So how did I take a newly registered website from non existent to Page Rank 3 in three months?
Let me start by telling you that this is the first project I have undertaken in Search Engine Optimization, so there is hope for all you people that have been told you need to spend thousands of dollars on SEO, bull! I did it with little to no spend.
In order to do this series of articles justice I should let you know my motivation for undertaking this project. Back in October my wife discovered a Personalized Children’s Books website while shopping for Christmas presents for our daughter, she was fascinated with the idea of personalizing a book for your child. Thus began the 3 month journey to buy, build, and promote her new website, like any other red blooded male I bragged that I would be able to get her ranked well in google in a short(ish)period of time. Little did I know she would take me up on my challenge. Well whats one supposed to do? READ, LEARN, heck even consider PAYING someone, luckily for my I chose the READ and LEARN option.
I have 2 posts prior to this one which explains the so-called Google Sandbox or Age Filter effect, I strongly suggest reading them before continuing with this post, you can find these posts here SEO Case Studies.
I am going to break this up in to several parts, I will document in detail each and every step I took to reach a Page Rank 3 in three months.
It appears that antivirus companies have begun to sell their products on USB thumb drives. This is a great idea now that Netbooks are more common since many of them don’t have an optical drive. In fact, some antivirus companies such as Panda Security are making aNetbook specific versions of their antivirus products which are lighter on resources and come on a USB drive.
Another great thing about antivirus products coming on a USB drive is that the installation of the antivirus product (which usually takes ages) would happen much faster, since it is usually much faster than installing something from a CD.
Lastly, at the end of the day the customer is left with a USB drive which they could use for other purposes.
One of the biggest frustrations when installing Windows XP was making sure you had the correct CD for your license key. Windows Vista fixed this problem by having a universal CD that contained all versions (all 32bit versions or all 64bit versions, not both) and simply installed the version that the key matched.
Now that Windows 7 is out, Microsoft have reverted back to needing a separate disk for each version which is annoying for us computer technicians. However, the only difference between each DVD is a small 51 byte configuration file called ei.cfg which tells the installer what version disc it is. If you were to turn your DVD into an ISO, remove this ei.cfg file and write it back to a DVD, that DVD would become a Universal DVD.
ei.cfg Removal Utility will make this easy for you. Just create an ISO with your legitimate Windows 7 DVD, run this tool, choose the ISO and let it run. Once it has finished, just write the ISO back to a DVD again and you would only need to carry one 32bit version and one 64bit version to support any Windows 7 install onsite.
Of course, your client would still need to provide you with a working key for the Windows 7 install to work.
Have you ever had to backup a clients files to a CD or DVD? I think most of us have at some point and it can be tedious sorting out how many files will fit on a single disk, especially if the client has a lot of data.
This is where Capacity comes in to make the task of backing up to CD or DVD much easier. Capacity will automatically separate the files into different CD or DVD sized folders. It can even create these CD/DVD sized folders based on the file type if you want so you can keep all documents on one CD and pictures on another. There is also other sorting criteria such as by month created, by month modified and by file size.
Capacity is small and mostly portable (requires .NET 3.5) application with a donation-ware license. This means it is free to use but if you like it you should consider donating to the developer.
This application is definitely worth keeping on your onsite USB drive and the backup machine in your workshop.
The fifth and final beta version of Firefox 3.6 has been released by Mozilla. It comes with a few tweaks on how the company allows third party software to integrate into the browser.
The release notes of Mozilla states, “This version is also faster and more responsive than previous versions, and has been optimised to run on small device operating systems such as Windows CE and Maemo.”
“Add-ons installed with previous versions of Firefox may not yet have been updated by their authors to work with Firefox 3.6 beta,” it notes.
Windows 7’s processor cycles will go through the roof when opening corrupted media files according to an article at Softpedia.
Microsoft explains, “You have some corrupted .wav files in a folder on a computer that is running Windows 7 or Windows Server 2008 R2. When you open the folder, you encounter the following problems: The computer responds slowly. You cannot perform any other operations. You experience high CPU usage in the Explorer.exe process.”
Windows Media Player will stop to respond after opening corrupted .wav files and Wmplayer.exe will also generate high CPU usage according to the company.
Search Engine Optimization is clearly an art, a science, but this does not mean any webmaster can not perform basic SEO. There are several things a webmaster can do to achieve a decent level of visibility in the Search Engine Results Page. Many of these tasks are simple yet often overlooked. I will give you my Top 5 tips which I believe every Webmaster should perform when designing a site.
1. “Meta Tags” – Should be included on all pages, remember though these tags no longer carry the same value they used to in the early search days. Today’s search engines have evolved and now have robust algorithms which take many factors into consideration. The days of “keyword stuffing” will no longer yield in better SERP. Google has gone as far as openly stating that they in fact do not even use the Meta Keyword tag to weigh in on their decision. That being said I strongly believe that all sites should leverage the use of <meta tags> appropriately.
2. “Friendly URL’s”- Make sure all pages on your site have a friendly URL. http://www.domain.com/about-us.html try and avoid long URL’s with many parameter passed. Most search engines can handle URI’s with up to 2 parameters but after that you run the risk that your pages may not get indexed.
3. “Sitemaps” – Create a sitemaps.xml and sitemap.html publish them to the search engines via their submission links. I like to create both pages some people say you only need one.
4. “Robots.txt” - Create a robots.txt file tell the search engine where your sitemap.xml file is located. Most search engines will respect the robots.txt file. BE SURE that you validate the file before publishing, a bad entry could potentially block the crawler from crawling your site all together.
5. “Unique Content”- I personally think this is the biggest of them all, have unique content for your visitors, if you have a site that is just repeating another site what is the incentivefor people to come visit you. Creating easy to read unique content will go very far, think about it, if you have a site that is interesting more people are likley to link to your site, the more “Relevant & Reliable” back links you get the better chance you will rank higher in SERP. I will cover this in more detail on my Top 5 Off Page SEO Tips
Dinotopia artist James Gurney posted this video about a “change blindness” experiment. 75% of the participants didn’t notice that the experimenter who bent under a counter was replaced by a different person. Says Gurney: “Here’s proof that most of the time we look but don’t see.” I think Matisse said something to the effect that he didn’t really see things unless he was painting them.
There may be the beginnings of an explanation for something that we have all observed in many forms.
In Windows Vista and Windows 7 you can increase the performance of external hard drive by increasing its speed in just a few easy steps. This is possible because Windows Vista and Windows 7 operate external hard drives connected by USB differently than internal drives. By default, in Windows 7 and Vista, write catching is disabled so that you can safely remove the drive at almost any time. This works perfectly fine if you insert and remove your external hard drive very frequently; but if you have a large hard drive that you never disconnect from your computer write caching is still disabled which can decrease performance.
Step1: Click on the Windows start button, then right click on Computer and select Manage.
Step2: Click on Device Manager on the side menu.
Step3: Expand Disk Drives and select your external hard drive from the list.
Step4: Right click on the drive and select properties.
Step5: (Vista only) – on the Policies tab, select Optimize for performance
Step 6: (Vista only) Next, check enable write caching on the disk and enable advanced performance
Step 7: (Windows 7 only) Click on Enable write caching on the device.
Step 8: Press OK and Reboot the machine to enjoy the increased performance.
It has been a little less than a week and it appears that Google has decided to let the the site start playing with the rest of the internet. Over the past week the SERP for “Personalized Children’s Book” has shifted from 180’s to the 120’s that a pretty decent drop for a week.
This begs the question, Is this a result of being “released” from the Google age delay filter?, or just the mere fact that Google has index additional pages and is slowly building and calulating our Page Rank.
We have made a few changes to the site, minified the Javascript and CSS which I will talk about a later time, compressed images and added a few more backlinks. Today is exactly 2 months from the day the domain was registered so I am happy with the way things are shaping up so far.