I also wanted to introduce you to a couple of tools i’ll be using to aid me in this SEO case study. The first tool is a FireFox add-on called SEO For FireFox, this tool once installed will sit at the bottom of the browser window just waiting to be used;). Here is a short video to tell you all about it…

This add-on is packed with features that I will need to take a look at how the competition is looking in the search engine listings, it provides all of the following information..

• PR: (Google PageRank) an estimated measure of global link authority
• Age: age pulled from Archive.org, shows the first time a page was indexed by Archive.org’s spider. The theory is that if Archive.org found a page so did many of the major search engines.
• Links: (Yahoo! linkdomain) shows a rough estimate of the total number of links pointing at a domain
• .edu Link: (Yahoo! .edu linkdomain ) shows a rough estimate of the total number of .edu links pointing at a domain
• .edu Page Link: (Yahoo! .edu link ) shows a rough estimate of the total number of .edu links pointing at a specific page
• .gov Link: (Yahoo! .gov linkdomain ) shows a rough estimate of the total number of .gov links pointing at a domain
• Page Links: (Yahoo! link) shows a rough estimate of the total number of links pointing at a page
• del.icio.us: number of times a URL has been bookmarked on Del.icio.us. Heavily skewed toward techy / Web 2.0 stuff.
• Technorati: an estimate of the total number of links to a site from blogs
• Alexa: rank based on website traffic . Heavily skewed toward internet marketing and webmaster related resources.
• Cached: (Google site:) shows how many pages from a site are indexed in Google
• dmoz: searches the Google Directory to count the total number of pages from a site that are listed in DMOZ, and the total number of pages listed in DMOZ that reference that URL.
• Bloglines: shows you how many people are subscribed to a particular blog via Bloglines.
• dir.yahoo.com: is a site listed in the Yahoo! Directory or not.
• WhoIs: makes it easy to look up the whois data for any site.

SEO Tool #2

This next tool is again a FireFox add-on, I apologize if you are using IE!. This tool is called The Web Developer toolbar ,this can give us a look under the hood at the code of your competing sites, I used this when I was designing sites a long time ago, but now im starting to use it for SEO ninja stuff!!.

The Web Developer toolbar is also packed with cool features, but I will only really be using a few of the tools for what we need to do.

Both of these tools are FREE to download and use, SEO For FireFox will be used to for more of the external SEO stats like links and other good stuff, and the Web Developer Toolbar will be used to go inside the site’s I am trying to rank higher than to pick them apart.

Follow Along

If you are going to follow along with me while I try to improve my blog’s SEO, you might want to take a look at the first  SEO Case Study post to see what I’ve done already.

I’m basically using what I already know, and Dan Thies’s search engine optimization ebook SEO Fast Start to hopefully boost my rankings in the search engines.

My aim is to learn as much as I can about SEO, and to develop some kind of method that I can apply to every post in order to give it the biggest chance of becoming ranked well in the search engines, and most of all I want to do this right way, no black hat tricks in here!;)

So feel free to join me;).

SEO Improvement Case Study

After reading Dan Thies’s SEO Fast Start which I wrote about in my previous post titled Search Engine Optimization Ebook, I wanted to follow up with my findings as a case study. To be honest im sick of using PPC to get traffic, and im also sick of just not quite having what it takes to even have one number 1 Google listing!, not one!.

I’ll admit that im no SEO guru, but I do have the basics covered at least to some extent. I’m aware of Title’s, H1′s and links, and all that good stuff but I was still unable to get any good rankings, obviously their are a few long tail keywords I rank pretty high for, but I wont see any great gain in traffic from it.

This SEO ebook was just what I needed, not only because I learned a great deal from it, but also because it made me take a step back and look at this blog.

When you start a new blog you obviously expect little traffic, so in order to boost that traffic I started to look around the web for blogging groups/directories that I could join in the hope that it would boost my readers, and I ended up finding a few.

Unfortunately what I then did was to add a widget from each of these sites onto my own sidebar, this widget contained the pictures of visitors to my blog which allowed other people to then click on a link to be taken to their site. So as I started to get visitor’s to this blog what I was really doing was displaying links from other blogs in these widgets that people would follow away form my blog. Duh!

My SEO Clean Up

This blog was in need of a clutter clean up that’s for sure!. In SEO Fast Start Dan explains that on your homepage you only really want links out to other pages on your site, this will point visitors in the right direction as well as distribute PageRank between pages on your site. Their is no harm in linking out to other sites, but its best to keep it relevant to what you are posting about.

Think About Your Readers First

If someone finds your site via a search engine after looking for some information, if your post gives them the information they need, even if they do click away to another link their is a good chance they will return, because it was your post in the first place that got them the information they requested.

I’ve spent the past few days working on optimizing my own SEO for my sites, the first things to go were the blogging site widgets from MyBlogLog, BlogCatalog and Google Connect, yes I had three of them!. I also took off the live tweets section and completely changed the hyperlink colors from red to blue(blue being standard).

Everything I took off was an un-needed and mostly unrelated link away from my blog to someone else, that had to stop. But their is another reason why its a good idea to take these items off your site – Javascript – , apparently the search spiders do not like JavaScript at all, and most of these widgets include a ton of it!.

Search engines see content higher up on a page as more important, while looking at the source code for this site because of all the JavaScript included in it, my main important SEO content was way down the code!, a big NO NO!. Once I removed all that code my main content is now right back at the top of the source code, sweet!.

Where Im At Right Now

As it stands right now I’ve completely cleaned up this site by getting rid of any unnecessary code and links out, I now have a much cleaner source code for the spiders to scan next time they visit, I even had to move an entire sidebar on one of my blogs to the other side of the page!!, a CSS(Cascading Style Sheets) nightmare but I did it in the end.

Now I just have to wait and see what the search engines do, I’ve only really changed about 25% of what I need to do from the book lessons, so their is still a way to go, but I’m at the point now where Dan explains that if you follow these small step…

you should see a considerable increase in rankings

As SEO does take some time I wanted to do a case study to keep following up with it, if this really does increase my rankings their is no reason why you too would not be able to follow along with your site and do exactly the same.

Heres a quick list of the first steps…

• Avoid linking out to other web sites from your homepage!!(Unless for good reason).
• Remove any unnecessary links altogether.
• Only necessary JavaScript should be left.
• If you have a sitemap, linking to them from your home page will make sure more pages get indexed.

See you next time;)