The top technorati ranks table for Planet Atheism members has been improved again. In addition to showing the Technorati rank, number of incoming links (from Technorati as well), and Google Pagerank, the table now shows Alexa ranks as well.

You can now also click on any of the above column titles to sort the table by that particular value/rank. Incoming links and Pagerank are “the more, the merrier”, while Technorati rank and Alexa rank are “the lower, the better”, so sorting takes that into account.

A note of warning: I’ve mentioned before that you shouldn’t really take any of these ranks too seriously, and this is especially true for the Alexa ranks. Alexa is a nice idea (it’s the only one that measures traffic instead of incoming links), but it has the following problems:

• it only counts hits if the user has installed either the Alexa toolbar (for Internet Explorer) or the SearchStatus Firefox extension (I recommend the latter, since, as everyone knows, MSIE sucks), and
• it often lumps all subdomains for a particular domain together (i.e. doesn’t distinguish between aaa.domain.com and bbb.domain.com, even though they may be totally unrelated). It apparently has some hard coded exceptions for some (not all) blogspot.com blogs… but the values aren’t really reliable. Still, you can use it to measure the changes in traffic for one site.

Incidentally, the application I’ve coded (and have been improving) to generate this table from a list of blogs is almost ready for public release.

I finally had some time today to move Way of the Mind (note the new URL) to my Slicehost virtual server. The new WotM Forum is also up, using MyBB, instead of phpBB like my other two. So far, I’m liking it (MyBB) a lot, though it’s a bit weird to have the entire theme inside the MySQL database instead of normal .php or .css files.

Moving the WordPress blog was simply a question of following these instructions. Basically, you go to the WP options in the old blog, change the 2 URL fields to the new address, dump the database, do a search & replace to change any images and other URLs in the database to the new address, import the database to the new server, copy the files, and that’s the proverbial “it”.

As for redirection, there came the eternal dilemma: if you redirect everything, then people will be lazy and keep using the old address (thus wasting your bandwidth); if you don’t, it’s inconvenient, and you lose everything you had in terms of incoming links and SEO.

What I did was to redirect (301, to signify a permanent move) every URL except the front page, which shows a message telling people about the change, and redirects after 5 seconds. I believe that this is the best of both worlds. Any link to an individual post will be redirected transparently, but whoever arrives at the front page will told about the change of address, encouraging them to update their bookmarks.

Currently (as it’s been from the beginning), my sites are all running on my home server (an OpenBSD box). I like the control it gives me; most web hosting services are of the “we provide this software for you” kind. Sorry, but, to me, it’s root access or nothing.

Even though my uplink is quite lousy (384Kbps), I haven’t actually had any problem with it, even when I was Dugg / Redditted / Shoutwired / del.icio.used / whatever.

However, I’ve long wondered about whether the fact that my server is located in Portugal is harming me in terms of search engine results for my English-language sites. The fact is that I get a comparatively large number of people arriving there from google.pt, even when the site in question is in English. Now, if google.pt is benefiting my English-language sites simply because they’re physically located in Portugal, it stands to reason that google.com (which is several orders of magnitude more important) will benefit US-based sites… and, if it puts those ahead, it follows that others are put behind.

(Did I make any sense just now? )

Therefore, since a few minutes ago, I’m a customer of Slicehost. In just 2 minutes, I had an Ubuntu virtual server running, with full root access by ssh. There’s nothing running there right now, but soon there will be: I will be moving one of my blogs, Way of the Mind, there (and it’ll be getting a new domain as well). I’ll only do it about a month from now… but I may start other sites there, in the meantime.

We’ll see if it makes a difference. I’ll post my results here.

(NOTE: this is part of the “Introduction to SEO” series)

SEO stands for “Search Engine Optimization”. It’s the art of making as many people as possible arrive at a particular site – preferably those who are interested in it.

Sounds confusing, doesn’t it? OK, let’s try a different definition: SEO is the name for a number of methods for improving the chances of someone searching for the subject of a site, and having that site appear in the top search results.

Better?

Basically, there are two kinds of SEO:

1. On-site: what you do in the site to make sure search engines index it optimally.
2. Off-site: having other sites link to yours.

Each of the above will be expanded in the next two parts of this series.

You can also divide SEO in two other kinds: “white hat” (“honest” techniques) and “black hat” (less honest techniques). I will only write about the former. The latter require more effort, are effective just for short periods of time, and will, in the end, harm a site in terms of SEO, since search engines try to fight (and punish) those kinds of techniques.

Some examples of those: splogs (spam blogs), spam comments in blogs, “keyword stuffing”, hidden text (for instance, text and background of the same color), different content presented to users and to search bots, etc.. Like I said, these methods are increasing less effective – if they’re effective at all, these days – and almost always end up doing more harm than good. My suggestion: forget about them.

In fact, it is because some self-styled “SEO specialists” believe that SEO is using those increasingly inefficient methods, that sometimes people say “SEO is dying”. It isn’t. It’s just that most dirty tricks don’t work anymore. The methods I’ll talk about in the next two parts still work perfectly.

(NOTE: this is part of the “Introduction to SEO” series)

This series’ goal, as the name suggests, is to be a primer to SEO (Search Engine Optimization), a term I’ll talk about further in the second part. What will appear here isn’t “rocket science”, and won’t turn anyone into an “SEO guru”, although it can be a good start. There are many sites, blogs, forums and books (I, myself, have read some) out there about this subject, if you want to go further, and I’ll suggest a few of them at the end of the series. But, if you know little to nothing about SEO… you’ve come to the right place.

Why did I decide to write this series? One of the main reasons is the sorry state of SEO in Portugal, my home country, though I doubt it happens just locally. Around here, even the sites of “big” brands or companies are, quite often, designed and created by people who don’t even suspect that it’s possible to optimize sites to be better placed in search engines. The results are often comical: posts in personal blogs appear, in query results, before the companies or brands’ official sites. And I don’t mean ultra-mega-optimized blogs. Simply, because they use software like WordPress, or services like Blogger, their HTML is more valid than the companies’ sites (most Portuguese web designers use software like FrontPage, are completely unaware there’s such a thing as “valid HTML”, or that there are browsers other than Internet Explorer 6), and they have… titles. Yes, some people haven’t discovered the <title> tag yet.

By the way, the series is meant to be read in order. There’s a nice series index, which will be updated as each part is written.

I believe the title says it all.

Some points:

• it’ll be a relatively short series. I’m guessing 5 or 6 parts.
• as the name implies, it’ll be a very introductory series. It won’t turn you into an “SEO guru”… but, still, you’ll know more about it than a great many people, including professional web designers, most of whom aren’t even aware that something called “Search Engine Optimization” exists.
• the series should begin this week, and will be finished before the end of August.
• unlike the Blogging Tips series, this one will appear, originally, in Portuguese, on my other blog A Arte de Blogar. The version here will be translated / adapted from that one.
• some topics: titles, meta tags (yes, they’re still used), valid HTML, links formats, search engines, directories, incoming links, etc.. Yes, I said it was an introduction.

Most of this blog’s subscribers speak English, and I know how annoying it can be to have a post in your feed reader that you can’t understand. And this post of mine, from “A Arte de Blogar”, doesn’t really make sense for people outside Portugal… at least, I think so. But it should be relevant to the Portuguese readers (and they exist, indeed ); therefore, here’s a link to it: Os Portugueses e a Web.

An excerpt, to whet your appetite (if you do speak Portuguese):

Por outras palavras, Portugal é como uma “selva inexplorada” em termos de SEO, e é facílimo ultrapassar os sites “a sério” em termos de posicionamento nos motores de busca (como disse, acontece frequentemente mesmo sem se tentar). Porque, por cá, ninguém sabe o que é SEO, ou como é que a Web funciona… e nem se quer saber.

According to BlogSEO, it’s happening now.

You can use the Future PageRank tool to check a site’s PR on each of Google’s servers.

Apparently, none of my sites change in PR. The newer ones, however, didn’t have a visible PR yet, and have one now. Mostly 4s, with one 3. Not too bad. The Tlog is still my highest rated one, with a PR of 5.

CopyBlogging has a nice article called How to Write Headlines That Work. I’ve already written about it in the Blogging Tips series, in The Importance of Titles, but my version is more SEO-related, while CopyBlogging’s has more to do with marketing, and titles that “intrigue” visitors. Good, useful reading.

I won’t say I “invented” this thing, but it’s a fact that I’ve never seen it mentioned anywhere, and I’ve been reading the feeds for several sites on blogging for months…

Maybe I’ll eventually expand this to a part in the Blogging Tips series. But, for now, here goes…

The tip is this: suppose you discover that some blog has linked to yours, or one of your posts. Always nice to know, isn’t it? To see that someone appreciates what you write, and finds it useful and/or interesting.

But… why not go a step further? Why not “give a hand” in promoting that other blog – especially if it’s less popular than yours, or newer, or owned by someone who doesn’t know (or care) about optimization, pings, SEO and all that?

I’m not suggesting you do a lot of stuff, but there are quick, small, easy things you can do. For instance, if that blog doesn’t ping anything, maybe do a quick ping for it in Ping-o-Matic or such, which will mark it as newly updated, and make several blogging services crawl it. Maybe you can check whether it’s listed in BlogShares, or whether Technorati, BlogPulse and others know about it. If not, why not add it to those yourself?

What for? Well, for a start, you’re, in a way, saying “thank you” for the link, and helping that other blog in return. But you’re also doing it for yourself:

1. The more visitors that other blog gets, the greater the chances are of someone clicking on that link to your blog;
2. The more popular, and well indexed, that blog is, the more “valuable” that link to your blog becomes – for PageRank reasons, and others. Remember, in terms of SEO, some links are worth much more than others, and a link from a popular site is always more valuable.

I’m not suggesting you do this all the time, for any link to your blog you discover. First, after a while, they will simply be too many. Second, this is worthless if the other blog or site already knows about blog promotion, pings, and all that stuff. Third, if the other site is more popular / older than yours, your actions won’t probably make any difference.

But if you have reasons to believe that that person has never done anything to promote his/her blog, then this certainly can help – both them, and yourself.

How to find out who links to you? If you’re a regular reader here, you’ve probably already read Who links to you?.

I’ve read - I’m not sure, but I think it makes sense and is probably true, at least to a point - that the geographical location of your sites or blogs – that is, where the server(s) they are hosted in is, physically – matters – and maybe it matters a lot – in terms of SEO.

In other words, if you have a blog, for instance, and it’s hosted in Canada (maybe you live there and have it at home, or maybe you chose a Canadian company), then it’ll get great results in searches in www.google.ca (Google Canada)… but it will be “hurt” in “normal” Google (www.google.com), for instance, appearing only in the 2nd or 3rd page, even though, otherwise, it would show up in the first couple of results.

If this is true, it means that a local site should really be in its appropriate country, but it also means that an “international” (or “country-less”) site, such as this very blog, should, in order to have the best possible hits from Google, be hosted in the U.S., since a lot of people use the “international” Google instead of the “local” one (me included).

And all my sites are hosted in my home server, in Portugal. (They also share the same domain, but more about that later.)

Maybe, in a couple of days, I’ll try moving one of them to a U.S.-based hosting provider, to see whether it makes a difference. It’ll cost me a little, but if hits visibly improve after a month or two, it’ll be more than worth it.

By the way: do you (yes, you! ) have any experience in this matter?

Best of the Web, a popular directory site, has a new Blogs section. It is currently free of charge, which is great.

They seem to be very demanding about what blogs they accept, though, and they review submissions manually. Unfortunately, one of the requirements is that the blog must be 6 months old or more, and none of my blogs are (this one is little more than 4 months old, and the others are even newer). Blogs must also, of course, be active, and not “spammy”.

I’ll be sure to submit this blog there, a month and a half from now.

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.

Yet, making the post’s title appear before the blog’s name is much better – both for SEO (search engines, apparently, prioritize the beginning of the title) and, perhaps even more importantly, for making people actually click on any links in search engine results.

Or del.icio.us bookmarks. Although you can manually change the bookmark’s name, by default – which is what most people pick – it uses the <title> tag, and making it begin with the blog’s name, in a way, “hides” the post’s name – which is what people may be interested in.

Not to mention that, often, long titles are truncated, so people will only see the part of the title – the beginning. That part had better be what that particular page is about.

Nobody ever searches for a “technology blog” (or a gaming blog, or a political blog, or…). People search for (samples taken from this blog’s December stats) “bloglines alternatives“, or “google earth squid“, or “nintendo revolution“, or “communist game“. And they may click on a link that’s labeled as something like that – not on one that says “The Tlog – a technology blog – (more text that nobody reads, because they’ve already skipped to the next link)”.

Now, how to make WordPress create “proper” <title>s? You can edit the theme files to change it, but it would put the separator in the wrong place. You can, then, give a parameter to the title to make it not show a separator, then insert it manually. Doable… but too much for something that should be really, really simple, right?

Somebody apparently thought so as well, and created a WordPress plugin called Optimal Title. You still need to edit a file, but it’s much easier, because you can simply replace wp_title() with… well, just read that page. It’s 20-30 seconds of work, trust me.

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?

Now, consider a different blog of mine, The Games of my Life. It’s on the same domain, on the same server, using the same software, and even a variant of the same theme. It was promoted in mostly the same way. Less than 15 blogs link to it, and, since it was created after the latest PageRank update, it still shows a PR of 0.

It’s only 2 weeks old – today, in fact.

Yet, if you google for some terms the blog is about, or which are the subject of particular posts…

• “target renegade”: it’s the 13th result (appears in the 1st page of results)
• “natuk”: 7th result (1st page)
• “lords of midnight”: 17th result (1st page)
• “fahrenheit / indigo prophecy”: 9th result (1st page)
• “the hobbit spectrum”: 5th result (1st page)
• “tennis critters”: 7th result (1st page)

and, even better,

• “80s games”: 9th result (1st page)
• “90s games”: 2nd result (1st page) (!)
• “zx spectrum chaos”: 3rd result (1st page)
• “zx spectrum penetrator”: 1st result (1st page) (!!)

Impressive, isn’t it? Especially for a 2 week-old blog.

And, needless to say, people are arriving there from search engines.

What makes those two blogs so different in this respect? Almost surely this: the Google Sandbox. One is in it, the other isn’t.

Either that, or someone at Google loves games.

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.

First, I want to thank Darren Rowse of ProBlogger, because of whom I came to be aware of how important post titles are. It was that article that inspired me to investigate this matter, and it came as a surprise that most people — including myself, not so long ago — are completely unaware of this.

Here’s a real life example. There’s a blog, The Invisible Monster (it’s in Portuguese, never mind the fact that the name is in English), that is possibly the best personal blog I’ve ever seen. Most personal blogs are mundane, boring, and of any interest only to a small group of friends of relatives; not that one (though the author is a relative of mine). It’s funny, witty, wonderfully written, and still personal – no “selling out” by talking about non-personal subjects to attract visitors at all.

However, it has a problem. Every post has a title like this: the very first post was called “The First”, the next one was “The Second”, the 34th one was “The Thirtieth-Fourth”, and so on.

And now, consider this: do you ever go to Google and search for “the second” or “the thirtieth-fourth”? Do you know anyone who does?

Now, that particular blog was personal in all respects — not a single ad, for instance — so it was OK. But if he wanted to get more hits, to become “popular”, those titles would be a huge problem.

Here are 2 important tips:

1. every post’s title should be related to the content.
2. every post’s title should be related to the content without requiring the reading of the article itself.

What does 2. mean? As I said in part 4, bloggers often have the temptation to be “clever” with the titles they use. Sometimes they use a couple of words (e.g. “And then…”) which lead into the article. Sometimes they have a title that only makes sense after you’ve read the whole article, but that, by itself, wouldn’t give anyone the slightest hint of whatever it was the article was about.

Avoid those. If you care about hits at all, use clear, self-explanatory titles, which mention in some way what the article is about, and which show what the article is about (those two are not necessarily the same).