Hit the Limit

I want to build up my main blog Page Rank. So I am developing a lot of other blogs, and putting free content online. Got most of the blogs started. Now I am creating the main web pages for the content I want to post. Tried creating some Google accounts so I can use a different one for each web site.

At first I was generating my web sites slowly. But each time I generate a site, I want to link the pages to all my other sites. This should be a good thing. One problem - I need to create the sites first to get their URLs. This is where I ran into a problem. Tried to create a bunch of new Google accounts today. This is what I got.

Account Creation Failed
We were unable to create your new Gmail account. We apologize for the inconvenience. Please click here to access more information from the Gmail Help Center.

So I clicked on the link to get more information. Brings me to a stock Google information page. Apparently they are fighting spammers. So if you try to create a lot of accounts at the same time from the same location, you get blocked. I hope this resets after a day or so. Google did recommend I look into their "Google Apps" for bulk account creation. But unlike most of Google's services, I don't think Google Apps is free.

That's OK. Maybe its time to try out other free web hosting sites.

Generating Links

When it gets down to it, inbound links to your site should give you better page rank. I have read about a number of strategies to generate a lot of these links. One long term strategy I have been loosely following is to build up a number of related blogs. I plan to cross link all of these, and have them all link to a master blog that I want to come out high on the Google SERP.

The problem with my long term strategy is that it requires a lot of work. And there is no guaranteed payoff in the end. It does have a benefit in that, when I write blog entries, it is definitely unique content. I just wanted to accelerate the process a little bit.

So my latest idea is to borrow some free content, and just make a web site that links to my existing start up blogs. This too takes some work. But it can be completed in days instead of many months. I had read about this technique before but just passed it over. Now I am putting it into practice. Cutting and pasting existing text is a lot faster than writing next text. And I am getting a lot of pages and links to my blogs. So far I think I doubled the number of inbound links this weekend.

The only thing I want to be careful about is not to trigger any suspicion with the number of inbound links growing too quickly. On the flip side, it would be nice if I could automate this somehow. I am a programmer. So that might be the next step.

Search Engine Result Pages

My first blog I ever created was one on Software Maintenance. So far I have not performed any explicit SEO on it. And I have found that I am nowhere to be found on Google's result pages when searching for "Software Maintenance". This seems a bit strange. I thought these factors would have helped me out:

• I have a number of heading tags
• My pages are indexed by Google
• There are a number of inbound links to my blog
• I got a full RSS feed available

The plan was to get some good content in the blog over the long haul and hope people would come. But I wanted to also be high up in the Google SERPs (for both more traffic and bragging rights). I do know I have the following deficiencies:

• Lack of keywords/descriptions for posts
• No meta keywords
• I got a lot of images but no alt tags
• The blog is relatively new (2+ months)
• The domain is new as well
• No links from del.icio.us or Digg

Another painful fact is that Technorati ranks my blog at number 4 million or so. Ouch. Perhaps I should amend my plan to do some SEO along the way as I build up content for my blog. To also ensure I do not give up hope, I sometimes do Google search for a combination of my 4 best keywords for my site. Then I see my blog in the 1st SERP from Google. But that is not going to get my any visitors. Time to get to work.,

Studying SEO

You read a lot of search engine optimization. Apparently there are all kinds of tricks to help you get to the top of the search engine queries. I am not sure what to make of all this. On the surface you would hope that you could tweak your site to your advantage. Then again, there seems to be a lot of hype in this area as well.

I am experimenting with a number of different blogs. And I also have a few web sites that I have built. So far I have not done any explicit SEO on these. But I do have an overall game plan to at least improve my search engine ranking. I would also love to get a high Google page ranking. I am willing to take the time to see whether there is a payoff in the end.

So come with my as I study the black art known as Search Engine Optimization. Yours truly. The SEO Proconsul.