Archives for category: SEO

surplus-sites.com – SEO experiment

March 14, 08 //
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I’m trying out a real world SEO experiment with a freelance client right now.  Surplus Sites – http://www.surplus-sites.com  hired me to build a quick brochure site for them.  As a matter of curiousity now, I am curious what SEO techniques may be able to help them increase their rankings…

So far I have tried posting an ad in bowling green kentucky on craigslist, twittering about posting on craigslist, and now blogging about all of them (which should end up on technorati thanks to wordpress, etc)…

Turns out it is pretty easy to manufacture a “quick and dirty” web of links – if the property in Bowling Green, KY gets some increased traffic (thanks google analytics for making this easy), I’ll consider this a victory.   If it leases, I’ll consider it a huge victory, and if nothing happens, I’ll consider it a little bit of lost time while learning about search engine optimization…

SEO, Tim Cahill, and Spagnostics

January 2, 08 //
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Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is a curious exercise. In layman’s terms, SEO is the set of best practices that you should follow to get information to register (and rank higher) with search engines, most importantly, with Google. I applied some of my learnings on SEO for the November 11th post Tim Cahill’s World-Class Goal (Everton at Chelsea) and the results have been a little surprising…

According to Google Analytics, over the last 4 weeks, nearly 60% of the traffic to this site came from people searching for tim cahill’s goal chelsea (ranked #1 in google), or tim cahill everton goal chelsea (ranked #3) or some other variation of those words. Kind of cool, I hope everyone finding this site looking for that post finds the post helpful and chooses to stick around. I’m happy just to have you peeking in…

And on a very strange note, Google also seems to think that I am an expert on “spagnostics” as I am the #1 ranked item for that search term as well… I’m not really sure what to make of that fact though.

Welcome Iranian web surfers!

November 3, 07 //
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Google Analytics is a very useful (and free) tool that tells me how many hits this site is getting, as well as what people are reading, how long they stay, what search terms they used (if they came from a search engine), and what countries they come from…  While this little blog doesn’t get much traffic at all, it is fun to check every once and a while.  Obviously the VAST majority of hits are coming from the USA.  Not surprisingly, Canada and Australia (culturally similar and English speaking) and England (EPL/Everton/soccer posts) show up with some frequency.

What I can’t figure out is my recent “bump” of traffic from Iran of all countries? If you happen to be one of my Iranian visitors, welcome to chriswho, and please let me know what you would like to hear about (or how you found me).  Oh, and I’d love to hear your opinion of President Ahmadinejad…

Google Analytics and AdSense

August 19, 07 //
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With a little time on my hands, I set up two Google products to work with chriswho.com, Google Analytics and AdSense.

The change you can see is AdSense – it displays those contextually appropriate ads at the top of the page. My traffic numbers are currently low enough I don’t expect to make any actual cash, but I thought it would be a fun experiment to do it, and I’m looking forward to seeing what ads google chooses to serve up based off of my blog post content. So far, it looks like PETA‘s protest ads regarding Michael Vick are winning, but on other pages you can get some others… fun stuff (in an ultra geeky way).

None of you will ever see Analytics, but it is very cool. It is another free tool from google that gives me some impressive reporting on the site’s traffic. Once again, very geeky, but this is my profession, so I should be aware of as many of the tools of the trade as I can.

So far, I’m impressed with the quality and ease of installation/use of both tools. I’m trying to learn more about SEO and monetizing web properties, so I think this is a good way for me to “dip my toe in the water” so to speak. So far, I like what I see.