PageRank Experiment - A few SEO Tips
I’ve been toying with the idea of starting a product review site on a domain that I own and doing the odd paid product review. It’s not the sort of thing that I’ve wanted to do on my main site at kdmurray.net, but in it’s own environment something I wouldn’t mind trying out.
The catch? You can’t make money if you ain’t got PageRank.
Many paid blogging services will only pay out if the PageRank is above a certain level. So I’ve decided to try out some SEO tactics, and see if I can get the PageRank on the site from 0 to 1 in only one week. It’s a daunting task, and luck will play into it as much as anything because PageRank requires Google to actually crawl your site, and any sites linking to it for those to be factored in.
So I’ve used a few of the SEO tricks I know to try to get the site to rank:
- With WordPress installed, set up a good SEO support plugin, in this case the All-In-One SEO Pack
- Use H1 tags which match your page titles
- When linking to the site, even from within your own site, use the page title in the link text
- For blogs, tag your posts
- Get higher Page-Ranking sites to link to yours
These basic rules will give you the basics for getting your site noticed. If you follow these steps, and get lots of quality content into the site, Google and others will in fact notice. You can do other things like promoting your site by linking to it in email signatures, forum signatures (particularly crawlable ones!) and other places where it could get noticed like your Twitter profile.
As for the experiment, we’re getting close to the end of the one-week period and so far, still nothing. Most of what I’ve read suggests that it can take upwards of a month for the site to rank. I did write up a post explaining the experiment on the blog. I’ll have to decide in the next couple of days whether to renew the domain (it expires in a few days) and continue the experiment, or abandon the whole thing and be done with it. If nothing else, hopefully it’s led to some useful tips for our valued AGP listeners.
If you’ve got any SEO tips that have worked for you in the past, share them in the comments!
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The biggest SEO tip I can give is this:
GET A SITE MAP
You don’t have to display it on your site, in fact most of the larger websites don’t have the option to check the site map, but it is one of the most important SEO moves ever.
A site map is like a blueprint of a building, want to know where anything is? look at the blueprint. The same can be said about a website, and of course the best blueprints don’t have everything on your site.
Now that sounds detrimental blocking out some content, but the truth is you don’t want certain parts of a site being indexed or easily accessible by anyone, ESPECIALLY Google, Yahoo or some of the other large search engine spiders.
An couple of examples of hiding useful content:
1) A designer with a large client base doesn’t want to draw attention to the designs for current clients, or the “accidental” backdoor into the extranet he just created.
2) Remember that article that everyone remembers you for, you know the one that you got infamous for on Digg? But it seems that its the only thing people find you for? Hide that from the spiders and make people look at other things before they come across it.
The cardinal rule with site maps is that before you create one:
DO YOUR HOMEWORK
A few tweaks of a .htaccess file or the header of a page and you can optimize where you want focus on your site and where to keep people away, but its majorly dependent on the search engines spider that maps your site.
So just because Google can’t see it, doesn’t mean that Yahoo uses the same tags or methods of reading that darn XML file, and for that matter smaller engines that Google and Yahoo index might not even look at the XML sitemap and might just drive on through your whole site taking happy snaps and grabbing links, all to just feed it to the bigger ones.
So to recap:
1) Site maps are good
2) Do your homework before jumping in head first
3) Protect what you need to with .htaccess
4) Make sure what you want seen is in there
Follow that, and you’ll be on your way to SEO gold.
Good suggestions guys.
I agree though - definitely use a plugin to do all the hard yards as far as WordPress is concerned. We here at the AGP Use wpSEO - that however is a paid SEO tool. The one Keith mentions has also had good reports.
Getting those sites with a higher page rank to link to you is probably the hardest job. To get that happening you need to have the content that they want to link to. Find that and you have gold.
For that reason there is not really any replacement for content and a bit of work.
I once heard a recipe for A-List success:
1. Every day, go to techmeme and choose one story to cover from the front page.
2. Do it for a year.
I am not sure how that equates now - I heard that a few years ago, I think the landscape has changed a bit now. But I know a few that gave it a good nudge and did quite well. Maybe not A-list but certainly B/C
Anyways short of being a tad black hat this is all great advice and well within the white hat space
Keith, I agree wth Tim. A sitemap is a must. Seeing you’re using WP, you can get a plugin that generates a xml sitemap which you an then point the google wemaster tools at. You *are* using webmaster tools on google I presume. It’s a valuable tool for your sites. You may also like to look at this document which gleened tips from google’s orig. patent filing: http://is.gd/5jWz
Good luck. But it seems there’s no substitute for time and good content.
Dave
Thanks for that feedback, guys. I completely forgot to mention the sitemap thing. The plugin I use is the “Google XML SiteMap Generator” http://is.gd/51Gg
Today’s day 7 and it’s still at 0. I’ve decided that I’ll keep the project alive and continue with it for the timebeing.
7 days usually will not yield any results with Google, they only release the spiders once a week to crawl new sites.
However, if you do direct submission to Google - Submit URL to Google then you’ll have faster results (usually 48 hours to profile).
Once you have an initial rank, then the fun begins, you need to get as many diverse links out of your blog as possible.
Oh and write good content.