SEO process blogs for beginners / newbies

I am now convinced that the long tail keyword search really works, when a user wants specific information. If he / she wants to find the information, he / she will refine the keyphrase search term to get a satisfactory search engine result.

Yesterday, I was just trying to figure out what keywords and keyphrases a site that I’m SEO ‘ing ranks well for. I typed “sexy college girls in miami” in the Google search engine and the site came up at number 64. Not so bad, considering my major on page search engine optimization / seo efforts were really started just a few weeks ago for that website. But what I found is that that Google took the text from an image alt tag not right at the top of the page - ‘access to college girls on DVDs’. The only words that matched my searched keyphrase were ‘college’ and ‘girls’. ‘Miami’ was in another alt text four images after. The description in the search results for my search all came from the alt text in consecutive images.

I mean, for the professional SEO people this might be nothing. For a beginner like me, it is a discovery. Seeing for myself how the long tail keyword really does work reinforced what they say - you have to try things out to see the result for yourself.

Technorati Tags: SEO long tail keyword search, Google results, image alt tags

This is a log of what happened:

20 Sept 07
SEO mommy wordpress blog feed URL was showing error for past few weeks:

1. the blog summaries were not showing up in the feed
2. i kept getting an error message
3. i checked with the W3c validator and it found 6 errors on that page
4. (a few weeks ago, I guess to try to see if i could fix the problem, i  made a copy of the blog/wp-includes/feed-rss.php file on the server by making a copy, and renaming it blog/wp-includes/feed-rss-original.php.)
5.  Today i changed the file from (feed-rss-original.php) to its original name (feed-rss.php)
6. now the URL works, but my past entries still don’t show up under www.seomommy.com/blog/feed
7. I have to fix this problem
8. I added a test post to see whether it and my previous posts would show up since recently it looked like my last few posts were not being recognized. (I did something with the wordpress system recently and honestly i can’t remember the whole story…..)
9. Anyway, I created and saved a ‘test’ post and the test post showed up with the previous posts. I guess it just took a few minutes to work
10. The first few posts don’t show up and there’s no ‘previous posts’ link to them.
11. I deleted the test post and refreshed the feed page and the posts show up. (Again, the first few posts don’t show up and there’s no ‘previous posts’ link to them.)
12. I checked the feed URL in the W3C validator again and this time “This Page Is well-formed XML!”

Conclusion:

• I think that because I had messed with the names of the original file (although I just renamed the original files and made copies of them) that everything got messed up. Maybe the system was programmed to deal only with the originals.
• This is my conclusion because as soon as i changed the original file names back to their original names, the problem was fixed.

Note: I did a similar file name change to feed-rss2-comments.php and it showed an error as well. Then i renamed that particular file as it was before and now the comments from blogs posted are showing.

Can you believe. This problem started weeks ago and I thought I had to get the help of a technical guy to help me figure this one out. I don’t even know how/why I ended up thinking of giving the files their original names back. I don’t understand all the technicalities, but hey I did it, and it WORKED! The feeling of accomplishing someone on your own. WOW!

I changed the post slug in WP for some recent posts so the post URL will appear similar to the name of the blog post, for instance:

a. http://www.seomommy.com/blog/hello-world to http://www.seomommy.com/blog/more-keyword-targete-text

I want to track how long it will take Google to index the new URL for the same posts.

I started keyword research for one of the porn sites that I’m working on using the Keyword Discovery tool. It’s been helpful so far, but there is room to improve my keyword research skills though.

I was reading about SEO for PHP sites since most of the sites we work with are dynamic websites. Just can’t get away from those. But dynamic websites are a musss-have nowadays, since data needs to be supplied immediately, and this way it’s easier to update information. Dynamic websites can cause problems too, like duplicate content issues. For instance, a page can sometimes be accessed using entirely different URLs. The dynamic URLs should be rewritten into search engine friendly static URLs. You’ll notice my blog entry URLs are keyword-rich rewritten. This feature comes with Wordpress. The URL is created with the title of the blog

Also on my list- SEO for images. Imagine a website that’s made up 90% of sliced images. This gives little room for text content. Ways to optimize images for search engine spiders include:

• adding image alt attributes
• making sure the meta descriptions, page titles, and internal and external anchor text are optimized
• focus on uncompetitive keyword phrases
• focus on long tail keyword phrases
• naming images with keywords (where it makes sense, and not overdoing it-of course)
• adding image title attributes (I read somewhere that this has become less important, thought)

As always said, keywords should be placed where they make sense. And image alt attributes should be descriptive of the images. More and more I’m getting the hang of this SEO thing. I’ve read the same things over and over and over. So now it’s time to do! Soon I’ll no longer be just a beginner.

Technorati Tags: Keyword Research, SEO, PHP, image optimization, duplicate content, dynamic URLs

I’ve noticed for the past few days that my Alexa rank increased a good bit. I’m tryin to figure out the reason for this spike in rank. Also, my keywords and phrases that fell on Gooogle have risen back in the search results. Wonderful!

I’ve been busy that past few days. Reading and researching SEO stuff for some other sites I’m working on. It’s like the work never stops. But that should keep me moving. When the websites achieve the search engine rank I crave, I’ll be so happy. I’ve also started looking into SEO case studies. That might help me out with some sites I’m working on.