Blogger's Effects on SEO
About a year ago I created a blog on Blogger, one of the web's oldest and most established blog hosts. The only reason I wanted the blog was to answer the following question:
Can a blog increase a website's search engine ranking?
It's a proven fact that inbound links to a website will increase that sites rankings on relevant search phrases, so I decided to use Blogger, at a separate URL, with links back to my site, to help my SEO efforts. The main goal of the blog was to increase my website's ranking on my tier-one search phrases (web design austin texas, website design austin texas). Most of my posts feature keywords, and keyword links back to my site. Whether or not people were reading my blog was completely irrelevant to me. What was relevant was whether or not search engines were reading my blog. Other than using good design principles, I was not trying any other SEO methods on my website at the time.
Within a few months my website was ranking highly, with several of my search phrases producing Google page one results. I begin employing other active SEO techniques and over time I've been fortunate enough to have a good number of my relevant search phrases appearing on page one and I attribute a large part of this success to my blog. Since Google owns Blogger I had a suspicion that Google might give preferential treatment to Blogger and crawl it more often than other sites.
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Faster Than a Speeding Bullet
The next morning I performed a Google search on the phrase "howard mcnear web design" and my blog article came up as the number one result! The goal of my experiment was not to rank highly for searches on "howard mcnear web design", but to see how fast Google would index the new article. I was absolutely shocked to see this kind of result. My next experiment will be to post a similar article to a blog I have on WordPress and compare the results.
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RUN - Don't Walk!
If you don't already have a Blogger account, my advice is to get one post-haste! It's free and easy to set up your blog and you don't need to know any code. Decide in advance what key search phrases you want to promote, then begin posting. Make sure your posts contain links back to your website. Also, make sure your posts have something to say - don't just create a post full of keywords (another theory I have is that Google will take away points if your articles are not relevant).
Try and post a new article at least every other week - Google likes updated content. Feel free to look at my blog and use any ideas you find helpful there.
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The Goolge Inbound Link Lookup
Want to find out who's linking to your website? Just go to Google and type in "link:www.yourwebsite.com" and Google will display a list of websites that link to yours. The list won't show every inbound link, just the ones Google has indexed.
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Page Title - Make it Work For You!
Note to readers: If you've ever submitted a pricing request from my website, you may have seen this article before.
When you go to a website, do you ever look at the page title? It's up in the top left-hand corner of your browser and while it may not be something you notice, it is something that ALL search engines notice!
Every page on your website should be titled and every title should contain the most relevant search phrase associated with the content of that page. For example: the title of this page is "Web Design and SEO Newsletter Fall 2007". One of the very first places a search engine looks is the page title. If the engine considers the title to be a good match to whatever search phrase a user entered, it assigns a higher relevancy to that page, resulting in increased rankings.
The most important page title on your website is the HOME PAGE title. Let's look at an example:
Travis Bickle drives a taxi - here's how his home page is titled:
When Mr. Bickle's potential prospects search for things like "taxi driver" there is no way this page title will come up in the results - it has nothing to do with taxis. A better page title would be:
Why not check your website's page titles?
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767 Comin' out of the sky
OK, I took a little license with the Creedence lyrics, but the point I'm trying to make is about website page width - specifically 760 pixels.
It's long been an accepted design standard to impose a width limit on web pages of 760 pixels. That's because there are still a lot of folks out there with monitors set to 800 X 600 pixels. If your web page is wider than your user's screen, your user will be forced to scroll horizontally to read your content. Now I've heard a rumor that website visitors are lazy. If that's the case and your website is too wide, you could be losing traffic because your visitors won't take the time to scroll.
In my opinion, the 760 pixel page width is easy on the eye and provides pleasing white space (or whatever color your background is) to offset your page content. Some of the biggest players on the internet like Dell and HBO follow this guideline.
If you insist on the wide look, you can achieve a full screen effect through the use of what I call 100% width tables, which is a way to create full screen table cells in HTML. A good example of the use of this technique is CACH Capital Management, LLC. The site has a full screen look, but the content remains fixed and centered at 760 pixels.
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Goodies
The Email Scrambler
One of the downsides of putting your email address on your website is the increase in spam you are surely (don't call me Shirley) to experience. Now you can foil the spammers by scrambling your email.
Find out how it works...
Scramble your email!
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IP Address Finder
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An IP address (Internet Protocol address) is a unique address that certain electronic devices use in order to identify and communicate with each other on a computer network utilizing the Internet Protocol standard (IP)—in simpler terms, a computer address (source: Wikipedia).
Some IPs are static and some are dynamic (meaning that every time you go online, your ISP (Internet Service Provider) assigns you a temporary IP).
Find out what your IP address is.
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