SSE to the Top of the SERPs

I have been actively monitoring how well my Windows Store app page was doing for searches of Software Schedule Estimator. Yesterday I was sad to see my page fall off from page 1 of the Google search results. Today I was elated to find that I climbed to the top of the SERPS. Yes, I am organic search result position number one. The only items ahead of me are paid search.

Not sure what catapalted me up to the top. But who cares? I must be doing something right. Got to keep up the good work. I am tracking the daily work I do on this job. Hopefully that will motivate me to great deeds.

If you want to know what my Software Schedule Estimator app does, check out my product page. Sure it needs a little work in the content department. However I think I have a good start. Shout out to mom, where you may be.

Penalized

Be careful implemting your SEO techniques. Google is on the lookout to punish those that try to game the system. Sometimes the best advice is just to create content that users want to see. Then you will probably not get any beat downs from Google.

Some businesses are learning this lesson the hard way. Pay some black hats to move you up in the SERPs. Then Google changes the rules and your site is nowhere to be found. Better test the waters with a throwaway site first.

Goodbye SEOMoz?

Just heard that SEOMoz is rebranding itself as just plain Moz. WTF? Seems like taking a risk. Also doesn't Moz feel like a nickname for Mozilla? Sure I get that you don't want to be lumped in with other lackey companies that foolishly put SEO in their title and domain. But SEOMoz should be considered an exception.

Impact of Links

Seems like it used to be that you could increase the number of inbound links to your site and get some juice. Well Google has become more and more wise about that. These days some links will not count toward your site's authority. And extra links might even count against you. So webmasters beware.

Link exchanging used to be a cool trend. It did not seem to black hat. However now reciprocal links just cancel each other out. That is, unless you can get a swap from a site with more authority. I think that might just benefit you a little.

The more important thing to look out for is links from a scammy source. You can't just buy up a domain and point a bunch of links to you. You have to consider the history of that new domain. Was it a link farm before? Don't get associated with it. It may just bring you down.

Heheh. I can think of some black hat tricks to help you out. You could get ahold of a lot of these scammy sites. Then you could bulk link from them to your competitors. When they get penalized, you could rise up. Sounds pretty evil. I like it.

Links and Keywords

I checked out an SEO guide and heard more of the same I always knew. But there were a few tricks I had not thought about. Sure you need links to your page. You should not have too many links out of your page. The links to you should be static text ones. The real light was shed on the use of keywords.

Put your keyword in your header. Check. Also put keywords in your H1 tag. Okay. You sould also have your keywords appear in the body of your text three times. Bamm. Keyword should be bold. Oh snap. Had not thought much about that.

Final new idea I read was that your titles should not be too long.

SEO Tuneup

SEO is an ongoing process. You need to keep up with your site to remain on top of the search results. One of the main jobs is to find the pages on your site that return errors. Find those pages with broken links and correct them.

You should also get rid of duplicate info on your site. That means duplicated across your site, and duplicated by others. Make sure your pages are relevant to your site's keywords. A quick way to do that is to put tag clouds on all your pages. Then you can see if they are relevant.

Good luck.

Blogging Tips

I just finished skimming a book about Google Blogger. Much of the book focused on how to get your blog read. These were good old fashioned SEO practices I will share with you now.

Note that text link ads might actually drop your Google page rank. Ouch. I got to make that money. But I did not know it would push me lower in the SERPS.

You should put keywords in your title. Add keywords to the first couple sentences of your blog post. Keywords should be part of your URLs and image names. Tags should contain your keywords.

Use keywords in your links, as well as around your links. Links within your blog help a little bit. Frequent posting is required. Comment on other blogs to get people to come to your own.