Working at Home on the Internet

Some Questions for an SEO Expert

As you probably have noticed, the URL of this Blog is workingathomeinternet.com/WP. I have worked very hard to make this a success with readers, new and old friends alike.

Since I bought the Domain Name http://workingathomeinternet.com (view the prospective Website) I have considered transferring the Website to the index of the site. I already started moving the Website from the freespaces.com platform.

My questions to ANY SEO Expert are:

~~ How will that affect the SEO for the Blog?

~~ Do the Search Engine Crawlers just look at the Domain and not bother with individual pages?

~~ If I leave the Blog as is (a Page) will it be adversely affected?

~~ Should I make the Blog a Sub-domain?

~~ Change from /WP to /BLOG?

Any help to resolve these question would be greatly appreciated. Please either leave any thoughts in comments, or if you prefer send me an E-mail.

Thanks…

Joe

 

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July 16th, 2006 at 12:33pm | Posted by Joe | Blogging, SEO, Suggestions, Websites | 2 reader remarks | Print This Post

Linking Your Old Site to Your New Home

 

If you have any type of site, whether it is a regular WebPage or a Blog and decide to move your pages for whatever reason, make sure you put come kind of referral on the Old Site.

I bring this up because in using the StatCounter and SiteMeter (outclicks) Statistics Services I noticed a good percentage (between 10-15%) of my pageviews on the New Site are coming from the Referral I put on the Old Blogger Blog.  Since I am still getting quite a few hits, especially on the older posts, on the Old Blog I could be missing out on quite a few New Readers.

When I put the referral on the Old Blog (in the Biggest Bold I could find) on the last entry, I thought it would be a good idea to put it in the Template so it would show on every previous post, no matter how old.  As it turns out, I (for once) was right.

At present I am getting around 10 times the traffic from Search Engines on the other site, so I would be missing any chance of those potential readers finding my new site without the referrals in place.  I also made sure to put a Return To The New Blog referral since I haven’t changed all the links to the older posts (over 325) yet.

Another thing that I almost forgot to change was on my E-mail.  Most all of us put links to our sites on our Business and sometimes personal E-Mail, so make sure you change the URl’s there or you could be referring potential customers to the wrong (or at least outdated) address.

Do you have any other suggestions for someone who is moving?  Have you seen the same or different results in your move?

July 12th, 2006 at 01:40pm | Posted by Joe | Basics, Linking, SEO, Stastics | reader remarks | Print This Post

Vishal P. Rao, Special Guest Writer

Vishal P. Rao is the owner of the Work at Home Forum* and the Home Based Business Opportunities** Webpage He is an expert on SEO applications for the novice and seasoned user alike. Vishal has been kind enough to write an article that should help in our Optimization of Search Engines. I have substituted [ ] enclosures for functions for demostration purposes only.

So, without further adeau…

SEO for Dummies

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is the process of designing your website in such a way that it is easily found and ranked well by search engines. In other words, make it search engine friendly.

Contrary to popular myth, you don’t need a PHD to get create a search engine friendly website. Even a novice with little HTML knowledge can make their site search engine friendly. Here are some basic techniques to create a search engine friendly website.

Remember, you are not aiming to get a doctorate in search engine optimization. Leave that to the professionals. Your goal is only to follow some basic guideines when creating a website or adding new pages. That’s it. Any more obsession with it and you are going to ruin your precious time which must be largely devoted to *creating content*. Don’t forget the golden saying - Content is the king.

Now the details…

1) Title Text

This is the text that you see in your browser title bar and is embedded inside the [title]…[/title] tags of your HTML page. This is one of the most deciding factors search engines use to rank your web pages. Don’t waste precious space of this tag to fill non-relevant words. Use keywords that reflect the theme of your webpage here. So if your particular webpage is about “vegetarian dog foods”, you might want to use - “Vegetarian Dog Food Information” as title text.

2) Meta Tags

The two most important tags that search engines use to rank web pages are Description and Keywords Meta tags. Though keywords tags appear to have lost importance, you must not ignore them altogether.

Again, in the description tag, describe your page as briefly as possible, including keywords you used in your title tags. You don’t want to run the text in decription more than 20-25 words. The idea is that if you use more non-relevant text, keyword density or concentration decreases. Just make the sentence look normal and not like it’s written purely for search engines. Now for the above example, the text in you description tag might be something like - This article covers information and resources on vegetarian dog foods.

Coming to the keyword tag, do not fill them endlessly with keywords like you find in most web pages. Just laser target to 2 or 3 keywords related to the *page* itself and not your entire site. So using above example, your keyword tag might contain words - vegetarian dog food, dog foods

3) Alt (Alternate) Texts

Alt texts are the text used to describe images on your web page. They are displayed in place of the images if the images could not be loaded for some reasons or the visitor has turned off display of images. Search engines also use these texts to determine the theme of the web page.
As a result, it makes sense to include your targeted keywords here too.

Here’s an example:

[img src=”/images/vegetarian-dog-food.gif” mce_src=”/images/vegetarian-dog-food.gif” alt=”Vegetarian Dog Food”]

4) Sitemaps

Not only sitemaps provide easy accessibility to visitors of your website, they are also a great tool to help search engines find all the pages of your site efficiently. It’s like giving a detailed road map of your site to search engines.

5) Link texts and Interlinking

This is another big factor search engines use to rank pages of your website. Link texts are texts that you use to link to pages of your website. Considering the above example, when linking to that page, don’t use texts like “Click here” or “Read more”. Instead use “Vegetarian Dog Food” to link to the page. This confirms the search engine’s views that the web page is indeed about Vegetarian Dog Food.

6) Keyword density

Keyword density refers to the concentration of keywords on your web page. Generally they should be around 3-4 times spread evenly across your entire page. Once in beginning and the end and 2-3 times in between, assuming your page is of 800 words. If less, then reduce density correspondingly and vice versa. Don’t overdo this.

Like I said earlier, you should follow this guidelines when creating a new page but do not make an obsession of it, tweaking your pages every now and then. Just do it and forget it!

I visit Vishal’s forum daily, and have learned many things each time I stop by. Be sure to drop in for some interesting conversation and information. I’m sure you will appreciate being there as much as I have.

Vishal’s Sites:
Home Based Business Opportunities
The Work at Home Forum

April 21st, 2006 at 09:39am | Posted by Joe | Guest Writer's Articles, SEO | reader remarks | Print This Post