Live Truly

My friend sent me this link to Ten Google Optimizations, which he got off of del.icio.us. I thought I had most of these covered, but upon further inspection, it’s a lot more hardcore. Very useful suggestions. Here are the summaries and surprises:

1. Make Google Sitemaps - “…You need to create separate sitemaps on each subdirectory, folder you have. Prioritize your root directory first. To be effective you need to have at least 100 .htm files on your root directory….”

2. Add all your content to google.com/ig/ (top left). (This let me realize the value of rss buttons and their lack on the current layout. This is also a really cool tool kind of like delicious.)

3. Add your website address (google.com/addurl/). (I almost forgot this one!)

4. Add scribbles and testimonials for your friends on orkut, mentioning your url one liner with your posts. (This one sounds a bit spammish to me)

5. Add your url to your signature, profile, and on topic emails in your gmail account. Google scans emails, so it my help ratings. (I never thought about this one. It better only be in on topic emails)

6. Start a blog and post your url’s on a Blogger, in your profile, entries, and all. Try to have it near the comment box. (I thought engines could detect this kind of stuff. I understand that blogger is nice since Google owns it now)

7. Add your xml content to Yahoo. If a big site like Yahoo has you, Google likes that too. Add it to Yahoo profile and to 360.yahoo.com. (This is so cool. Never knew about 360. dmoz might be worth a try too)

8. Search for “google” and network with the webmasters. Learn your things first and offer good questions and conversations. Arrange link exchanges where appropriate. (I like this one as long as the exchanges are on relevant topics)

9. Use googlegroups to make lists promoting subjects relevant to your site. (Perfect if you have real updates, not for spam)

10. List your site on froogle.com. If you sell products, have your own ecommerce payment system, or use a third party merchant account provider. (I wonder if Amazon Associates counts?)

For the full article check out www.discussbiz.com/ftopic144.php. Even without optimizing, many of the services mentioned are simply worth using. 360 seems so clean, as is google’s ig. There’s also a wordpress Google Sitemaps plugin.

After trying to think of a way to list the categories in the archives using list_cats, which has an insane amount of display options, an far easier idea came into my head. I left the descriptions for search and archive pages blank for now and simply added the keywords to the static pages. Oh dear, that’s the solution for descriptions as well. Haha, two hours of reading documentation and an unrelated solution that took than less than a minute to implement.

For the specific categories, again I tried playing with the plugin and the various options, but in the end I decided the easiest thing to do would be to simply list the category descriptions in the keywords. Grammar words like ‘and’ or ‘the’ may take weaken my word list, but it should add relevance and at visibility until I figure out a better way.

Here’s the new code on startingrealestate.com:

<meta name="keywords" content="<?php if (is_home()) {echo 'real estate blog training lessons';} elseif (is_category()) {echo category_description();} else {echo get_the_keywords('',' ','','');} ?>" />

Alright, have to run. This optimization business is becoming addictive.

This morning (I got up an hour ago, still jetlagged), I added categories to my Starting Real Estate Blog. I’m still not sure to the best way to break things down, as cognitive science philosophy and linguistics drilled us, “Categories don’t contain items, rather items have properties that describe them.” There are no essences. Sorry Aristotle. It would be nice to get some advice about label though. There’s a General one that contains all the posts. I’m still debating whether to get rid of that one. So far I have three labels: Purpose, Advice, and Education. Because right now most of the advice is about education, the two overlap a lot, just like they do in life. I hope search engines don’t get upset that the category pages overlap a lot. Does anyone have tips on this topic?

Looking at the ads on a course materials post, none of them seemed very relevant, they were on books and courses, but on completely different topics. The description was “my courses and books” and the keywords are “courses books real estate principles practice”. Just to check, I added “Real Estate” to the description (”My Real Estate courses and books”). Bam! Immediately all the ads grew in relevance, all were about Real Estate exams and courses. I know changing the title to include those words will have an even greater effec, but when it comes to content, I’d rather keep things clean.

Update: Simply changing the order of the keywords and description on this post: moving “niche blog”, “meta description”, and “ads” to the front and “category label” to the back changed the ads from office supplies to webpage optimizations on this post. I love how you can see results right away.

I spent the evening looking for the perfect theme for the Starting Real Estate Blog and found this guy: ProBlogger Clean Theme by Tim Yang. It took a bit longer than it should have because I missed the customisations section on the support page. Once I found that, installation was a snap. I love how it has so many features built in. The RSS buttons are especially nice, as is the built-in Adsense support and protection.

For the meta tags, I added Jerome’s Keywords Plugin and Kaf’s Head Meta Description plugins. Because the clean theme separates all the meta information into a separate php file (as it should) I used the is_home() conditionals to know which data to display. For Kaf’s plugin I had to add wp_head() into one of the lines in the header file.

<meta name="keywords" content="<php if (is_home()) {echo 'real estate blog training lessons';} else {echo get_the_keywords('',' ','','');} ?>" />
<?php wp_head(); /*for head meta description plugin*/ ?>

I also decided to give Site Meter a chance, because so many top bloggers had it on their sites. I’ve been using StatCounter here and on other projects and haven’t had a problem, but thought it’d be worth trying something new if so many top bloggers used it.

I’ll need to add Google Sitemaps as soon as I get a few more posts up. I’d like to add a nicer banner to the top and cover the keyword cases for archives and search, but seeing that it’s past five right now, I better head to bed. Optimization homework for tomorrow. Happy holidays.

Last night I registered the domain and started writing the first few articles as dreamhost (yes that’s my reference link) set everything up. It only took about half an hour before I could see the site and I used their one-click install to set up wordpress. Piece of cake. I went to bed happy knowing that I just made the first steps, and did so with no problems.

This morning I wanted to add some stat measures and change the layout a bit, and to my horror, the host couldn’t be found. Panic.

Did someone attack the site? Did it get banned for some strange reason? I went into the dreamhost panel and everything seemed legit. I checked the server status and again things seem ok. Then I reread the email from the registration and it said:

Hello,

Your registration of … has been processed.
It will probably take 1-3 days for your domain to begin to work as the new dns information propagates across the Internet!

“1-3 days” - Perhaps there’s no need to worry yet. I submitted a report just in case, but I guess I can still take a shower and eat and attend to other business while everything gets set up. There’s nothing else I can do there anyway.

Update: Everything was back up within two hours.

Found on del.icio.us, an fantastic article on Blogging from ProBlogger: 18 Lessons I’ve Learnt about Blogging. I have a lot to learn from it and will try to use it on the site I’m about to launch. Here’s a breakdown of the rules, although I’d really recommend reading the article’s in-depth explanations.

1. Be Lucky - “The key I’ve found with luck is to run with it and to make every lucky instance last as long as possible. So when you strike it lucky enjoy it but also ask yourself ‘how can I capitalise on my good fortune?’”
2. Work Hard - “Work alone is definitely NOT everything (I’ve seen many hard working bloggers who have not had success) but it is one element that I think is essential.”
3. Use the Power of Exponential Growth
4. Differentiate Yourself
5. Provide Value
6. Target a Niche (Keep a blog focused and don’t spread yourself too thin (8) content-wise)
7. Diversify (At least try a few things before throwing all your energy toward a single one.)
8. Don’t Spread Self too Thin — Absolutely! It’s better to do one thing really really well than a whole bunch of things at a mediocre level
9. Have a Backup Plan (Don’t depend on blogging alone)
10. Be Light on Your Feet (Opportunities come and go)
11. Relationships are Key — Yes!
12. Establish Boundaries
13. Don’t read your Own Press
14. Beware of Hype
15. Get a Life (Enjoy what you do, but enjoy the rest of life too)
16. Make Mistakes — Very important one! I couldn’t agree more
17. Be Yourself
18. There are No Rules

I feel many of these rules apply not only to blogs but to all business, and all of life in general. These rules could apply to relationships very easily as well. Target a niche? Yes, find something that special someone really likes.

If you just look at the rules, perhaps they can be simplified to:

• take advantage of opportunities
• get focused
• help others
• stay true

But these eighteen rules are perfect in the way they’re specific enough to directly apply and yet general enough to apply to all sorts of situations.