Russell Crowe Is A SEO Freak!

September 21st, 2008 • general, seo • 2 comments

Gladiator

It’s 2 a.m. and I’m watching Galdiator on tv. Actually I’ve already seen that movie about ten times. It’s hard to find something more interesting at these hours, that’s why it’ll be eleven from now on. No harm in making it eleven.

As you may guess Galdiator or Russell Crowe has nothing to do with search engine optimization, at least not related to any seo technique that I’ve known. But eventually due to this post everyone that will search Russell Crowe on Google will come to my blog one day - yes, I really believe that. So we can conclude that Russell Crowe himself is a seo technique that will draw traffic to your web site, I swear. You see, I was wrong saying that Russell Crowe has nothing to do with search engine optimization. Ok, I’ll shut up.

Tonight I noticed that my blog has been included to Google index. Not as I expected but at least now I have some pages indexed. It seems that Google bots have visited my blog the day I wrote my first post. So they took only that post. Now I’m waiting for the bots to crawl my sitemap and include all my pages to google index. After that - hopefully - I’ll get some traffic from search engines. For now I’m ok with StumbleUpon traffic. In fact, I noticed that someone has favorited my blog on StumbleUpon. Thanks a340 for the fav, that just made me happy

Now, let’s go back to Gladiator.

Hi There!

September 19th, 2008 • general • 1 comment

Dear Visitor,

This blog is a total waste of time. Please make sure that you have some time to waste before continue reading.

Have some time? Great. Let’s go on.

There are millions of web sites with billions of articles about search engine optimization. Each article focuses some topic which can be expressed in a single sentence. However, authors - no one knows why! - prefer to hide that sentence we are looking for behind at lease one hundred words. I’ve already read %99,9 of those billions of articles - have a couple of them left only. And I’m sick of that style. I almost every time just looking for that single sentence and don’t want to read how the author discovered it, who suggested it to him etc. That’s why I’ve built this blog.

In every post, I’ll try to apply a technique to increase this blogs traffic and share my experiences with you. I may go in wrong way, that’s not important. This is just a try-and-fail blog.

Anyway, I hope my posts will be helpful for you. As a SEO technique, I’d be glad if you bookmark this site or give a link to it

See you later.

Increase Your Web Site Traffic Using Social Bookmarking Tools: Del.icio.us

September 19th, 2008 • seo • No comments

Del.icio.us

After I’ve submitted RunSEORun to StumbleUpon, just in a couple of hours I started to get some hits So, all those SEO articles about StumbleUpon weren’t wrong at all. For now I’ll just stop at this point and not focus on StumbleUpon. A more in depth work will be crucial for StumbleUpon later. Tonight I’ll introduce my dear blog to Del.icio.us, another social bookmarking site. I don’t expect any traffic from Del.icio.us unless I share my blog link with some people on site. Since Del.icio.us uses “nofollow” attribute in anchors listing your site to these tools will not increase your PageRank directly. But hey, this blog is totally for experiments. There is no harm in trying everything.

Since I’ve thousands of visitors from StumbleUpon, I can talk to my visitors from now on

Add RunSEORun to Del.icio.us

Is Stumbleupon A Good Traffic Source?

September 19th, 2008 • seo • 1 comment

StumbleUpon is a great service to get discovered. With correct set of actions you can direct a reasonable amount of traffic to your website. At least most of SEO articles says like that. Now it’s time to test for me. Hope it’ll work.

For now I’ve only added RunSEORun to StumbleUpon. I expect actual traffic to come after some social work I’ll make on StumbleUpon. Since it’s a social bookmarking tool, making friends and getting reviews of your page will be of great use.

I’ll share the results soon.

Technorati And Other Ping Services

September 18th, 2008 • seo • 1 comment

Technorati

Search engine submission has completed. Let’s move to next stage: ping services. Ping services are important especially for blogs. They keep track of content changes. What you have to do is ping a server when you write something. After that ping, services like Technorati will visit your site to fetch the changes. Normally wordpress has default ping support. After you write a post it’ll automatically ping the servers you’ve specified. Wordpress pings Pingomatic after changes and Pingomatic pings several public ping services like Weblogs.com, FeedBurner and Technorati.

It’s a good idea to claim your blog on Technorati. By claiming your blog, you will be able to follow the reactions of your blog: How many favs have you got? How many sites have given a link to you? etc…

I’ve added RunSEORun.com to Technorati. Here is the link: RunSEORun @Technorati.

Search Engine Submission

September 18th, 2008 • seo • No comments

Yahoo Site Explorer

Live.com Webmaster Center

After submiting RunSeoRun to Google Webmaster Tools, it’s time to submit to some other search engines too. I’ve not directly add my url to Google, using their “Add Url To Google” link, since there is no need to do it after submitting my sitemap.xml. There are many services that you can use to submit your url to several search engines, but truly I don’t believe that they affect much. Always I make sure that Google, Yahoo and Live.com crawls my site and don’t care about other search engines. Both Yahoo and Live.com has services like Google Webmaster Tools. None of them are as useful as Google Webmaster Tools. But at least they give you an oportunity to submit your sitemap.xml.

To use these services, again you have to verify your site. There must be a generic way to verify that a site is yours, every tool requires a different action. I hate that wierd meta tags. Anyway, I submitted my sitemap.xml to Yahoo Site Explorer and Live.com Webmaster Center too. From now on, I’ll host some other spiders.

Sitemap.xml And Google Webmaster Tools

September 17th, 2008 • seo • 1 comment

Google Webmaster Tools

After setting up permalinks and correcting meta-tags it’s time to build a sitemap for my lovely blog which already has thousands of visitors every day. Sitemaps are great tools to help search engines discover the pages on your site. If you don’t have a sitemap yet, consider building one. You can find some detailed explanation about sitemaps on Google’s Webmaster Help Center. Again for Wordpress we have a great plugin: Google Sitemap Generator. For those who haven’t got a clue about what this plugin does from it’s name: This plugin generates a google sitemap. Surprising, isn’t it? Anyway, I’ve downloaded this plugin from this link and activated from my admin panel. And got my first sitemap.xml file. So what am I gonna do this file? Yep, Google Webmaster Tools. Google provides a set of very useful tools that you can use to analize your web site. It provides feedback about crawl issues, meta-tag issues, index status etc. I’m planning to write a detailed post about webmaster tools. I verified RunSEORun.com on Google Webmaster Tools and submitted my sitemap.xml. All I can do for now is to wait Google spiders to crawl my blog. Hope it’ll not took much.

SEO For Wordpress

September 17th, 2008 • seo, wordpress • 3 comments

Wordpress

Wordpress - by default - is a good choice for search engine optimization since it provides a clean and powerful interface to search engines to reach the content. However after I installed and configured wordpress, I noticed that some meta tags are missing so I looked for a plugin. If you think that something is missing in Wordpress just do some googling for appropriate plugin. There is always a plugin that do the work you want, believe me. Also you can check the wordpress plugin directory. Anyway, I found the “All In One SEO Pack” plugin for wordpress, a cool plugin that you can use to add flexible meta tags to your blog. After downloading the plugin using this link, I set the home page description meta tag to “RunSEORun.com is a playground for experimenting search engine optimizatioon techniques.” and home page title tag to “Run SEO Run | Experimental Works On Search Engine Optimization”. Also I’ve set up some keywords for main page. I’ve used Google Adwords Keyword Tool to select some popular keywords realted to RunSEORun.com:
“seo, search engine optimization, search engine, search marketing, search engine marketing, web promotion, search engine ranking, web site promotion, website marketing, marketing seo”. After playing a little more, I noticed that this plugin has added a small drop down box below the “Write Post” page in admin panel. It looks like this:

All In One SEO Pack Screenshot

Using this box you can set the page title, description and keywords of a spesific post. After noticing that I updated my previous posts to include some popular keywords using Google Adwords Keyword Tool as I did for homepage. You have to be careful about the tags you’ve added for a specific post. It seems that this plugin uses the tags you’ve provided as well as the keywords you’ve explicitly spesified as keywords meta tag. I found some duplicate keywords in meta tags after update, so I checked the list one more time. From now on I’ll only use wordpress’ default tags and not specify any keywords in plugins box.

As far as I know keywords and description meta tags are no more that valuable to search engines but I believe there is no harm in providing correct tags.

Anybody Out There?

September 17th, 2008 • Analytics, general, wordpress • No comments

Statcounter: Web Tracker And Counter

Now I’ve started to update my blog, I’ve millions of readers and I don’t know who is reading me! What a shame. So I installed a StatCounter tracker. StatCounter is a free and easy to use tracker. All you have to do is following the step-by-step instructions given on site. They have a handy Wordpress plugin as well. I used that plugin. Just download the plugin from this site, unzip it under the wp-content/plugins directory and activate it from your admin panel. After that you have to fill in the configuration using the StatCounter code provided when you create a project on StatCounter.com.

I’ll not go over the details of how to use StatCounter. Figure it out by yourself.

Google Analytics

If you need more just try Google Analytics. It’s definetaly better than StatCounter. But you have to try harder to learn the details. Hopefully I can write something on these later.

According to StatCounter there is no one out there. Now, I’ve to go. See you.

First Steps

September 16th, 2008 • seo, wordpress • 3 comments

Here are the first steps that I’ve followed to make this blog run:

• Download & Install WordPress
• Configure Akismet
• Download & Install Sans-Serif Racer wordpress theme.

After these steps, I’ve configured WordPress to use permalinks. WordPress uses some dynamic url structure by default. It looks like (http://www.runseorun.com/?p=7). So I changed this to (http://www.runseorun.com/2008/09/16/run-seo-run). By doing this I’ve added more keywords to urls. Also it has a cleaner look. Anyway, everyone knows that permalinks are better than dynamic urls. So I will use them as well from now on. If you like too, just go to ‘Settings > Permalinks’ under the admin panel. Don’t forget to set correct permissions to .htaccess file. For more information refer to WordPress permalink documentation.