Site Design Changes

I was reading at SEOMoz how search engines (or at least Google) will only look at the anchor text of the first link to determine ranking. This meant that my navigation tabs at the top of my page were poor because the anchor text was week. For example "Blog" was the first tab which doesn't offer the value it could.

To address this, I changed my design slightly to support a bigger navigation area and made these links more details. For example, Blog turned to Online Dating Blog.

These are all internal links so I doubt it will change much but it was still worth the time it took to improve it.

The Cost of eHarmony

It's always surprising when particular topics become popular. This time my post on the cost of eHarmony has garnered me additional visits. eHarmony is the largest dating site (by number of visitors at least) and it is very unique in its approach but the dating service is also more expensive than the majority of other services. The cost isn't revealed until users are signed up so it turns out this is a question many singles are asking.

Trying to find the best topics (those that people are actually interested in) is something I struggle with. Most articles I write I believe are going to be interesting only to be surprised by which ones have success. Normally it is only afterwords that the reasons make sense! To put it another way: would I have thought that eHarmony cost would be a popular question? No...but now that I realize it is, it does make sense.

Layout Cleanup

I decided to remove the tag cloud from the footer of my site. It was never generating anything to speak of and most readers were never looking at the footer anyway. As a part of this, I cleaned up some of my source that had wrapped the layout in a table (two rows, one for the main body, on for the footer). Now I know using a table is horrible form but it was one of those things I added quickly and never got back around to fixing. Since I'm removing the footer now, the table was not longer of use.

I guess I hope these changes would cause Google to see my layout as a bit "cleaner". I don't expect anything noticeable from it but I'm sure it won't hurt, generally speaking.

NoIndex on Categories and Tags

I've been hesitating to to this but I finally added noindex to my tags and categories (through the All-in-One SEO tool for WordPress). I hesistated to do this because I do occasionally get traffic from search engines that land on these tags/categories. Not much but doing this will cause me to lose a few visitors a day.

My thought is that losing those few will worth it if avoiding these strengthens the value of my other pages. I'm really not sure how I'm going to measure how successful this is, though.

I also removed the tag cloud from the footer of my site. No one was ever using it so I thought it would be better to include it on my Archives page. That way, people looking for particular posts would find it there.

Other than these changes my SEO attempts have been pretty boring: Social Media submissions, more Yahoo! Answers and the like.

I also created an account at MyBlogLog to see if that helps generate any visitors activity. I have my doubts it will. I did a search there for "dating advice" and it's basically what you would expect: a whole lot of garbage. I suspect that having to rising above all the "noise" may prove the site to be less valuable. If someone were looking to find an online dating advice community, it would really be random chance if they found me.

Forum Posting

I decided to post at a forum I visit from time to time and link to an article I had written. I was sure to pick something I believed the readers would find valuable and also explained in my forum post why.

I did get some traffic from this but unfortunately my forum post didn't generate any conversation. I'm a little disappointed by that because (and I guess this is always the case) I had thought I picked something people would want to talk about.

I know posting on forums is one recommended method of generating traffic but between everything else I'm just not sure when I would have time to post on a community forum enough to become a real "member".

AdWords Not Going As I Expected

This being my first experience using AdWords, I'm a little surprised by how things are working. I expected to see my rather low daily limit eaten up in the first day but what has actually happened is that I go zero clicks at all!

I had 200+ impressions which in the grand-scheme of things isn't much so I probably need to either a) be patient or b) raise what I'm willing to pay per click. Still, I do worry that maybe my poor marketing skills are showing in how I'm writing my Ad. I'll give it a few more days and if things stay the same I may start tinkering with the text (which is a pretty annoying since Google has to approve it each time).

Thoughts on My Spike in Traffic

As I mentioned in a previous, my site saw a spike in traffic due to eHarmony's free weekend. Something that was very interesting here though: I have good rank for the free weekend (top 5 for most search queries) and this rank seemed to be passed along to my other posts. For example, I have a post on eHarmony prices and another arguing whether or not the service is worth using. Both of these articles jumped to the first page and for some queries were number 1.

Then, as the free weekend is passing, these "related" articles jumped to the first page have reset to their original position. I'm not an SEO expert and I don't even know what this means but it was very interesting to see.

Testing AdWords

Well, I've decided to try AdWords to see if that helps better drive traffic I'm looking for (that is, people who are looking for dating advice). I'm setting a very small budget and will try it for a month or two depending on how far my investment goes.

I created one campaign with two ad groups. In the first group I'm targeting people looking for dating advice and in the second I'm targeting shy people who are looking for dating advice. I've never really marketed myself as "advice for the shy", but as a shy person I did have to overcome quite a bit of my own anxiety as well as a lot of bad advice written for shy people by other people who only understand shyness to the degree that they've read about it.

My campaign has been running for an hour now and only has 14 views and 0 clicks so I'll be trying to add some more keywords today. I went light on the keywords because I wanted a very particular audience but between my low budget and my target audience I'm just not seeing enough opportunity. We'll see how things go over the next few days.

Social Network Submissions

One thing I discovered a few days ago was that much of my older content isn't being indexed. As a way to get more readers to this content and possibly get it back on Google's radar I've been submitting these articles to several different social networks (primarily Digg, StumbleUpon and Reddit).

It seems like one out of ten submissions gains some traction and sends me some traffic (some but not much). Still, it's easy to do so I'll continue to try to get all of my older content submitted.

eHarmony Free Weekend Drives Spike in Traffic

Every time eHarmony has a free event, I post about it on my site. I'm normally on the first page of Google for the event (as long as I can submit it early enough). This time for many of the searches I'm in the top 5 for many of the search terms and this is driving about double the traffic I would normally see. I think it's great but I do wish this was from a more permanent source - my traffic for this search will likely start to drop today and will be all but gone by this Sunday when the event is over.

Contacting eHarmony

I've not been doing much SEO in the last two days because I've been concentrating more on content clean up in my dating guide at Little Red Rails.

I did take the time this morning to contact eHarmony about an article I wrote that shows the cost of eHarmony is not near as expensive as most people believe. I'm fairly certain nothing will come of this but it only took a minute to contact them.

Generally my site's traffic is holding steady. I'm not seeing any strong benefit from my steps taken this month (that is, I'm not seeing any traffic on my new inlinks). The overall traffic is up but I'm fairly certain that is due to four of my new articles which for the time being are getting some Google love on their placement.

I did add some links to my most popular article (writing the first email) and that may generate some additional traffic. This is one of my oldest articles and I've written a lot that compliments it since originally posting it so there was opportunity I was missing to lead people to related content.

More Answers and an Article

This morning I once again visited Yahoo! Answers. The returns on this have consistently been low. I'm getting more traffic from the answers where I reference my site in the actual answer instead of the source, but it's still pretty low. Still, this is one of the easiest things to do and when I'm still waking up (like when Daylight Savings Time kicks in) it's a good option.

Lately when I've been answering questions on Yahoo! Answers I've been using the questions as potential post idea. Some of these ideas will turn into articles on my actual site while I've been posting others in the service eZine Articles. I was very reluctant to post anywhere but my site (because, shouldn't it be on MY site!) but lots of people who know lots more than I do are always recommending this type of activity so I try to do it from time to time.

Let me just say that as a service I think eZine Articles is really great. It has a nice interface and publishing tools. This is the main reason I've been hesitant to try some of the other services (which I know I should be doing).

Anyway, the traffic I get from eZine Articles is only slightly better than what I get from Yahoo! Answers. The great thing about eZine though is you also get to create keyword links in your articles as well which is great. I really do need to be doing more of these but with only an hour on most days, it seems I just don't have the time!

SEO and Offline Marketing

Since yesterday was Saturday I had a little more time to read about SEO and try to apply some of these ideas to my site.

What I tried yesterday was to send an email out to many of my friends to encourage them to comment on my blog or pass it along to friends they think might find it interesting. It's hard for me to measure how many are passing my site along but I can see that about 1 in 10 has actually visited the site (due to a particular URL I included in my email to them). I'm really uncomfortable with solicitation so this is the kind of marketing I will very (very) rarely do.

I wanted to offer a little bit of advice to anyone who is thinking of trying this: I would suggest that you personalize the emailing to each friend you contact. I realize that this will take more time but I can't help but feel my email sent to all my friends at once yesterday is having much, much worse results than I expected.

Yes, I do need to give this some more time but looking back, I really could have personalized it to each of my friends. For the ones who are busy I could have kept things short and sweet, for the friends who love to know how I'm doing with my site I could have been more detailed, and so on.

Unfortunately, I'm pretty sure my email came off as spammy. Good news: I only contacted a subset of my friends and the remaining I'll definitely be making more personal attempts with. This is also good since I'll be able to directly compare the two approaches.

Adding Links to More Directories

I'm adding my site to a few more directories and will list them here as I do so:
Add Url to xtlinks.com

What Happened to Technorati?

Several years ago I signed up for Technorati when I first created my blog. I wasn't concerned with marketing my blog at the time and before long I had forgotten about my account entirely.

Well, with my new SEO interest, I decided to check out the site to see how my blog was doing. Wow...the site is a disaster now. My site wasn't registering and nothing I tried to change was taking affect - I wasn't even provided the opportunity to change something like my blog's feed.

Eventually, I deleted my blog and added it again. People had been complaining that it was taking Technorati months to verify blogs but thankfully my verification only took a week or two. Still, everything was just as broken as before.

Even simple things like updating your profile on the site don't work. You make a change and when you save the changes are gone. Now I did find that if I used Opera instead of Firefox it did record my change...how weird is that? I tried a few versions of IE and then Chrome but these browsers are unable to update the settings either. Apparently this issue has been going on for 6 months+ which is really crazy. What happens that could cause a site with as much traffic and clout as Technorati to not address something so critical but at the same time small. I mean, getting an internet form to save across browsers...it's not as if we're talking about writing a new Javascript library for visual effects or something!

As I commented on their help page, I think the best thing that could happen for the users of the site would be for Technorati to get some serious competition. To allow problems like these to persist could mean any number of things (staffing issues, just don't care, etc) but none of those things are good.

Initial Results of Yesterday's Yahoo! Answers

Well, my different approach yesterday with including links in my post instead of just in the source has resulted in additional traffic (very small but it's still there). However, there was one thing I didn't expect but probably should have: the only ones generating traffic are those where I was voted as the best answer.

This is what seems to be happening: I offer an honest answer in an attempt to really help the person and each time talk about a post where I discussed the same issue. The person who asked the question does not look at my website but they still vote me as the best answer. Other people then come along and see me as the best answer and assume that part of the reason the "asker" voted me the best is do to my posts so they come to my site.

So from my test yesterday, to generate any traffic I will need to a) have the best answer and b) get more people to view the question after it has been answered. Not what I expected but I'll take it. Hey, I like being voted the best answer anyway!

Another Approach to Yahoo! Answers

Today I decided to give Yahoo! Answers another try. Last time I answered a few dozen questions and listed my site as the “Source” and I’m pretty sure it generated no traffic at all.

This time, I found questions where I had relevant posts and in the text of my actually answer I cited these posts. I only answered 5 or 6 questions but I’m hoping that this few questions will help more than the previous batch since I’m making the links prominent.

Google Webmaster Work

Today I’ve been keeping things simple and have been going through Google Webmasters to see if Google is seeing any issues with my site.

One area it had was that my categories didn’t have good meta descriptions. I didn’t think that this mattered but I went ahead and updated each category to have a good description. I also tried to clean up my tags this morning and removed a lot of tags that were only associated with one post. I don’t imagine this will affect SEO in any way but it will help me when trying to pick tags for posts.

I’ve actually been considering telling Google not to index my tags and categories but I actually have some SERPs based on these pages. Nothing that I’ve noticed driving any real traffic to me but still. I don’t post the entire content on my tags or categories pages and I don’t use the category in my URL string (which supposedly can cause some duplication problem with Google) so I guess I’ll leave them around.

I really need to enable canonical but I’m very hesitant because when I did that last year (using the All in One SEO plug-in) all of my search results dropped out of Google. I turned off canonical and a few days later they came back. Still, doing that would fit in well with the clean up I’m doing today. I’m going to have to bite the bullet at some point though because it seems like Google is sometimes even seeing the same content as two pages (someone links to me with a trailing slash and someone else doesn’t and it appears as two separate choices in Webmasters).

Webmasters also pointed out some very strange inbound links from what appear to be directories built off of dmoz. It point these out because the links are being pointed to a page that doesn’t exist…I’m considering 301’ing those links but I’m really not sure why they’re coming my way in the first place.

404 and Google

Back in February, my blogs database had a crashed table and was down for 2 days. Normally I’m pretty good about checking it every day but as luck would have it, I was at family’s that weekend.

I corrected the database problem but my Google results have never fully recovered. The week after all my pages were showing to Google as 404’d my traffic from the search engine dropped to zero. One week later after the next crawl, many pages started making their way back in.

Still, over a month later and only about half of my pages are indexed. Now I’ve never seen a point where they were all indexed, obviously, but in the past I was probably looking at something more like 75% or 80% indexed as opposed to 50%. It’s not as if I have a ton of content so it’s hard for me to imagine that they are limiting what they index at my site already (although that may be a bad assumption).

I guess I’ll have to start looking into this. I only noticed it because I couldn’t find my own pages in Google when I was trying to get some of my articles URLs and didn’t want to log into the admin pages. After checking Google Webmaster, my fears were proven true. Hopefully I can find a solution to this.

I’m starting to find SEO rather depressing!

Commenting at Other Dating Blogs

Today’s SEO hour was very simple: finding other dating blogs and then commenting on them. Most comment systems provide a nofollow link back to your site. In theory, they shouldn’t help Google results but might send more traffic if people like you comment. In some ways, it’s a lot like Yahoo! Answers.

I eventually found five dating advice blogs and will continue to comment at these sites semi-regularly. I thought most of them were offering great advice although the most popular one among them seemed to offer advice I disagreed with. But perhaps generating controversial content was part of the secret to their success.

I also submitted an article on 10 Dating Profile Heading for Software Developers to StumbleUpon and Reddit (I’d already submitted this article to Digg some time ago).

With several days behind me in these hour sessions, I haven’t seen any real direct traffic from any of this work. None from Yahoo! Answers or my comments or my Squidoo article. Not that I was expecting much, but that’s where I stand today. I have seen my unique visitor traffic increase by between 10% and 20% over the last few days but we’ll see if that lasts.

SEO Friendly Directories

I’ve learned to avoid adding links to directories since a) it feels like a big hassle finding good directories b) they always want a reciprocal link and c) I’ve never seen much gains in using them.

Today, I figured I would break the rule since someone who knows a lot more about this stuff than I do (http://blog.seohaus.com/) posted on SEO friendly directories: http://www.strongestlinks.com/directories.php.

I took this table, transformed it into an excel sheet and then removed everything I wasn’t interested in (pay directories, directories with conditions on “free”, etc.). What I was left with was 15 or 20 directories to try. I think I ended up adding my site to about 10 of them with no reciprocal links needed.

Now I still am not expecting much from this as who knows when (or if) I’ll get listed on any of these directories. Still, it’s a step up from reciprocal linking and waiting for them to add me.

As far as direct traffic goes, are all directories worthless? I mean, are there directories out there that do drive in traffic? I will admit that in the last six months DMOZ has sent me one or two people but that’s really not worth bringing up. Does Yahoo!, with it’s large directory price tag, just give you a better link or are people actually using the pay directories to find content?

Squidoo: Writing My First Lens

Squidoo is a strange beast to me. It is allows people to break what I've come to consider "rules of linking on the internet". What I mean is generally I've not been able to generate real links to my site without something being required of me. Sure, I can get a million nofollow links if I want but most of time any real link will require something.

At Squidoo, I can put links all over the place to anything I want. My website, affiliate...there wasn't even a review process when I submitted my article. Now I'm not complaining but it all feels so strange. Maybe I'm just not thinking things through. I guess I could do all that on Tumblr too. I just kept waiting for the rules to be presented to me and they never were.

Overall, I really liked the content generation process. It took me a while to get a handle on it (so this morning is more like 3 Hour SEO) but it is a nice system. My Amazon widget still isn't working and I still don't understand why they could potentially be sending me payouts (my guess is that they share in ad revenue with the article author).

One BIG Tip: Twice content I had written just disappearred. Once when I was saving and then a second time when I went to edit soemthing. I'm not saying this is Squidoo's fault exactly (I think I was missing closing quotes) but just be aware this can happen. I started writing in a text editor on my PC and would then copy/paste the results into Squidoo.

Here's my first page (called a Lens). As you'll see (unless you're running some type of ad blocker) the site is absolutely filled with advertisements. Again, that's fine and I suppose it's not a bad business model either. Let other people write content because they want inlinks and make money off of advertisements. Speaking of inlinks, I'm not expecting much value from these links based on all of this. Still, the experts recommend it so I try it.

Yahoo! Answers: 30 Questions Answered

My first attempt at some SEO has been answering questions at Yahoo! Answers. This place is the wild west of advice with some absolutely insane advice being thrown around and people more than willing to insult someone's question any way they can.

Still, I've tried to take answering these questions very seriously and I have been selected as the best answer several times already. Still, as far as traffic goes, I'm not seeing anything to speak of. I've seen two recommendations for SEO regarding Yahoo! Answers:

1. Answer the questions and link to your site (as long as it is relevant to the question) as your "source"


2. Answer the questions but don't link to yourself as the "source". Instead, include a link to your site in your profile.

Well, I've been trying to take a combination approach. I link to my site in about 75% of my Answers and always take the time to give the best answer I'm capable of. Still, the system is baffling in that I can try to really help someone by writing up an answer for 10 minutes only to see the eventual "best" answer being selected is:

no,no,no...lowl. Wy woud you do thta?! lol

Right.

Anyway, nothing good out of it yet but I'll keep trying. One note for anyone who tries this: You have to be at Level 2 for your links to work. At level 1, they just show as text. You gain levels by visiting the site and answering questions. The good news is that I included URLs to my site when I was Level 1 and when I hit Level 2, the text turned into links.

For those interested, you can see the questions I'm answering in my profile.

Background on my Site and Motivation

To give some background, on my decision to try my hand at SEO I should probably describe my current blog and how it came into being.

I met my wife using an online dating service. It took me a long time to get comfortable using these services and then some more time before I was actually able to have success. That's the point of my blog (LRR Online Dating Guide): to help other people who are as lost as I was when I started dating online.

To date, I've done very little to market my site. Actually, aside from submitting it to some directories (which I've found to be worthless) and adding it to the big search engines, I've done almost nothing to promote it.

There are several reasons I've decided to change that and try to promote it:

1. I feel like my experiences really will help some people, but only if they're able to find it.


2. I believe most of the dating advice I find through search engines is pretty crappy. It's obvious that most advice being given is for the benefit of the person selling something, not for the person reading the advice.


3. I'm curious if I can market my site well just by staying committed to making small efforts every day. It's a skill I wouldn't mind having, honestly.


4. I wouldn't mind if my site made some money. I'm not looking to make a living off of it but I would like to see it make more money than it costs me every year.

I actually hate promoting my site as I've always felt like I wanted it to grow naturally. However, I'm getting over that feeling :)

Today, I won't be doing much SEO as I'm still finding my way around Tumblr but I hope in the next day or two my posts will have concrete examples of steps I'm taking.

Hello Blogger!

I created a Tumblr account but I think it's too bare bones...I'm too accustomed to many blogging features that seem to be missing. Don't get me wrong, whoever designed Tumblr has done a great job for what they were looking to do. I'm just looking for a little more blogginess from my blog. I'm testing blogger out and as long as I like it I'm move my limited number of posts over at Tumblr to here!