Without a doubt, Google revolutionized search engine technology and Apple did the same with smartphones. However, when it comes down to fundamentals, Google Caffeine is no more revolutionary than the iPhone 4. The new iPhone is slimmer, faster, prettier, but it’s not as groundbreaking as its predecessors. The same goes for Google Caffeine: faster more recent results, but again, not groundbreaking — it still provides relevant results and information being sought.

I’m more interested into probing into what Google Caffeine will mean for SEO. Initially, there will likely be some manipulation taking place. There will quickly emerge a new generation of “real-time SEO experts” that will know how to take advantage of the new technology, as they will poke and prod until they spring a leak and the waterfall of desired results comes pouring out. There will be a short window of opportunity where these “SEO experts” will charge a fortune for what will eventually turn into marginal results.

Fundamentally speaking however, Google Caffeine is not revolutionary. It does exactly what Google search has always done: providing the most relevant results; it’s just happening faster. It could eventually result in what has happened in mainstream media — who can provide the latest and greatest breaking news with the best delivery (hopefully minus the sensationalism).

No longer will it just be about bringing the most relevant content, but you will need to provide the most relevant content in the shortest amount of time. So not only will you need to provide the most pertinent information for those seeing it, you will need to do so as quickly as possible. For well-established topics and information it will not be as important, but if you are on the bleeding edge of technology it will be paramount.

For the big guys (TechCrunch, Gizmodo, Slashdot, etc.) it probably doesn’t mean a whole lot. They already have the infrastructure and resources to provide breaking news quickly and effectively. However, for the little guys, it may provide a window of opportunity to speak their minds and acquire the audiences they are seeking.

So if you’re interested in taking advantage of Google Caffeine, how might you go about it?

1. Keep your ear to the ground

Stay connected and read what folks are talking about. Write about what people are reading about. However, in order to be heard you need to…

2. Develop your own opinion

Probably the worst thing you can do is repeat what others are saying, as your voice will be lost in the noise. Do something crazy like compare Google Search to the new iPhone and perhaps piss off a few people in the process. Nothing drives more traffic to a website than anger and controversy.

3. Express your opinion

…express it quickly, and express it well. If you can gather your thoughts quickly and provide an intelligent editorial on breaking news, you’re likely to get noticed.

4. Apply all the same old rules such as…
• Relevant content
• Well-written content
• Original content (expressing your own unique opinion will take care of this)
• Inbound links (relevant, well-written, original content will eventually generate inbound links and take care of this as well)
5. Get involved

Whatever interests you online, get involved in some online forums. If you have an area of expertise, join forums in your field, hyperlink your signature file to your website, and start posting questions and answers. If you have relevant articles on your website to the topic at hand, hyperlink to them. The majority of forums allow you to create hyperlinks that provide coveted linkjuice back to your website.

Do not haphazardly begin joining any and every forum in your field and start posting garbage. You will quickly get banned and disrespected and will achieve the opposite of what you wish to accomplish. Go in with the genuine intention of providing useful information to those seeking it (the very same intention you should have with your website), and ask thoughtful and provoking questions that will solicit helpful answers. You will quickly garner the respect you deserve.

Ultimately, if you’re already providing relevant content on breaking news that others are interested to read about and you provide your readers with a unique perspective, you should be in pretty good shape to take advantage of Google Caffeine. It could mean a few late nights or early mornings to be the first one to break some big news, so you may wish to invest in a good coffee machine and a nice big mug. And with that… it’s time for bed. It’s past 1:30am here.

Supply and Demand

Fundamentally speaking, organic traffic from search engines comes as a result of two components: demand for certain keywords (people searching for things) and supply of information (webpage providing content that matches those keywords). Of course, it’s not entirely that simple, but at a very high-level that’s how it works. The AdWords Keyword Tool does help to inform you keywords people are looking for, but it says nothing of how many webpages there are providing information on those keywords. That’s where my Keyword Tool Supercharger can help.
Image Credit: SilverStar

How the Keyword Tool Supercharger Works

To find the competition data, my tool takes advantage of the Bing API to bring in preliminary numbers for the competition data. It performs exact searches (by default) on each keyword. It will output the number of search results for each keyword according to Bing. It also breaks down monthly searches by average daily search, and then builds a supply/demand ratio based on the daily searches divided by the total number of results for the keyword.

The Bing data is far from perfect, but it at least provides a good first guess. To provide a better estimate, you will notice that the competition data is hyperlinked. Clicking on the hyperlink will then bring in the estimated number of search results for that keyword on Google. This should give a much better figure for the competition data and supply/demand ratio. The lower the ratio, the better the odds you’ll receive some organic traffic if you use those keywords on your page. The additional keyword analysis data is provided in three new columns in the display.
Image Credit: eugrafia

The Options

In addition to the new columns in the display, there are also new fields and buttons on the submission form. Here is a description of each of the new options:

• Desired Daily Volume: The number of daily searches for the keywords. Higher is better.
• Desired Competition: The number of websites containing the keywords. Lower is better.
• Desired Supply/Demand Ratio: The # of competing sites/# of daily searches. Lower is better, a ratio less than 1 is ideal.
• Required words (comma or space separated): Words/phrases you wish to see appear within the results. These need to be separated by commas. You can also prefix a word/phrase with a minus (-) to specify words you do not want to appear in the results.
• Exact search: Whether or not you want the competition data to be based on searches of the exact phrase (the keyword phrases are seached with quotes). By default, this is enabled.
• Filter on SEO Criteria: When you click this, only rows that match the criteria above will be displayed.
• Show All/Update Display: This will display all results (including those that do not match the criteria above).
• Reload Competition Data: This will reset and reload all of the competition data. This may be necessary if you’ve selected a new choice for the Exact search option.
• Get keyword ideas: Loads in the keyword data

Image Credit: Xander

How to Use It

To take advantage of the information provided by the tool, you should seek out keywords that are high in demand and low in supply (those with a low Supply/Demand ratio). You also want to be sure there is sufficient demand to drive traffic to your site. Once you’ve identified keywords that meet this criteria, sprinkle them throughout your site and use them in page titles and headings as well. There are two ways you can use my free keyword tool supercharger.
Image Credit: STyx

Chrome Extension

The easier way, is to install the Google Chrome extension. Simply click the link below to install it, and then visit the AdWords Keyword Tool page.

Keyword Tool Supercharger Chrome Extension

Bookmarklet

If you don’t have Google Chrome, I still have a solution for you. Drag the bookmarklet below to your browser’s bookmarks bar.

KWT Supercharger

When you visit the AdWords Keyword Tool page, click the bookmarklet. This will load in the JavaScript file that performs the manipulations on the page to display the additional keyword analysis. It should work in Internet Explorer and Firefox. Your mileage may vary with other browsers.

The majority of blogs implore the nofollow tag in their comments. That means that when you specify your website URL when leaving a comment, the link created does not help to elevate your website’s status in the algorithms search engines use. Although not really an “official” term, people often use dofollow to describe blogs that do not use the nofollow tag. In other words, comments left on these blogs do help to elevate your website’s status in search engines.

Automatic Dofollow Detection

I had made a few attempts in the past to try to automatically detect whether or not a blog was a dofollow blog or not, but had little success. I’m pleased to announce that my latest attempt has proven successful, and I’ve managed to put together some code that will automatically detect dofollow blogs. It works relatively well and I’ve used it to identify more than 2,000 dofollow blogs.

Unlike other custom dofollow blog search engines, mine uses an automated algorithm to identify dofollow blogs. Many of the other dofollow blog directories and dofollow search engines I’ve seen are manually created, and are often out-of-date and littered with nofollow blogs. I will update my search engine periodically, to ensure that it remains up-to-date.

For lack of a better name, I’ve dubbed it The Ultimate DoFollow Search Engine. The search is powered by a Google Custom Search Engine, but the back-end that builds the list of dofollow blogs uses code I put together myself. If you do use my search engine to post comments on dofollow blogs, please do so responsibly.

Commenting on DoFollow Blogs

Do not post comments along the lines of, “Nice site. I’ve subscribed to your feed.” Such comments are likely to be moderated and tossed away into a pile of useless nonsense posted by others seeking quick and easy backlinks. Such comments are pointless and do not contribute to enhancing the information provided within the article and subsequent discussion. Most dofollow blogs moderate their comments, so you will get nowhere fast posting comments like this.

I would recommend submitting a question to the author about the article. It will appeal to the author’s ego of being an expert on the topic discussed in the article, and it will not come across as a feeble attempt at creating a backlink to your site. Asking a thought-provoking question is a great way to solicit an engaging conversation from the author.

If you do happen to come across a nofollow blog when using the search engine, please let me know. I’m still fine-tuning the crawler and working on ways to improve it. Enjoy!

The Ultimate DoFollow Search Engine

GeekLad.com went from no PageRank to a PageRank 3 within less than 30 days.  Although I hadn’t written a blog post about it, the site also managed to reach PageRank 4 within three months.  I think the main reason I was able to hit PageRank 5 was by taking a page out of the book of my good friend at Blog Traffic Exchange.

I thought that reaching PageRank 3 in less than 30 days was pretty cool, but Blog Traffic Exchange managed to hit PageRank 5 in less than 30 days!  How did he do it?  It’s a pretty stupid simple but ingenious strategy.

He simply developed a few nice WordPress plugins that would display backlinks to his site on blogs that would install them. One thing that is great about this strategy is that it’s much easier than mutual blogrolling.  There’s no having to send “I’ll scratch your back if you scratch mine” type emails. Your back gets scratched when people install your plugin and you don’t have to scratch back.

The other great thing about this strategy is the same thing that makes mutual blogrolling so great. You receive a backlink from every page on the blog in which it is installed.  I decided to try my hand at putting together a PageRank widget plugin (you’ll see it on all my pages).  I shamelessly put a link to the plugin page on the widget, and it wasn’t long before the backlinks started flowing in.

Generating backlinks to a blog is really quite simple, and it doesn’t take all that much effort to quickly improve your PageRank.  Here are some of the things I suggest you try:

• Mutual Blogrolling
• Use Disqus as your comment system
• Syndicate your content with RSS feeds
• Create WordPress plugins that link to your page
• Create badges that link to your page

Of course PageRank isn’t the be-all and end-all for achieving high-ranking results in search engine result pages (SERPs).  Owen from The Linux Blog made an interesting comment about better results on SERPs with a lower PageRank.  His PageRank has bounced around a bit, and although it is lower, his blog is syndicated in many places which he believes has helped him to achieve a higher ranking in the SERPs.

I’d say that for the most part, the strategies I’ve discussed and have used are relatively straight-forward.   It is really common sense more than anything, but I’m not so sure that many people use blogrolling and plugins as primary strategies for SEO.  As Voltaire says, “common Sense is not so common.”  I will continue to share my observations on SEO as I come across new strategies.  Stay tuned.

Busby SEO Test!!! it’s a nice post. thanks for informing

It was obvious it was just some comment spam to obtain a backlink. Mostly out of laziness or perhaps indifference, I didn’t even bother to moderate the comment or visit the site linked.

A few days later my curiosity piqued, and I took a look at the site. The comment spammer was a participant in some sort of SEO contest. It took some time to find the actual contest website, but I finally managed it with a few different Google searches.

Initially, when I searched for Busby SEO Test on Google, I got a ton of hits on pages with that exact title. Funny enough, none of them actually provided me the information I was seeking, although they all made mention of the contest.

However, rather than linking to the official contest page, for SEO purposes they would simply link back to themselves. It quickly became apparent it was going to be somewhat challenging to find the official contest page. Finally I discovered that the contest is being sponsored by Busby Web Solutions.

The contest is the Busby SEO World Cup 2. The objective is to achieve the top spot in a search on Google for Busby SEO Test. There are cash prizes for the top five spots in the search results:

First Prize: $5000
Second Prize: $2000
Third Prize: $500
Fourth Prize: $250
Fifth Prize: $100

The contest began on October 1, 2008 and will end on January 31, 2009. There is also a Midway prize ($1000) being offered to the entrant with the highest average ranking as of January 5. At the time I wrote this post, there were 536 registered entrants in the Busby SEO World Cup 2 contest.

Other than writing this post and soliciting for backlinks, I will not put forth any further effort. I thought it would be fun and interesting to enter the contest with minimal effort. Rather than feverishly attempting to manually generate my own backlinks to my contest entry, I’d simply write an informative article that would provide the exact information that others may be seeking regarding the contest.

My entry into the contest is rather paradoxical. On one hand I’m attempting to win the contest by providing the best information about it. On the other, I’m encouraging competition against me by providing others the information they need to find out what exactly Busby SEO Test is.

If you like my approach, you’re not interested in joining the contest yourself, and you’d like to help me win, feel free to link back to this article with the words Busby SEO Test. Otherwise, if your’re interested in competing against me and the other 500+ participants, you can register for the contest yourself.

May the best SEO specialist win!

Busby Web Solutions Search Engine Optimisation Challenge

Photo Credit: Martineric

The reason FeedBurner changes the title URLs for your articles is so that it can track clicks on them. If you are not interested in such stats, you can disable item link clicks. With this feature disabled, the links in the article titles for your feed will contain the URL for the original article. To disable item link clicks:

1. View your feeds in FeedBurner
2. Click on the feed title to jump to the Analyze tab for that feed.
3. Click on Configure Stats.
4. Disable the checkbox for Item link clicks.
5. Click Save.

Disabling Item link clicks

I’ve seen this process for disabling FeedBurner redirects mentioned on a number of other blogs:

• Using FeedBurner may hurt your PageRank!
• Disable the Feedburner Redirect
• Blogging Tip: Turn off FeedBurner Redirect in RSS Feeds

I do not believe that the FeedBurner redirect will actually affect PageRank in any way. According to the first comment in the first article, FeedBurner uses a 302 HTTP status code to perform the redirect. From what I gather in Matt Cutts‘ article about 302 redirects, Google will honor 302 redirects 99% of the time.

Another thing you can do to reclaim your feed is to put your feed on a subdomain. For instance, I have my feed on http://feeds.geeklad.com/GeekLad. To set this up:

1. Navigate to the MyBrand feature within your Account configuration.
2. Enter the URL you wish to host the feed on.
3. Create a CNAME DNS entry for that address, as specified by the instructions.  You will have to do this through your host/DNS provider.

Setting up MyBrand

If you’re using AdSense for feeds, the CNAME will be a feedproxy.ghs.google.com address (you’ll append your Google Account signon to it).  If you aren’t, the CNAME will be feeds.feedburner.com.  Once you have MyBrands configured, be sure to update your site to link to the new feed URL.

Disabling item link clicks and using MyBrands are two great ways to make your usage of FeedBurner a bit more transparent to your readers. It also makes life a bit easier for them, if they spend a lot of their time in their feed readers. If they want to site your article, they no longer have to click through the FeedBurner link for the sole purpose of obtaining the original article URL.

Unfortunately, there were some recent changes to Google Blog Search that makes this strategy a little more difficult. Google Blog Search now includes blogrolled links within the search results. That means if someone has blogrolled your site, every time they post a new article or page, the article or page appears in the results when you search for your name. You will also receive a Google Alert when the article is posted, because the blog has your site blogrolled.

Although the alerts now include blogroll links, all is not lost. It is possible to discern between alerts coming as a result of a blogroll and those from the direct mention of your name. When you receive an alert from a page where you’ve been blogrolled, you’ll see your blog/site name and a · symbol (that’s a bullet, not a period) separating it between other blogrolled links. Essentially, you can ignore alerts with those bullets.

Using Google Alerts to track your blog or website also helps to track inbound links to your sites. It’s a nice and simple little tool to add to your SEO toolbelt.

Promoting a corporate website or a startup web service is a daunting task. It’s not as easy to promote a brand that is not a person, as it doesn’t lend itself to community. A blog can easily be promoted by guest posting on other blogs, commenting on other blogs, joining social networks, and so on. This is a big reason why there are many people that have been able to afford a living from blogging. However, a web startup does not have such advantages.

I’m living proof of this. I created a service to send text messages for free over 7 months ago, and it still sits at a dismal PageRank 0. Yet I managed to reach a PageRank 3 in less than a month with GeekLad. I recently decided that in order to really learn more about SEO, I was going to have to learn how to promote a website that was not a blog. ForeverSMS presents me with the perfect learning opportunity!

I decided to take the first step by writing a press release and submitting it to free press release websites. Christine O’Kelly (Self Made Chick) wrote a great hub on Hubpages about how to write and distribute a press release. She also made a presentation on writing and submitting press releases. I did my best to follow her advice when I wrote my press release for ForeverSMS. So far, it has been published to the following sites:

• PRLog
• SeeNation
• dBusinessNews
• Google Base
  Google Base seemed odd to me too, but it was in Christine’s presentation, so I figured what the hell

I’ve also submitted to the following, but it hasn’t been published yet (as far as I know):

• openPR.com
• Free Press Release Center
• PR-USA.net
• I-Newswire.com
• Launch Feed 
• Get Satisfaction

I got the idea for adding Launch Feed and Get Satisfaction from a post on marketingstartups.com with 10 tips on how to get your startup noticed. The article couldn’t have been more timely, as I had just written the press release a couple of days before.

Of the sites that have published the release so far, I think the SeeNation release is closest to what I wanted, with the proper hyperlinks and all. Unfortunately, some of the press release sites would only allow HTML or wanted money to add links. I figured I’d try my hand at doing it for free since I’m all about free stuff (i.e. I’m a cheap bastard).

Hopefully the press release will help create some buzz (and this blog post may not hurt either). It does seem that some of the sites I’ve submitted to have syndicated it. A quick search for ForeverSMS Press Release on Google shows a few sites where I didn’t even submit it. So the first step towards promoting ForeverSMS is well underway. Now I have to figure out what the second step will be.

So what is the secret to going from a PageRank 0 to 3 in less than 30 days?  It’s actually quite simple.  Have your site added to a blogroll on a site with PageRank.  The incoming links from the blogroll must not be nofollow links, otherwise they will not contribute to your PageRank.

Notice I said simple, not easy.  If you already have a blog with PageRank or a very good friend that has a PageRanked blog, then it is simple and easy.  If not, go out and make some friends.  I added GeekLad to my blogroll on WealthBoy, and I believe it is the number one factor in what increased my PageRank so quickly.

Last month, I developed a Greasemonkey script for providing nofollow information in Google Webmaster Tools.  I took a look at the incoming links for http://geeklad.com and what I found was very interesting.  There were only a handful of incoming links (that were not nofollow) to my site that had a PageRank, and the majority of them coming from WealthBoy.  There were only three other inbound links that were not nofollow, had PageRank, and did not come from WealthBoy:

• http://www.seo-scientist.com/
• http://www.mybloglog.com/buzz/members/GeekLad/
• http://e-businessadvantage.com/blogging-tools/the-unlimited-search-engine-for-dofollow-blogs/

In all, I have 15 inbound links that are not nofollow with PR 1-3.  I have 154 inbound links that are PR 0 that are not nofollow.  Of the 154 inbound links, only 29 of them are coming from sites other than WealthBoy.  I think this is all very compelling evidence that all it takes to increase your PageRank quickly is to be placed on the blogroll of a site with PageRank.

When I came to the realization as to why my PageRank increased so quickly, it did take some of the wind out of my sails.  It wasn’t due to all the time and effort I spent in developing lots of useful and relevant information.  It was because I took 10 seconds to add myself to my blogroll on another blog.

However, it was an important discovery to make and share.  I was compelled to find the answer, and in the process I’ve learned a lot about search engine optimization.  I also developed a useful tool for nofollow link analysis.

I’m also working on a server-side tool.  It will allow people that do not use FireFox and Greasemonkey to perform external link analysis as well.  The server-side tool I’m working on helped me perform the analysis I shared here, but it is not yet ready for production.  You can be certain that I will share it with the masses as soon as it is ready.

]]> http://geeklad.com/fast-simple-seo-to-increase-pagerank-0/feed 37 http://geeklad.com/update-to-google-webmaster-tools-greasemonkey-script http://geeklad.com/update-to-google-webmaster-tools-greasemonkey-script#comments Thu, 06 Nov 2008 14:53:39 +0000 GeekLad http://geeklad.com/?p=550 Continue reading → ]]> I recently made a minor update to my Google Webmaster Tools Greasemonkey script for displaying nofollow information.  The script allows you to learn which incoming links to your website are nofollow links when viewing the detail for a site within Google Webmaster Tools.  I have added functionality that will also display the PageRank for the incoming links.

I finally had a chance to take a look at the JavaScript code for the SEO Link Analysis Firefox addon, and I borrowed the PageRank code and incorporated it into my script.  I left PageRank code untouched, with the exception of the output for the display of the information.  If you are ever working on your own Greasemonkey script and you need to obtain PageRank information, feel free to use the code.  Just load in all of the necessary support functions (GooglePR, googleCH,  googleNewCh, myfmod, c32to8bit, exclude, strord, mix, zeroFill, and hexdec) and make your changes in the GooglePR function to output or manipulate the results in any way you wish.

Install the Script

Yoast SEO Link Analysis Firefox Addon

Screenshot of My Greasemonkey Script

Install the Script

FeedBurner

First of all, if your blog doesn’t have an RSS feed, I highly recommend you set one up with FeedBurner. I’m using the FeedBurner FeedSmith WordPress plugin to automatically redirect my feed to FeedBurner to ensure that everyone uses the FeedBurner feed. FeedBurner provides many nifty tools for customizing and analyzing your feed. You’ll definitely want to enable PingShot, which will automatically broadcast your feed to other feed aggregation services.

Social Networks

Join lots of social networks and link them with each other and your blog. You may find these particularly helpful in promoting your blog:

• MyBlogLog
• FriendFeed
• Twitter (I use the Twitter Tools WordPress Plugin to integrate with the blog)
• Technorati

Trackbacks and Commenting

Subscribe to feeds on popular blogs that blog about the same topics you do. For blogs that provide the ability to add comments, provide your feedback on the articles. When prompted for your information as you post your comment, be sure to provide the URL for your blog. If your comments are useful and constructive, you will get clicks from folks that want to learn more about you. Because you blog about the same topics, you will attract regular visitors to your site.

Most blogs put nofollow tags on the links that appear in comments. Unfortunately that means that the links won’t contribute to your PageRank. However, they will drive traffic to your site which really should be your primary goal. In addition to providing comments, some blogs also have trackbacks enabled. If you link to an article on a blog that has trackbacks enabled, a link to your article will appear within the article you linked to. As with comments, most sites with trackbacks also use nofollow links.

Another you can try for comments on your own blog is to disable nofollow in comments on your own blog (aka dofollow, which is my commenting policy). Although it doesn’t necessarily help to promote your site, it does give people some incentive to leave comments on your blog. Constructive discussion on your blog will provide additional credibility and attract new users. You will likely want to moderate comments so that you do not just have a bunch of people saying useless stuff like, “nice article!” You’ll also want to use a comment spam filter, such as Akismet. I was manually filtering spam on WealthBoy for a while. However, as the blog gained popularity with the spam bots, it became overwhelming. Akismet does a fabulous job of filtering spam.

Pinging Services

Traditionally, web search engines will crawl websites and pull information from them when they can. With the advent of blog pinging services, you can now push your content to other websites rather than wait for it to be pulled. Feedburner’s PingShot service does the same thing, but only with a select few services. You can ping many other services with the following comprehensive list:

• http://blogsearch.google.com/ping/RPC2
• http://1470.net/api/ping
• http://api.feedster.com/ping
• http://api.moreover.com/RPC2
• http://api.moreover.com/ping
• http://api.my.yahoo.com/RPC2
• http://api.my.yahoo.com/rss/ping
• http://bblog.com/ping.php
• http://bitacoras.net/ping
• http://blog.goo.ne.jp/XMLRPC
• http://blogdb.jp/xmlrpc
• http://blogmatcher.com/u.php
• http://bulkfeeds.net/rpc
• http://coreblog.org/ping/
• http://mod-pubsub.org/kn_apps/blogchatt
• http://www.lasermemory.com/lsrpc/
• http://ping.amagle.com/
• http://ping.bitacoras.com
• http://ping.blo.gs/
• http://ping.bloggers.jp/rpc/
• http://ping.cocolog-nifty.com/xmlrpc
• http://ping.blogmura.jp/rpc/
• http://ping.exblog.jp/xmlrpc
• http://ping.feedburner.com
• http://ping.myblog.jp
• http://ping.rootblog.com/rpc.php
• http://ping.syndic8.com/xmlrpc.php
• http://ping.weblogalot.com/rpc.php
• http://ping.weblogs.se/
• http://pingoat.com/goat/RPC2
• http://rcs.datashed.net/RPC2/
• http://rpc.blogbuzzmachine.com/RPC2
• http://rpc.blogrolling.com/pinger/
• http://rpc.icerocket.com:10080/
• http://rpc.newsgator.com/
• http://rpc.pingomatic.com
• http://rpc.technorati.com/rpc/ping
• http://rpc.weblogs.com/RPC2
• http://topicexchange.com/RPC2
• http://trackback.bakeinu.jp/bakeping.php
• http://www.a2b.cc/setloc/bp.a2b
• http://www.bitacoles.net/ping.php
• http://www.blogdigger.com/RPC2
• http://www.blogoole.com/ping/
• http://www.blogoon.net/ping/
• http://www.blogpeople.net/servlet/weblogUpdates
• http://www.blogroots.com/tb_populi.blog?id=1
• http://www.blogshares.com/rpc.php
• http://www.blogsnow.com/ping
• http://www.blogstreet.com/xrbin/xmlrpc.cgi
• http://www.mod-pubsub.org/kn_apps/blogchatter/ping.php
• http://www.newsisfree.com/RPCCloud
• http://www.newsisfree.com/xmlrpctest.php
• http://www.popdex.com/addsite.php
• http://www.snipsnap.org/RPC2
• http://www.weblogues.com/RPC/
• http://xmlrpc.blogg.de
• http://xping.pubsub.com/ping/
• http://www.bloglines.com/ping

Most blogging platforms give you the ability to take advantage of pinging services (I’m using WordPress). I highly recommend using the list above and adding even more if you don’t see them on the list.

Feedburner, social networks, commenting, trackbacks, and pinging services are just a few more of the things I’ve done to get GeekLad off the ground. As I continue my quest on becoming an SEO expert, I’ll be sure to share tips on what you can do to help increase your PageRank.

]]> http://geeklad.com/increasing-your-pagerank/feed 8 http://geeklad.com/pagerank-0-to-3-in-under-30-days http://geeklad.com/pagerank-0-to-3-in-under-30-days#comments Sun, 28 Sep 2008 04:46:04 +0000 GeekLad http://geeklad.com/?p=364 Continue reading → ]]> Less than a month ago, I set out to create this blog.  GeekLad was “born” on September 3, 2008.  Although I had learned quite a bit about Search Engine Optimization (SEO) when I created my personal finance blog back in January, I’ve learned quite a bit more with my launch of GeekLad.  I’ve been keeping a close eye on my PageRank and tonight I was pleasantly shocked to learn it has already hit three!  I think it was many months before WealthBoy ever hit PR3.  I’d like to share with you some of the things I’ve learned over the course of the past month, and perhaps touch on some of the things that I believe that have helped me to reach a PageRank of 3 in less than 30 days.

First and foremost, I think one thing that helped me a lot was developing some original content.  This has probably been the most difficult thing for me to do with WealthBoy.  In the world of personal finance there is very little that hasn’t already been blogged about.  Believe it or not, for me it’s actually been relatively simple to do develop original content about technology.  Initially, I thought this blog would primarily consist of reposts of interesting articles I’ve read, along with some additional commentary expressing my point of view.  However, I have manged to find an excellent and relatively simple method to write some original material.

Whether I’m at work or at home, I’m more often in front of a computer than not.  It’s one of the things that makes me the geek that I am.  When I’m tinkering around with computers, I often turn to the Web for answers to questions I have or solutions to problems I’m having.  Sometimes I have a very difficult time finding the solution or I end up having do develop my own solution.  These situations are perfect for developing original content. Even if you do find a solution you were seeking, if you had a difficult time finding it you should write about it!  Chances are very good there are a number of other people out there asking the same question and having the same difficulty finding the answer.  You can probably present the solution in a more organized manner and make it easier for others to find the answer.

For instance, I was having problems with running Google Chrome behind a SOCKS proxy.  That led me to come up with my own workaround for getting Google Chrome to work with a SOCKS proxy.  Currently, if you search on Google for google chrome socks, my article appears on the first page of results.  I’ve been keeping a close eye on Google Analytics to see what sort of organic traffic I’m getting from Google.  Second to my post about Gordon Freeman at the Large Hadron Collider, the Google Chrome socks proxy workaround article is the second most popular landing page from search results.

I think that another factor that has contributed to GeekLad reaching a PR3 so quickly, is the manner in which I’ve been writing.  As I’m writing an article, I keep in the back of my mind the sort of keywords that one may use to try to find the information I’m providing.  This is more of an art than it is science, and you have to do it somewhat subconsciously.  If you become too intent on filling your articles with relevant keywords, you may end up keyword stuffing and will not achieve the results you are likely trying to attain.  Sometimes it helps to go back and read your article or webpage before you publish it, and look for places where you can easily use relevant keywords without upsetting the focus of the article.

It’s hard to say whether or not this has helped, but I have been posting more often on GeekLad than I ever have on WealthBoy.  Article posting frequency has always been a topic of discussion in the world of SEO.  I’m not sure how much of a factor my posting frequency has been, but I do think that the volume of articles probably does help.  The more pages you have, the more opportunities you will have for backlinks.  Backlinks are essential to SEO and achieving a good PageRank, and chances of receiving backlinks increase as the number of pages on a website increase.  As your website begins to receive many backlinks to original content, you really have a good recipe for success.

I think it also really helps that I’ve been blogging about my passion, technology.  As much as I love money, personal finance isn’t my life and I’ve found keeping up with WealthBoy to be fairly difficult.  I’ve found maintaining GeekLad to be quite easy and even more enjoyable.  I had the most difficulty in maintaining and writing on jsierra.net.  I think it was because I never really developed a focus for the site.  Sometimes I would write about technology, sometimes I would write about happenings in my life.  If you are going to blog about multiple topics, I would suggest maintaining separate blogs.  I think it helps to keep your thoughts on a particular subject organized on a single site.  It probably also helps in terms of maintaining topical relevance, as far as the search engines are concerned.  I believed this strategy to be useful when I created WealthBoy and even more so when I created GeekLad.

If you blog about technology, it may actually be easier to develop new material than you previously realized.  The next time you develop a bit of code to help you do something you couldn’t find, blog about it!  If you fix a problem you couldn’t find the solution to anywhere, or that you found spread out over 4 different discussion threads, blog about it!  If I haven’t already told you anything that you didn’t already know, I apologize for disappointing you.  There really is no SEO silver bullet.  There are some other more objective things you can do in addition to the subjective-type strategies I’ve mentioned here.  I’ll share some of the other things I’ve done to promote GeekLad in subsequent articles.

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