And my blog is sinking into the SERPS faster than the Titanic. I just checked my blog and I am now ranked 103 for the search term Alex Jeffreys.
Fast Forward 24 hours.
That was the beginning of a blog post that I started yesterday morning and saved as a draft to finish when I got home from work. Thank goodness I got some things sorted out with my blog and discovered the reason why Google was "pimp slapping" me. My blog is now back on the second page of results and things seem to be back to normal.
The culprit was a plugin called "simple tagging". It was causing "broken" links all over my site which would keep the spider bots from being able to crawl my blog properly. When the spiders run into a lot of dead ends they will sometimes leave the site and not crawl it at all. I knew it had to be something of this nature.
Since Alex Jeffreys started the contest to get ranked number 1 for his name, I have been experimenting with different "title" tags. When it comes to on page SEO, the title tag of your blog is the most important factor followed by H1 and H2 tags. A quick note on title tags. You have 65 characters before Google cuts off your title. You also want to use your target keywords often, but naturally. It is also been proven that if you use the "strong" tag and "em" tag on your keywords, it will improve your results.
Back to the contest. I had changed my title tag about a week ago. The listing in Google was still showing my old title after a week. This is not normal. If you have a farily active blog, Google will be crawling your site almost daily. Especially if you make daily blog posts. Your blog sends out pings every time you make a new blog post.
If you go to your blog admin and click on Settings/Writing you will see a box at the bottom of the page that says "Update Services". This lets you control who your blog pings. Here is what you need to do if you want to get spider bots swarming all over your blog.
- Go to http://pingler.com
- Click inside the box that says Ping Services
- Press CTRL and A on your keyboard
- Press CTRL and C on your keyboard
- Go to your admin page and to Settings/Writing
- Click inside the box that says Update Services
- Press CTRL and V on your keyboard
You will now automatically ping all of these services everytime you make a post. Now there is a precautionary measure that you might want to consider. If you go back in and edit a post several times after you publish it, WordPress will ping these services everytime you make an update.
If you do this several times within a few minutes, you could possibly get banned for pingspamming. Installing the "Smart Update Pinger" plugin will eliminate this potential problem. Your post will only be pinged when it is initially published.
Anyhow, I knew that Google wasn't crawling my site. I went to my Google account and used the Webmaster tools to analyze my site. Sure enough, it said there were 30 something urls they couldn't spider. This steered me in the right direction that eventually led to me fixing the problem.
There is an important lesson to be learned from this. When you make changes to your website, make them one at a time and then wait at least a few days to see what the effects are. This is also true for any kind of testing you do. You want some sort of control. You have to be scientific and systematic. Only change one variable at a time and then monitor the results.
SEO is a long term strategy. There are ways to create quick SEO results but they are Black Hat methods and Google will eventually catch up to you and possibly ban your IP address and domain forever. You can also report any suspicious activity directly to Google if you suspect that someone is using Black Hat methods.
Black Hat includes things like:
- hidden text or links
- misleading or repeated words
- deceptive redirects
- doorway pages
- cloaked pages
- duplicate sites or pages
Google considers all of these as spam and if you get caught, and you will, they will ban your domain and all your hard work is for naught.
The best SEO strategy is to provide valuable, fresh, and relevant content. You can optimize your site but don't over do it or it will look spammy. Make sure your navigation is "spider friendly". There are things you can do to help on page and off page. I have talked a little about on page today and will make another post with some off page tips tomorrow.
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Here is the second installment of the tutorial I created for Alex Jeffreys coaching class. There is one more yet to come that will finish it.
Part 2
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Fellow student Joe Trueman brought up a possible problem with all of us creating these huge blog rolls with links to all of the students in the Alex Jeffreys coaching program. I don't think that it is a problem right now but as more and more students create big blog rolls we could be subject to Googles scrutiny.
Google is very unforgiving in these manners. I had my adsense account stripped away a couple years ago and still do not have a clue why they did it. I was not using any "black hat" tactics of any sort but according to them, I violated their terms of service. That was the only response that I could get from them after numerous emails.
So, I do advise caution but not to worry. There is a very easy fix for this. All you have to do is down load this plugin called Nofollow Links, install it on your blog and apply the "nofollow attribute to your outgoing blog roll links.
I have created a little video for you to show you how.
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Here is the most requested tutorial video according to the poll on my Alex Jeffreys coaching program Hub Page. It shows you the easiest way that I have found to put a video on your blog. You will need to have some software, like Camtasia, to create the video. The video then needs to be uploaded to YouTube or a similar video site that will give your video a URL. Then by using the Mediacaster plugin for WordPress, you can quickly and easily add the video to a blog post.
I will post another video soon that will show you the quickest and easiest way to distribute your videos to all the major video sites. Enjoy!
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Yesterday we had the first "brain storming" session of Alex Jeffreys coaching program. It lasted for a good 4 hours and I have to take my hat off to Alex again. "You've got a lot of energy and tremendous patience dude!"
As I listened to my fellow students talk about their ideas and what they were having problems with, I started a list of things that I can do to try and help out. Most of these "start up" things are easy for me because I have been doing this for several years now.
The thing is, I remember how frustrating it was at first. I didn't have the money to hire some one to do all the "tech" stuff, so all I could do was muddle my way through it. It was very time consuming and at times I was ready to throw my computer out the window. I must admit that it was a very good learning experience, but I wouldn't wish it on my worst enemy.
So I have decided that I am going to have a Camtasia marathon this weekend, starting tonight. In order to get a lot of them done I am going to let the quality suffer a little. Not the quality of the content mind you, but if my daughter bursts into my office and makes a lot of noise in the background, I'm not going to quit and do another take.
I can always go back and edit them later. I just want to get them out there right now so the people that need help NOW, can benefit from them.
Here is what I have planned so far:
- how to set up your RSS feed with Feedburner and where to distribute it.
- how to put a video on your blog
- how to set up Web 2.0 bookmarking on your blog and which ones you should use
- which plugins you should be using
- how to tweak your blog so the search engines will love it
Now I was also thinking about putting up some of the real basic stuff like:
- how to register your domain and set up your name servers
- how to set up your blog with Fantastico
- how to add a paypal button
- how to use some of the basic html tags
- how to set up your Aweber
I am going to let the people decide. Post a comment and leave suggestions for possible videos you would like to see. You can leave more than one. Then go to my Alex Jeffreys Coaching Hub page and you will see a poll where you can vote for the one you want to see most.
I will be updating the poll with new suggestions all through the weekend and will remove options as I complete the videos. I want to help the people that need it most so get the word out and make sure every body offers their suggestions and votes.
I'll have the Senseo coffee machine in overdrive this weekend.
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