Blogging for SEO

This article is not for those of your thinking about blogging to make friends: its for those of you who have a blog to improve your site's site engine ranking. For those who think that a BLOG stands for a Better Listing On Google.

Heres the steps.

1. Set up a blog giving it a name and description that utilizes your target keyphrases. I don't know which blogging software is best. I don't know if its better to have a blog on a site (eg www.homeschoolonline.org) or have it on a blog hoster (such as www.homeschoolblogger.com/edmouse ).

2. Write a few dozen articles. Short. Maybe two paragraphs each. Schedule them for publishing once a day or once every few days or whatever. Space them out. They should make sense, be on target, and be OK. These initial ones won't get many readers so don't go all out.

3. Include links to leading sites that are relevant to your subject. Maybe a link or so in each article. This establishes your blog as legitimate.

4. Get others to link to you. This could be done by intelligently commenting on other blogs or in forums or newsgroups in ways that mention your site or using your site as your byline. If you do it right, this draws traffic, makes friends, and soon you are getting links. It helps if you really care about your topic. If you are terribly witty and social, it helps. If you have insider insights, it helps. But then, you would be writing for people, not just for the spiders (which is this article's topic).

5. Make sure pingomatic or other blog registers get "pinged" (notified) each type your articles are published. Some blogging software does this automatically, others don't.

6. After awhile, include a few links to your own domain. The links should come come from your target keyphrases. For instance, second grade math help .

7. Make the links as relevant as possible. For instance, if you are writing about John Edelson, discuss a number of johns and edelsons and maybe some johnsons and edels and then at one point, link to the site like this: john edelson

8. Keep this up for a few years.

9. Repeat with different blogs on different addresses with different content as necessary.

Eventually, all else being equaly, it will help raise the visibility of your site. I hope. Good luck. Lets hope google doesn't switch to a new type of algorith which focuses on user preferences rather than site links too soon...

more...on seo blogging including linkbacks and articles

Having students with learning issues? Dyslexia - Attention Deficit - Sensory Processing Disorders - Autism - Aspergers - Downs Syndrome

Is there a free lunch? Not in the homeschool domain monetization space.

Uhg, I just looked at this month's results on traffic club for the six sites that I parked there. Web Home School, family homeschool, gifted child, Florida HomeSchool, gifted child, and gifted student : literally $.83!!!

Here's what the table shows. It shows that theres no traffic......
A total of 17 visitors for a total $.83.

I somehow thought their service included directory submissions etc. Guess not.

Home Page issues - SEO vs Readability

I just reread my home page and I decided to bite the bullet and rewrite. It was written by an SEO geek with the intention of driving traffic. The terms he built around:

term / my google position
Educational teaching games 1st
learn to read 18th
lean to read programs 6th
learn to read program 20th
kid (s) math game (s) 62 / 64 / 85th
kid (s) reading game (s) 42 / 45 / 47 / 55
home education not in top 100

What I hate is that the page just does not read very well.
Also, it expresses a point of view of Time4Learning circa early 2005.

What has changed?
- We've learned that members care passionately about curriculum and educational content.
- We've learned that all the educational bells and whistles (reports, redos, detailed scope and sequence, teaching guides, answer keys) are of great importance to our families.
- We've not found much of an audience who cares about using our service as a "better-than-video-games-type" entertainment baby-sitting service

So, I'll focus on improving the writing and try to pick some new pictures. I'll retain the two expressions that we have done well on:
- educational teaching games
- learn to read programs
And drop the others.

About About, 101, Bella, and ivillage

There are an array of megasites which seem to appear in the top listings for alot important keyphrases. I suspect that they know what they're doing in terms of seo. Here's what I'm wondering about...Is there a reason that they use addresses that have the key term on the left side of the URL instead of the right? And, how do they do it? Are these independently listed URLs? Examples:


http://parenting.ivillage.com
http://homeschooling.about.com/
http://specialneedschildren.bellaonline.com/Site.asp
http://autismspectrumdisorders.bellaonline.com/Site.asp
http://specialneedsparenting.suite101.com/

Examples of the other way:

http://about.com/parenting/
http://www.suite101.com/welcome.cfm/homeschool_curriculum
www.amazon.com/100-Top-Picks-Homeschool-Curriculum/dp/0805431381
http://www.time4learning.com/homeSchool-curriculum.htm
http://www.bellaonline.com/site/Homeschooling
http://www.time4learning.com/learning-dyslexia.shtml
http://www.bellaonline.com/site/specialneedschildren
http://www.time4learning.com/learning-sensoryprocessingdysfunction.shtml
http://www.time4learning.com/autism.shtml


Is there a difference in terms of SEO impact? Does this require registering different domains? If not, how do they do it? I thought domains were defined by a common domain name which meant www.domainname.com . I've never fully understood the relationship between www.domain.com and domain.com but I'm not at all sure how to think about www.onetopic.domainname.com and www.anothertopic.domain.com .

Anyone know any articles on the topic?

Writing for the Web and Three Audiences

My web pages are written for three distinct audiences.

1. The Skimmers. The majority of web visitors read only the headlines and bolded text before deciding: "Do I click into the site or do I move on to another site?" For these skimmers, I focus on the overall visual effect, the headlines, and an appealing and visible action button.

2. The Readers. The readers feel that the rest of us suffer from some combination of the lazies or attention deficit and they get frustrated by pages that lack substance or that are poorly written. For the readers, I provide well-written paragraphs that expand on the headlines and a full page of relevant information. This segment of the audience will scroll down and so pages continue down past "the fold" providing them substantative information.

3. The spiders. Each page is also written for the perambulating octopieds and their robotic arachnid preferences. I don't just bold, I H1 (is that a verb yet?). I pick my headlines and wording with more than just a casual glance to key phrase volumes and my competitiveness on them. I provide alt tags, page names, titles, and links (both inwards and outwards) so that the bots understand in the fraction of a second that they dedicate to analyzing my site, which categories, searches, and class of site (authority site, if you please) I belong in. more on seo...

Monetizing Domains in the Home Schooling

Like many compulsives or impulsives, I seem to accumulate alot of domains. Each great business and marketing idea seems to lead to me rapidly registering new domains (often in the dead of night). In some cases, I have actually created the site but in about 90% of the cases, I have registered a domain and not yet done much with it.

I'm often surprised when I look at my list of domains: "What crazy idea did I have when I actually signed up for www.somethingodd.com"?

So, rather than leave these domains idle, I am looking for help on what best to do with these domains (I've tried ignoring them but they haunt me).

Also, since I host and register in a number of places (I have a bad case of the deal-of-the-month) and I don't have the expertise to forward or to properly redirect, I end up with weird Kludges.

Weird Kludges - For instance, the only way that I have found to direct a domain (registered at namebargain) to a page at Time4Learning (registered at registersite.com, now misk.com and hosted at webstream.net) is to set the dns to trafficclub which allows me to select the page to redirect the domain to. I suspect the search engines don't like this combination but its the best I can do until I get a techie to work with me.

Here are the four strategies that I have come up with along with my thoughts on how to measure them.

1. Monetize domains with some appropriate algorithm-based pages and advertisements. Most of my unused domains seem to get populated by a set of pages with ads and affiliate links and link pages where are making money for someone (the registrar?). After much inquiring, I found a way to set this up myself. So in a few minutes, I registered the following domains onto trafficclub.com. Anybody have a better idea?
Florida Home School florida-home-school.com
California Home School california-home-school.com
Gifted Child gifted-child.com
Gifted Student gifted-student.org
I set these up earlier today so we'll see how they do ($1/day? $10/day? $100/day?).

2. Redirect the domains to relevant pages on the site that I most care about. Here for example:
Californiavirtualacadmy.com California Virtual Academy - goes to T4L CA page
Florida Home School florida-home-school.org - goes to T4L FL page
Gifted-Child.org Gifted Child - goes to T4L gifted page
Gifted-Student.com Gifted Student - goes to T4L gifted page
Home School Online Home-School-Online.com - goes to homeschoolonline.org
Home School Resource Home-School-Resource.com - goes to T4L homeschool resource page
I guess if traffic comes in from these domains on my monthly stats, I'll know that its helping. And if google or yahoo counts them as links, then they weigh in a bit.

3. Put up a tiny original website with a few relevant links. Examples...
Time For Learning Timeforlearning.com
Home School Curriculum Review Homeschool-Curriculum-Review.com
Learning Games for Kids LearningGamesForKids.com PR4
To measure this, I should set up a few this weekend and endow them with the example same links so it'll be an apples to apples comparison. These others have been up for awhile and have some decent page rank on their own.

4. Or just redirect the whole domain to another:
http://www.Time4Math.com PR2
http://www.Time4Reading.com
Again, these are old and new ones should be set up to measure. These sites do direct traffic (in the hundreds per month, not thousands) and do have some page rank.

A google refrigerator and an Ed Mouse portrait

Great Day of Mail:
A Google Refrigerator
and an Ed Mouse Portrait

Don't you hate ho-hum mail? You go to the mail box and return with some catalogs, flyers, credit card solicitations, and some bills... nothing of interest.

But, I recently received not one, but two exciting packages. ...a google refrigerator and a portrait of Ed Mouse, (the Educational Mouse)!

The frig was sent "gratis" by google's ppc group for paying alot of ppc commisssions and then not joining any of the class action suits about click fraud (that's a joke. I'm sure they would have sent me the frig either way).

The Ed Mouse portrait of this animated educational cartoon mouse was commissioned by Time4Learning from one of our Members, Andrea Hermitt, decorative artist. Since Time4Learning is about to make the big move from a home office to an office-office (is that the right term?), these will both be very useful.

This post sponsored by the best homeschool curriculum on the planet (currently at 9 on google) which is a great homeschool resource for learning enrichment.   

Ed Mouse Support Time, circa 2012

Top Search Queries Table - What do they mean?

What is the meaning of the Top Search Queries Table?

Google's help says: "Top search queries are the queries on the selected search property that most often returned pages from your site" ...over the previous three weeks. Here are two possible explanations.

1. These are the highest volumes searches that returned my site in the results.

If this is true, what is the cut-off that google is using to say that my site was "returned"?

ALL THE SEARCHES ON MY TABLE HAVE AN AVERAGE POSITION OF 10 OR LOWER so I thought this was the answer. Sometimes, I see some phrases as high as 11 or 12 but never higher.....

Vanessa Fox (at SES Miami) said that this couldn't be the whole story since she said that she has seen tables where people are listed with positions as low as 40. But, the Google sites queries table for my site - Time4Learning.com - lists "homeschool curriculum" (where I'm 10th) but does not list homeschool (where I'm 53rd on a good day)

2. These are the highest volume searches where some minimum number of people actually clicked on my link.

This explanation makes some sense although its not at all what the explanation suggests. It would require Google to:
- Find searches that people have clicked on my site
- Prioritize them by volume
This explanation also makes sense because its using similiar data to whats in the second table but in a different way.

Conclusion - I return to the simplest explanation although Vanessa talked me out of it. THE TABLE SHOWS THE HIGHEST VOLUME SEARCHES WHERE MY SITE RATED IN THE TOP 10.

Anybody have any data to the contrary?

This discussion sponsored by Time4Learning - the finest homeschool resource available online. They have a comprehensive range of materials. For instance, check out the breadth of information online including: 2nd grade math worksheets, reading comprehension, and the online homeschool. And, it's not just for homeschoolers. If its Back To School time for your kids, this is a great way to get them ready for the new school year or to provide learning enrichment . If they didn't let us spin our wheels on this seo stuff, we wouldn't be able to give them any traffic for their marvellous education machine.

Homeschool Keyphrase progress

Time4Learning-SEO-Progress
Measured by the Cool SEO Tool

	Searches	March	April	May	June	Aug	Sept	Oct
homeschool	137,953	+100	65th		65	59
home education	4,530
homeschool curriculum	28,814	21	20	14	13	10
homeschool material	2,278		55	9	8	10
homeschool online	6,441		9	8	4	5
homeschool resource	5,607				16	22

The solution to the problem of keeping the table at the top of the page was suggested by the brilliant and helpful peter of: http://bloggerfordummies.blogspot.com . The answer is to edit the html code to have no spaces in it....

Trackbacks on Blogger

Trackbacks are a little hard to understand. They are not intuitive. With some help from Adam, I've now figured what a trackback is and how to use it. Here's the steps:

1. Get set-up. Trackbacks are not built-in to blogger. You need a 3rd party tool. I use haloscan. Adam figured this all out and set it up for me.

2. Create an article and cite another blogs article. Here for instance, is a link to a comment on blogger trackbacks from haloscan's blog.

3. After publishing your article, login to haloscan and go to manage trackbacks and click send trackback ping and provide the url of the blog articles (cited and citee)

Robots.txt - Another lesson from SES Miami implemented

Vanessa explained to me that a sc****d up robots.txt file was probably not helping me. Then, seeing the truly blank look on my face, she explained to me what a robots.txt file was.... Then, she sighed and looked at her watch.....

In any case, I've been studying hard this week and I think I now understand...My google maps, http://www.time4learning.com/ › robots.txt analysis for http://www.time4learning.com/robots.txt says:

Last downloaded July 13, 2006 4:36:05 PM PDT Status 200 (Success)
This means that My site returned a "heres the content that you want" message for the request for a robots file. The report continues:

Parsing results, lue Result http://www.time4learning.com/robots.txt
robots.txt file does not appear to be valid

Then in the box, it has the source code for my default "page not found". Got it. :> I'm returning the wrong page without an appropriate error message. Since I don't know how to fix that (it requires involvement of my hosting company which is a non-starter....I know, I should move. I should also exercise more and not stare but.....), then I should at least create a proper robots.txt file and place it there. Which I've now done!

Then, the google test has a nifty test ability of a robots.txt file. What a shame I put it up prior to testing.....But then, since Vanessa actually wrote it for me at the show and I emailed it to myself, it was a reasonably safe bet.....Now I've tested it and it seems to be successful.

Check off another base covered....

Result Codes & Redirects

Thru the haze of 301s, 304s, 200s, and 404s; I can now discern some meaning.

It turns out there are two sets of issues: results & redirects. And the reason to confuse them is that they are the same but different. From my point of view, there are three topics which rely on these codes:
- trying to understand result from when we look for pages
- trying to redirect pages and domains in ways that are useful to users and search engines
- trying to configure the site so that apparently great solutions do not come back and get me in trouble (ie - right now I handle all "page not found" situations by giving them a default page with a "good-to-go" message. But, the search engines will not like the serving up of the identical page as correct from many different URLs.

Result Codes - The client asked the server and the server gave an answer:
result code 200 - the request for content is valid and I'm sending along the page
result code 304 - Not Modified (since last request from the same something?)
result code 404 - Not Found (but in addition to the result code, a page of some sort can be given?)

Redirects - Are page and domain redirects the same thing?
I have domains with great names that I want to redirect. Best way....
My hoster allows me to do something (redirect?) which I've done for:
http://www.Time4Math.com
http://www.Time4Reading.com

[open bracket
meta http-equiv="Refresh" content="5; url=http://www.newlocation.com/page.html">
quoted from: http://web.mit.edu/is/web/reference/webspace/redirects.html

Sources:
Vanessa sent me to: To err or not to err 200s vs 404s
I found Status Code Definitions

Initially, other than sheer disorientation and the coincidence of them being 3 digit numbers in the web world, there may been no reason to have confused redirects and error codes. But then, once i understand the difference, I have learned that they actually converge.

PS. 529s are neither redirects or result codes, they are state sponsored investment programs for higher education that are given special tax status. Somehow that made it onto my notes from talking with Vanessa Fox. Did she give me tax advice, is my hearing a problem, or am I that confused? Or, all of the above.

Google PPC - Hints from the google gurus...

At SES Miami, in addition to the organic search people, I had time with Lina Goldberg & Ashley Buehn from the ppc team.

I use to be a bigtime adwords spender (see my google frig) but have reduced it to a much smaller spend in the last six months and done very little management of it. Face-to-face with the optimizers, this is what I learned.

Negative Keywords - Use Them!!!

They will change your life. And your account.

- Lina Goldberg

Heres what I retained from the session (other than they are pretty nice to anybody who has earned a refrigerator).

1. Look up my terms and explore them using the adwords word term. Find negative keywords, use them. I had used some (ie for reading, I had negative keywords for Pennsylvania, UK, astrology, future, medical, public etc) but not alot. Lina says Use them Alot. Personally, while I see how it would improve my CTR, the real problem has always been conversions, not click-thrus and I think my ads make it clear that I'm a kids literacy tool, not a way of telling the future or of speed reading. But, I'll give it a try.

2. Get Organized. My learning PPC campaign is a messy disorganized hodgepodge. This makes analysis very difficult.

3. Try the nifty new adwords interface. This is a software package to download to use to analyze and manage my account. Still beta but pretty exciting they say.

I also campaigned for my pet peeves as changes.

1. I set up my campaign with the conversion tracking a mix of email sign-ups and customer registrations so the conversion data in the account is useless. I set up the sales count data accurately. But the adwords interface is setup so that to look at my conversion rate (the sales count variable) by keyword or campaign, I need to go to the report center and generate reports and analyse spreadsheets. Why can't I change the variables that the account shows in its default reports?

2. Effective analysis means being able to aggregate data across a number of different variables to get patterns and to find statistically meaningful data. A pool tool would allow you to do all the analysis that we now do using sorts and filters in spreadsheets. For more info, the pool tool.

Google Query Stats Questions - what does it mean?

I just lucked into the most fabulous opportunity - the SES Exhibit Hall in Miami featured a well-staffed google both and not that many visitors. I got Vanessa Fox's full attention for an hour. (If only I had been better prepared with questions - what an opportunity!!!)

I need to revisit this question about Top Search Queries.... What does it mean?

It's explained as: "Top search queries are the queries on the selected search property that most often returned pages from your site" ...over the previous three weeks.

Does this mean that:

a. These are the searches that my site ranks highest on. - I don't think so since I know there are searches where I am number one but which are not listed. Those are lower volume searches.

b. These are the highest volumes searches that returned my site in the results. If this is true, what is the cut-off that google is using to say that my site was "returned"? My table has seaches where the highest average position is 11.

I thought b. was the answer but Vanessa said that this couldn't be the whole story since she has seen tables where people are listed with positions as low as the 40s.

I've now thought of a third possible explanation...

c these are the highest volume searches where some minimum number of people actually clicked on my link.

This is the only explanation that I can think of that can explain this table.
This would require Google to:
1 - Find searches that people have clicked on my site
2 - Prioritize them by volume

Explanation C also makes sense because its using similiar data to whats in the second table but in a different way. I will test this by picking some huge volume term such as "learning games" or "homeschool" (where I place around 40th) and click on them and see if these terms hit the table. Stay tuned....

I'm also puzzling now over the term: "selected search properties". What does this peculiar phrase mean?

My blog with most of the notes from the conversation -http://learn-to-market-online116.blogspot.com/2006/07/vanessa-fox-at-ses-miami-google.html and my site http://www.Time4Learning.com

PS - my next personal project is to figure out how to use trackbacks on blogs and some other basics about blogging. I just sent this in to a newsgroup and google has let it go up: I'm also going to put it up on David Naylor's blog, is that too many?

vanessa fox at SES Miami - google insights for free!

I drove to the SES Miami conference today and found an underpopulated exhibit hall and a booth full of google employees ready to help by answering questions.

I cannot begin to describe my excitement.

A patient and knowledgeable Vanessa Fox fielded by questions which were too-often punctuated by, "Sorry, can you back up and explain...." She did backup and try again. thanks thank thanks.

Heres what I retained. I only wish I had a bigger brain, more time to prepare, and better note-taking....

1. My site is basically OK. My two tiered site map is fine, there's no clear advantage for me building & maintaining a site map, and there are no obvious red flags to worry about. But.....

2. Stop wasting time building internal links. Google doesn't count or weigh them. Internal links only count in so far as the spider uses them to find pages. It's only external links that give pages "page rank". (I asked "Is this "party line" or is it true?" She assured me it was true-true. Then she smiled at me. I believed her.)

3. Stop wasting time obsessing over the page rank bar. Its even more useless than i thought. And while google iste maps will tell us the one page that is doing the best on our site, Vanessa will "not ever ever ever tell" what the relative page rank of any other internal page is. She said that my page crawl stats show a healthy distribution of page rank and that there are no real problems with timeouts (despite what the reportcard web site was telling me) or code errors.

4. Learn to use redirects. This has been a area of ignorance for me. Learn about 200, 404, 301s and how to use my excess domains thru redirects. Also, having no robot.txt file, I've been sending out my handling of a "page not found" which is a 200 and serving up a default page which people like but which doesn't much help the spider.

5 Build a robot.txt file which is easy peasy. Now its done!

6. Put no follow on my links to secure pages (ie https:) to save time for the spider.

7. Do not repeat text. If possible, have my new articles start on my site and then get republished so its clear that i'm the source. I've been doing this backwards by having a blog which I used for rough drafts of pages and then move to my site when they are well-written.

8 For keyphrases which the google crawl query stats list as a high volume search but which are not in the high volume clicks table, revisit how my listing is appearing on the google search to make it more attractive.

9. The page analysis shows some terms as not appearing often in my site but which I consider to be crucial. Use them more!

Read read read - http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/

http://gsitecrawler.com/articles/error-404-200.asp

http://google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=40132&topic=8845

http://google.com/support/webmasters/bin/topic.py?topic=8843

http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/guest-post-vanessa-fox-on-organic-site-review-session/

http://groups.google.com/group/google-sitemaps

thanks thanks thanks thanks to vanessa fox
Are you coming back next year?