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I’m currently experimenting with a couple of SEO plugins for Wordpress. The first is All in One SEO Pack from Uberdose.

Click for full size image.

This nifty addition adds meta tags to each post. I know all the SEO experts will tell you that meta tags are long dead and buried but we aren’t using them here to gain ranking, but to give the search engines a nice user-friendly title and description.

The second plugin is Google (XML) Sitemaps Generator for WordPress

I had a very bad experience with XML sitemaps when they were first introduced. It wasn’t that Google ignored my sitemap. Quite the contrary. It came calling hard and fast. Only trouble was I had built one of those grey-hat sites (dark grey) with about 800,000 pages. It was a long time ago when bandwidth was measured in megabytes and it got very expensive very quickly. Since then I’ve been shy of generating them, although I’m a reformed character now and only use purely white hat techniques. Honest.

This plugin generates a XML-Sitemap compliant sitemap of your WordPress blog. This format is supported by Ask.com, Google, Yahoo and MSN Live Search. As well as generating the sitemap it calculates a priority for each post based on the number of comments and notifies Ask.com, Google, MSN Live Search and Yahoo via ping.

Obviously you can also submit the sitemap via Google webmaster console to monitor its progress.

The social marketing directory is a master resource list with three categories of social (web 2.0) sites that you can use to create your very own streams of highly targeted traffic/subscribers/sales for your websites in 2008 and beyond!

This resource guide contains:

Over 100 Social Networking Sites (i.e. MySpace, Squidoo, etc..)
Over 150 Social Bookmarking Sites(i.e. StumbleUpon, Digg, etc..)
And Over 180 Video Sharing Sites (i.e. YouTube, AOL, etc..)

ONLY $9.95!

At least that’s what it says on the sales page.

It’s actually a decent list of Web 2.0 resources. But, being a Nice Guy and all, I got the resale rights so you can get it here for free.

There was a post on the official Google webmaster blog this morning commenting on a change to their algorithm. Googlebombs are where a number of sites, usually blogs, use a specific and unrelated anchor text to try and get a site high on Google.

The best example of this was getting George Bush’s official White House page to rank #1 for the search term “miserable failure”. It held this spot for two years, even ranking high for the single word “failure”.

Not any more. They have changed their algorithm to prevent this. No specific details, of course, all they say is:

“By improving our analysis of the link structure of the web”

It will be interesting to see what other sites currently enjoying a high position in Google through heavy link campaigns this impacts. I’ve no doubt other sites using the same anchor text for all their links will be affected in spite of the official line:

“the impact of this new algorithm is very limited in scope and impact”

Another nail in the coffin for SEO link building campaigns perhaps.

This is a  question that often crops up.  Hourly? Daily?  Weekly? Monthly?

Before I answer the question, you need to consider what type of traffic you are targeting.  Are you looking for repeat visitors or are you looking for search engine traffic?  This makes a difference to the answer.

For repeat visitors, the long held mantra is that you post everyday.  The argument is that your readers will give up on visiting your site if they see no new posts for a few days.  Some hyperactive bloggers have taken this to heart and post a dozen times a day.  Some have done very well when they do this.  Robert Scoble has one of the more popular blogs and he posts several times a day.  Others burn out very quickly at the self-imposed workload.

With all of the Web 2.0 hype that surrounds us, it seems that we now have to build more of an interactive community which leads to more frequent posting and responses.  I was watching MyBlogLog yesterday and noticed the same person was visiting Blogging on Blogging at least once per hour for several hours.  I was tempted to send him a message or make a special post welcoming him, but never did.  Was he desperate for my next post or did he have no life?

I’m going to argue that posting frequency doesn’t matter as much as it used to.  The majority of readers of this blog, and most others,  now read posts through an RSS reader.  They are subscribed to my blog feed and whether I post once a day or once a month they will still see new posts.  If  I take a few days off, the traffic directly to this site drops, but then picks up again once I have daily posts.  Nobody unsubscribes from my feed because I don’t post for a few days. 

I personally subscribe to about 40 different blogs through Google Reader.  That takes up a lot of my reading time.  I recently unsubscribed from two blogs, not because they weren’t providing valuable content, but because there were just too many posts to read each day.  Even skimming the articles was too much work, so I just unsubscribed.   

More frequent posting can also lead to a reduction in quality.  Something worth reading takes time to write.  Time to research.  One person posting a dozen times a day doesn’t have time for quality posts.  Others only post once a week but when I see them on the feed reader I go to them first.  They are always quality posts worth savouring.

Ultimately it comes down to your schedule.  If you have time to post everyday, great.  If not, the worst that will happen is that you lose casual readers with short attention spans.

If your visitors come mostly from search engines there’s a different answer.  This answer is based on my own experience and observations.  I don’t have any SEO theories about why this work, but it does for me.

About two years ago I started a blog around the game Everquest which I was still playing at the time.  I posted religiously every day to the blog for about a month but its performance was less than spectacular.  I think it was getting around 50 or 60 visitors a day from the search engines.  The blog was buried somewhere about page 20 on Google for most of its keywords.  Since it was a lot of effort for very little return I slowed down the posting to once a week or so.  Not deliberately, it just happened.  Suddenly my traffic shot up to 300 to 400 a day and it started to bring in the cash on affiliate sales. It was around page 2 or 3 of Google.  

There could have been any number of explanations to this, from moving out of the Google sandbox, to a change in their algorithm.  Obviously I got excited by this and started posting once or twice a day.  Guess what?  The traffic dropped back down to 50 or 60 a day.  I lost interest thinking it was a fluke and posted less frequently.  Again it happened.  Back up went the traffic to 300 plus. 

The only thing that had changed was my posting frequency.  I experimented a bit over the next few months and found that I could maintain the traffic with a post every 3 or 4 days. 

Coincidence?  Perhaps.

I’ve tried this same technique over a number of other blogs that rely only on search engine traffic and there does seem to be a sweet-spot for posting frequency.  On some blogs it’s daily.  On others it’s every three days.  Others are fine with once a week.

As I say, there’s no scientific evidence to support this theory so try it at your own risk.

Read Part I Part II Part III Part IV and Part V first.

I’ve started on the How to Make Perfume niche blog and I created a couple of posts on the blog at make-fragrances.blogspot.com 

The topics I’ve used were random and plucked from my imagination with some hints from our initial analysis but here’s how you are supposed to choose topics.

Rather than invent my own post topics I’ll let Google help me.  Within the Adwords control panel there is a keyword tool that suggests alternative phrases based on your entry.  If you have an Adwords account, you will know what I mean.  You enter any keyword and it returns a list of suitable phrases and, here’s the important bit, tells you the advertiser competition and the search volume all in a pretty graph.  This is the Adwords advertiser competition, not  the organic search competition but I’ve found they are closely correlated.

Here’s what it told me when I entered the phrase “make fragrances”:

These are those related terms picked from the keyword tool with highest search volume:

make perfume  
making perfume
how to make perfume  
make your own perfume
make cologne
making perfumes
create perfume
make essential oil
how to make fragrance
making fragrance

If you need more suggestions it’s easy to drill-down on the suggestions to generate a list of several dozen with only a few clicks.

Using our (free) keyword tools mentioned previously, we have these values for searches per month and organic results:

make perfume   1241, 47,300
making perfume 770, 34,000
how to make perfume   1530, 9,430
make your own perfume 810, 828
make cologne 210, 19,500
making perfumes 1650, 22,000
create perfume  210, 11,400
make essential oil  1350, 594
how to make fragrance  660, 17
making fragrances 450, 615

Calculating the KEI and rearranging for best results gives us:

how to make fragrance 38.8
make essential oil 2.27
make your own perfume 0.98
making fragrance 0.73
how to make perfume 0.16  
making perfumes 0.075
make perfume   0.03
making perfume 0.02
create perfume 0.02
make cologne 0.01

Taking the best of these results gives me four initial post topics:

How to Make Fragrances
How to Make Essential Oil
How to Make Your Own Perfume
Making Fragrances

Now all I have to do is to write the next posts around these topics.  As luck (or foresight) would have it, I’ve already done the first topic so it should be all downhill from now on.

(Hey Big G, go index How to Make Fragrances will you?  Thanks.)

Using Google Adwords Keywords Tool is only one method for generating ideas for topics.  There are many others if you do not have an Adwords account such as Hittail, Overture Inventory or simply brainstorming using your own imagination.   I will probably install and use HitTail for future topics.

In the next post in the series I will go into the procedures for getting the blog indexed and getting targetted visitors.

A couple of posts ago while talking about niche selection I performed an experiment.  I had discovered that “purple bass fishing lures” (in quotes) had no competition in Google.  The same search without quotes returned 395,00 results.  I peppered one paragraph of the post with this phrase together with some related LSI terms. 

Not surprisingly a search with quotes today shows only this blog.  What is interesting however is that when I searched for the phrase without quotes yesterday we were at the top of the second page.  Today we are on the on the first page (7th site when I checked this morning).  This is from a site which has nothing to do with fishing and absolutely no links using anything to do with fishing.  In fact I have very few incoming links to this site.  We jumped onto the first page of Google amongst 395,000 results in less than three days.

We are also ranking for similar searches.  For example, we are on page two for bass fishing lures purple.  I don’t expect to get much traffic from this (only 3 visitors so far) since I used an odd search term, but if I do ever show on page one for “bass fishing lures”,  I’m changing this whole blog to “Where to get the best bass fishing lures”, okay?

Obviously such a phrase gets very few searches each month.  This was an easy experiment to show the technique.  Most phrases will have more searches but some competition which is why I did the KEI analysis for the case study. 

Think what the results could be if my site was actually about fishing and had a few related anchor text links.

There are probably thousands of long-tail searches in your niche with  little or no competition for quoted searches.  This really is the main technique that gets traffic to my niche blogs.  By using some basic keyword research you can get hundreds of visitors a day from Google.

If this doesn’t get you excited about using this technique on your pages nothing will.