There's plenty of other useful SEO resources on the web, apart from Search Engine Optimum, and we'll be highlighting some of them from time to time. For instance, here's Google's guide to SEO (PDF). We'll assume that they know what they're talking about, since they tend to rank pretty highly on most site ranking tables.
(To Bing, Yahoo! etcetera: Don't worry, you'll get your turn.)
Monday, 25 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.
Saturday, 23 July 2011
Too much me, not enough PageRank
While I think this blog has got off to a reasonable start, I do notice a couple of obvious flaws. First, the blog entries are far too long; short and sweet should be the rule; and secondly, that's probably because I'm mentioning myself too much.
To alleviate these problems, I've launched yet another blog,"Martin Gradwell's Blog". You should go there if you're really here to find out all about me. So, if you're still here, I'll assume it's for the SEO. Let's plough on, and maybe mention someone else for a change.
Adrienne Smith has what looks to be a very good blog about SEO. I discovered it because one of her pages is about "10 tips for getting your name on the first page of Google", which coincidentally is the target that I have set for the name of this blog (and the target which @seogoogleexperts say they can achieve in six months or your money back. Seriously, there seems to be a lot of attention paid to that first page on Google for some reason :-) ).
Anyway, there are some good points among her ten. but she's talking about how to get your own personal site or blog into the top ten if you have a name that happens to be common. That may be relevant for my newly created personal blog, but it could only be used for a special-purpose blog like this one with some modification. I'll produce my own top ten list in a future blog entry, which may well be based on hers (with suitable acknowledgments if that is the case and sufficient differences to make it unique, of course).
One other thing that caught my eye was "Wow, Google doesn't like me any more", an article about how Adrienne's blog recently went down from PageRank 4 to PageRank 2. There doesn't seem to be any good reason for that, or at least Adrienne couldn't see one and at first glance I can't see one; but she accepts it stoically and won't let it stop her from doing what she is doing.
I think the lesson to be learned from that is that SEO isn't an exact science. Even people who have been steadily building up their ranking for years can suddenly find it reduced and be at a loss to understand why. But that's okay, because PageRank isn't everything. In fact, it isn't anything tangible at all. It's just a number. Having it reduced won't make an interesting blog any less interesting. It won't impact the experience of the average visitor to a site in any way. So, what does it actually mean?
That can be the subject of a future blog entry, since on its own it could probably fill quite a few entries. Short and sweet is the rule. Bookmark this space.
To alleviate these problems, I've launched yet another blog,"Martin Gradwell's Blog". You should go there if you're really here to find out all about me. So, if you're still here, I'll assume it's for the SEO. Let's plough on, and maybe mention someone else for a change.
Adrienne Smith has what looks to be a very good blog about SEO. I discovered it because one of her pages is about "10 tips for getting your name on the first page of Google", which coincidentally is the target that I have set for the name of this blog (and the target which @seogoogleexperts say they can achieve in six months or your money back. Seriously, there seems to be a lot of attention paid to that first page on Google for some reason :-) ).
Anyway, there are some good points among her ten. but she's talking about how to get your own personal site or blog into the top ten if you have a name that happens to be common. That may be relevant for my newly created personal blog, but it could only be used for a special-purpose blog like this one with some modification. I'll produce my own top ten list in a future blog entry, which may well be based on hers (with suitable acknowledgments if that is the case and sufficient differences to make it unique, of course).
One other thing that caught my eye was "Wow, Google doesn't like me any more", an article about how Adrienne's blog recently went down from PageRank 4 to PageRank 2. There doesn't seem to be any good reason for that, or at least Adrienne couldn't see one and at first glance I can't see one; but she accepts it stoically and won't let it stop her from doing what she is doing.
I think the lesson to be learned from that is that SEO isn't an exact science. Even people who have been steadily building up their ranking for years can suddenly find it reduced and be at a loss to understand why. But that's okay, because PageRank isn't everything. In fact, it isn't anything tangible at all. It's just a number. Having it reduced won't make an interesting blog any less interesting. It won't impact the experience of the average visitor to a site in any way. So, what does it actually mean?
That can be the subject of a future blog entry, since on its own it could probably fill quite a few entries. Short and sweet is the rule. Bookmark this space.
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.
Thursday, 21 July 2011
Establishing a baseline: What's in a name?
Before we get started in earnest, let's try to establish a baseline, so that when we look back in six months or a year, say, then we can see just where we started from.
How successful is this blog already? After just one post the answer is probably "not very", but how can we check? One way is to search for the title of the blog. Firing up Google, with "search engine optimum" (in quotes, to let Google know we are interested in that exact phrase and not in any cases where the words just happen to all fall on the same page) we get "About 6,850 results".
"About 6,850 results" is about 685 pages. We're not in the first page, or in the first three. I'll not bother to search through all 685 or so pages, since it's a fairly safe guess that if we're in there at all it's somewhere near position 6850. But take a look at what does make it onto the coveted first page: In some cases, even though the words are together and in the right order, it seems to be just by chance. The inserted punctuation is a dead giveaway: "Website for Visitor or Search Engine, Optimum SEO Optimization", "... not attract attention of search engine, Optimum frequency is 5-7% ...", and so on.
By the way, notice that in giving these examples I'm just happening to mention a couple of times the phrase that I've chosen to focus on. I'm doing this in order to make points which are valid and, I hope, interesting to the reader. I could have quoted all ten of the examples on Google's first page, and more, but that would have been a huge mistake. It's called "keyword stuffing", and search engines don't like it. Site visitors don't like it. Search engines don't like it BECAUSE site visitors don't like it. So, make sure you don't ever do it. Even if it worked, in the sense of bringing visitors to your site (which it doesn't), what's the point of bringing visitors to your site just in order to annoy them and drive them away again? If you take only one lesson away from this post, it should be "don't do keyword stuffing". Mention a phrase a couple of times by all means, in order to emphasize your point and make sure that it sticks both in the mind of your reader and in the algorithm of the search engine, but don't get carried away.
Anyway, to get back to what I was saying, some of the entries on Google's first page seem to be there by accident. This suggests that there isn't a lot of competition for the phrase "search engine optimum" and so getting onto the first page for that phrase, even without any financial expenditure, ought to be a realistic, achievable task. Great! Let's do it!
"Wait!", you may say, "what's the point of getting onto the first page for a phrase that hardly anyone searches for?"
Well, consider this: Spotify launched in Sweden in October 2008. If in 2007 you had been offered the opportunity to appear in the first page of any search for "spotify", would you have snapped it up, or would you have laughed? Similarly for "Twitter" in 2005, or "Facebook" in 2003, or "Fregobo" in 2011 (I just made that last one up, so don't bother searching for it. Or on second thoughts why not? 8 hits. Turning Fregobo into the next Facebook beater is something I might attempt as a future exercise, unless one of those eight beats me to it).
In other words, it's up to you to take a word, or a phrase, or a jumbled collection of syllables, whatever it is that you have to work with, and MAKE it memorable. And tweetable. And Mashable, and so on. You can do that with any random group of letters, but it isn't easy. If people have never heard of your site, and the name tells them nothing about what it actually does, they have no incentive to click on it. It's only after the initial traction has been gained that a weirdly memorable name can be an asset. Having a phrase that isn't so generic and well known that it's endlessly fought over by millions, but which is nevertheless descriptive enough to let people know what the site or blog is about, I'd say that has to be some kind of optimum.
P.S.
A special "above and beyond" badge goes to @seogoogleexperts. I made my first post on this blog at 3am yesterday, and by 7am they were following me on twitter. I've followed them back, as a matter of courtesy, but please note that I'm not affiliated with them in any way. I don't know how good or bad they are at SEO, but I have to admit they're on the ball.
How successful is this blog already? After just one post the answer is probably "not very", but how can we check? One way is to search for the title of the blog. Firing up Google, with "search engine optimum" (in quotes, to let Google know we are interested in that exact phrase and not in any cases where the words just happen to all fall on the same page) we get "About 6,850 results".
"About 6,850 results" is about 685 pages. We're not in the first page, or in the first three. I'll not bother to search through all 685 or so pages, since it's a fairly safe guess that if we're in there at all it's somewhere near position 6850. But take a look at what does make it onto the coveted first page: In some cases, even though the words are together and in the right order, it seems to be just by chance. The inserted punctuation is a dead giveaway: "Website for Visitor or Search Engine, Optimum SEO Optimization", "... not attract attention of search engine, Optimum frequency is 5-7% ...", and so on.
By the way, notice that in giving these examples I'm just happening to mention a couple of times the phrase that I've chosen to focus on. I'm doing this in order to make points which are valid and, I hope, interesting to the reader. I could have quoted all ten of the examples on Google's first page, and more, but that would have been a huge mistake. It's called "keyword stuffing", and search engines don't like it. Site visitors don't like it. Search engines don't like it BECAUSE site visitors don't like it. So, make sure you don't ever do it. Even if it worked, in the sense of bringing visitors to your site (which it doesn't), what's the point of bringing visitors to your site just in order to annoy them and drive them away again? If you take only one lesson away from this post, it should be "don't do keyword stuffing". Mention a phrase a couple of times by all means, in order to emphasize your point and make sure that it sticks both in the mind of your reader and in the algorithm of the search engine, but don't get carried away.
Anyway, to get back to what I was saying, some of the entries on Google's first page seem to be there by accident. This suggests that there isn't a lot of competition for the phrase "search engine optimum" and so getting onto the first page for that phrase, even without any financial expenditure, ought to be a realistic, achievable task. Great! Let's do it!
"Wait!", you may say, "what's the point of getting onto the first page for a phrase that hardly anyone searches for?"
Well, consider this: Spotify launched in Sweden in October 2008. If in 2007 you had been offered the opportunity to appear in the first page of any search for "spotify", would you have snapped it up, or would you have laughed? Similarly for "Twitter" in 2005, or "Facebook" in 2003, or "Fregobo" in 2011 (I just made that last one up, so don't bother searching for it. Or on second thoughts why not? 8 hits. Turning Fregobo into the next Facebook beater is something I might attempt as a future exercise, unless one of those eight beats me to it).
In other words, it's up to you to take a word, or a phrase, or a jumbled collection of syllables, whatever it is that you have to work with, and MAKE it memorable. And tweetable. And Mashable, and so on. You can do that with any random group of letters, but it isn't easy. If people have never heard of your site, and the name tells them nothing about what it actually does, they have no incentive to click on it. It's only after the initial traction has been gained that a weirdly memorable name can be an asset. Having a phrase that isn't so generic and well known that it's endlessly fought over by millions, but which is nevertheless descriptive enough to let people know what the site or blog is about, I'd say that has to be some kind of optimum.
P.S.
A special "above and beyond" badge goes to @seogoogleexperts. I made my first post on this blog at 3am yesterday, and by 7am they were following me on twitter. I've followed them back, as a matter of courtesy, but please note that I'm not affiliated with them in any way. I don't know how good or bad they are at SEO, but I have to admit they're on the ball.
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