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.
Filed under Alex Jeffreys Coaching Program by 
I thought I would post about Video Marketing today as a warm up to tonight's special bonus module,
"The Future Of Video Marketing"
Alex has a special guest joining us, Maria Andros, who is the undisputed Queen of Video Marketing. As usual, Alex has outdone himself again. It should be a lot of fun and very informative.
If you have been reading this blog then you have heard me talk about Web 2.0, social bookmarking, and social media sites and how powerful they can be. Well, I have a perfect case study to help drive home the point. If you go to Google and type in "Alex Jeffreys coaching", you will see a listing that says Mail List Secrets.
This is Steven De Gracia's squeeze page for his profit pulling platform. It has a Google page rank of 3 and is in the top 3 listings. If you know anything about SEO, then you know that this is incredible. First of all, a squeeze page has almost no content to speak of which makes it unfriendly for the spider bots.
Second, it is ranking higher than at least 200 Word Press blogs that are targeting the same keywords. Google loves Word Press blogs. That is why Alex had us all create one. He know how powerful they are.
I asked Steven what he was doing raise his squeeze page to such lofty heights. He has been creating videos and then submitting them to social bookmarking sites and most importantly the social news sites which he calls them the "Big 3".
Digg, Propeller (formerly Netscape), and Mixx.
You can read his entire response on his blog. Here is the link http://steven-de-gracia.com/?p=105
He has some interesting stuff there so take a minute to check it out. While your there, leave a comment and use the Onlywire button for one of his posts. We all need to start doing this when we visit each others blogs. It only takes a minute and it is very very powerful.
Steven taught me something that I hadn't thought of. You see, I have always used Digg and Propeller to boost my Hub pages and Squidoo lenses in the SERPS. I always submit my videos to YouTube and all the other video directories but never thought about submitting them to the social news sites.
Gary Simpson keeps going on and on about how much talent there is in our group and he is right on. We all have a lot to learn from each other and it is only going to get better.
Filed under Video Marketing by
