Find some Nichols

I began researching keywords for my introduction to my blog. Not quite as easy as I had hoped, I think because the of my topic. SEO techniques as a keyword is already quite popular with about a million web pages dedicated to it. I guess SEO is too broad, and according to the long-tail theory I need something more niche’. I have my doubts about how to achieve this. The research tools I used for keyword research was Yahoo Search Marketing. This gave the number of times that it has been searched for over the last month. I also tried WordTracker because they have a free 2 hour trial. The results of most everything I tried related to the blog came back as a bad choice for targeting. WordTracker couldn’t find anything on “SEO to-do list”. So I started investigating by Googling the term. There are a couple of pages with this term and as I was pleasantly surprised to find my own website within the top 10!

I’ve come to realize that building popularity of your website is similar to how you cultivate your friends. There are some relationships you enjoy and there are some that you avoid. Relationships you enjoy you put forth more effort in maintaining them; you call more often, visit, or email. If you want significant traffic to your website, you have to do the same. First order is to provide quality content that people can use or enjoy. Next is to put yourself out there and be available on some social networks like Technorati; this is much like dating, isn’t it? When you find worthy websites, start linking to them, then put forth the effort to monitor those sites for reciprocal links. When you start spreading the link love, it will find it’s way back to you.

I really like this website for SEO topics.

I’m working on a list of resources for the resources page. I tried out the Dreamweaver microformats extension. The first thing I tried to do in Dreamweaver was select some text and click the XFN button. I “encountered a problem” and the application was immediately shut down. No matter that I was trying to write one of these posts; luckily, I hadn’t written a whole sentance before trying out my new toolbar. I opened it and tried it two more times with the same results. Being an old-time Windows gal, I figured the solution (to everything Windows related) is to reboot. I did, and tried it again with the same result. I was totally disgusted at the whole episode, and now I try the hCard button. I was happy to receive a pop-up dialoge box to help me fill out the hCard. Seems the problem was only with the XFN feature. I didn’t proceed to publish the hCard though; I’m discovering it’s not always appropriate to use this. I was referring to Chris Pearson in my previous post, so I simply linked to his bio. I don’t see where an hCard would be beneficial at that point. The only thing I know about him is his website I stumbled upon.

I was reading Manny’s Blog and found a nice website about SEO by Chris Pearson. Pearson explains a couple of things you can do to increase traffic to your website. I really like his idea about providing Google images. He shows that in his webstats, about 50% of his traffic lately is due to people searching Google images. The keyword arena is fiercely competitive and difficult to obtain traffic; however, the Google images searches are less competitive. If you can provide images that people want, they will come to your site for the image, and there’s automatic traffic.

Some other ideas are to utilize dynamic title pages. Word Press is already doing that for us. I like his reason for using two site maps instead of one. One is XHTML and the other is XML (Google). The XML site map is supplied for the search engines to crawl your site. The XHTML site map is for making sure your pages are interlinked, and to help users find information.