SMJ Solutions

A Little SEO

November 24th, 2006

I have made a few changes to SMJSolutions.com over the last several days, mainly to tweak how the site is crawled search engines. I’m not terribly concerned about where my site shows up in Google, but it’s nice to get some traffic from people I don’t know so I know that my little corner of the web isn’t totally unnoticed.

My biggest hit so far has been the Fantasy Football Team Name Generator, which was ranked highly in MSN searches. The beginning of the fantasy football season brought lots of additional traffic. Other articles I’ve written get an occasional referral from various search engines, but nothing substantial.

So, I made a few changes to be a little more search engine friendly. For those not in the biz, they call it “Search Engine Optimization” or just SEO for short. Here are two simple SEO changes I made to SMJSolutions.com recently:

1. Changed the title structure
If you look at the top of your browser window, you will see that the title of this post reads, “A Little SEO — SMJ Solutions.” It used to read, “SMJ Solutions >> A Little SEO.” Not a huge difference, but the search engine gets the topic first hopefully increasing the magic score that search engines use to place pages. Also it should make it easier for users who may be browsing with multiple tabs (using Firefox).

Since I use Wordpress, making this change was really easy, even for a programming newbie like me. I simply added these lines of code in my header template, replacing the old title code:

< ?php wp_title(' ');?>
< ?php if(wp_title(' ', false)) { echo ' —'; }?>
< ?php bloginfo('name');?>

2. Submitted a Google sitemap
I installed the Google Sitemap plugin and ran it. It’s a very simple plugin that can generate a list of links for the Googlebot to pay attention to on your site. As a site owner, it’s nice to be able to tell the bot what is important and what is not. Plus, the Google Sitemap plugin will automatically “ping” Google to let them know that the site has changed every time I post a new article.

So far, I have been impressed with the new plugin. I noticed the Googlebot hit the generated sitemap.xml file the next time it came by SMJSolutions.com.

So, will it work? I don’t know yet. I doubt I will be on the Technorati Top 500 any time soon, but we’ll see if these small changes are noticed by the bots and whether any of my pages get more traffic because of the two simple SEO changes.

Entry Filed under: Web

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