Search engine optimisation (SEO) has a bad reputation. That’s tough for SEOs but unfortunately it’s a side-effect of black hat SEO techniques.
I haven’t knowingly used any SEO techniques as this blog is really just a hobby of mine. I enjoy writing for it, find it a good place to store my notes for future reference (hence why sometimes there is detail here that would not be useful to anyone else!) and like the feedback I get when someone else finds my content useful. I’m pleased with my site’s ranking (considering I’ve done very little to boost it, other than to write lots of posts) and although the advertising revenue will not let me give up my day job yet, it does at least cover the hosting costs. Even so, I’ve been intrigued when reading SEO articles in .net magazine (it seems that SEO is not a black art – just common sense really) and recently I’ve been checking out a few tools and methods which should help anyone to increase the placement of their site (it seems that I’ve been using much of this advice purely by chance):
- Firstly, check out Rand Fish’s article on 21 tactics to increase blog traffic.
- Next, write good content (hopefully then people will link to it).
- Avoid black hat techniques as the short term gain is unlikely to be worth the long term pain. Each of the major search engines has it’s own advice for webmasters (Google webmaster guidelines; Yahoo! search content quality guidelines; Microsoft Live Search site owner help: guidelines for successful indexing).
- The SEOmoz page strength tool gives some useful information about a page’s relative importance on the ‘net.
- Some of the SEO Consultants search engine marketing tools can be useful for analysing code quality and I found the check headers tool useful to validate that my duplicate domain names are properly redirecting to my primary site (i.e. using an HTTP 301 redirect code).
There are also a few more links that might be useful in some of my previous posts: