Just a week ago, in "Establishing a baseline: What's in a name", I wrote about how this blog wasn't anywhere in the first few pages of Google's results, and how this wasn't surprising given that the blog was only a day old at the time. Well, what a difference a week makes: Not only does this blog show up on the first page in a search for "search engine optimum" now, but also it shows up in the very top position. And in the second position too!
Furthermore, on the 23rd, just 5 days ago, I registered the domain name "search-engine-optimum.com", and the next day,just 4 days ago, I posted a holding page to it. That page occupies positions 3 and 4 (it's essentially the same page, under two different names). So that's gold, silver, bronze and runner-up, all at once!
On top of that, Alexa.com now ranks this blog at position 9,797,390. Being 9,797,390th in the world might not be the most impressive thing ever, but it's better than millions of sites which have been around for longer. Speaking of which, search-engine-optimum.com, which was unranked a week ago, now ranks 15,342,486th. It also has 222 backlinks according to MajesticSEO, presumably a legacy of the previous ownership, though the last time that it was indexed by archive.org was in July 2007.
So, the target of getting this blog into the first page on Google for its name has been met, and comfortably exceeded, in just a week.
Is there any general lesson to be learned from this? I think there are a couple. First, I think it shows that Google attaches a lot of importance to the site name. If you want to rank highly for a certain phrase, it definitely helps a lot if your name is that phrase.
Second, it definitely helps if there isn't too much competition for the phrase you are trying to promote. Going for low-hanging fruit such as "search engine optimum" probably makes a lot more sense than going for "search engine optimization", at least to start with (besides, the latter is split between those who spell it with a "z" and those who spell it with an "s"). And if "search engine optimum" doesn't bring in enough hits, there's lots of other long-tail key phrases that we could add to it.
I suppose what I should do now is build up search-engine-optimum.com. I have a few ideas for what to put there, but it'll take a few days to put it all together. In the meantime - watch this space. When there's something to see there. I'll mention it here.
Showing posts with label alexa. Show all posts
Showing posts with label alexa. Show all posts
Thursday, 28 July 2011
Sunday, 24 July 2011
DIY SEO and discrepancies
There are companies which will work hard on SEO for you, but there is also a lot you can do on your own just using browser extensions. For instance there's one called Chrome SEO. Can you guess which browser it's for?
Anyway, pointing it at this blog, I discover that Ask, Bing, Google and Yahoo all currently have zero pages indexed here. But wait - MajesticSEO has 3,576,791,630! Wow, I didn't even know I'd written that many! ... Oh, never mind, that's just the number of pages they've indexed on the whole of blogger / blogspot. There's no backlink information and no ranking information to be had either, again with the exception of MajesticSEO, and the only social activity is a couple of tweets, probably both by me.
Let's compare that with an established and popular blog. For convenience, I'll stick with the one I mentioned yesterday. AdrienneSmith.net has 66 pages indexed by Bing, 462 by Google, and 13,664 by MajesticSEO. There are 76 backlinks according to Alexa, and 49,594 according to MajesticSEO. Her PageRank (which you may remember had inexplicably gone down from 4 to 2) is now 3, and her Alexa ranking is 83,292 (meaning that Alexa reckon her site is the 83,292nd most popular in the world). Overall, quite impressive! Rather than try to match that, I think that for now I'll stick with my existing goal of getting this blog on Google's front page for its name.
One thing that's worth mentioning is the discrepancies. 462 vs. 13,664 for instance is a big difference. I can't imagine how MajesticSEO gets such large figures - no doubt there'll be an explanation on their website, which I'll look into, but for now I don't see how there can be 13,664 pages to be indexed in a blog that has just 309 posts. That's something for a future blog entry.
Similarly, there's a big difference between Adrienne's Alexa ranking (83,292) and her Compete rank (2,294,583).
Why does this happen? These rankings are based on estimates of site traffic, and different services have different methods of estimating. They have to do a lot of extrapolating based on the little information that they do know. And that's another reason not to get too hung up on Google's PageRank. PageRank is supposed to be a measure of a site's "authority" rather than its popularity, but volume of traffic should surely have at least some bearing on that; and while Google probably have a better idea than most, nobody, not even Google, has a complete worldwide picture of how many hits there are each day to each site. Their guesses might be more informed than most, but they're still guesses.
Anyway, pointing it at this blog, I discover that Ask, Bing, Google and Yahoo all currently have zero pages indexed here. But wait - MajesticSEO has 3,576,791,630! Wow, I didn't even know I'd written that many! ... Oh, never mind, that's just the number of pages they've indexed on the whole of blogger / blogspot. There's no backlink information and no ranking information to be had either, again with the exception of MajesticSEO, and the only social activity is a couple of tweets, probably both by me.
Let's compare that with an established and popular blog. For convenience, I'll stick with the one I mentioned yesterday. AdrienneSmith.net has 66 pages indexed by Bing, 462 by Google, and 13,664 by MajesticSEO. There are 76 backlinks according to Alexa, and 49,594 according to MajesticSEO. Her PageRank (which you may remember had inexplicably gone down from 4 to 2) is now 3, and her Alexa ranking is 83,292 (meaning that Alexa reckon her site is the 83,292nd most popular in the world). Overall, quite impressive! Rather than try to match that, I think that for now I'll stick with my existing goal of getting this blog on Google's front page for its name.
One thing that's worth mentioning is the discrepancies. 462 vs. 13,664 for instance is a big difference. I can't imagine how MajesticSEO gets such large figures - no doubt there'll be an explanation on their website, which I'll look into, but for now I don't see how there can be 13,664 pages to be indexed in a blog that has just 309 posts. That's something for a future blog entry.
Similarly, there's a big difference between Adrienne's Alexa ranking (83,292) and her Compete rank (2,294,583).
Why does this happen? These rankings are based on estimates of site traffic, and different services have different methods of estimating. They have to do a lot of extrapolating based on the little information that they do know. And that's another reason not to get too hung up on Google's PageRank. PageRank is supposed to be a measure of a site's "authority" rather than its popularity, but volume of traffic should surely have at least some bearing on that; and while Google probably have a better idea than most, nobody, not even Google, has a complete worldwide picture of how many hits there are each day to each site. Their guesses might be more informed than most, but they're still guesses.
Friday, 22 July 2011
More baseline and more Fregobo
More Baseline.
Yesterday I did a Google search for "search engine optimum" and checked if this blog was in the first three pages. As expected, it wasn't. I've just checked again and it still isn't, but again that's expected. Rome wasn't built in a day. SEO is something that really needs to be worked at for months in order to show good results, and besides there's hardly been any SEO here yet. All I've done so far is uploaded a couple of posts here and mentioned them on Twitter and Google Plus.
Anyway, checking for mentions on Google and other search engines is just part of establishing a baseline. If we want to know exactly where we are starting from, there are a few other things we can check, things like Alexa ranking. We can also use analytics, such as those provided by Google, to keep track of things such as how many visitors we get, where they come from and how long they stay for.
Another thing that we can do is to install a browser add-on, such as SEOpen or Swoosty SEO tools or Chrome SEO, which will allow us to quickly and easily check things such as backlinks, Pagerank and Alexa Rank not just for our own site but for others too.
Alexa.com is a site that measures or estimates the traffic going to a site. It has no data on this blog yet. Quantcast.com provides a similar service, and there are others.
As for analytics, there are those which are provided as part of the blogger service. They tell me for instance that this blog had 16 visits yesterday, and an all-time total of 31 visits. mainly from the United States and the United Kingdom, with one from Germany. To get more details, or to get analytics on a site which isn't a blogger blog, you can use Google Analytics, google.com/analytics. I set that up for this blog a short while ago, but it hasn't had enough time to gather any data yet. Again, there are other sites that provide a similar service.
All the things I've just touched on here will be covered in more detail later. Bookmark this space|
Maybe there isn't much happening yet with regard to the ranking of this blog, but elsewhere things are definitely looking up. For instance, my peerindex has just tripled, from 1 yesterday to 3 now. How many other people can say that their peerindex has tripled overnight? Not many, I'd guess! My activity and authority are still both listed as zero, but I suppose we can't have everything.
More Fregobo: Fregobo - The Next Facebook Killer?
Yesterday I pulled the name Fregobo out of the air, and speculated about whether it could be "the next "Facebook killer". It was just a throwaway remark about a randomly chosen collection of syllables, but afterwards I though "why not start a blog about it"? You can see the result at http://fregobo.blogspot.com/2011/07/introduction-what-is-fregobo.html. If you do, please make sure you read the kicker in the sixth paragraph.
Yesterday I did a Google search for "search engine optimum" and checked if this blog was in the first three pages. As expected, it wasn't. I've just checked again and it still isn't, but again that's expected. Rome wasn't built in a day. SEO is something that really needs to be worked at for months in order to show good results, and besides there's hardly been any SEO here yet. All I've done so far is uploaded a couple of posts here and mentioned them on Twitter and Google Plus.
Anyway, checking for mentions on Google and other search engines is just part of establishing a baseline. If we want to know exactly where we are starting from, there are a few other things we can check, things like Alexa ranking. We can also use analytics, such as those provided by Google, to keep track of things such as how many visitors we get, where they come from and how long they stay for.
Another thing that we can do is to install a browser add-on, such as SEOpen or Swoosty SEO tools or Chrome SEO, which will allow us to quickly and easily check things such as backlinks, Pagerank and Alexa Rank not just for our own site but for others too.
Alexa.com is a site that measures or estimates the traffic going to a site. It has no data on this blog yet. Quantcast.com provides a similar service, and there are others.
As for analytics, there are those which are provided as part of the blogger service. They tell me for instance that this blog had 16 visits yesterday, and an all-time total of 31 visits. mainly from the United States and the United Kingdom, with one from Germany. To get more details, or to get analytics on a site which isn't a blogger blog, you can use Google Analytics, google.com/analytics. I set that up for this blog a short while ago, but it hasn't had enough time to gather any data yet. Again, there are other sites that provide a similar service.
All the things I've just touched on here will be covered in more detail later. Bookmark this space|
Maybe there isn't much happening yet with regard to the ranking of this blog, but elsewhere things are definitely looking up. For instance, my peerindex has just tripled, from 1 yesterday to 3 now. How many other people can say that their peerindex has tripled overnight? Not many, I'd guess! My activity and authority are still both listed as zero, but I suppose we can't have everything.
More Fregobo: Fregobo - The Next Facebook Killer?
Yesterday I pulled the name Fregobo out of the air, and speculated about whether it could be "the next "Facebook killer". It was just a throwaway remark about a randomly chosen collection of syllables, but afterwards I though "why not start a blog about it"? You can see the result at http://fregobo.blogspot.com/2011/07/introduction-what-is-fregobo.html. If you do, please make sure you read the kicker in the sixth paragraph.
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