Back at the Blog Business Summit, I asked Dave Taylor what I could do to improve my ranking in some of the “other” search engines… It seems that over 90% of RCG search engine traffic comes from Google and while I appreciate the traffic from Google, I would like a little love from the other search engines as well…
[photopress:seo.jpg,full,centered]
Dave’s advice was simple, and since the changes are not default in WordPress, I thought I’d pass them along to others…
1) I flipped the Blog Name and the Post Title around… The title (way up above the address bar!) for this post is “Some SEO changes by Seattle’s Rain City Real Estate Guide”. Before I made the change, the title would have been: “Seattle’s Rain City Real Estate Guide >> Some SEO changes.”
2) I added meta keywords and meta descriptions. To figure out good keywords, I did a few common real estate searches on Google AND Yahoo and then stole (borrowed heavily) from the sites that scored well… Here are the meta tags I ended up adding:
- Keywords: Seattle Real Estate, real estate blog, real estate guide, Seattle real estate blog, Ballard, buying, selling, research, neighborhoods, Seattle neighborhoods
- Description:Seattle Real Estate Blog, Seattle Washington’s complete website for real estate, homes for sale and virtual tours. Search for Seattle Real Estate neighborhood information.
(You can see the implementation by “right-clicking” on this page and selecting “view page source”… Also of note: all of these changes were made directly to the header.php file.)
I’ll give it a month and let you know if these simple changes have any affect on the other search engines!
You may also want to try these:
– adding “real estate industry news” to the keyword meta tag as that may be what people are searching for the kind of contents you have on your site
– you may want to add some of these keywords such as “real estate” throughout your website, the articles or section headings (instead of graphical buttons or pictures), so that there is higher density of those keywords you want is higher
When we implemented changes, sometimes we would be surprised how quickly Google would react to the changes and new contents (in days).
Henry
http://www.movoto.com
But now you end up with your blog main page Title starting out with “by”
Is that the effect you want?
How is this working for you? Have you noticed a difference? Do your keywords match the comments you post about regularly?
Thanks for the feedback…
Dave, I didn’t even notice that… The other affect I just noticed was that it puts a “>>” in front of the article title… I’ll futz around when I get a few more minutes!
Reggie,
In terms of changes… Let’s give it at least a week! 🙂
I’d make sure you actually submit your site to MSN / Live Search and Yahoo. If you don’t tell them that you exist, they might not find you.
Either that, or Google really is becoming the a monopoly people accuse them of becoming.
Dustin,
I changed the meta tags on one of my sites and it hurt it. I may have screwed up but google was not happy at all with that one.
Also, adding a google sitemap to the site is always a great trick.
Tom
Shouldn’t the keywords be a meta of each page? If so, then the categories/tags should be the keywords.
Thanks to a little help from my friends, a fixed some of the bugs in the title.
This may not sound very politically correct, but a long time ago I switched the title around so that instead of being “Rain City Guide”, we were “Seattle’s Rain City Real Estate Guide” for SEO reasons. I noticed almost immediately that I started showing up much better on Seattle-related searches, so I never changed it!
I’m happy that in this latest incarnation, I get the best of all words… (i.e. The title of the blog is Rain City Guide, but I still get some important keywords in the title!).
Thanks Greg!
To others,
Robbie: RCG is DEFINITELY being crawled by MSN and Yahoo, but they just don’t send me much traffic. Interestingly, however, today was the first day I’ve even noticed where the percent of traffic from Google was less than 90% (it was 88%). I’ll be curious to see how this changes over the next few weeks! But that likely had a lot to do with the fact that we show up quite well on many searches for Zillow. (Did anyone else notice that Zillow made an announcement last night???)
Tom: I’m going to work on the site map… I figured that the archive would probably do the trick for this site since every article is listed there, but I may look into the site map as well.
Phileto: I turned off tags for a little while because I keep pushing out my servers and the people at my hosting company were convinced that it was the tag plugin. However, I keep getting notices that the CPU rate on the servers is way too high even after the tags plugin was taken offline, so that obviously is not the problem! (There’s too many of you visitors! You guys are getting expensive! LOL)
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