My blog in this form is now a little bit over 40 hours old and I already made several mistakes with regards to our friends: the search engines. There are several good articles and presentations that I would recommend for reading: try this, this and this. So here are some of the basic rules you should follow when creating a blog:

1. Keep the link to the articles simple and nice. With Wordpress this is called Permalink and you can choose different formats. There is only one format that really makes sense: /%postname%/ This is just the title of your post (no dates, categories etc. needed). Important: Once your blog has been online for a certain while never change the link format again!
2. Get your titles optimized! The standard titles of most blogs are something like “My new blog >> Article title”. This is just not good when looking at your article as the result of a search request on Google or some other search engine. If you are using Wordpress you can use this plugin to change the way titles are presented and even specify unique titles for each blog entry.
3. Change the main title of your blog… “Tobman’s Blog” doesn’t tell Googlebot or other spiders much about the content to expect. When you go to my homepage and have a look at the title you will see that I have changed it in order to more clear on what to expect on this blog. You can use the plugin mentioned above for this task as well.
4. Get a Sitemap and submit it to Google! I used this plugin to create an XML sitemap and also to automatically submit the sitemap to Google and MSN.

As a sidenote: I have not followed those rule from the beginning - unfortunately. I thought to have content first is more important and then do the search engine optimization. Well, I would say this was a mistake, as I had to change the paths to my blog entries and this will definitely lead to some 404 errors…

Another thing that really annoyed me was the fact that I had linked from one of my blog entries to some others several times - all those links were broken after changing the permalink layout of course. So I was wondering - is there a better way to link within blog entries? Well, no not really. As described in the docs you can either use peramlinks or linking to the id of the blog entries. When you link to the id’s it does not matter when the permalinks change, but it’s not very pretty:

<a href="index.php?p=123">Post Title</a>

And also you have to look up the id number of the post… So basically I would suggest sticking to permalinks and just not changing them once their structure is set! But if anyone knows a more elegant solution (e.g. a plugin) I’d be really interested to know!

Blogging, Search Engine Optimization Permalink, Search engine optimization, WordPress

So, I wrote just a couple of minutes ago that it might not be such a bad idea to blog my entire project and give regular updates. This actually seems to be true!

This article (mind the English) has some interesting points:

• It should take about 3 months to increase a page rank by 3 points
• Blogging is a good way to increase the page rank
• Your blog should be integrated in your main site (to share the Page Rank)

I’m really curious whether it will be possible to increase page ranks of my sites by 3 points within the next couple of months… but as this sounds like a nice goal, I’ll set it anyway! So… django PR 6, all others PR 3!

Search Engine Optimization PageRank, Search engine optimization

It’s time for a new web project! This domain used to be my personal website for quite some time, then some Domaingrabber bought it, fortunately never sold it and I bought it back. Then this domain became my personal blog for my foreign exchange semester (Facebook was not popular back then…). Recently this domain hosted a funny project of mine: Project 100%. The goal was to make 100% return on investment with stock trading… per month that is.

The project didn’t quite work out (well partly due to the financial crises this year) and it became quiet about this site. That’s about to change! It’s time for Project WebMoney. This is deal:

I currently own four domains where I have direct control over the content. That is (in order of appearance on the web):

• tobman.com (since 1998)
• django.at (since 2001)
• videopodcast.tv (since 2005)
• advertbreak.com (since 2007)

Those domains basically do one thing… they cost me money! Just this week I received another bill for advertbreak.com and I thought: this is going nowhere. As I’m currently working on a new project (vooch) I had this brilliant idea today: why not try to actually make something of those websites and create some heavy traffic which then should bring 1.) traffic useable for vooch and 2.) money through Google AdWords.

Project WebMoney was born. My intention is to create content for those domains mentioned above during the next months and try to dramatically increase the traffic they get. This project will be documented via this blog.

Project WebMoney adwords, money, page rank, Search engine optimization