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Know about your site and your competition – Google Operators

Jimmy — Sat, 22 Aug 2009 19:42:57 +0000

This post will show you how to search google and see exactly how your site is performing in their search index. There are a variety of different operators that you can use in the google search box that will allow you to change how google is searching the web. These operators can be very helpful if you learn to use them correctly. I’m not going to explain all of the operators, but I will explain the ones that are most relevant to seeing how your site is doing.

The first you should know about is the site operator. It is fairly simple. In the google search box type in site:yoursite.com and hit search. This query is going to show you all of the pages from your site that google has in their index. If you enter the search and nothing is found, you need to take efforts to get google to index your page. For that read these 2 posts:

Get your Blog Indexed by Google FAST!!

Get Indexed Ever FASTER!!

The second operator that you should know about is link. To use this type in link:yoursite.com and hit search. This will show you all of the links to your site that google has indexed and that you are getting credit for. Remember the number of relavant links that you have strongly determines what type of search engine traffic you will get. The more links the better. You can also use this to investigate your competition. Take some sites that rank higher than you do on google and see how many links that they have. You can also investigate all of those pages that they have links on and attempt to get those sites to link to your webpage.

Here are some other basic operators and their functions:

+ (ex: +pa) This excludes synonyms. PA will not become Pennsylvania
- (ex: car -hybrid) This excludes pages that contain hybrid
“” (ex: “hey buddy”) This searches for the entire phrase and not 2 seperate kws
* (ex: My * Blog) This is a wild card. It matched My “anything” blog
OR (ex: car red OR blue) Searches for both car red AND car blue, but not car red blue. MUST be in caps

In another post, I will explain some of the more advanced operators and show some of their uses.

Making your Blog Comments Count – get them indexed!!

Jimmy — Thu, 20 Aug 2009 00:19:09 +0000

Today’s post is going to be on the art of aquiring links through blog comments. Blog commenting is not fun, so I’m going to show you how to get the most out of your blog comments and links. I’m sure that many of you have had the experience of blog commenting, waiting for the links to roll in, and then they never hit google. What a waste right? Hopefully after reading this this will not happen to you again.

So our objective is to get all of the comments that we have made noticed by google bot so we can pick up our sweet links. If you simply post a comment, then there is a reasonable chance that search engines will never pick it up. The solution is to gently guide the search engines to check out those links. I’m going to give you a quick easy way to do this. Please, be creative and try different ways to make this work for you.

1. First thing to do is to make a list of all of the pages that you made a comment on. If you make a comment, and it goes through, save the link in a notepad document.

2. Now sign up for an account at Wordpress.com or Blogger.com and start a blog. Now write a post that includes links to all of the comment pages that you saved.

3. Now sign up for an account at digg.com. Now submit your wordpress or blogger post that has the links to digg.

That is all there is to it. If all goes well your digg page will be indexed quickly. It will spit google bot out at your free blog, and your blog will spit google out to all of the links that have your comments on them. Now I’m not saying that this is a fool proof method or 100% successful. This method can however be applied in a number of different ways boosting its effectivness.

Note: Don’t use your own blog to post links to the comments you made. You’ll be turning your 1 way links into recipricol links and screwing up the link weight.

Let Google Image Search work for you!

Jimmy — Tue, 18 Aug 2009 02:46:28 +0000

This post is aimed particularly at those whose blogs are heavily motivated by media. Music, Celeb, Politics, or anything along those lines. I’ve discovered that you can draw lots of traffic by placing pictures in every post. You can actually draw 10 times the traffic from google image search than you can from google web search when you are first starting. To do this, you have to be careful about how you present your images.

Although google may one day have a fast working facial recognition algorithm, that day has not yet come. Because of that google relies heavily on what the webmaster says about the photos presented. A smart webmaster can use this to their advantage. To the best of my knowledge, google is looking at the name of the image file and “alternate text”. This is why you should always RE-NAME your image files for SEO purposes. I like to use the name of the person, and possibly one short descriptive term. In the alternate text, I will then again mention the persons name and give a small caption about the pic.

I’m sure that other factors, such as the title of the page, contents of page, make a difference also, but you have to have the name and the alternate text right. If you are uploading your own photos (hotlinking will get you no where), then save them to a good name before uploading. When you upload the image, make sure that you edit the “Image Caption” field. This is also known as your alternate text.

You should be creative with your alternate text, trying to draw people in on longer keyphrases. If you have the spare time, you may even want to go back through your old posts, and add alternate text.

No Follow Tags

Jimmy — Sun, 16 Aug 2009 23:50:28 +0000

I think there is a lot of confusion surrounding no follow tags, especially with beginners, so I hope to clear some of that up. Most people have been told that a link with a no follow tag is no good. Also blog owners have been convinced to add no follow tags to comments to keep their link authority. I’m not saying that a no follow tag is meaningless, but I think that its actual effects are exaggerated.

If you are just starting out and looking for blogs to post on, you will probably notice that many of those blogs use no follow tags for comments. Don’t let this deter you from posting a comment. Scouring through all the blogs trying to find ones that don’t use the no follow tags is a waste of time. You are better off making comments on each and every blog that you come to that allows a link.

If you watch your logs, you will notice that google bot will show up on your page and the referring link will be from one of your no follow comments. There is no doubt or argument that google follows these links. What is arguable is that the no follow links may not carry as much weight.

Although many experts still contend that there is value in the no follow tags, Matt Cutts has publicly stated that webmasters should take down their no follow tags. Although he hasn’t actually said it, I don’t think the difference between a no follow link and a regular link is substatial.

A lesson on Keywords

Jimmy — Sat, 15 Aug 2009 22:45:14 +0000

This post is more for beginners and deals with selecting good titles to use in your blog posts. If you typically blog about news, celebrities, sports, music, or anything popular than chances are you can generate more traffic by picking better titles to use.

Just as an easy example, lets say you write an article about the death of “Popstar X”. Because there will be tons of competition in the form of other blogs writing on the same topic, you need to be picky about your title.

“Pop-Star X Dies” – is not going to work.

“Legendary Performer Pop-Star X dies suddenly” – is much better.

Because the big sites will pick up the traffic for “Pop-Star X”, you need to include interesting and relevant keywords in your title to pick up some search engine traffic. Also, if the news is breaking, vary the title more drastically and get your post up ASAP. There is some value in getting your post indexed first.

In general, because your site is small whenever you go for a keyword try to think about what terms you can add to make the kw more specific but still relevant.

Also, if you have All-in-1 SEO installed, then your tags are also marked as meta-keywords. If you have a unique take on some breaking news, make sure that you use the tags to your advantage.

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Get Indexed Ever FASTER!!

Jimmy — Sat, 15 Aug 2009 01:38:46 +0000

This is an expansion on Get your blog indexed by google fast!!

For this technique you need an existing site, hopefully a blog to use (some of this will work without an existing site – keep reading). It is really not that difficult, but I classify it as an intermediate technique because you have to already have a site.

An existing blog works perfect for this because the front page is constantly changing, and constantly getting crawled by search engines. To make this work, in step 3 in the last post you compile a list of 5-10 blogs that you can comment on. Now what you want to do is save all of the urls from the pages that you commented on. You can also click on the comments page and get that seperate url. If you want to be really sneaky, grab the RSS feeds from the comments and save urls from those.

If you have a blog and you don’t care about a shameless out of place post, then write a post that has hyperlinks to all the pages (not the feeds) that you want indexed, and add your new site to the blog roll. If you have a respectible site, then add your site to the the blog roll, and add the links discretely to the blog roll also. The idea is to get the pages that you want indexed and followed on the front page of your blog. Keep the link to your new site in the blogroll so it stays on your page for a while. Delete the links to the comment pages off your blog roll, or delete the post that you put them in after a week.

You can do this part without an existing blog. Do this at your own risk…

Now what to do with those RSS feeds? I don’t think anyone would mind if you used a ping service on the feed. I don’t want you to abuse any one service, so just search for “blog ping” and use something that comes up. Don’t go abusing the servers because you can get your ip banned for exessive use. Send 5 out over 5 different servers, wait 20 mins and send the last 5 out and you should be fine.

Get your Blog Indexed by Google FAST!!

Jimmy — Sat, 15 Aug 2009 00:42:27 +0000

Ok, so you have set up your blog, configured it correctly and now you are ready to start attracting traffic. The first step is to get your pages indexed by google and the other search engines. You are however, one lonely site in the middle of cyberspace and noone knows about you. We will change all of that.

We will use a 3 step approach to getting indexed quickly. You should already have your blog set up for SEO and need to have 2 plugins installed: Google XML Sitemap and MetaBlogPress Ping Optimizer. If that is not done then read this first.

1. Compile a sitemap with the Google XML plugin. Then, start an account at Google Webmaster Tools. You can use your gmail login if you have a gmail account. After you login, click add a new site.

To verify using a Meta-Tag is easy. Copy the tag that google gives you. Go to WP-Admin, then settings, then All-in-one SEO. At the bottom, paste the google Meta-Tag in “additional home headers” and update the info. Click verify on Google Webmaster Tools and you are done!!

Now we need to tell google about your sitemap. On Google WT click on Site Configuration and then Sitemaps. When you are on that page, click on Submit a sitemap. Now in the box that comes up after yourdomain.com/ type in sitemap.xml and click submit. Now we are done with that.

2. Next we are going to use the power of Digg.com. Start an account with Digg, and write a page about one of your posts. Although you may never get traffic from Digg, their pages are indexed very fast and if everything goes correct, the Digg page with your link on it will also be indexed fast, pointing google’s little spider right to your blog. You may also want to claim your blog at Technorati, set up a Squido-Lens, or start a profile on a social networking site and leave a link for your blog.

3. Now we are going to have to use our brains on this one. Think about what terms people may use to get to your blog. Search for blogs similar to yours that are popular. Compile a list of 5-10. Now everyday for the next few days, you are going to post a comment on all of those blogs linking back to your website.

That is about it. You also want to write one or two posts a day to get your RSS feed noticed.