RSSTesting Some REW Power – Flickr Overrated in Google
By Ryan Ward | February 23, 2009
I wrote a post the night before last about this years Keller Williams Family Reunion and I wanted to see how it would rank. Currently, it’s just below KW and Flickr, but, I think it will stick longer than the Flickr, but, I really want to just check and see how it’s going to stay up there.
I posted a little of my outline for classess as well as quite a bit more information and photos from Gary Keller’s presentation so it should have quite a bit more staying power than on photo and no content from Flickr. I think Google may be waiting flickr a little bit too high for it’s relevancy. Take a look at the two posts and let me know which one is better on its merit. Just Google “keller williams family reunion”. My post is on the realestatewebmasters domain and the one above me and just below kw is a flickr photo. Seriouly. That’s an algo that needs to be fixed in my opinion.
Category: Testing | No Comments »
Plugins to Help People and Search Engines For A WordPress Blog
By Ryan Ward | March 8, 2008
WordPress out of the box offers an excellent platform for search engines, but, there are a number of free plugins to improve upon the out-of-the-box platform. I use a number of plugins, but, there are others and some may be better than the ones I use so if you have any recommendations, please reply in the comments below. Here are the ones I use:
- All in one SEO pack- This plugin allows you to use the title of the post as the title displayed as well as allows you to add meta keywords and a unique meta description for each post.
- Dagon Sitemap Generator- This plugin allows you to create a page that will dynamically index your posts and pages automatically.
- Feedburner Feedsmith- You need this to install Feedburner.
- Google Sitemap Generator- This one generates an XML sitemap for Google.
- Subscribe to Comments – If you want people to communicate on your blog, this one notifies them that someone else has commented on a post that they have also commented on automatically.
- WP-Cache – Helps to get your blog and posts to load more quickly.
There are other really good plugins for WordPress and because it is open source, there are new ones coming out all the time. You may be interested in making your blog comments dofollow so that they pass link juice back to the commenter, but, that is up to you. just Google for one and there are a handful. There are pros and cons to doing this. You will get more commenters, but, you might get more spam as well.
One of the most important things that you can do does not involve a plugin at all. In tyour CMS, go to: Options then Permalinks. Select custom, specify below and enter: /%postname%/ and then click update permalink structure. What this will do is automatically make the title of each post the url, so for this post it you be: realestatetestblog.com/plugins-to-help-people-and-search-engines-for-a-wordpress-blog
O.K. So that is my list. Please feel free to add your recommendations…
Category: SEO | 2 Comments »
Internal Linking and Anchor Text
By Ryan Ward | March 4, 2008
I’ve been doing some testing recently to test the effects of different anchor text on internal linking and whether or not it affects SERPs for targeted keyword phrases. My Atlanta real estate website was created when I knew absolutely nothing about SEO. Admittedly, today I am still quite the amateur, but, I have been learning and testing and some of it has been very helpful.
Each internal link in my main navigation used to say “city real estate” and it made the navigation bar look cluttered, but, I was afraid to change it for fear of losing rankings. So I changed one link to only “city” and waited…and waited. After about a month (plenty of time for everything to be recached, my position did not change in the search engines.
I would never recommend something that I have not tested so before writing this post, I changed a few more of the navigation links and found the same result – no change in position in the search engines.
The one caveat here is that I am only speaking of results in Google.
So, if you were curious, but, afraid to make a change, I can tell you that my experiment and testing showed that it did not affect rankings. Perhaps Google is simply smart enough to see the internal linking and follow the title tags and metas along with offsite optimization to discern the page.
Category: Testing | 2 Comments »
