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In Search of SEO

In my quest for traffic, I’ve been immersed in the esoterica of Search Engine Optimization. In a sense, following advice you find online on this subject is akin to listening to doctors about what to eat. You acknowledge that what you are told makes sense, and it is most likely good for you, and the sources seem knowledgeable and sincere. So you follow the advice, but there are no immediately visible effects. And if you are doing other things at the same time to achieve the same goal, it’s hard to tell what any one thing did to help. Sure, I lost weight when I cut back on the carbs, but I also started working out, so who’s to say which had the greater effect?

Oh, I know the server’s access logs allow you to see where people are coming from, so if I was so inclined, I could spend time analyzing them, and trying to correlate activity X with an increase in referrer A, but frankly, all I care about are the numbers on my little real-time stat counter on my laptop screen (and now, also on my cell phone screen – check out the PixelList page). Besides, such an analysis requires either the assumption that all activities have an immediate effect, or that the effect delay is known for each activity. Suppose you also did activity Y, and it’s effect delay was shorter than activity X, you could easily come to erroneous conclusions about causality.

If you become a slave to analysis, you will find yourself delaying activity Y until you know the effects of activity X, which is fine if your goal is to become an expert in these matters. If instead, like me, all you want is traffic, you’ll do X, Y, and Z right now, and maybe X again, and try Y.y for the heck of it, and start doing research on alpha and beta. Did Z work better than Y? Who cares? It didn’t hurt, and if traffic went up, so did my smile!

Without further ado, I got most of my SEO ideas from this excellent post by Mark Bloomfield, and I added some tweaks of my own.

The name of the game in SEO seems to be “appeasing the Google God”. Like any good god, gGod is awesomely powerful, with unknowable motives, mysterious ways, and cult-like followers who’s job it is to tell the rest of us how to write virtuous code, so that maybe, if gGod smiles upon us, we too may achieve the highest levels of search results nirvana.

Ok, maybe cult-like is too strong a phrase, but some of the parallels between gGod and Zeus are pretty striking, don’t you think? Zeus had his thunder and lightning, and gGod has his search index, which he can use to smite those who displease him . While Zeus feasted on sacrificial lambs, gGod gets his pleadings via e-mail :
 

I-Newswire owner Eric Borgos:
“I e-mailed Google today to let them know about these changes, so hopefully they will add my site back,”

Good luck, Eric!

As befits the information age, gGod seems to be fixated on words (good thing, I’m fresh out of lambs), and the consistency of the “message” is as important as the sincerity of the sacrifices of yore. For a proper sacrifice, you know, the lamb itself was not enough. If you really wanted things to go your way, you had to make a sturdy pyre to set your offering on, start a good, roaring fire, and make an impassioned speech. Wailing like a baby probably didn’t hurt, either, especially if others joined you. Likewise, the content of a web page is not enough. For gGod to notice you, you need to set your prose at a sturdy URL (with words that support your content, while making a short directory stack), engulf the text with clean code, and expound on your content with relevant meta keywords, page title, and description. Wailing like a baby probably doesn’t hurt, either, especially if others joined to you with hyperlinks.

I was able to implement most of these concepts in this WordPress blog. If you are reading this on my web site (and not through an RSS feed), take a glance at the page title at the top of your browser. You will notice either the blog name and description, category name, or post title in the page title, depending on how you accessed this post (on the blog home page, as part of a category, or as a single post). This text is generated automatically for every page, it is not hard-coded for each post. Also, if you view the source code for the page, you will see the same title text at the beginning of the keywords meta tag, and the first few words of the post excerpt (if it exists; older posts without them will have the first words of the actual post) in the description meta tag. All of this was done to surround the post contents with a relevant “envelope” of data that is consistent with the topic of the post. Supposedly, gGod looks favorably upon this.

A related technique is to put the title of the post in the permalink URL. I have not been able to implement this yet, because my web host does not allow me access to the .htaccess file that is necessary to implement the redirects to make this work. I hope to be able to figure out a workaround to this soon, but I cannot spend too much time on it at the expense of other activities that may bear more fruit. I hope this does not displease gGod too much.

As far as surrounding the page content with clean code, the objective here is to get the words of the post nearer the top of the page HTML. So, I moved the Skyline area map code and related <Form> to the bottom of the page, by moving the PHP that generates this from the header template to the footer template. I also did the same with the call to generate the sidebar, it is now in the footer as well. The result of these efforts is that all the words gGod cares about are consistent in their meaning, which increases relevancy.

The changes to the blog page structures were accomplished by implementing these plugins:

Head META Description
Optimal Title

I also tweaked the title code like so:

<title><?php
if (!$Prod) print "Local ";
optimal_title(' @ ',TRUE);
bloginfo('name');
if (!optimal_title('', FALSE)) { print " > "; bloginfo('description'); }?></title>


The first line of this code prepends the word “Local” to the page title when it is running on my laptop. I got tired of not knowing which of my many open browser windows had my local test and development web site, and which had the public “production” web site. The next two lines just use the Optimal Title plugin and standard bloginfo function, and the last line adds the post description if the plugin is not available for some reason.

Will any of this make any difference in my traffic? Who knows? At the least, I’ve learned something new, I’ve experienced implementing it, and it can’t help but increase my blog rankings in the future. The journey continues, and these side trips make it that much more interesting. Onward ho!