This post on growing Organic Search Traffic to a Blog is by Ciaran McKeever who is the author of Chance Favors.
Image by James @ NZ
Although I’m not very tech savvy, for reasons that are beyond the scope of this post I have a very good working knowledge of SEO (search engine optimization).
I’ve successfully applied much of what I know to my budding financial planning blog and if I can do it so can you.
In this post, I’m going to share every secret (which aren’t so secret if you know what to look for) that I use to garner organic search traffic from Google and Yahoo (not MSN for some reason).
Originally, I wondered whether I should write this post because, if the concepts are applied properly, many of you can probably outrank me on keyword phrases I target, and my rankings might slip.
But I decided that’s a poor man’s way to think, and much like the approach I take on my blog, I’d like to help some of my personal finance blogging friends take their organic herding skills to the next level. The more good content there is at the top of the SERP’s (Search Engine Results Pages), the better it is for our visitors and for all of us.
Some of you may already be doing some of this, some not. I think most bloggers should be able to take something from a few of the points; if not, then you’re doing a lot better than I am.
Also, please keep in mind, by no means am I an SEO pro, just someone who is self taught, enjoys figuring things out and has a passion for jumping into things head first. Without further ado…
10 SEO tips that I know can have a profound impact on your search traffic:
1. Adopt the proper mindset
You often read from SEO pros that it’s not good to try and write for the search engines. They argue that the pieces will be overly optimized, sound artificial and visitors won’t read it. Now this is true to some extent, but there’s plenty of room to find a happy medium.
I think, especially in the beginning, when your blog is less than 6 months old, it’s very important to find your voice, but why not do it with some SEO attached. If you don’t know anyone in the blogging world who can send you traffic or boost your profile, then it’s up to you to make it happen for yourself.
For this reason, I think you have to target search engine traffic, and as your site gets more and more popular, you can wien yourself off of that. What do I mean by that?
Well in my case, I write many fact based pieces, looking to target a web surfer searching for a specific keyword phrase (not necessarily as interesting as something you might find at Get Rich Slowly, but I don’t have that luxury just yet).
This way I’ll get traffic to my site and start building a solid reader base. Keep in mind this post may not appeal as much to a reader that stumbles upon my site, but is far likelier to interest the search engine targeted visitor.
Always set goals
For the first three months of the New Year my goal is 4 posts a week. Until my daily traffic is consistently over 750 unique daily visitors, I plan to write 2 creative, human interest, pieces and two posts that are more fact based and keyword driven (but still interesting I hope).
Like most things, you need balance when writing a fledgling blog. I recommend a mix of writing articles with a bend towards search engine visitors and articles that are not. I am also introducing a new series of posts called “My Two Cents” that I hope will add some life to my blog, so look out for that.
Averaging 300+ visitors a day, my short term goal is 750
2. Prepare the targeted keywords in advance
This is sort of another way of saying: have a general idea of what you’re going to write about before you sit down to write.
For instance, if I decide to write a post about ‘2008 Roth IRA eligibility‘, well, I know what I’m going to write about and you can see from the phrase I know what my targeted keywords are, as well.
Sometimes I’ll just write the post and when I’m done I’ll find the necessary keyword phrases after re-reading the post.
Rarely, you can stuff a few of the keywords into the post, afterwards, if you think the text needs a little more keyword density, but I generally would advise against that. By doing so, your articles WILL start to sound artificial and then, neither search engine visitors nor direct traffic visitors, will be interested.
3. Target 3 and 4 word phrases
This is especially important in the early days of your blog. Many people make the mistake of targeting highly competitive 1 and 2 word phrases that they can’t compete on. Those type of phrases are for the more established, older, branded sites and generally don’t have the user stickiness of a longer (niche like) phrase anyway.
People searching for longer phrases are far more likely to be the kind of visitor you want. If they take the time to type in ‘2008 Roth IRA Rules‘ chances are they’re more captivated then someone searching for ‘2008 Roth.’ Your goal, at least in the first year or two, should be to become a big fish in a little pond.
My goal is to reach the first page of the SERP’s for these longer phrases. I’m shooting for 5 to 10 new visitors from each of these posts. Many times it doesn’t work, and sometimes you’ll find a gem of a phrase that can bring you 3x-4x the amount of daily traffic you anticipated.
Over the course of a month I’m looking to slowly build my organic traffic base. For me, right now, my goal is 150-200 new unique a month.
I can tell you, since September, my organic traffic has slowly been climbing. And then I got a very nice boost in early January from many of my 2008 Roth posts, which I had been targeting. As you can tell from the images I included (above) you can see:
- I rank #1 on Google for 2008 Roth IRA Contribution Eligibility.
- I rank #1 on Yahoo for 2008 Roth IRA Rules.
4. Know where to find the right key phrases
I’m going to give you 3 resources (I use) to do your keyword research. All three of these services are free:
- Wordtracker- this is what I currently use. It’s very simple to use and gives you a lot of great ideas on ‘your phrase’ and other relevant phrases you may not have thought of originally. Wordtracker is very popular and highly regarded in the SEO world. It gives you the most accurate results. If anything Wordtracker has been accused of erring on the conservative side with the results they return. As a rule of thumb, at this point in my blog’s development, I look to target phrases that return between 15-200 daily searches on Wordtracker, much like the phrases highlighted in the image below.
- Overture Keyword Suggestion Tool- I used to use this religiously many years ago. I would think it’s not used anymore by serious SEO’s because the search result numbers are inflated. It’s still useful as a way to get good ideas for future posts because it provides long lists of juicy keyword strings.
- SEO Book Keyword Suggestion Tool – I haven’t used this tool yet but have checked it out. He imports the Wordtracker results and puts them side by side with his own traffic estimates. All of his stuff is excellent so I will assume this is a quality tool, but decide for yourself. (see video)
5. Choose the right 3 and 4 word phrases to target
This is probably the most important of the steps so far. You have to pre-screen the keyword phrases so you have a good idea what kind of traffic you can expect to receive.
You’ll figure out pretty quickly if they are relevant phrases to target, how much traffic they are already receiving, and whether or not you can realistically compete in the SERP’s (Search Engine Results Pages) on that phrase. You also need to find the phrases that are the best natural fit for the post you are going to write or have already written.
In the above image, I’ve circled 4 and 5 word phrases that I have actually targeted in different posts. As you can maybe tell, it should be easier to compete on the phrase ‘roth vs traditional ira’ than the phrase ‘roth ira contribution limits’ because there are far fewer people searching for it across the internet, which usually means fewer sites are optimizing towards it.
Wordtracker gives me a very realistic estimate of how many people (across the major search engines) have searched for that phrase in any given day. For example, Wordtracker predicts that approximately 174 people a day will search for ‘roth ira contribution limits‘ (as seen in the image above).
6. Optimize page titles and permalinks
Everything I’ve written so far deals with things you need to do before you actually sit down to write the post. At this point lets assume I’ve written the post on ‘2008 Roth IRA Rules’. Now I have to do a fair bit of on page optimization.
Optimizing page titles and permalinks is a pretty simple step, but surprisingly this is where the great majority of blogs (and most websites) drop the ball. The search engines place a tremendous amount of importance on what they see in your title tags, and to a lesser degree, the URL of your permalink page.
Think of the search engine spider just like you would anyone else coming to visit the site. You want the spider to know what your page is about, fairly quickly, so he (or she) knows how to categorize it. If you don’t tell it what the page is about, it’s not going to know where to catalog you in the SERP’s and will leave confused or indifferent.
The way to tell Slurp (Yahoo’s spider) or Googlebot (Google’s spider) what your page is all about is by leaving them clues in your source code. And that is done mainly in the title tag and URL permalink.
The title tag:
URL permalink post slug:
The way you optimize the post permalink is by changing the post slug. WordPress automatically defaults to using the title of your post as the permalink, you can override that by changing the post slug to whatever you want (as seen above).
For good measure I optimize my keyword tags:
ALT (image) Tags:
and page description:
Now everything is tailored towards my key phrases, so there’s no confusion about how I want Google to interpret my page. Would you rather your site resemble a wonderfully tailored suit or some unknown fabric slapped together, that hangs off your shoulder blades?
Using the right ‘SEO Editor’ plug in
When I first started writing my blog, I used the ‘All In One SEO Editor’ plugin for WordPress, but had problems optimizing the meta keyword tag to my liking. The All In One Editor automatically takes the individual post tags and uses them as your meta keywords.
This is a problem if you want to have free reign (which you need) over differentiating between the words you use as meta keywords and the blog post tags. With the ‘All In One SEO’ plugin you’re forced to have your pages’ actual tags commingled with your targeted keyword phrases. That’s no good.
I switched to the plugin ‘SEO Meta Editor Advanced’ and it works like a charm. I recommend it. The only problem is I can’t use some punctuation, like apostrophes.
(btw, I checked the source code for many a personal finance blog, in preparation for this piece, and almost everyone I came across uses the ‘All In One Editor’. I understand newer versions of ‘All In One SEO’ are available, but I believe the problem still persists).
Before and After SEO
If you view my source code for 8 things you need to know about a Roth IRA for 2008, this is what the header looks like:
As you can tell I’ve done a fair bit of optimizing (but not too much, which is key!) alerting the search engine to what this page is all about. Notice I keep the title and keywords tag very lean, focusing only on what I want the search engines to know.
The description I use is brief, enticing (I hope;) and reiterates many of my keywords. In essence, this is how I’m asking the search engine to describe my listing. And if you scroll back up to the Yahoo image I included, you will see Slurp obliged, because that’s how it now appears in the SERP’s.
Many blogs make the mistake of serving up endless lists of words, in all these fields, that confuse the robots more than anything, dilute your message, and end up hurting you in the search rankings.
A willing participant
With the permission of Ana from DebtFree Revolution, I’m going to show you a similar snippet of source code she used for a recent article titled Thrift Savings Plan for Idiots and Dummies.
Ana’s source code is devoid of a meta description and keywords. Her title tag is showing strange characters and unnecessarily listing the name of the blog, which only serves to dilute the power of the other words in the title tag.
ZigZagging
You may say to me, ‘hold on one cotton picking second… I want my blog’s name in there for branding purposes!’ I say it’s a waste of time at this point in your growth cycle. What would you prefer:
- more search engine visitors reading good content? or
- less search engine visitors seeing your brand name?
When your readership swells to the size of Get Rich Slowly, or dare I say the magisterial A Simple Dollar, then you can begin to worry about your brand.
OK went off on a bit of a zigzag there, back to our example…
So Ana at DebtFree Revolution needs some help revamping the way she approaches SEO for her post pages. Here’s what I would do to the targeted page, if I was her:
- Switch plugins: to ‘SEO Meta Editor Advanced’ if having problems optimizing the tags properly
- Change the title tag to read: Federal Thrift Savings Plan (TSP) – Military thrift savings plan
- Add the following meta keywords tag: federal thrift savings plan, military thrift savings plan, thrift savings plan contributions
- Add the following Meta Description: What you need to know about the Federal government’s Thrift Savings Plan (TSP) for military personnel…
- Post Title: actually like it a lot, might add the word ‘Federal’ at the beginning
- Change the post slug to read: Military Thrift Savings Plan Contributions
- and finally, I would recommend (in this case) looking to add the targeted keyword phrases 2 or 3 times throughout the copy. There are plenty of natural opportunities for that on this page.
Now that’s just to give you an idea. I spent about 10 minutes at her page and that’s what I came up with. Obviously, she knows her blog a lot better than I do and can change things more to her liking (i.e. flip flop the title tag phrases).
7. Optimize the internal links within your site
In most every article I post I look for opportunities to add hyperlinks that point back to previous articles that I’ve written.
Sometimes those links will be made up of regular words that flow in the sentence, but often when I see known keywords in a sentence (i.e Roth conversion) I use them to create a hyperlink, much like I’ve been doing throughout this post:) These links have the keywords that match up with keywords in the title tag of the page its pointing to.
The reason to do this is to create balance between the many pages of your site. To use an analogy, it’s kind of like pumping blood to every part of your body to ensure everything is working right.
The better your circulation, the better your body performs. It’s important to have strong internal linking because search engines notice and appreciate it. The more balanced your internal linking is, the healthier your site is in the eyes of the search engines.
TIP: When linking to popular sites that don’t need your links (e.g. Google, MySpace) or internal pages that you don’t want to rank high (e.g. Disclaimer page) add rel=”nofollow” to the links. That way you save your link juice.
8. Add No Index meta tags
Now this is moving toward the outer fringe of my technical capabilities but I understand the concept here.
One of the biggest ‘NoNo’s’ with search engines is having duplicate content on your site. There is a lot of debate surrounding the degree to which you can be penalized, but it’s universally accepted that having the same content on different pages is bad.
In my case, I had many copies of the same page on my site. So, to avoid the possibility of duplicate content penalties, I use No Index tags for the category, archive and tag pages. Here’s the piece of text you need to insert in the head section of your header.php file:
To learn more about this go to Ryan Caldwell’s blog.
9. Remove unnecessary links
Each one of my permalink posts has a title (obviously). In my case, each permalink post title had a hyperlink in it. That’s unnecessary, since you’re already on the page; I’ve read that it can affect your rankings negatively. So I removed it by going to Presentation > Theme Editor > Single Post and editing the following line of code:
10. Building up a ridiculously sized tag cloud can be a good thing
As far as I’m concerned you need to use everything in your arsenal to get noticed. In addition to everything else I do, for each individual post I create tags to feed my ever growing tag cloud, which I take pride in.
(Remember I have ‘No Index’ code setup for the Tag cloud pages so the search engines don’t index them, but visitors are invited to play around in my cloud as much as they like).
My tag cloud is just another way for readers to get to their final destination. I actually have quite a few readers clicking thru on tags and going to other pages. I focus on building certain areas of my tag cloud, (which stand out) so visitors are more likely to click thru those areas.
Eventually (6 months from now), by glancing at my tag cloud you will have a very good idea what my blog is all about;) And at the same time, its just another signal you’re sending to the search spiders, letting them know what pages are most important to you.
Wrapping up
Most of the personal finance blogs I come across are severely lacking good SEO (as opposed to bad, black hat SEO) and with a few simple adjustments would be competing for far more eyeballs.
It only takes about an extra 15 minutes per post once you learn the routine, and after a while it becomes like old hat. I hardly think about it anymore.
Unofficial Disclaimer
To be fair, if you examine my site you will see that there are some violations of my own rules. A few of these points I was unaware of myself early on. Just recently I started to optimize the post slug to focus more on my targeted keywords and as I come across old posts I often take a moment to mend the fences.
Final piece of advice
Please take everything I’ve written with a grain of salt, and understand, I don’t advocate writing ONLY for rankings. You should always write what comes naturally to you, but at the same time, be very cognizant of how to remain in the good graces of the Google and Yahoo gods.
Trust me, they want you to properly optimize your pages as much as you do. That way they can categorize them properly, resulting in higher quality, relevant search results for their visitors. A search engine purist might muse… the Holy Grail.
Final final piece of advice
Continue to write from the heart and know that not every post is optimizable, nor should it be optimized. Like many things in life, moderation is the key; apply your own judgment and tastes to your blog.
In the end, these are just arrows in your quiver, whether you decide to use them and to what extent is up to you.
I’ll see ya on the front page of the SERP’s hopefully not too far ahead of me:)
About the Author:
Ciaran McKeever is the author of Chance Favors a blog that hopes to educate, encourage and empower those in their 30’s and 40’s to achieve financial independence.
Great Post. Lots of insight and will be very helpful to anyone who wants to attain that #1 spot in the search engines.
This is an incredibly useful, well-written article. While I had learned through reading about a few of these techniques, this is probably the best single-source write-up I have seen on how to do SEO yourself.
Great job!
One other thought: if you change a post slug after the article has been posted, you should write a 301 redirect in your htaccess file to redirect the old slug to the new one. Otherwise, the SE’s will encounter 404’s (as will anyone following a link to the old slug).
Always a good thing to check what 404’s you are already generating by looking at Google Webmaster tools. I have also found Alex King’s 404 helpful for providing insights on where I have made changes that I needed to fix.
Wow! This is a great article on SEO. All these tips together in one place. What do you think about using alexa or whois for SEO advice?
Thanks
Yes, these are the basic steps for a blogger. I have to review my SEO, too.
Just a little tip, keyword research can also be done before you start your site.
Very useful article about SEO for someone like me who is just a beginner.
Thanks a lot.
Very helpful post indeed. I’m going to have to take the time to implement some of them. I really like the wordtracker too. Bookmark that one!
Yes, I agree, this is definitely one of the best single sources of usefull SEO tips I’ve come across. I particularly like the tip about not keeping the blog name in the title and also not keeping the permalink URL in the page. We’ll see what difference it makes. Thanks for such an awesome post!
I’ve bookmarked WordTracker and I’m really excited about trying to put it into good use. Great list of tips that I don’t think could go over anybody’s head. Highly suggested reading for sure!
Is there a way to edit meta tags using the ‘All In One Editor,’ or do I need to switch to the ‘SEO Meta Editor Advanced’? I’m using WordPress, but I’m very new to this kind of blogging.
I can’t wait to put some of these ideas to use in my own blog!
~Anne Keckler
ACSM Certified Personal Trainer
http://www.annekeckler.com
A great and packed guide for those who wanted to have constant influx of search engine traffic.
Some of them, such as building a ridiculously sized tags are things that I need to look into as I am not implementing it yet.
This is one hell of a list of SEO tips…
I doubt anyone else has agreed to share that much amount of SEOptimizing anywhere else. Can’t wait to implement these!
Great Job! :)
Thanks Ciaran for helping me understand the tagging area – I will use it to it’s full potential.
Darren… thanks! This, this only and not other, is the best post you’ve published ever! Congrats to you and Ciaran!
Great job!
Ciaran , this is a really impressive post, i especially like the headline, the items you listed will be used as a checklist for my future web projects…with a pinch of salt of course ;p
Great tips! As always, I am impressed. Thanks Ciaran and Darren…
Teri
~
Power packed advice. Thanks a lot.
Im definitely trying this stuff my goal right now is 100 visits per day ! keep the good work guys!
Excellent advice! I’ve done well for myself in the SEO department, currently ranking well for “blog consulting.” All the basics you mention really show the connection between good content and good SEO. One precedes the other.
A point about the All-in-one SEO pack plugin. You can uncheck the box in the options for automatically adding meta keywords tags based on categories. Then you can manually enter keywords per post (even though most search engines don’t care about keyword meta tags anymore–it’s the meta description that you need to pay attention to). You can also use A.I.O. SEO to block robots from categories and archives, without needed to futz with code.
Not to quibble about plugins, but I’m just saying so that those who already have A.I.O. SEO don’t need to dump it–maybe just upgrade it.
This was fantastic and easy-to-follow advice, so again, great post. I especially liked the tip on keeping titles and keyword phrases down to 3 or 4 keywords.
I wouldn’t get too hung up with the duplicate content issue. The worst thing that can happen is that the SEs don’t rate the duplicate page(s) highly, which is still not worse than not having them indexed at all. Instead of adding the ‘noindex’ robot tag I’d leave it to the SEs to decide if they see it as duplicate content, and even if they do they may still find some parts of the page that may be worth indexing.
In my opinion the duplicate content issue is way too hyped up, and you may well leave money on the table by disallowing the SEs a view at your work.
Excellent advice – I was one of those with blog title in my page titles. I promptly removed them and hope for better search engine landings. I had not considered that it was diluting the keywords in my title, but it makes perfect sense. This is a great SEO overview for bloggers!
Hey Ciaran (and Darren),
When I started out over 2 yrs ago, I had gotten indexed by MSN way before the big G or Yahoo by submitting my url to
http://search.msn.com/docs/submit.aspx?FORM=SUNO
In the beginning MSN was 90% of my search traffic.
Google has since taken over as top dog, but I am still getting indexed by MSN.
Hope this helps a little.
Joe
I really enjoyed reading this post. Thanks so much!
This is a really thorough article. I’m starting to think that one of the most important ways to Herd Traffic to your site is to write an engaging and very useful article like this…
I guess being found and being returned to are two different animals. I’m new to trying to monetize and run a fun/interesting blog, so tips like this are great.
I will especially check out SEO Meta Editor Advanced post haste.
Thanks again. Keep up the great work!
Definitely an interesting post. Very through.
Hi Ciaran,
Great post – nice to see all of this compiled in one place. Thank you!
I wanted to point out another SEO tweak that is useful and underused; interestingly, the top bloggers do it all the time: Optimizing header tags (H1, H2, H3).
In your post Down home financial planning you do it brilliantly, where you break up the post into:
– Formal financial planning
– Informal financial planning
– Down Home financial planning
Using keywords this way is not only good for your visitors – it gives them, at a glance, an overview of what the post contains – it is also good for search engines because it points out what you consider important, includes your keywords (which are related), and is, as a result, deemed ‘important’ by search engines; usually leading to better placement in search results.
Also, a couple of tools that may be useful to readers of this post:
Rex Swain’s HTTP Viewer, a tool that allows you to see what the spiders see when they visit your site – and therefore useful in diagnosing problem areas.
Marketleap’s Search Engine Saturation Tool, a tool that shows you which pages of your site are indexed by MSN, Google, and Yahoo! – just an easier way to see data grouped together rather than having to go to each engine and use the ‘site:’ operator.
Thanks again!
Ciaran, this is an excellent article. Very comprehensive and useful. Thank you.
Excellent article! Thanks – I know a bit about SEO for websites – but your approach to blogs is very helpful.
Thanks for the continued great work.
http://bajaswines.blogspot.com
Robert
Found it a bit too long and overwhelming, especially compared to most other ProBlogger articles, but it is incredibly useful and well put together information. Might have been better off if it was broken up over 2 or 3 posts for better reader consumption.
Very nice post!
I especially like the fact that you not only told us what to look for, but gave examples as well (like the WordPress PHP changes).
Until reading this post, I did not know what the Post Slug did…now I do, and can use it accordingly…Thanks!
Thank you so much for this. I was optimising my sites pretty well, but when it came to WordPress I was flumoxed. And when I’ve tried to find info, it has been pretty vague – telling how to optimise a site, but not physically showing you how to do it on WordPress.
Thanks again. I will be printing this out.
Thanks for those tips, Ciaran. Is WordTracker the place you’d recommend to get keyword search analysis, then?
I found this tremendously informative although there does seem to be some disagreement over the duplicate content issue. The majority of my traffic comes from search engines and I have duplicate content all over the place. However, I removed some items to counteract this effect on a new blog I started.
Great article, Ciaran. I’m going to have to try out a few (OK, all) of these tips and see what happens. :)
Great post Ciaran, some really good stuff in there. If you don’t mind me adding a little, here’s my $0.02
Another great place to find your keywords is Google’s keyword analyzer, which can be found here: Google Keyword Tool. It has a few more layers of data than the Wordtracker tool, as it shows popularity of phrases by advertisers on their adwords network and shows some monthly variance in the search quantities etc.
Also worth pointing out, is that from a rankings perspective, the meta keywords and description tags aren’t that valuable (they have their roots in the first search algorithms, but by about 1998 were just getting spammed too much to be of any real use to the search engines), that’s not to say they aren’t still useful though. The important thing to note is that when someone finds your page in the SERPs, Google will (usually, not always), show your description tag in the snipped instead of a (seemingly) random bit of text from your page, so the description tag is a way of gaining some control over what users see in that snippet and hopefully making your page more attractive for them to click on.
gr8 post darren,
I m gonna try your tips but after I successfully migrate from mambo to wordpress. I m struggling with it currently..
You did a great job in this article. I tend to stay organic but alter my slugs periodically. Instead, I focus on a good headline and content.
I found the Robots Meta plug-in to be a valuable tool–I don’t do PHP so anything that makes it easy is appreciated. Find it at
http://www.joostdevalk.nl
Darren (and Ciaran) – I just wanted to thank you for this article. the only thing I know less about than programming is SEO so the simple-to-follow advice of this article, given in plain English, helped me cover some very basic bases I never would have known about (alright, maybe not “never” but it would have taken a lot longer)!
Thank you both!
Luke
http://www.realworldreally.com & http://www.blogaboutbeer.com
Good article.Thanks for explaining the Post Slug, until now I had no idea what that was. One problem, I cannot fine the SEO Meta Editor Advanced plugin. It is listed on the WordPress Plugin Database, but the links there get you nowhere. Anyone here know where it can be downloaded?
Great post with a lot of detailed information, although I’m not quite sure why the meta tag (keyword) technique won’t die.
But, I guess if you have a tool that does all the work automagically, then it can’t hurt anything :-)
Thanks!
JT
Freelance Sprout
Tremendous article, thanks for putting the time into writing such an informative and detailed post!
Great Post Ciaran. I grabbed a few pieces of information that I used to overlook.
Hi Ciaran and Darren,
The tag cloud part of this post intrigued me. I haven’t yet added a tag cloud, as I thought it might use up too much of my blog’s “real estate”, but I’m thinking I best change that mindset, and add one.
Absolutely superb post! Thank you.
Wow great post there.. Very nice points shared there :)
btw do you use any plugins rather than SEO editors for better optimization of pages?
Unfortunately, it appears his rank has gone from 1, to 4 in Yahoo.
This is EXACTLY the kind of info I just recently started to look for. I just learned about AdWords and play around with the keywords on there..
this is a very important article- thank you very much for sharing
*deeply* appreciated
One of the best SEO-guide posts I’ve ever read. That tip on adding the “no-index” tag on the archive pages really got me thinking and after this, I’m going to have a good look into it. Many thanks!
For the person looking for the link to the SEO meta editor, I think I have found it…
http://cheekyo.com/seo-plugin/
You can thank me later ;)
hey everyone. I appreciate all the kind words and thanks to Darren for posting my article.
I emailed Darren on a whim, thinking (in a perfect world) it would be better to post my article here, as a opposed to my little blog. I thought there was no chance I’d hear back from him.
He emailed me back pretty quickly, saying he liked the article. I found him very accessible and it’s easy to see why this blog is what it is.
I’m going to write a little follow up on my blog tomorrow afternoon, since I received quite a few emails over there, in addition to the comments here.
btw, I’m from NY and The NY Giants just won the Superbowl, it was the best football game I’ve seen in 2O years… I’m ecstatic… Incredible!
nice to see Patrick, Pinyo and Mrs.Micah from my world over here;)
IMO the whole duplicate content issue is taken a bit far at times. As I understand it, the original source (or at least what Google perceives to be the original source) will never be penalised (nor will your actual site), it’s just the actual duplicated pages themselves where you’ll see a reduction (they probably won’t appear in the SERP’s at all).
If you think about it, this approach makes a lot of sense – otherwise you could easily knock your competition off the search results pages by getting a throw-away domain, copying the content of a few of their key pages and serving it up to the spiders.
Wikipedia (whose content is available under an open source license obviously has their content copied a lot… and it doesn’t hurt their rankings one bit, in fact it helps lift it even higher as part of the requirements of the license it is released under says you must link back to the original article (this is a very good thing – helps Google recognise what the original source is, and provides a PR boost to that article)
As long as your archives have a permalink back to the original article, all should be sweet, the sky won’t fall in, trust me :)