Don’t include the word “blog” in your blog’s title, unless it’s about blogging.
You may have noticed that this site is back to simply “The Tlog” (which is neutral and doesn’t affect what Google will think the blog is about), losing the ” - a technology blog” part. Yup, I make mistakes like everyone else. 
This can help in SEO, too.
Which of the following titles (let’s say, as a result of a Google search, or in some list) is more appealing, to someone interested in WordPress 2.0:
The Tlog - a technology blog » What’s new in WordPress 2.0?
or:
What’s new in WordPress 2.0? » The Tlog - a technology blog
I believe anyone would prefer the second choice. Right? However, WordPress creates titles in the first format, by default. And, until a few hours ago, that’s what the titles in my blogs looked like.
Seen on ProBlogger, an interesting report: Why You Should Consider Budgeting a Site Redesign for Firefox 1.5 Now. It’s not really a tech report, but, instead, a report for marketers.
Which I am not. But I found it intriguing anyway - seeing how “the other side” thinks, and which arguments can affect them (since they’re not that concerned with “the standards” or “doing things right”, or even “using and supporting the best software”, like I am.)
At SEOmoz, there’s a new Beginner’s Guide to SEO. While (assuming it’s a subject that interests you) you probably already know a lot of what’s there, it’s still likely that you’ll learn something new, and it’s nice to have so much information so well condensed.
Eric Giguere of An AdSense Blog: Make Easy Money with Google has been doing an AdSense case study from some time now, which I’ve found quite interesting. Basically, he’s been creating a small site about invisible fences for dogs, and each stage of the site is archived, so you can compare them.
For instance, the first stage, “content”, only has text and some AdSense ads; the second stage is SEO’d, the third adds images and the fourth moves all formatting to CSS, incidentally improving the looks a lot.
Along with this article, this case study has been one of my main inspirations for my new mini-sites.
Looks like a big coincidence, doesn’t it? After I mentioned my drastic drop in hits from Google in my gaming blog, Darren from ProBlogger makes a brilliant post called “What to do when your Google traffic disappears.
Go there. Read it. Now. But come back here, afterwards.
One of the points Darren makes is very important - in an already successful blog or site, such a drop in Google search rankings (whether caused by the Google Sandbox or something else) can mean a drop in your earnings of 2/3 or more! 
What if your blog has been slowly but surely growing, and you’re starting to see some money, which causes you to see the “light at the end of the tunnel”… and suddenly, earnings drop down to a trickle, almost nobody comes from Google… it’s enough to make many people quit blogging, or at least hoping to one day make a living from it.
But, as Darren says, all of this - again, whether it’s the Sandbox or not - is temporary. It may take a couple of months, but you’ll get back to good positions in Google, eventually. Meanwhile, keep blogging, keep improving your blog, and get ready for the big comeback, when suddenly you’re flooded with hits. And clicks.
In João Craveiro’s blog, I’ve just found a link to a very informative article: High Accessibility Is Effective Search Engine Optimization.
It makes a lot of sense, if you think about it a little. What’s accessibility? It’s making sure your blog or site is readable even to people with some kind of disability - sight, hearing, etc.. How do you do that? Consider blind people - they’ll be using a browser capable of reading text out loud. Note the “text” part. Their browser won’t interpret Javascript or anything like that, won’t show Flash animations, or read text inside images - it can, however, read the “alt” tags in those.
Have you ever tried a text browser, such as Lynx? Try browsing to your site with it. Can you still read the content? Navigate around the site? Use most or all of the options? Post new content, if the site allows it?
Because, if you can’t, neither can a blind person.
Or what about a cell phone browser? Opera 8.0 in my Nokia 6630 is almost like a “normal” browser, but what about an older version, like Opera 6.2, or even worse, the browser that came with the phone. How’s your site in it? A complete mess? Or still usable?
And now think about search engine crawlers. What do they do? They “read” the text, and follow links. Nothing more. Hmm, isn’t that a lot like what a browser for blind people does? Or a text browser?
I won’t give a list of tips here, because I’ve already mentioned a lot of them in my Blogging Tips series, and also because the linked article itself has a list of such tips. But now you know that I wasn’t just being pedantic when I said that <img> tags must have the alt=”description” part.
As you should know :), this particular blog has been around for 2 months, and it gets a lot of hits per day. However, very few (relatively speaking) come from search engines. And the ones that do come…
… well, let’s say that the top 5 searches are related to Sudoku. Which I only mentioned once, in a post about a version for Series 60 phones. And the top search string is actually a misspell, coming from a user comment.
In other words: virtually no one arrives here because he or she searched for something that this blog is about. Not technology, not games, not software, not blogging tips. No, people come here because they misspell “sudoku” in Google. 
Yet, the blog is relatively well linked, having earned a PageRank of 5, and having almost 50 blogs linking to it, according to Technorati.
Weird, isn’t it?
Continue reading ‘Funny things about search engine positions’
Yesterday’s Google PageRank update was the main SEO-related happening, of course, but there was another: they also updated backlinks.
Backlinks are what you get when you go to Google and search for “link:address” (e.g. “link:www.thetlog.net“). It was a bit annoying that MSN Search and Yahoo Search showed many backlinks to my (less than 3-months old) blogs, but Google didn’t. Until yesterday.
That update also made Silktide SiteScores go up a bit, which is always nice.
Again, my gaming blog seems to be too new to be affected: it still has a PR of 0, and 0 backlinks. Oh well, that’ll change 3 months from now…
Again, I have to be completely unoriginal and credit Darren for the information.
Google is, at this very moment, updating the visible PageRank (PR). You can see the update almost in real time by using the Future PageRank Tool - it shows the PR for a particular URL in several of Google’s servers. A few hours ago, the PR for this site had only been updated in 2 servers; right now it’s been updated in 6 of them.
A little explanation: Google updates the PR continuously. However, the visible PR is updated only every 3 months or so. That means there’s not any jump in hits from Google when they change this site’s PR from 0 to 5 (it was 0 because it’s less than 3 months old). They do it this way because, otherwise, SEO people would spend all the time changing little things and checking how they influenced PR.
PR, by the way, is determined by how many sites link to yours, but also by how high those sites’ own PR is. So, a link from a top site (without the “rel=nofollow”) is very, very desirable.
As I said, this blog now has a PR of 5. My philosophical blog and my personal blog will both have a PR of 4. My forum is PR 3. And, unfortunately, my gaming blog will remain as PR 0, apparently… it’s too new. Oh well…
Since a few minutes ago, I’m trying out a little experiment with ping services (Pingoat, in this case) and blog exchangers.
I’ll run the experiment for a couple of days. If it works, I’ll let you know. 
(NOTE: this is part of the “Blogging tips” series)
I’ve already mentioned this in part 4: Making your blog search engine-friendly, but this is an important, and usually ignored part of search engine optimization, which deserves an article of its own.
Continue reading ‘Blogging tips 4.5: The importance of titles’
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