Luke’s $10k A Week Blog

I’ve been educating myself (slowly but surely) on how to get more traffic on my blog — or any site for that matter. One of the most important things of course is to get Google to turn my pages up first on a search. The key factor in this is Page Rank.

I figured out how to give away page rank to valued readers who post comments. However, there are hazzards to giving away links indiscriminately. Whenever you link from one page to another, you automatically reduce the value of the one and increase the value of the other, to some degree.

It’s essential to have some pages on your site with relatively high PR, and other pages that you don’t care as much about. Particularly when you are first starting out, and don’t have super high PR on any of them — you want there to be at least some chance of people finding your site. It’s a matter of specialization: some pages exist to be found, others to provide content of a specific nature.

Category pages and the main index page are especially important. A search for “10kLuke” on Google turns up productivity category near the top, as well as the list of posts written by me. Google likes lists of posts that are related somehow. It is also particularly sensitive to things written in url lines, such as folder names and filenames — so the “pretty” permalink structure is important.

One thing you don’t want to do is get your pages classified Supplemental Results. This is a euphemism for junk web sites that Google doesn’t want to worry about. These are pages that contain duplicate content, are not linked to by anyone, or have no valuable content whatsoever. If your site has any of these traits, they need to be eradicated.

I feel much more confident about my ability to perform effective SEO as I continue to learn more about how this stuff works.

Related posts:

1. SEO and blogging
2. Three nice plugins to have
3. My goals
4. What is a Blog?
5. Getting Adsense to work…

This entry was posted on Thursday, March 13th, 2008 at 8:00 am and is filed under blogging, business, wordpress. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.