I realize it is a little bit weird to talk about the actual site instead of something going on in my life, but over the weekend I put a pretty large amount of effort into making the site a little more SEO friendly. I have to say that it is a very interesting experience looking into this stuff. SEO for those who don’t know is Search Engine Optimization. And a lot of the stuff is very basic, but sometimes I guess I forget how much this stuff affects the amount of visitors I can get in any given day.
The first thing you might notice is that on my front page I have a new image thingy on the front page. This is a semi-new (one year old) service that is essentially a link exchange network called Entrecard. Basically you put this little banner on your site, you can go to other sites and “drop” your card on their site, you get a credit and hopefully they drop on your site and give you both a credit and a hit to your site. You can use these credits to then advertise on other people’s sites or trade them in for products and/or money. Not an entirely bad idea, though I feel that half the increase in hits you are getting are false at best. Still not a bad way to get the word out a little. I do miss having the old link exchanges around and I think this isn’t a bad modernization of the idea.
Another thing that I have done is automate the titling process. I have long chosen the format of Razakius.com – Post Title for the titles of every post. Now I have a way in place to make those titles generate automatically without me having to do it manually. While I was at it I decided to go ahead and add the category into the title just to help make sure that the category term is deemed important by search engines. For instance, The Incridble Hulk Review I have up now has a title of “Razakius.com – The Incredible Hulk Review | Movies.” This gives me the added benefit of telling the search engine that we are talking movies here and not necessarily comics which I think is a nice addition. The downside of course is an unwieldy looking title. Unfortunately, the previous utility I had been using also still had the old titles in there so on many posts you might notice a doubling of Razakius.com – Razakius.com: Titles. Sadly, I’ll have to go clean these up at a later time individually.
Another thing I have done to try to improve how my site gets indexed is that I have gone through steps of setting up some basic tools that I have never really bothered with previously. For instance, I set up an XML sitemap creation plugin for this site so that all the posts get indexed by engines, and that they won’t look at category, archive, or tag pages to avoid duplication issues. Odd that I’ve never done this, but there ya go. I also set up Google Analytics and Google’s website tools so that I can keep an eye on how people are coming to this site and what they are doing with it. I also set up my blog on Digg which I think means that posts will automatically get indexed there, though I’m not entirely sure. I don’t like Digg that much anymore but a lot of people still do and it can get you a ton of hits.
The last thing I’m doing, which is ongoing and may take weeks, is paying attention to my keywords more. I realize I really should be trying to really hone in on what keywords my site gets so that I can get better ranking on search engines. This is something I have not been really paying attention to. I mean I do put in a little bit of effort into adding keywords and tags to the post to ensure that there is some relevance to it, but now I have decided that I really should go after some of these terms and take it seriously.
Hopefully, some of this will pay off. I mean I certainly don’t mind my current readership. For those interested, I tend to get between 20-30 visitors on an average day. This isn’t huge numbers or anything but it appeases me to the point that I don’t mind being a smaller blog. Still, I must admit that I wouldn’t mind seeing my numbers jump to 200-300 visitors a day. And if paying a little more attention to SEO is how I get that done, then maybe that is what I need to do.
3 replies on “Some SEO upgrades to the Site”
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As an addition to this story, I recently added a plugin that will put the last 10 links of those who drop on my blog on the Lifestream portion of my site. I realize this isn’t a huge bonus, but I figured that it would be a nice addition to help encourage those people who may visit my site and be a entrecard user to drop on my site as well.
I’ve used Entrecard for a while now, and yeah, most of the traffic is worthless. But since the points system keeps people motivated on dropping cards it might be enough to convince someone to continually revisit the same, familiar blog (it helps a lot since you already know the Entrecard widget is located on the site) to drop cards, even if they might not otherwise be motivated enough to bookmark a site and visit it regularly. Sometimes a post might catch a regular dropper’s attention enough to prompt him or her to leave a comment, which is nice for thos (like me) who have relatively quiet blogs.