Seo Adventures

If you want to rank high in Google and can afford not to take pay checks early a great way to go about things is to have absolutely no ads whatsoever. That is until you make it big.

Set a traffic/subscriber goal that once reached you can inundate  your site with ads without killing off your userbase entirely. That and gradually introduce ads to get your base to get used to it.

If you provide good, well optimized content, have good links, update daily, etc slowly adding adds to a well known site will turn off the purists but not the masses.

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seodude :: Aug.30.2007 :: General, Tips :: No Comments »

At one of my sites http://www.fantasy-mmorpg.com/ I just recently added adsense and realized that the ads being served acted like a kind of mini-directory to go along with my flash game.

Now with very very tiny traffic it makes around $3 a day from adsense alone.

The key here is to find keywords that have a high competition market and that will fill adsense ads with highly competitive ads.

This way you embed this in to a page about the subject and make it look like a small directory of ads and voila you’ll get more clicks.

The other thing this page has going for it is that it has very very few outgoing links that aren’t adsense. The fewer the links, the more likely they’ll click on an ad link.

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seodude :: Aug.28.2007 :: Adsense, Case Study - Fantasy-MMORPG.Com, Tips :: No Comments »

Google loves sites that keep things fresh, case in point I didn’t blog here for 3 days once and my rankings dropped significantly.

If you keep well thought out posts coming on a daily basis and get them linked from other sources you’re sure to get good rankings as well as the nice referral traffic.

Try as hard as you can to post at least one thing a day that is meaningful and worthwhile and the search engines will surely reward you for it.

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seodude :: Aug.25.2007 :: Tips, Wordpress :: No Comments »

I think it’s a good thing to vary the text in the page’s main H1 and it’s title just to increase your keywords but it’s not necessary.

Google may see this duplicating as a bad thing but I don’t think it’s a serious determining factor for ranking so if you have no way of varying the two just set them to the same thing.

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seodude :: Aug.25.2007 :: Tips :: No Comments »

In my early days I was dumb enough to make URLs like this:

http://www.gamebrink.com/playstation-portable/2981-Dragoneers_Aria-info.html

It’s almost good but not quite. You see Dragoneers_Aria has an underscore.

2 years ago I thought nothing of it but today I’ve come to find out that Google and other search engines see the underscore as no space at all.

So in reality Google sees Dragoneers_Aria as DragoneersAria. This is bad.

So for further projects I’ve moved over to all dashes instead of underscores which is the default in Wordpress for a reason.

Very few pages at GameBrink rank in Google while this blog and NuclearSushi.com started ranking right away largely because I used Dashes and not Underscores.

So Metroid_Prime_3 is BAD as Google sees this as MetroidPrime3.

And Metroid-Prime-3 is GOOD because Google sees this as Metroid Prime 3!

And even though Google as come out and publicly said that now Underscores are now word separators, proclaims Google I see no reason for you to test this theory as in practice I’ve found this not to be true.

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seodude :: Aug.20.2007 :: Google, Tips :: 1 Comment »

In less than a day I’ve already gotten a couple decent spots in Google for two different posts.

The first is the number 6 spot for the phrase: wordpress tag cloud

Continue Reading »

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seodude :: Aug.20.2007 :: Google, Social Bookmarking, Tips :: No Comments »

Although I can’t post any real hard proof of this I have sites that use both a trailing slash and those that don’t and those that don’t definitely get more traffic.

For some odd reason, which may be fixed or changed at any time, Google loves urls that have zero trailing slash.

So use mod_rewrite in all its glory and configure all your plugins to avoid this and enjoy more traffic!

Even if you don’t see any improvement there’s no harm done so give it a try.

If you have no idea what I’m talking about here is what I mean:

No trailing slash = Good

http://www.seoadventures.com/2007/08/20/never-end-a-url-with-a-slash

Trailing slash = Bad

http://www.seoadventures.com/2007/08/20/never-end-a-url-with-a-slash/

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seodude :: Aug.20.2007 :: Google, Links, Programming, Tips, Wordpress :: No Comments »

First off you must have a decent non-spammy site that you wish to submit.

You want it to have a good chance of being accepted into the directory so that you’re not just wasting time and money.

Once you have your site ready to be submitted head on over to Yahoo and submit it:

https://ecom.yahoo.com/dir/submit/intro

Next note the credit card you used.

Once you’ve confirmed the charge from Yahoo has been made either report that card stolen or cancel it completely.

When billing time rolls around a year later Yahoo will not contact you in any way and your listing will stay put!

I have done this successfully with two sites, one of which has stayed listed for the past 3 years without any billing notice.

It seems that once you’re in and Yahoo likes your site you’re home free. That up front fee seems to just be a processing fee, that is unless you let them charge you over and over again.

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seodude :: Aug.19.2007 :: Directories, Links, Tips :: No Comments »

All websites these days MUST have a news feed.

It’s not only a hot trend, it’s great for SEO, and a great way to stay connected with readers.

If you run a non-Wordpress site head on over to Feedburner.com and follow the instructions.

If you do run a Wordpress site you can install the handy Feedburner Feedsmith Plugin.

Once you have all that setup here are a few options I always turn on.

Login to Feedburner, select your feed and:

In Optimize:

1. Click SmartFeed and enable it for maximum compatibility.

2. Click FeedFlare and add all your favorite social networking sites. This adds links right into your feed!

In Publicize:

1. Click Chicklet Chooser - get a chicklet for your site if you don’t already have one.

Be sure to just browse through the options as there are many good ones I didn’t mention.

Now from time to time you can head on over to FeedBurner and see how many subscribers you really have.

They use an averaging system which looks at how many referalls your feed gets each day.

It’s a great way to track your popularity and a great way to make your feed human readable and not a mess of XML when they click on it.

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seodude :: Aug.19.2007 :: Tips, Wordpress :: No Comments »

Like I was saying in my post about Google Analytics, it only updates once a day.

If you’re a nut like me you want to check your stats all day everyday.

So here is a list of alternatives I like.

WordPress.com Stats - It’s obviously only for Wordpress but it’s quite nice although it only updates every hour or so.

Statcounter.Com - Another freebie that you don’t have to show and updates very quickly.

Site Meter Basic - Updates incredibly fast but you have to show a graphic in the free version.

Definitely use one of these WITH Google Analytics as while these update very fast, they don’t hold long term data like Analytics does.

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seodude :: Aug.19.2007 :: Tips :: 1 Comment »