Monthly Archive for August, 2008
As few of you may know right now, but many of you may be able to tell in the future, I’ve neglected to write any articles here for a while. It’s been about two weeks. Part of it is because of exhaustion from working elsewhere and part of it is because of another website I have.
That website has been increasing in popularity rather quickly. I have been working on it and doing so because the site is basketball related. The olympics have been going on and I needed to adjust accordingly. Sure I should have posted here a bit more and I wouldn’t exactly be “practicing what I preach” by taking the time off but there is a point. A method to the madness if you will.
You must prioritize your responsibilities.
For me, with this site, I’m still chilling in the Google Sandbox. I’ll discuss that in more detail later. The fact of the matter is i’m not going to be respected for a bit. For most websites, when they are in the sandbox, they work on their SEO.
I know there is a lot of potential to this blog and I know I can get there but really, it’s pretty tough knowing you need to work on a site and publish articles and you aren’t going to get google’s respect for a period of time. Though, the more often you write, the quicker you get out of the sandbox.
I guess I have just been prioritizing my other blog which has been growing pretty steadily so far. I also run a forum that I’m in the middle of optimizing and ohh boy. Optimizing a forum properly is much different than a blog.
Though, I must admit. The spiders have been crawling this site like crazy. Anyway, this is your update and I’ll keep you posted. Until I get out of this sandbox not many of you will even read this… 
Tags: new blog, prioritize, Sandbox, Time Management
For some reason, The Simpsons comes to mind when thinking about the 12 day since purchasing this domain. I’m picturing Bart and Lisa knocking on Burns’ giant mansion door and upon seeing kids after opening the door, Burns yells “Release the spiders!” Yep, instead of the hounds being released it appears as though Google has released the spiders. Well, to be accurate it’s not just Google. I’m getting a few. Here are my top 10.
| Visits |
|
| Java |
362 |
49.5%
|
| Google |
92 |
12.6%
|
| Yahoo! |
54 |
7.4%
|
| Twingly |
43 |
5.9%
|
| Moreover |
26 |
3.6%
|
| BlogPulse |
23 |
3.1%
|
| FeedBurner |
23 |
3.1%
|
| Technorati |
20 |
2.7%
|
| DoCoMo |
20 |
2.7%
|
| WordPress |
14 |
1.9%
|
On the 12th day, it seems I did something that really got them paying attention to this website. I’ll have to figure it out and keep you all updated. It may just be natural. Either way, spiders visits went from 5 to 96 and then to 238. In the past 5 days the site had anywhere between 10 and 40 unique visitors. Personally, I’m more happy about the dramatic increase in spiders because those directly lead to getting your page ranked.
Spiders, bots, webcrawlers, etc.. are essentially programs that go through massive amounts of websites and keep track of the information on them. So Google’s spider is going to crawl around and visit my site and go to each of the pages it can find and read all the content as well as the meta tags for the page it located. It takes the list of the important words I defined in my meta tags (using wordpress all-in-one seo) as well as the title of the page and compares it to the content. Then the Google bot analyzes the data and stores it in it’s database.
Eventually, when Google trusts my site enough, it will begin to show each one of my pages in it’s search results. Where I’m positioned in Google’s results is determined by many different factors and I’m sure I’ll get into that later. Since Google’s method for ranking is proprietary and only known by them, we have to get as much knowledge as possible on how they work. Google talks about it to the public and the general idea of what to do and how to do it is pretty much known.
Not all spiders are used to index your blog pages on search engines. Some are used to collect email addresses for spam. Some are used to determine if you have any copywrited content on your page. Some are used to gather your content and then publish them on their own websites. Some are used to scan for security vulnerabilities on your website.
This is why it’s important to have some sort of tool for your blog that allows you to analyze the traffic and the spiders that visit your website. I use statpress for wordpress to quickly analyze the traffic. I also have various other stat tools including one from my web host. Analyzing your traffic is important for many different reasons, the above is just one of them.
If you are using Google Adsense, one of the spiders that will visit your site will be used to determine what your blog is about in order to display relevant advertisements on your page.
Overall, the presence of an increase in spiders is important because it means your site is getting out there. It means that your internet presence is increasing and various search engines are aware of your site and are going to rank it in searches.
An increase in spiders directly leads to an increase in traffic.
Tags: Bots, google, SEO, Spiders, traffic
So after hearing the FeedBurner name get thrown around a few blogs I frequent, I decided to give it a try. So I registered for an account and was surprised that the “Pro” option was free. This put a smile to my face; the good. I also realized quickly (after clicking on a help topic) that Google bought FeedBurner out which is why and when they made the Pro features free.
For those not quite familiar with FeedBurner, It is essentially an RSS feed management service that was launched in 2004 and purchased by Google in 2007. As of the date of writing this article, FeedBurner has 1,057,910 publishers and have “burned” 1,879,482 different feeds. As you may be able to tell, most people seem to have more than 1 blog on average.
People use FeedBurner because of the features. It gives the user the option to subscribe using whichever aggregator they choose and can even allow users to subscribe by email which is an interesting option that many people may use. They also keep statistics of your feeds, give you an approximation of how many people are subscribed to your RSS (only aproximate because they don’t keep track of your subscribers that don’t use the FeedBurner service).
Is using FeedBurner really worth the features though? There have been many opponents to using FeedBurner as a means to analyze your traffic and data. Syndicating your feeds through FeedBurner comes at a cost. You will lose the link popularity that comes with managing your own RSS Feeds. mktgchelsea.com is one of those opponents and has written an inciteful article about the subject though, it seems a bit outdated.
What I think mktgchelsea has not yet discovered (probably for various reasons), is this article by FeedBurner about SEO. They recommend using a free product in addition to FeedBurner called mybrand. As quoted from their article:
“Our MyBrand service (one of our few paid services) allows you to map a subdomain so that your feed URL becomes “feeds.yourdomain.com” instead of “feeds.feedburner.com”. Either option gives you plenty of opportunity to rank well in search results, but publishers looking to have maximum consistency between their feed and site (not to mention publishers who are looking for maximum portability of feed URLs) might consider using MyBrand.”
Although they state that it is a paid service, it is now free. My guess is that the Google acquisition is responsible once again responsible. So, instead of directing users to feedburner.com/username for their feeds, you can now have them direction from a subdomain on your own URL. I’m sure Google is quite aware of the importance of inbound links, subscribers, and SEO in general and by using this method which is now provided by them, I think the SEO bugs have been fixed for the most part.
As always, I’ll keep you updated on anything new. Be sure to comment and Subscribe to my feed.
You can read a bit more from FeedBurner’s Wikipedia entry or from FeedBurner itself. For you new bloggers just getting started and are a bit lost, see my article on what RSS feeds are.
Tags: FeedBurner, RSS, SEO
Simply put, RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication. The RSS document is often called feeds or web feeds and it allows people to subscribe to your blog. They will be notified whenever you write a new post in the software they choose to get their feeds. This software is often called an RSS reader, feed reader, or aggregator.
Subscribers can use various tools to see your new articles. As a publisher, you may allow your readers to get the title and the full article written or just a summary. The most important thing you need to know about RSS feeds is that they help your blog gain readership loyalty. They are going to be notified whenever you write a new article and if the title and intro interests them enough, they will go read your article.
This is another reason why it is important for your blog to have well written titles designed for not only SEO but with your subscribers in mind. I’ll write more on that later though.
As a publisher, you should be well informed about RSS and hopefully you use it yourself. It’s good for you to keep up to date with not only my blog (subscibe to blog4booty) but other blogs that are related to your blog. By subscribing to other blogs you can keep up to date with the community of bloggers which is an important community to belong to as a blog publisher. Getting involved is very important for you to create recognition for yourself and your blog, getting inbound links, and getting news that you yourself should be genuinely interested in reading.
Learn more about RSS feeds:
Some popular Aggregators:
Tags: RSS
