Link Carpet Bombing

After last week’s discussion of external linking, the search for links from the big boys, I didn’t really go into depth about the current methodology I have in place.

I have been over doing the whole social media thing and plan on curtailing this activity for a while and see if it changes much, but I have added a new way to build up links to posts, and that is Carnival Carpet Bombing.

The important thing, is to get all your posts links of some kind, so they don’t become little orphans (this means internal or external links, but especially external links). As most of my readers of  THE Canadian Personal Finance Blog knows I create new content every week (usually about 5 posts), and I have been making a conscious effort to make sure that each post has a link to something internally on my site (usually a much older post), to ensure I have fewer orphaned posts (especially older ones).

The second thing I do is typically on Thursday, I will go to Blog Carnival Central and submit each of the posts for the week to one of the many Personal Finance carnivals, to ensure that then each post has an external link to it (hence the concept of Carnival Carpet Bombing).

Will this bring a lot more readership to my site? I am skeptical, it sometimes brings spikes in readership, but there is a low retention rate on these new readers. This does add external links, and if you are starting out, more likely than not from a higher Page Rank site, which then gives you a higher Page Rank. As long as the external site linking to you is not an identified SPAM or SCRAPING site, then this can only help your site in Google’s Eyes.

What might be useful would be a tool to wander around the net and draw the link map for each of your post, showing where it might have links to, and show the traversal path of robots through your Internal Link Lattice as well. Anybody know of such a tool? I prefer graphical output, since text files with thousands of words give me headaches.

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So somehow THE Canadian Personal Finance site is back to a Page Rank of 5 with Google. This has meant I am now inundated with requests for link exchanges (which I mostly ignore), SPAM comments by the tonne (somehow this has increased), and lots of requests for advertising on the site.

I have no real explanation why the site jumped, but my guess would be my creation of an Adwords account did not hurt my site much. The traffic is slowly increasing, however, my guess is that it could just as easily slow off, if there isn’t future work to increase readership.

Digg and StumbleUpon are both brining more readership which is good, but it ends up that any mention on either the Canadian Capitalist or in the regular printed press tends to bring “looky Lous”, who only look for a day or two and then they are gone. I am not sure how to best keep those occasional readers.

A theme change is needed, but I have not had time to get one that interests me as of yet.

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SEO Bible from Amazon

SEO Bible by Jerri L. Ledford

(ISBN: 978-0-470-17500-2) As usual I have not purchased this book, I have, however, borrowed it from the Ottawa Public Library.

This is an excellent book for those who are beginners in the “Mug’s Game” of Search Engine Optimization.(SEO) It explains what the basic concepts of SEO are, and why they are important if you are trying to make money on the web.

The book starts sensibly talking about how you need a plan for how you are going to use SEO on your site (know what you want to achieve so you know whether you have succeeded or not). A good point made is that if you are going to do this, you should use Google Analytics to collect data (again, you need data to know whether you are succeeding or not).

The book then dives into different SEO techniques like the use of META tags on your site to get Search Engine Robots to find your site and be able to classify it, correctly. If you do a “View Page Source” on this page you’ll see which meta tags I have set up for this site too. The key to SEO is the use of Keywords, and the rest of the book outlines well how to get Search Engines to associate Keywords with your web site, and how to get your rank for that Keyword up the list (appearing on Page 10 on Google isn’t your goal).

Very good learning points about Keyword densities (don’t use them too little OR too much), and what techniques you should be using in a Pay Per Click (PPC) environment as well. Their explanation of PPC is useful for “newbies” as well, I learned 1 or 2 things I didn’t know as well. I skipped the section on Advertising keywords, since I was not very interested in that section (yet), but it seems quite detailed on tactics in that area as well.

Content is king, is my credo and the book outlines the importance of not simply putting out a bunch of retread information or some hack-kneed old information, you need to be interesting and fresh to attract and KEEP readers (don’t just do book reviews, as an example, unless your site is a book review site).

The books sections on Links and Robots is again very illustrative and important to understand if you want to play the SEO game. This site for example has very incoming links and whereas my financial site have hundreds of links in which helps it keep it’s popularity. How to deal with Robots is also quite important and the explanations in the book are very helpful. The author’s warnings about SEO SPAM should be heeded, unless you want to be a Black Hat SEO person (i.e. a bad guy).

Analysis of the data after you have implemented your plan is your final goal and deciding whether you have succeeded (and how you might change your plan to create more success), concludes the books content.

Rating:

I always feel that if I get three new ideas from any content it is of value, and I view this book as a useful resource and a good read. I will not be buying it, as I have already noted from it what I want to use, but I would recommend this book if you are starting out in the SEO game.

Good read!

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I stumbled onto another very useful tool, which is Smart Page Rank a tool which will find back links to any site and tell you the page rank of the linking sites, and can tell you what the linking text from the site was as well. At first I didn’t think the tool was that exciting until I input my old site and saw how many high ranked pages still link to my old address. From that one run I found over 10 sites that I have sent e-mails to, so they may update their link to my financial site and thus help my page rank rise a little maybe, but at least ensure folks don’t run into the Blogspot page redirection page. Cool site, and I recommend it. Typical output looks like:

And all of this I got from the Blue Hat Seo site too, interesting eh?

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This is quite funny because now both my sites have this page rank, including this site. I am astounded to see that somehow this simple little “on line notebook” is actually ranked at 2/10, while my Canadian Personal Finance Blog which has thousands of links and such is also 2/10 (but then again, so is the Canadian Capitalist, and he is a much higher ranked blogger than I am).  What’s funny is our friend over at Canadian Money Review is ranked 3/10 yet he hasn’t posted anything in months (busy with new baby and such). 

I think I am getting my ranks back because I have turned off the “Bots” on my left over sites over at Blogspot. At the end of the year, I am going to delete the Financial One, since it still seems to be creating “echos” throughout the Web, and the redirection from Blogspot does not seem to work that well these days either. 

Given I am using Chrome much more these days, I haven’t really been looking at my page rankings (haven’t got a chrome add in for this), so I only noticed that this site seems to have a page rank of 2/10 on Friday. I am not getting deluged with advertising opportunities here yet, and somehow I doubt that will happen, but then again, you never know either.

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Evidently there is a new exciting entry in the search engine world, CUIL. I have looked at it and found that it does have copies of my old Financial Web site, but does not have Canadian Financial Opinions hooked into it yet.  I sent them an e-mail with updated pointers and descriptions of both of my web sites, but I have no idea how long it will take for them to Spider my sites.

I have spent a lot of time adding Canadian Financial Opinions to many different search engines and directories, but the amount of search traffic that I get is quite insignificant compared to the referral traffic that I get from other financial bloggers. This suggests my SEO work has been fruitless so far, we shall see if the changes I have been doing in the past little while remedies any of these problems.

I continue to slog through the posts that point to my old BLOGSPOT sites and I am also using the Broken Link plug in to make sure I fix all broken links as they occur, to make sure all spiders can easily traverse my sites. This site still does not have a Page Rank, which I guess is ok for now, hopefully it will get one soon.

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Page Rank Up

Canadian Financial and Consumer Opinions page rank seems to have raised up to a 2/10 in Google’s eyes, which is a start given it was at 0/10 for a very long time (due to unknown reasons). What caused this? I have no idea, I have been cleaning up the mess of cross-links (over 300) that was left from when I moved from Blogspot to Dreamhost and WordPress, so that might be a contributing factor, but if anyone else has a guess, I am open to suggestions as well.

WordPress Clean Up Algorithm

To clean up the mess that I left (without thinking) moving a mature blog from Blogspot, I have come up with the following algorithm.

Find all articles with canajunfinances.blogspot.com mention in it

For Every Article in list DO
    Find Every entry in article to canajunfinances.blogspot.com DO
         Find corresponding article in canajunfinances.com
         Replace original article link with canajunfinances.com entry
    DONE
DONE

This clean up was pretty darn painful with this web site, but it only had 150 entries and not a lot of cross links, however, with the Financial Blog, there are thousands of cross links I have been fixing by hand, and it is a slow and very painful process.

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After writing about watching Joel Comm’s videos about making money with Adsense I then noticed that I had in fact not followed one of the Cardinal rules of the Adsense game, which is making your ads blend in with the surrounding text. I had headers that were different colours and links in the wrong colours on all my sites, which is a big no no.

If you check out the Canadian Financial Opinions web site you’ll notice that now the adsense ads blend nicely into the text published. I also fixed the ads on this site as well to follow the Cardinal rule of adsense to make your ads blend in!

Still no change in my Page Ranking for the financial blog, so I guess it is going to stay that way for a long time, which won’t help revenues much, I guess. I did send in a request to review this rank (again), but this one has had no effect.

To ask for a review you go to the Google WebMaster Tools page (where you have registered your site hopefully, if not, you should sign up for that right away), and there is a “Request Reconsideration” entry on the right hand side of things.  Fill in the form, if you feel your page rank is too low.

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The numbers for Day One on the new site was quite interesting. Lots more readers, biggest day for this site ever, howver, remember, my posting here is going to be at best spotty, so come back oftern .

I got accepted in Yahoo Buzz, have no idea what the heck that means, it has been so long since I signed up for that.

Google’s crawl of my sites continues to be at best spotty, we shall see if my Page Rank ever returns, hope it does, it means much better chances for advertisting. TextLinkAds claims this site isn’t interesting enough to advertise on yet, hope that changes too.

Turned on some new WordPress Plug Ins here:

• Crawl Rate monitor tool, to watch if and when this site ever gets crawled
• WordPress statistic monitoring
• I have turned ON the plug in for SEO Optimization, but have not turned on the feature yet, not sure if it is of any good.
• Word Press cache’ing Plug In is turned on as well, this site seems to get quite good throughput
• Kontera is now turned on as well.

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I am attempting to banish my blogspot version of Canadian Financial Opinions from the Google Index.

First I added the all important META tag into the header for the site

meta name=”robots” content=”noindex, nofollow”

That should stop the Googlebot from wandering through the site and getting any data on the content that is in there. How long stuff festers in the Google search indexes I have no idea, but this is a start.

I also submitted a “Remove URL” request for the old site as well, that might help speed things up too. Right now my old site has a Page Rank of 3 whereas the new site has a Page Rank of ZERO (still or again).

Thanks to “Google Advertising Tools” by Harold Davis (O’Reilly) for ideas!

Hope this finally works!

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