Google USA and Google UK: Wayne, David, or me… or someone else a robot might consider.
Photo credit: striatic
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Nice one Ari! If I mention the key phrase in this comment – i.e. how to improve SEO ranking – do you think it will give you, me or Wayne a boost? My post, at the time of writing, is still #1 for that phrase. I’m not even sure how worthy a phrase it is, that was Wayne’s call. It’s had only a few hundred visitors since I posted it on April 19.
Things like SEO plugins help a little, as do dofollow comments. There is less proof that anyone gains real benefits by outlinking to big sites. Fundamentally, there is still one basic SEO rule in operation that has been that way since Google first spidered the web, and at the moment at least it’s still working for me.
Oh one thing about SEO plugins, they’re for Wordpress only sites generally, but if you know how to edit your template/theme for any type of site and have your meta tags, .htaccess and robots.txt set just write you can do all that they can do and more…
I guess the follow up question is whether comments help improve your SEO ranking as well. It is interesting how quickly sciencetext.com indicated they moved to the top of what I would assume is a highly competitive search term using what, as you say, seems to be a relatively simple strategy to seduce search engine robots to your page.
Fred H Schlegel´s last blog post..Physics and Ideation: When Does A Breakthrough Idea Become An Acceptable Idea?
I’m not an SEO expert (to be fair, I’m not an expert of anything), but my understanding is comments help boost a blogger’s credibility rating on Technorati, Alexa, and similar sites that track such things. On the flipside, considering the search engines are now indexing comments…
I think as time goes by, more and more authority will be placed on the inbound links/popularity/etc. than the straight coding. That being said, H1 and H2 and H3 should always be at the core of posts/pages/etc….I don’t think those will ever go out of style as did the meta tags.
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Did you mean to write “…as didn’t the meta tags?”
While less emphasis is placed on certain meta tags, there’s no denial the “robots,” “description,” “noodp,” and to a lesser extent, “keywords” meta tags are worthwhile.
The whole arena of SEO ranking tends to confuse so call me naive – and some will, have or plan to – it still seems to come down to content. Good content is ultimately what brings people back, gets word-of-mouth going, etc.
When you Google “Christopher Gabriel” or “Blog Harbor” I arrive rather quickly. And I certainly do contextual linking and internal linking. BUT…after the simple and obvious ways for me to come up, I believe someone lets the ball drop…oh, is that me??
That’s the point my understanding hits a dead-end. The H1 tagging I don’t quite understand. And all the things you (Ari) try and lay out on a routine basis go way over my head. It has been maddening to try and get off the plateau I’ve been on. I started Blog Harbor 17 months ago and since that time, traffic is up close to 500%. And while I feel blessed to have so many regulars checking in to Blog Harbor as well as a steady flow of new visitors, things have leveled off. They’ve leveled off at a good point, but I believe I should be reaching more people.
Yes Ari, let’s call it like it is: I feel like a lamb with an attitude lost in the SEO woods.
I know how to write and produce strong content in the area of posts, audio satires and fun videos (lots coming). But the technical side of things – understanding how to really increase one’s viweing/listening/watching audience………
That sound you hear is silence in Blog Harbor’s marina.
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Ari,
What I like about this post is that you’ve:
1. Defined why SEO is important
2. Linked to a few key concepts
3. Linked to a few posts that have high utility
Twitter posts are now indexed, so I imagine that WordPress plugins that create comments from tweets about a post are great SEO tools (but I’m not an expert either).
John
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Ari, I appreciate this article. You’ve given me a better understanding of what I’ve been blindly trying to work on. I’ll be checking out the Wordpress plug ins most of all, since I’ve heard much about them.
Thanks for sharing and um, what works works.
PS. tying in w/another post of yours on Twitter and following. SEO types are coming out of the wood works these days. Can it be it’s that easy to be an expert or more likely, that many fools grabbing at easy money??
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Thanks so much for another great post. I am thinking about creating a twitter account to gain some traffic to my site, but I was undecided until reading this post. Thanks for the information!