SEO Dance

Field of Dreams is one of my favorite movies. The line “If you build it they will come” is one of the more well known phrases made popular by the movie. This saying can be applied when it comes to web content in that if you write it, they will come to your website.

I had written a small generic piece on how to personalize The Sims 2 using the Sims 2 Body Shop. This off-the-cuff article repeatedly brings in a lot of traffic to my website. After reading my original article, I decided that I could do something more valuable to readers, so I created a tutorial using the keywords that bring most people to that original article.

While my original article brings in traffic, it also a big exit point because it really lacks specific instructions on what people are looking for when they click on the article. I have fixed this by writing an in-depth tutorial and adding an update to my original article that will refer readers to the tutorial.

I plan to write several more tutorials on the Sims 2 program because it brings a lot of traffic and if I have better content on it then I might convert some of that traffic to regular readers. Writing the tutorials is on topic for my website plus it’s something I really enjoy doing. That’s the key to good content on your website: write your passion and what fits in with your website. If you write it, they will come and possibly come back again.

keyword content

StumbleUpon is a website with a great concept. Looking to surf the Internet but have absolutely nothing to check out? StumbleUpon might be the right place to visit. Users submit interesting articles while other users will randomly be taken to web pages.

Through the StumbleUpon toolbar, just click the stumble link to be taken to a random page. It’s great for finding interesting web pages and also a great traffic tool for websites that have been submitted.

I hadn’t realized the full power of StumbleUpon until I had an article submitted to it. The referrals from StumbleUpon were through the roof, which was especially exciting for my fairly new blog to have such nice traffic stats. It’s easy to register with Stumbleupon and submit articles. Just note the web address and write a short review describing the article. The increased traffic is worth the small effort that it will take to get your article in the stumbleupon rotation.

StumbleUpon

You may be asking yourself just what is article blasting? Article Blasting is a promotional technique to write a lot of articles about your niche website, then submit them to directories. What this hopefully accomplishes is an authority about the subject, driving more traffic and PageRank for your website.

Amy Bass, who is a blogger working to pay off her debt by making money online, coined the phrase on her blog. She explains on her blog that her goal is to write 50 niche articles and them submit them over time to several article submission directories. Her articles will be sprinkled with keywords for her niche website. Amy will be reporting is this was a success or not on her blog.

My problem with article blasting would be coming up with 50-100 different niche topics to write about. It could be done but would take me a few months, so I don’t think that is in the spirit of an article blast. My method might be more of an article trickle.

It will be interesting to follow Amy’s results since I have been wanting to submit articles to directories but not sure if there is any real payoff to it.

Recently I had switched to using Firefox and wasn’t using Internet Explorer. I have installed the Alexa tool bar for IE but didn’t have it for Firefox. I recently installed it on Firefox since I had noticed a drop in rankings on some of my websites.

The problem with the Alexa rankings is that it is determined through Alexa tool bar users or through Alexa redirect links. Friday I had revealed the Alexa ranking for SEODance.com as 442,585. Usually rankings are updated over the weekend and during the week at least once. Today’s ranking of SEODance.com is 438,093 so the ranking feel and that is good. The lower the number, the better ranking the site has according to Alexa.

It is curious, though how much of a weight my surfing with my Alexa tool bar went into figuring the ranking. The Alexa rankings are easily manipulated but are still valuable to some. If the Alexa toolbar was used with more of a sample of web surfers like how Nielsen does their ratings then the results might have more value to the masses. Right now it’s just a fun tool to get some data about your website.

Alexa has released a toolbar for Firefox. Alexa measures web traffic of websites then ranks then according to their algorithm. The catch with Alexa is that sites that are visited by those who have installed the Alexa toolbar are the sites getting votes and have a better rating.

I use the Alexa toolbar in Internet Explorer for quite some time. My websites have slowly gotten a lower Alexa ranking. The lower the number is, the more traffic it is receiving. Recently I stated using the Firefox browser, so I haven’t been surfing in Internet Explorer. Yesterday I used Internet Explorer for the first time in about two weeks. I’ve noticed that my rankings have fallen slightly across the board. It makes me wonder just how much voting power one Alexa user has on the system.

Now I have the Alexa toolbar installed on Firefox, so we’ll see if there is a change in my rankings. I do like the toolbar better for Firefox as the rankings show up in the bottom right-hand corner.

The current ranking for SEODance is 442,585. Alexa updates their rankings at least twice a week. After the next update I will post the new SEODance ranking for comparison.

Alexa toolbar for Firefox

I spent the holiday trying to get some things accomplished on my blogs that I’ve just been putting off. I updated a few affiliate banners and tweaked a few templates. I was hoping to get more done but we did go to the movies and then spent the evening at our neighbors’ house. Since it feels more like a holiday week, I’ve decided to make a to do list and work to bang out other small projects the rest of the week.

Set Goals. There is one program I want to include on one of my blogs but to qualify I need more traffic. So, for the month of July I’m going to work on building traffic for this one blog. It seems I have a spike in traffic when I do any sort of traffic building effort whether it is taking part in a forum discussion or leaving comments on blogs. This month I plan to have a daily goal of comments left and track my efforts.

Reading articles later. I have a bad habit of finding great articles and making the mistake of not reading them at that moment. I will bookmark to read later. The problem is later never comes. It’ll be weeks before I think about a particular article again. So, if something piques my interest enough to click on it, I plan to read it at that moment.

Updating old Posts. I’ve become quite the spell checker in the past few months. I can’t say I spell checked every single time before then, so I’m committed to going back to all my old posts and checking them for errors and updates. It will take a while since there are over 800 posts but at least I can get started this week.

By making my SEO to do list, it will help me to keep on track and make the most of my time online. In a few weeks hopefully I will see some results from my efforts.

Recently I learned about Google’s Supplemental Index. It’s web pages that are excluded from Google’s search engine. The main reason a web page seems to land in the index is because it is duplicate content. Using the SEO Tool for Firefox, I found out how many of my pages were in the supplemental index. For one of my websites that is a blog using WordPress, I had 2400 pages indexed and 2300 in the supplemental index.

I checked a couple of results pages to see which pages were in the supplemental index. Most seemed to be either comments or RSS content. Apparently WordPress creates a bunch of duplicate content by its structure. Having a post in two categories can possibly create duplicate content. To fix this problem, I added a robots.txt file to my root directory. My first robots.txt was apparently too restrictive and blocked a lot of pages from Google. My Google traffic was nonexistent for about two weeks. It needs some tweaking before I add it back again.

The supplemental index pages do not count against you when it comes to PageRank. The pages listed in the supplemental index will not be found in Google searches. Most of the pages for my website in the supplemental index don’t have much value anyway since most are comments or feed results. It would just be nice to get that large supplemental number to a much smaller one.

After announcing to the whole blogosphere that Google still snobs this blog, I have found one more reason why SEO Dance won’t rank well:

AdSense ads make it hard for sites to get a decent search engine placement. This is according to a survey conducted by RankingMeasures. Its press release includes:

“To the search engines, one warning sign of a spammy (read: uncool for the search engines) website is the presence of contextual advertising.

But no, this news, actually it’s an old news, won’t deter me from getting in better terms with the big G and with just all the search engines ever made. I’m not spamming… right?

RankingMeasures full press release.

via Revenews

google ban, adsense, seo blog, google sandbox

It’s been a month since I announced my SEO Dance Blog experiment. Now here’s what have become of my blog in the eyes of Google, Yahoo, and MSN.

But before that, you might want to know about the procedures of the experiment:

SEO Blog Content Optimization
I have produced a total of 40 blog posts, which is quite an accomplishment for me because I have never blogged this frequent for any of my own blogs. But for the sake of this SEO experiment, I did it! Actually, I just didn’t want to get booted out of the 451press team. No, really. It’s a part of my goal to come up with a certain number of posts and find out how will SEO Dance fare with the major search engines.

Forum Participation
Aside from posting semi-regularly, I started getting into forums like Steve Pavlina’s , Webmaster World and just a few days ago, Conquer Your Niche.

Getting into the Nerves of other Bloggers
I also started becoming more active in leaving comments (read: not spamming) to blogs though they are not all necessarily related to SEO. However, this at first I did not plan on doing since I’m really much of a lurker but I can’t resist not joining in the convo, especially with the fun posts of BinaryDollar, which I’ve been reading for quite some time now.

Blog Submission Mission
If you will be searching for SEO Dance using Google, you will see that some blog directories where I submitted it, were already indexed. So far, there were about three blog directories that I already bugged for ‘em to display this blog.
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If you are faced with the dilemma of what to give more attention to in optimizing your website or blog for better search engine visibility, on-page or off-page SEO, one SEO study showed results that search engines favor more the off-page SEO efforts of webmasters.

SEO experts of Fortune Interactive used its SEMLogic technology to acquire information on what SEO factors search engines find important. The study used the highly-competitive keyword “laptop” and checked out the top 100 search results from the Google, Yahoo, and MSN. The data was analyzed last June 30, 2006.

Here are the results of the study:

- *IBL Quality is the most important factor across the board.
- IBL Quantity is of least importance relatively among the off-page factors across the board.
- Achieving the **coveted trifecta of ranking well across the search engines requires strong values in the two most important influential factors for each search engine.

*IBL stands for inbound link
**coveted trifecta - ranking high for the three major search engines

Here are more details on the results of this study about SEO factors.

IBL quality, coveted trifecta, on-page SEO versus off-page SEO, SEMLogic, Fortune Interactive, SEO study

Chris Pearson of Pearsonified shared his on-page optimization triumph by employing two methods that have caused his site’s search engine traffic to increase by 455% in one month:

As for this SEO blog, I’m still waiting for the new blog theme to be rolled out next week before I can request tweaking for on-page SEO purposes.

How about you? Care to share some tips on how to fix your site or blog for on-page optimization?

Details of Pearsonified’s On-page SEO success…

Pearsonified, on-page optimization, SEO technique, SEO tool, Cutline Wordpress theme, Wordpress

SEO forums are one of the great sources of SEO tips. And just this morning I have come across some optimization information about how long will it take Google to index or recognize that a site receives inbound links from a site with a high page rank.

Here’s what a WebmasterWorld forum member speculated:

For a high-quality link from a site with “a lot of trust” I have seen it affect rankings in as little as a week.

Another SEO forum member mentioned that what makes it easier for Google to index a site with IBL from a high page rank site is its “age”. Does it mean that it will take ages before the Google search engine finds out that it should be doing its work and show the site on its SERPs already?

I’ve been a witness to that less-than-a-week speed of Google to recognize that your site is receiving some sweet Google juice from some trusted sites. But I’d want to know if the level of page rank will also affect that speed, say how long will Google index your site if you receive a .edu or a .gov (which are said to be “very trusted sites” inbound link or a link from a PR 8 or 9 sites.

You can follow this Google link building recognition discussion by visiting the WebmasterWorld forum.

Google, link building, search engine, indexing, WebmasterWorld, SEO forum, SEO tip

(image from comit-hosting.com)

After a week of my announcement of my SEO Dance Experiment. Yahoo! and MSN started giving in and gave me the following SERPs ranks:

SERPs for the keywords “SEO Dance” for October 26, 7:45 PM

Yahoo! Search yielded 2,700,000 search results and gave this new SEO blog the Top 3 spot today. See the screenshot of Yahoo! search engine results page for SEO Dance.

MSN Live Search yielded 255,620 search results and gave this new SEO blog the Top 5 spot. See the screenshot of MSN Live Search sengine engine results page for SEO Dance.

Google Search yielded 7,850,000 and gave this new SEO blog the Top 1 spot! NOT!

It’s something to be expected, the Google sandbox can’t be surmounted that easily. But I’m quite happy with Yahoo! and MSN SERPs today.

SEO experiment, Yahoo! Search, MSN Live Search, SERP, SEO blog, SEO

Aside from the recent SEO contest I’ve joined, getting my SEO blog to show up in the first few pages of the SERPs is one of the most challenging SEO endeavor I’ve ever gotten myself into. Thanks to the one who chose my domain name SEO Dance, (Is it Chrispian?), this will be one hell of a roller-coaster ride. Haha!

One of the first few SEO steps I have accomplished is to try to get as many IBL (inbound links) directing to my blog. It’s one tried and tested method to get out of the sandbox.
Link building translates to building trust as how many SEO gurus would preach. Whether they call that getting trapped in Google algorithm’s quicksand a sandbox or trustbox, one thing is for sure, everyone needs to get out of the darn box!

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Doesn’t that title sound like a kind of alien invasion film? If you haven’t read my SEO experiment announcement yet, I won’t do a recap for you. Please don’t be a lazyas$, do read it.

To those who have read it, as promised, here is my SEO-fu plan.

Search engine optimization is so much of a guy’s craft I’ve noticed. This is because I don’t know of too many ladies out there trying to tinker on SEO. However, although I can’t be those kinds of guys who can and would try to understand the Google algorithm, I do enjoy working on each aspect that allegedly compose the Google algorithm. Why am I having this love-hate relationship with the Google algorithm? Google is the search engine which is known to be the hardest to please because of its retro-virus like nature - it has already evolved even before any search engine optimizer or analyst has cracked its code.

However, since I’m not going to compete against those millions of search results because I have a client who will pay me for to reach the top of the SERPs, this experiment should not be that taxing. But still, having a blog that should be dealing with search engine optimization, I can’t be a runny-nosed invalid settling for a page 20 of the SERPs, which is one feat on its own already if you are competing with millions of blogs.

Ok, enough of the yada-yada’s. Here are my SEO tactics:
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