Serendipity Forums

I'm no master at search engine stuff and I'm not sure if it's even a problem but I thought I would ask anyways. I can't seem to find any of my content from my little site by using google or yahoo. I see in my log files that they constantly go to the site and they crawl the articles but when I do a search, I don't get anything back from my site. I do realize that my content is most likely far back in the results.

One example is that I tried searching for "Casino Royale Doesn't Suck" and there were only four results but none of them were from me.

I have google sitemaps intalled and it seems to be working. I have the meta plugin installed and I also have mod_rewrite usage turned on. My new and little site is http://invisiblespot.com for further examples.

Any help would be apreciated.

I had a good look at your blog, and the most obvious thing that stood out is the focus, or lack of. I hate being critical of others peoples blogs because they are a very personal extension of our personalities, but allow me to be honest from a pure SEO perspective. I beg you don't take offence.

In your blog title and description you don't give any reason why search engines or visitors should be there. "A whole lot of nothing" means as much to the googlebot as it does to me. Looking at your entries, they seem to be a bit all over the place, some are loosely tied into food and beverages but only by their association of being food or beverage. In SEO terms you're not providing enough info to the googlebot to make your site an authority on beer, fast food, or movies you've watched.

If you're not interested in SEO then a blog about everything is perfect, its as I mentioned earlier, an extension of your personality. And in these instances you need to promote your site differently. Forget about PR or search engine ranking, instead, add a bunch of photos of people drinking beer or eating fast food to flickr, go find similar blogs in technorati and make comments on their pages, use social bookmarks for your own posts and other peoples posts if they connect with your own. Traffic will start to climb reasonably quickly if you do this with the intention of increasing traffic.

On the other hand if SEO is your major driver, then focus your blog into 2-3 similar subject areas. By doing so, every post adds to your authority because certain keywords will come through in almost every post. Then go and find a bunch of other sites that are competing with you, or compliment your entries, and get some of them to link to you. Don't forget to get other blogger to link to your entries. The idea is to build your profile as an authority.

BTW, go a google search for 'hemingway template' or 'serendipity templates' and see where my site sits. Its just proof that if you follow the above guidelines you'll make significant progress.

Another BTW, you seem to be promoting http://www.invisiblespotsite.com, this is in your profile, but in fact this doesn't work, your site is actually on http://invisiblespotsite.com. Get your host to add the alias www to your url.

carl_galloway wrote:I had a good look at your blog, and the most obvious thing that stood out is the focus, or lack of. I hate being critical of others peoples blogs because they are a very personal extension of our personalities, but allow me to be honest from a pure SEO perspective. I beg you don't take offence.

In your blog title and description you don't give any reason why search engines or visitors should be there. "A whole lot of nothing" means as much to the googlebot as it does to me. Looking at your entries, they seem to be a bit all over the place, some are loosely tied into food and beverages but only by their association of being food or beverage. In SEO terms you're not providing enough info to the googlebot to make your site an authority on beer, fast food, or movies you've watched.

If you're not interested in SEO then a blog about everything is perfect, its as I mentioned earlier, an extension of your personality. And in these instances you need to promote your site differently. Forget about PR or search engine ranking, instead, add a bunch of photos of people drinking beer or eating fast food to flickr, go find similar blogs in technorati and make comments on their pages, use social bookmarks for your own posts and other peoples posts if they connect with your own. Traffic will start to climb reasonably quickly if you do this with the intention of increasing traffic.

On the other hand if SEO is your major driver, then focus your blog into 2-3 similar subject areas. By doing so, every post adds to your authority because certain keywords will come through in almost every post. Then go and find a bunch of other sites that are competing with you, or compliment your entries, and get some of them to link to you. Don't forget to get other blogger to link to your entries. The idea is to build your profile as an authority.

BTW, go a google search for 'hemingway template' or 'serendipity templates' and see where my site sits. Its just proof that if you follow the above guidelines you'll make significant progress.

Thanks for your replay. It helps a lot. I wasn't looking at it from an SEO point of view. I just wanted to make sure I had everything working from the technical side. I know I have a lot of work to do and my site has no focus but I figured the more content I put out, I'll figure out what focus I want to have.

mrblah wrote:I know I have a lot of work to do and my site has no focus but I figured the more content I put out, I'll figure out what focus I want to have.

I think that is actually a really good way of looking at it (and it is generally what I have done, though my blog is still pretty much about whatever I think is interesting). I am not a SEO guru though.

From a technical standpoint, I don't see anything wrong with your blog. You are using pretty urls (which search engines like) and you have content. I think Carl's idea about getting "www" working in DNS is a good idea (and it looks like you have gotten that done already).

That is about all you can do for now. The next step is to probably to start looking at sites like technorati to get your site some coverage, and to try to develop inbound links (which search engines really like). The easiest way to get inbound links is to be part of a community (which goes back to Carl's discussion of focus), but it isn't the only way.

If you just keep posting search engines should pick up your content... Then you can join in the grand old tradition of posting what searches have brought visitors to your site... *grin*

Other folks may have more ideas of what you could do, but I think you will see more results in search engines as you go on. (If not, you can take a look at your logs and see exactly what content they are looking at and see if there are any problems with it, specifically.)

Hey there, content is very much king, without it the search engines just won't bother. My point about focus is aimed at the SEO viewpoint, not just normal blogging. Matthew is entirely correct in what he says, however that approach is fairly hit and miss, kinda like firing a shotgun in the general direction of the target and hoping all the shot balls will hit the bull's eye.

In SEO it doesn't work like that. The reason I made the point I did was that your question is why aren't you listed if there are only four indexed pages. Logic says you should be listed as number five if the search engines are paying attention. But this is where focus comes in, you see your site isn't an authority in the area so the Googlebot doesn't place you in the rankings. In point of fact, I would imagine there are literally tens of thousands of sites in the Google index that mention the film, some of them only loosely, others in more detail than your entry, but none of them are listed in the results because none of them are authority sites.

If you do want to turn your blog into an authority you need to be mainly concerned with a limited number of topics, sure you can add the odd entry from outside your specialty just don't do it too often until you know your site is an authority. To become an authority you need a couple of other authority sites to link to you. Not just general links to your homepage, but deep into your entries to a page that is fairly obviously about the topic that the other authority site is linking from. You also need to build your own community etc, and I know that this isn't really what you're asking about.

If you are interested in keeping this discussion going from an SEO perspective then feel free, otherwise, looking at your content I really recommend going the flickr/technorati/social bookmarking route. Considering your existing content you'll have far greater success in building traffic going down this road.

Cheers

Carl

carl_galloway wrote:H
If you are interested in keeping this discussion going from an SEO perspective then feel free, otherwise, looking at your content I really recommend going the flickr/technorati/social bookmarking route. Considering your existing content you'll have far greater success in building traffic going down this road.

Cheers

Carl

I think I'll stay away from the SEO perspective for now. I've actually added my site to technorati a few weeks ago and have noticed some visits because of that. I'll look more into the social bookmarking. I was using the plugin for that but it was killing my page load time.

Hurstel