In my last post I talked a little about SEO companies in Regina, or the lack thereof, and Marshal Finch left a comment basically saying there are no dedicated SEO companies in Regina. The best part about Marshal leaving that comment was that I went and visited his website and blog and I found this interesting post on how to build backlinks.

Marshal lists some good, basic backlink building strategies. I left a couple of comments with my point being that building backlinks now is no longer just about getting links wherever you can get them, but it is about building relationships with others to help build links. Directory listings are nice to get, especially if you can get into Yahoo, DMOZ or even the Best of the Web directories, but how much traffic will you get from them? Very little. I have some websites that are listed in each of those directories and the amount of traffic I see from any directory is less than ten since January. That is right, less than TEN referrals from any one directory.

Want to know what websites send the best and most traffic? Referrals from blogs and forums. Places that I have taken the time to build some relationships with, leave comments, and take part in the communities of those websites. Places where it was not just about me getting a backlink. I routinely get requests for link exchanges in my inbox, want to know what happens to them? Can you guess? They go straight into the trash.

Interestingly enough a few days after I read Marshal’s post there was a great post on SEOBook about this exact topic. Link Building: The Future Of Relationships. Building links back to your website is not just about getting that link, it is about building a relationship. About giving back. Being a webmaster or blogger is not just about pushing your own website. You need to be social, be an active participant of different social communities to help promote your website or blog.

Want a really good example of how to do that? I already gave you one at the start of this post, did you see it? Here is your chance to put it into practice. Leave a comment, subscribe to my RSS feed, follow me on Twitter, build a relationship and backlinks and visitors will follow.

I have started several post for the blog here today, but I have not been able to finish a single one. I don’t know what it is about today that seems to be causing me to drift from topic to topic, but that is the kind of day it has been. Since I was not able to finish a complete post today I’ll just give you a run down of some of the post topics I was thinking of writing about today.

WordPress Themes – I have been doing a lot more WordPress development. I currently have five website/blog projects on the go all being done in WordPress. On top of that I have another two quotes out that are also websites/blogs that would use WordPress. I recently came across a post that had a list of five blank WordPress themes to help in development. Now I just need the time to sit and look at them.

Regina SEO – Since moving to Regina I have been wondering what companies down here do SEO so a little Google search and it appears that no one in Regina Saskatchewan does SEO. I did not find one company on the first page of results that was from Regina or even from Saskatchewan for that matter. Do the web companies in Regina not care about SEO? Do they just not do it? Maybe there is just no market in Regina for SEO, not that I want to take the Regina SEO market by storm, but I thought there might be at least one company doing it here.

Blog Consulting – I have been having an interesting email exchange with someone about helping him make some changes to his blog. The whole exchange has gotten me thinking that perhaps I can take my webmaster knowledge and starting doing some blog consulting. In many ways I have already started doing this, but I have never really formally come out and said “heh I do blog consulting”. Can Regina handle having a blog consultant?

Big News – Looks like I will be able to announce my big news on October 1, 2008. Make sure you check back on October 1st to find out what I have been trying to keep under my hat since the move.

That is the kind of day it has been here on the seventieth of September two thousand and eight.

I have a friend doing some search engine optimization on a website and we have had several conversations about the job. I have looked at the website and I thought I would share with you the secrets I told him after looking at the website about how to help it rank in the search engines for their keyword phrase.

Here it is, the secret to ranking number one or at least on the first page of Google for your keyword or search phrase? The number one secret to ranking on the first page of the search engine results is to…drum roll please…have your keyword phrase in the content of your website!

That does not seem like much of a secret does it? I’ll be honest there is a lot more to ranking high in the search engines than that, but the truth is if you do not have your keyword or your keyword phrase in the content of your website why would you think the search engines are going to rank you for that keyword or phrase? Search engines are not mind readers, they need to be told what your website is about. Using your keyword in the content of your site will help the search engines know what your site is about and help them rank you for that phrase.

Most SEO’s will tell you that you should aim for a keyword density for your main keyword between 3 to 7%, but don’t over do it. Make sure your website content is readable by a human being and makes sense. Don’t sacrifice readability for keyword density! Remember build your website for human beings first. Also, don’t forget to add your keyword to your page titles, your meta keyword and description tags and use it in headers in your text copy. All these things can have some influence on the search engines ranking you.

Want another secret to ranking high in the search engines that goes hand in hand with using your keyword in your website copy? Simple, use your keyword as link text to your website. For example I would not expect this blog to rank for the keyword phrase “blog consulting” since there are no external or internal links pointing to this blog for that keyword. If I start to link to my blog for that keyword and can create some external links back to this blog for that phrase this blog should start to rank for the term “blog consulting” but it would be easier to start ranking for “Regina blog consulting” instead of blog consulting since there will be less competition. Just remember to start building links back to your website with your keywords.

Since I am giving away SEO secrets today, here is another one for you. Search engines still love fresh content, the best way to add fresh content to your website is to have a blog. By adding a blog to your website you create a venue for people to link to you, comment on your posts, build community and be more than just a static website but rather be an actual person. That way if you have a website that is about real estate in Manzanillo, Mexico you can talk about how great it is to live there on your blog, build links back to your website and eventually rank your website for the keywords Manzanillo real estate. See how easy that was! Simple isn’t it. Watch my little blog will start ranking for Manzanillo real estate just because I talked about it.

Now you know the secrets. What SEO secrets do you use to help improve your websites ranking in the search engines? (Ya I know who is really going to share their SEO secrets but I have to ask just in case you do want to share.)

I was looking through Google Analytics for this blog the other day and I was amazed at the number of visitors I get to this blog from the search engines versus how many visits I get from social media and from referrals from other sites. It might not come as a surprise that the majority of traffic comes to this blog from search engines. Maybe because I don’t spend a great deal of time sitting and writing the kind of posts that would appeal to the Digg or StumbleUpon crowd. Aside from that fact however I think there is something more important to learn from traffic from either the search engines and social media and direct referrals.

This blog has never been on the front page of Digg, and to be honest, I am glad it has never been. I have read several articles on the Digg effect and I am quite convinced that the energy and effort that is required to have it happen and survive the onslaught of Digg users is simply not worth it. Blogs that do get on the front page of Digg have that huge rush of visitors for a day or two and then everything dies down again.

This blog has been Stumbled several times, and I am a big fan of StumbleUpon. It is a great service to discover new sites and find interesting information. The StumbleUpon effect is also not such an onslaught as a Digg. There is a large rush of initial visitors and if the post is thumbed up enough you can get several thousand new visitors. My Video Rambler blog had a great time on StumbleUpon at one time with over 10000 visitors on on popular video over a one month period. I have also seen increases in StumbleUpon traffic months after the initial rush, but it is rare that the second or third wave is as large as the first.

I also get a regular amount of traffic from Facebook, MySpace and the latest is LinkedIn. LinkedIn is a new social media site that I have not seen in the referral logs before. What I find most interesting about it, they are going to my post about Register.com. Register.com did you hear that? People are finding out about your overpriced services! But I digress.

Overall the social media sites can create a huge rush of visitors to a site, and you might gain a few new comments and some loyal readers. For the most part these people are not going to stick around. I know I rarely subscribe to a blog I discover through StumbleUpon or Digg. The social networking sites don’t send the same amount of large traffic but they also tend to not stick around. The looking at the number of page views of people from these sites the average is low. Usually around one to one and a half page views per visit. They are coming reading and leaving as fast as they came.

The visitors that come here from the search engines are looking for something very specific. They are looking for a solution to a problem they are trying to solve, or information on a product or service that I have written about. This is no surprise, they typed something into the search engine and my blog was the one of the results that the search engine believes will help that person. I often get a great laugh looking at what the search engines think my blog is about looking at the keywords that some people find it. Some of the interesting ones I noticed lately are regular searches for ubuntuxp with this post about my Virtualbox installation of Windows XP installed on my Ubuntu desktop being on the first page of results. I also routinely get visits for people looking for help with PHP and .htaccess problems. That is great and I hope my posts help them but because search engine readers are looking for a solution to a specific problem they don’t stick around long. They might look around a little more but the page views per visit are usually under three.

Percentage wise the referrals from other blogs and websites are not near as large as people coming from the search engines or social media, but they are more interested in the blog as a whole. The number of average pages views is around seven pages views per visit. They also spend more time on the site and are more likely to come back. They are coming from blogs that I have left comments on, participated in or have linked to other posts. Networking with others is a great way to increase visitors and readers to your blog.

The best part of looking at my traffic statistics was seeing how many people come directly to my site. You must be regulars! Thanks for coming and reading and taking part in the conversations here. It really made my day to know that the second highest number of people coming to my site come directly. That also shows in the visitor loyalty graph in Google Analytics.

Overall traffic from search engines, social media and referrals all play a role in bringing traffic to your website. In the long term it is the search engine traffic and referral traffic that will bring in the largest amount of quality traffic and readers. Social media traffic, while great to see and fun to have that spike on your traffic graphs, does not provide a regular and reliable source of visitors and readers. Don’t get me wrong, I think social media traffic plays a part in helping to create some buzz about a site, but in the long term it will not provide your website with a regular source of new readers.

What are your experiences with social media traffic? What do you prefer search engine traffic, social media or referral traffic?

I thought I would continue talking about Joomla since they have now released version 1.5. Joomla is a great system and offers a great framework to build a website on. If you want to create a community based website where people can message each other, Joomla can do that. If you want to create a basic website that you can add the occasional page or poll then Joomla can do that too. If you want to blog then use WordPress, if you want a website with a lot of power use Joomla. Joomla does have one flaw though. It’s urls suck.

I have not had a chance to try out the new version yet. Time just ran out yesterday, but I do know that to help Joomla 1.0.3 urls be a little more user friendly you can add an extension to help solve the problem. The Joomla extensions directory lists several extensions for creating.

My favourite is nuSEF. It used to be called OpenSEF but unfortuneately was dropped by its developers. Thank goodness the project was picked up. Of all the search engine friendly url extensions I have tried for Joomla it is by far the easiest to install and use.

If you use Joomla and want to make your urls more friendly for both search engines and your visitors take a look at adding an extension to Joomla to make them a little more friendly.

Some days it is just easier to sit and listen to a podcast or watch a video. If you are interested in SEO you have probably heard of Aaron Wall. He is the author of the SEOBook. The only ebook I would actually recommend to read if you are a webmaster and want to improve your websites ranking in the search engines. Aaron has been doing some screen casts for a little while so I thought I would gather some of the together into a playlist. Currently I have the following videos on the playlist:

• SEO Keyword Research Basics
• SEO Friendly Internal Link Architecture
• Google On Page SEO Tips & Strategies
• Create Google & SEO Friendly Page Titles

When I get a chance I will add a few more that I like and think are useful.

One of the things we want to do here at Epiblogger is focus on ideas and tips for bloggers to make blogging easier and more fun. I come to blogging from a very different perspective than Rhett. I consider myself a webmaster, not a blogger, I enjoy sitting and coding websites from scratch and there are things about WordPress that frustrate me. Don’t get me wrong, WordPress is a very good platform to create a blog with, but it is far from perfect on first install. There are a number of things that the default WordPress install overlooks that bloggers should pay attention too to help increase their blogs profile in the search engines.

1. All in One SEO Pack – This plugin should be built into WordPress. WordPress on its own does not create very nice page titles, creates a lot of duplicate content and does not generate keywords and description meta tags for each post. All in One SEO Pack takes some of the hardest work to tweak a WordPress blog and does it for you in seconds.
2. Robots.txt – Spending a little time looking at your robots.txt file can also improve how your blog does in the search engines. Much like using the All in One SEO Pack you can direct the search engines to now index the duplicate content that exists on one your WordPress blog. At the bare minimum you will probably want to include the following on your robots.txt file.
   User-agent: *
Disallow: /cgi-bin
Disallow: /wp-admin
Disallow: /wp-includes
Disallow: /wp-content/plugins
Disallow: /wp-content/cache
Disallow: /wp-content/themes
   There are more folders you might want to disallow access to and we will look at those more in depth in a future post.
3. Permalink Structure – The only reason you should use the default WordPress permalink structure (http://www.yourblog.com/?p=123) is if you have no other choice! It is unfriendly to your readers, and while search engines will still index it, you will most likely rank higher in the search results with a nicer permalink structure. While the there is endless debate about what the ultimate permalink structure is here are the three choices I would choose:
   1. Date and Name based: This structure is a familiar one to people that have used Blogger since it uses a similar permalink structure. It looks something like this: http://www.yourblog.com/2008/01/02/sample-post/. Depending how often you plan on posting I would remove the day and leave it to /year/month/
   2. Category based: Many people are using a category based permalink structure. It is more friendly to people and many people think it helps search engines because the url has more keywords in it. It looks something like this: http://www.yourblog.com/category/post-title/.
   3. Postname based: This is the easiest and the one choosen for Epiblogger. It is simply http://www.yourblog.com/post-title/. It gets right to the point and will probably deliver more search engine benefits than the other structures.
4. URL Canonization – Before WordPress 2.3 WordPress blogs suffered from a problem with URL Canonization. That is whether or not they had the www in the front of the domain name or not. This created duplicate content for the search engines because www.epiblogger.net and epiblogger.net would seen as different websites, even though they had the same content. If you are running WordPress 2.3 or higher you no longer have to worry about this because WordPress will use the url you place in your options. If you are not using WordPress 2.3 or higher you really should upgrade for security reasons.
5. Statistics – There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics. (Wikipedia) Statistics might just be a bunch of lies, but there are better lies and worse lies. Install a decent statistics package to help you keep track of what people read, how they find you and to help you improve your blog. Google Analytics is a good package, but there are others. I have used pMetrics Performancing Metrics and it is very good as well.

Next week I will look at 5 WordPress Security Essentials to keep your blog secure.

If you have been building websites for a little while you have probably heard of Aaron Wall. He wrote a popular search engine optimization book called, appropriately enough, SEOBook. If you are interested in SEO at all I would recommend reading through Aaron’s ebook. It is the only ebook I have bought that was actually worth the money. If you are interested in buying the book you can pick up a copy over at SEOBook. Be sure to read Aaron’s blog as well, it is another one of the blogs I check in my RSS reader on a regular basis. He has some good insights.

On to Darren Rowse interview with Aaron. You can read part one and part two over at Problogger. The question and answer that jumped out at me from the second part of the interview was “What’s the best link building strategy you ever used?” The short version of Aaron’s answer “Creating free software and giving it away.” Sounds a lot like what I was saying in What I Learned from McDonald’s about Getting More Links.

Head over to Problogger and enjoy the read.

This video has Matt Cutt’s doing a presentation at WordCamp 2007 with search engine optimization tips for bloggers.

It is a long video, just over 1 hour in length so you might want to just put the headphones on and let it play while you are working on something else.

There is a lot of good, basic information in the video that will help all people that run blogs and websites. Aside from the basic information about SEO, Matt encourages people to be creative to find ways to get links. He also has a great security tip using an .htaccess file to protect the WordPress admin folder. Make sure you change the IP address of your home computer and your work computer.

Put this .htaccess in /wp-admin/ (not in your root directory!

AuthUserFile /dev/null
AuthGroupFile /dev/null
AuthName “Access Control”
AuthType Basic

order deny,allow
deny from all
# whitelist home IP address
allow from 123.45.67.89
# whitelist work IP address
allow from 89.67.45.123 Read more at: http://www.reubenyau.com/protecting-the-wordpress-wp-admin-folder/

There is a great article on title tags for your website over at Search-This. It is amazing how often title tags are ignored, even by the big web development companies. This is such a simple and easy thing to do.

The post has six main points about what the title tag should or should not contain:

• should contain the keywords for that particular page
• should not include your blog or company name
• should be short and concise
• should have the most important keywords first
• should not include words like “the”, “by”, “that”
• should be unique for every page

Read the whole article Title Tags – A Search Engine Optimization Cornerstone at Search-This.

This is a great list, but I slightly disagree with having the blog or company name in the title. If your blog or company name has the keywords that you want to optimize for, it actually makes sense to have the blog or company name in the title tag. A quick example is this blog. The title is LGR Webmaster Blog, a quick search on Google places me on page two of the search engine results for webmaster blog (today anyways).

Of course if your company or blog name has nothing to do with the keywords you are trying to optimize for leave it out of your title.