SEO Advice Requested

I don’t generally ask for much from my blog readers other than feedback and commentary on blog posts I write about domain names, but I would like to ask a favor of readers who are SEO experts/professionals. Regarding ElliotsBlog.com, are there any things that I can and should be doing to improve my current search ranking that I am not doing right now? Are there obvious mistakes that I am making that should be corrected ASAP? I know that nobody is ever satisfied with their SERP rankings, and I am in the same boat, but I would like to fix it if possible.

Traffic is about as high as it’s ever been, and it seems that my daily traffic continues to produce higher highs every month. My blog’s page rank continues to be strong, and I have quite a bit of inlinks that reference popular articles. My blog’s Alexa ranking seems to be increasing every month as well. Much of my traffic comes from blog readers, domain news aggregators (Domaining.com, NameBee.com and Altop.com).

So what do I do to enhance my SEO right now? First thing is that I use the All in One SEO plugin to quickly use good SEO for my blog posts. I Ā  limited the number of links in my blogroll, which had dozens and dozens of links last year. I also moved many outbound links to the Resources page with “no follow” commands. I sent notices to sites that had been copying my content, and almost all dupe content from scrapers has been removed. Finally, I write unique content on my blog daily.

There are two primary things that leave me a bit unsatisfied with my SEO:

1) Only 19% of my traffic is from search engines. This is compared to my developed websites which see anywhere from 50-90% of the traffic from search engines. These stats are for sites that get anywhere from 250 – 600 visits per day on average, so it’s not really an anomoly. I would like that number to be closer to 40%, which I think is reasonable considering that I have over 1,000 unique posts in 2+ years.

2) I had site links a few months ago when you searched Google for “Elliot Silver” and “Elliot’s Blog”, but I don’t have them any longer. One thing which may have impacted is that I changed the user name from Admin to “Elliot Silver” and when I did that, I saw that Google searches for “Elliot Silver” showed my blog #1 but the meta description ended up changing to my latest post rather than the standard meta description I now have. As a result, I changed the user name to “Elliot,” although I don’t know if that impacted the site links.

One other issue to note is that several months ago – maybe over a year ago in fact – I changed the url structure to eliminate the date. Many of my previous posts lost ranking and page rank in Google, but they should be forwarding to the correct page. In fact, I use Dean’s Permalinks Migration to help with that.

Because traffic is much higher this year over last year, and it is steady or growing, I haven’t worried too much about my SEO issues. However, I know there are a number of SEO professionals who read my blog for domaining tips, so I would like to ask for some feedback about how I can take advantage of additional search engine traffic.

THANKS!

Elliot Silver
Elliot Silver
About The Author: Elliot Silver is an Internet entrepreneur and publisher of DomainInvesting.com. Elliot is also the founder and President of Top Notch Domains, LLC, a company that has closed eight figures in deals. Please read the DomainInvesting.com Terms of Use page for additional information about the publisher, website comment policy, disclosures, and conflicts of interest. Reach out to Elliot: Twitter | Facebook | LinkedIn

19 COMMENTS

  1. You may want to consider switching your RSS feed from partial posts to complete posts. Granted, it may not lead as many people to your site, but your full set of content is there.

    It has benefited me from driving people to the site to comment on what they read in entirety, as well as from feed aggregators who republish posts. Not to mention people who read feeds on a mobile device that may not want to visit a Web site.

    You may also want to add a blog “signature” to each post as I have done at TheHotIron.com, where I link to my blog and feeds in each post.

    mp/m

  2. I’d read this (this covers a lot of the technical things you should be doing)

    http://yoast.com/articles/wordpress-seo/

    If I were you I would do some keyword research on terms that are likely to be relevant to your audience and rewrite your title tag on the home page – i’d have ‘elliots blog’ as the last thing in the tag. You could also consider not having ‘elliots blog’ appended to all your post titles – you need to decide how important the ‘brand’ aspect is to you.

    Finally (and this should be the easiest thing for you), write some posts that are likely to trigger SE traffic from non-domainers. Some ideas (by no means exhaustive), ‘how much is my domain worth’, ‘how to buy a domain’, ‘are domains good investment’ – so these are all off the top of my head. But if you put yourself in the mind of a non-domainer they are likely to start their journey via a SE. What kinds of questions would you ask if you were interested in domains and their relationship to the web, but weren’t an expert? In any event, it’s great that you have so much non-SE traffic, its a great indication that people value what you write (i do).

  3. Elliot.

    No I am not an SEO expert.

    It just so happens after I read your blog post I went to the domain blog at Ygrab.com and he has an article today, “11 Domain Tools You Should Check Out”.
    http://snurl.com/11tools [ygrab_com]

    Anyway, tool # 5 refers to the “SEO Text Browser and SEO Score” tool from DomainTools.com.

    Ygrab says ,”It even tells you how to improve you SEO ranking on your site.”

    I tested it using your domain and lots of info and suggestions are offered up.

    An explanation how to use the tool is here:
    http://www.domaintools.com/seo-score/

    Hope it’s useful for you.

  4. There are numerous SEO WordPress “best practices” and then there are market-specific SEO tactics you can use, but real SEO effort will need to be closely tied to your publishing strategy (trying to reach whom, with what content). So while you can benefit from “generic” seo advice (the basics) your real competitive advantage (outranking others in specific search results) will come from an SEO looking at your target keywords and your content, and advising you on how to either 1. outrank others using your existing content or 2. shape your content to better compete in the SERPs.

    So I guess I’m saying a real competitive SEO would probably not respond to your request, because “it’s not that simple”. You will get whatever generic SEO/WP tips you aren’t already using, as those who work with WP and do their own SEO, or those who sell “SEO for WordPress” services, contribute. That would help.

    All in One SEO vs. Headspace? Use of nofollow tag and canonical tags? Permalink structure? Theming/siloing? All useful, but opinions vary and should be based on strategy not tactic. And of course, why would an SEO expose actual competitive ideas to the public? SEO opportunities are only opportunities while no one else is exploiting them.

  5. Elliot,

    Your source code doesn’t have keywords, a title or a description. Even when I went to “About Us” I couldn’t figure out who your target market it.

    I encourage you to do that. The SEO All In One Pack is awesome but doesn’t replace the overall SEO for your site.

    Victoria Kamm
    @biztube247

  6. @elliot

    Google shows 500 pages for ‘site:domaininvesting.com’ which means it is only indexing half your site. Your main issues with getting pages listed and then ranked in google are the following:

    1. You have an H1 of “Elliot’s blog” on every one of your pages. The H1 should be the title of your blog post to tell google what the weight of the page should be. Make “Elliot’s blog” an H2.

    2. You don’t have a robots.txt file directing the SE’s to your posts, so you have huge duplicate content problem because your posts show in /page /category /postname /feed etc so there are at least 4 URLs of each post on your site, confusing heh?

    3. Your sitemap.xml is out of date. Either update it or delete it.

    There’s more, get started with these items. šŸ˜‰

  7. What Jon and Too Many said… or you could move your site to blogger and Google will automatically do all that for you. I know I’ll take that secret to my grave because no one believes it but I live it every day.

  8. Well, when I used to publish my blog in a simple shitty text only format without doing any SEO, because I had no time and spent no more than 15 mins on each post… I got few hundred visitors per month from the engines, at random.

    Once I got serious about the SEO and went the more advanced route, by including images and tagging them properly, doing all of the on-page optimization with unique titles + descriptions, getting more link juice, etc… Traffic increased 10x ++ and continues to grow at a steady and healthy rate, daily.

    You want to include more images and videos in your posts… šŸ™‚

    All of the blogs that are exclusively text-based = old newz.. All of the most successful blogs this days are ones that have the interactive stuff, Google loves it and will show you lots of love once you provide interactive content.

    Hello 2009! šŸ˜‰

    Cheers,

    Mike

  9. Pretty much same as Dan,

    -try out google keywords tool for related exact key word phases for titles before posting.

    -Remove “elliots blog” from your title structure. I feel it makes it easier for the person searching google to read your title, as they quickly choose which website to click on. I also feel it gives more “google” power to the 3 or 4 words in the title.

    -maybe write custom descriptions for your posts. Try site:www.domaininvesting.com in google and see what the descriptions are like. I always got told, think you are writing a Restaurants menu board which stands out on the street, trying to entice people walking past to come inside and purchase a meal.

    -Try adding the titles keywords into the description. Try this out for your canadian sex acts post. You are currently ranking number 6 for this in google. šŸ™‚

  10. Agree with John Andrews that whatever superficial tips you might get about WP Plugins / H1 tags etc won’t do much for you. Someone really needs to delve into your analytics to see what’s really going on plus have a conversation with you about what you wish to accomplish with your SEO effort.

    Of course, it couldn’t hurt to get links from all your other domainer friends :.)

  11. Elliot:

    You may have to “close this blog” and open new WP install on a “keyword folder so that you can do the following

    – Need to remove the /index.php from your URL… it’s useless

    – Make URL end in /title_of_post/index.html instead of php

    – To increase 19% SE traffic underscore works better than hyphen.. in order read the SEARCH results… URL string

    – Meta Title: Currently with 53 spaces. Remove a) & b) |
    once you remove both, your title space count will be 45. You now have another 19 spaces to add keywords.

    (Be real with yourself… Your title reads “DM Investing” .. but you spend a great deal of time and postings on development tips. You are constantly quoting trade conference topics to be focused on web development and optimization) So ise those 19 spaces on your preferred “Web Development” keyword.

    Meta Description: Rewrite it up to 180 spaces. Every word starts with a capital letter. No commas.

    Meta Keywords: 25 keywords / Keyword Combination. Every letter starts with a capital. Place the important ones first.

    – Install an additional Blog that optimizes web development topics while the other focuses on domain investing.

    – Your favorite links: You should treat your friends with respect. Write the strings of the links correctly

    Example: Rick Schwartz’s Blog
    Your live link – http://ricksblog.com/
    Correction – http://www.ricksblog.com/

    Example: Burbank & Lowell… Why are yours written correctly

    http://www.lowell.com/
    http://www.burbank.com

    Why didn’t you get careless with your URL string.

    Category Pages
    – If you decide to open the new install. rename the word category.. with a better keyword.

    – Duplicate Content – The truth is that WordPress out of the box “It’s not SEO” friendly.

    Category pages, Month pages, “older entries” /2 /3 /4 pages create duplicate also.

    Question:

    – Is the No follow effecting the links on both sidebars?

  12. Web site:domaininvesting.com = 593

    Web site:www.domaininvesting.com = 593

    Blogs site:www.domaininvesting.com = 1260

    Elliott: Google has you positioned as a Blog.. so you may not be getting placed on the straight web results.

    You have a 50/50 chance with universal search

  13. SEO rankings always depend on good and white hat SEO. You should always go for white hat SEO and more important don’t apply SEO work in bulks in a small period. SEO work always needs some patience and correct linking.

  14. SEO rankings always depend on good and white hat SEO. You should always go for white hat SEO and more important don’t apply SEO work in bulks in a small period. SEO work always needs some patience and correct linking.
    OH! You’re my new favorite blogger fyi

  15. @ geoffrey gonzales – if you do underscores instead of hyphens, then the URL will only help when someone searches for the terms in the exact order as the URL. If you use hyphens, order doesn’t matter.

  16. @ Too Many Secrets – I know there are few things that aren’t SEO friendly on it, but I hate to change anything major in the structure because Google seems to like it. Within minutes of making a post it’s in Google’s organic listings, and usually ranked pretty high for moderately competitive terms.

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