It always amazes me how much time and effort that people will put in to SEO tricks and tactics, how they swear that they know Google will ‘see’ this or ‘know’ that based on some rumour of a overheard bit of gossip written by a black hat SEO guru. Lol, what is a SEO guru anyway?

It’s an emperors new clothes designer that’s what! If someone tells you that they know what the Google algorithm wants then they are feeding you a line of BS because no one knows and if they did, Google would change it so it would be old news very quickly.

Is all SEO hopeless or even real?

Of course not! there are things that you can do that are known as ‘best practices’ or more commonly known as, ‘common sense’ and you can find out about them from Google itself from their webmaster pages and blog.

A good friend of mine who has successfully got his clients to the number one position on Google for their chosen terms recently wrote an interesting article on SEO and is it real?. He spends his life on and around Google search and even he says that you can try too hard.

The human factor

I recently had emails go to and fro with a colleague and she was quoting another SEO guy who said to bold this term and only do it once and how that is how the Google algorithm ‘knows’ what the article is about.

That makes me lol! Google algorithm ‘knows’ nothing! it can’t ‘see’ anything either, it can only trawl text and html source. It doesn’t look at images, it only stores what they’re name is and whether or not it has a caption and what that caption is.

Here’s a little experiment I want to try to prove that last paragraph..

My blog is 2 months old today and I woke up this morning to see a Google pagerank of 5 applying to this site!

This is the first site I have built that didn’t have the whole PR thing predominant in it’s construction, I just wanted to have some fun for a change and along with my wordpress plugins and prolific commenting, I get a PR of 5 and an Alexa rank up to 223,600.

In that time, my online counter says over 16000 unique visitors came here, my page hits on my other stats says an awful lot more but 16000 is a good enough number to say!

The busiest day always seems to be Tuesday and a peak of traffic comes in at around 4 o’clock in the afternoon (UK time), Stumbleupon has been the biggest traffic source with the weblog tools collection site and the official WordPress plugins page for CommentLuv coming in second and third.

Google itself has only accounted for about 1000 of the entire hits, it’ll be interesting to see if those go up now it’s a PR 5 here.

I haven’t even got any monetization going on here, apart from a small link in the sidebar to a pre-release affiliate program, I may go the monetization route later in the year. First, I want a professional redesign of this place. More 2.0 colour scheme and a rounded corner look and a little bit of tidying up on the sidebar and then I’ll start thinking about some flyby advertising to see if can get my PR down a little

Sooo, who’s up for a free paid review? lol

I had an excellent response to my contest with lots of people entering.
Everyone who entered made a nice post about the contest and mentioned my wordpress plugins which was excellent. I’ll post stats and geekery once Google analytics has updated it’s records to show up until Wednesdays visitors.

I did specify that the post they made needed to be at least 100 words, this was to cover the case of someone just slipping in a link within a massive post of other contests (which only happened once).

I did ask for an email from the entrant to say they entered but I think my spam monitor killed some of them (grr), but I kept a list of entrants from all the trackbacks, pingbacks, comments and emails over the past 3 weeks. If you entered but you are not listed here, sorry about that, please don’t take offense! and please let me know before the closing date!

Entrants:

Contest Beat: http://www.contestbeat.com/
The Link Bait: http://www.thelinkbait.com/
My Blog Contest: http://myblogcontest.com/
Lalla-Mira: http://www.lalla-mira.com/

http://makanon.com

Local Girl: http://islandreview.blogspot.com
Contester: http://contester.wordpress.com/

http://contestblogcat.com

http://j-ne.ws

Angela: http://www.mommybytes.com

http://www.thekingspeaks.com

Nate: http://www.avgjoeblogger.com

http://myblogcontests.com

http://adsensetrack.blogspot.com/

Johnathan Long: http://cmanscognitivecontent.blogspot.com/
Mark: http://youcube.us
Anastasia: http://mediamafia.org

http://footieblog.co.uk/

http://blogodise.blogspot.com

http://thedragonproject.blogspot.com

these are entrants that didn’t match the minimum amount of words but I let in anyway because the post they made covered everything else..

http://contest.lr2.com

LauraWilliamsMusings: LauraWilliamsMusings.blogspot.com

http://blog-contests.net

Thien Lee: http://www.Thienlee.com

http://theprizeblog.com

http://www.mrprizes.com

http://nkhan.jwmediabox.com/blog/

http://internetducttape.com

Now, to choose the winner…. I think the fairest way will be to use the UK lottery Wednesday draw to select the winner, all the entrants that qualified will get 2 numbers and the others will get 1 number from a list of 48 (2 x 20 qualified and 1 x 8 others = 48). Whoever matches the bonus ball with their number wins the prize! (you can see the lottery results at my VWD site or see them on the right toolbar on this blog)

There are only 49 numbers on the UK lottery so if the bonus happens to be number 49, we’ll use the first drawn number to determine the winner.

If anyone else enters before midnight Tuesday 9th October or I missed someone off the list then I’ll have to go with the old faithful of picking a name out of a virtual hat but, having the winner chosen by something I don’t control is fairer I think (and more exciting!)

There’s still a few hours left before the contest closes so feel free to make your entry today (and don’t worry about putting me to the trouble of making a randomizer script to choose the winner!)

I would like to extend my thanks to everyone that entered, there were some great posts made about the contest and my plugins, and it certainly upped my Technorati ranking, traffic, incoming links and plugin downloads. I smell some more contests coming but maybe with a little bit more interaction.. watch this space!

Here is a list of plugins that I have used on my old blog and couldn’t live without when I moved to FiddyP.

• SH-autolink
  An excellent plugin that can make keywords automatically link to whatever you want. Just install and avtivate. Go to Manage/Sh-autolink and you can add a word and it’s corresponding link, you can also choose to open link in the same window, new window, parent frame or top frame. I use it all the time for words like uvme or elottery or vwd.
  I like the fact that the html for the links isn’t saved with the post so if you want to change where a particular word links to, you can and anywhere that word is in your posts it will link to the new url
• Deans Permalinks Migration Plugin
  This saved my life, I had my permalinks set to the old ?cat= and I wanted to change them to a more search engine friendly version without ruining the old links and this did the job, it makes the old links report a 301 page moved and the search engines will index the new one and you don’t lose any page rank and all the old links still work.
• Feedburner Feedsmith
  Makes all your feeds point to your feedburner feed so you can track the amount of subscribers and also see what posts they clicked through to and more. It makes it much easier for surfers to subscribe by providing links to all the major feed subscription services like google reader and yahoo.
• Instant Upgrade
  I hated updating WordPress, there were too many chances of overwriting the wrong files. Fortunately, this plugin takes care of all that for you. It’s reported to work with the 2.3 upgrade too.
• Popularity Contest
  This assigns scores to your posts based on comments, pingbacks, permalink views and more. You can also display the top posts in your sidebar. Nice to have the most viewed posts up for display to new visitors.
• Related Posts
  I’ve found myself clicking on related post links when I have clicked through to a single post on someones blog so I installed the plugin here and the related posts links have been getting clicked, especially on a single post that’s getting a lot of hits from Stumbleupon. It may take a few posts before it starts getting better at relating the content but it works quite well.
• Samsarin PHP widget
  An easy peasy way to add php scripts to your widget enabled blog, just past your script in the widget options and drag it to the sidebar to have it execute along with the wordpress core php on the server side. Good if you use widgets on your sidebar and have a plugin that requires you to edit the sidebar template with the plugins procedure name.
• IG:Syntax Hiliter
  Probably the best plugin for showing source code on your blog, it can do html, php, javascript, perl and much more. Very easy to use, the way to add buttons to the post page isn’t really needed if you only show one type of language, just use the [] [/]tags with the language name to enclose the code.
• Live
  Adds a really nice AJAX real time stats page to your admin pages. Shows visits, referers and comment entry.
• Top Commentators
  Encourage people to make more than one visit and comment, reward them for joining the discussion with a list of top commentators on your sidebar.
• Subscribe to Comments
  An easy way to allow surfers to subscribe to the comments of the post that they comment on.
• WP-Online Counter
  Shows how many visitors on your site at one time and keeps a total of unique visitors over time.
• WP AJAX edit comments
  How many times have you made a comment on someones blog and noticed a typo after you submitted? lol, it happens to me all the time. This plugin allows your commenters a few minutes to edit their comment.
• DoFollow
  Allows the links to your commenters sites to be followed by search engines, another nice incentive for people to join in the discussion of your blog.
• SpamKarma 2
  A lot of people use Akismet to combat comment spam but I have found SK2 to be a much better and easier experience. I very rarely have to moderate a comment or flag one as spam and on my old PR5 blog, it caught dozens a day and had a fantastic success rate on authorizing legitimate comments through all the mess of viagras and elargment spam.
• CommentLuv
  A nice way to spread some lurv to the readers who comment by adding a titled link to their last blog post. Like BlogRush but for people who you know, why link to strangers blogs with a widget when you can reward your commenters and provide links to people that are in your community?
  I made this one! I’m not a pro PHP coder and this isn’t at a full 1.0 release but it seems to work nicely on the blogs that I’ve seen it on and I’m going to keep developing this as my blog progresses.

Phew! and that’s not all of them, just the ones that I have found to be useful and above all, easy to install and use. Props to all the coders who provide the plugins that WordPress is famous for.

I had my first SURGE of stumbleupon traffic and managed to capture the event on Camtasia!

I think I only got the tail end of it but it lasted for a nice while, it even came back the next day although at a reduced rate, stats and geekery below the video.

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I’m guilty of giving some of my own posts a thumbs up now and then to start a trickle of Stumbleupon traffic to an article I have written or seen elsewhere such as the Hide a rar file in a jpeg. I saw it on a blog completely obliterated with adsense blocks so I decided to reprint it here in a cleaner-easier-to-read way. It got some traffic and upped my feed subscriber count but, the traffic wasn’t huge, just a few hits each hour, but still nice to have some new readers to my new blog

Then, I saw a small side article in a daily newspaper (yes, there is news available outside the internet!) about how Tussauds in London was due to show it’s first ever computer game character, it looked like a great story and I did a bit of research on Google for “Tussauds” ,”London” and “master chief”.

There were plenty of articles but none that mentioned London. Great!, there was one page that I found about Master Chief being in the Las Vegas version of Tussauds, it had some good information and some really great pics so I thought I would snag the pics, do some Photoshopping on it to give them a London edge and “make me an article” for here.

I was quite pleased with the Master chief is coming to London and gave it a thumbs up on my work browser and finished off for the day and went home content with writing a new article that didn’t suck and wasn’t a copy and paste of some content found elsewhere.

When I got back home, I went to my Live page (a plugin [link] that displays hits to your site in realtime) in my WordPress dashboard to see what was going on at FiddyP and I was amazed!, the video above is the tail end of what I saw.

These are the load times in the middle of the spike..

So, even with 141 at a time coming in, the server was still able to send the page in less than 5 seconds to most of the world.

I think the difference with this self stumble was that it was for a unique article and a few people gave it a thumbs up one after the other, I think that if you can get a few thumbs up as soon as the submitted page goes into circulation then you get a sort of exponential increase which could lead to another one and so on. As long as you keep getting thumbs up, the traffic will keep coming.

The hits started again the next day..

Some google stats..
One of the (many) good things about Google analytics is the way you can refine the stats so you can see all the individual stats for a particular referrer or page, here’s what was found just for the stumbleupon visitors

Not bad, average of 2 pages per visit means a lot of them took the time to see what else was on the site. 33% is a pretty good bounce rate for a social networking happening.

Encouragingly, nearly 90% of the people coming in were using Firefox. Sensible people use Stumbleupon

The vast majority of visitors had bigger than a 1024×768 screen, most had widescreens which surprised me, there must be a lot more widescreens out there than I thought.

I’ve seen a lot of advice about being a top Stumbler or increasing your ‘juice’ at places like StumbleGods that say you should add as many friends as you like and be a social junkie with comments and reviews of peoples profile pages. I think they’re right but for someone as busy as me, it’s hard to dedicate time to spend all my day trying to make contacts, the upside is, the contacts I do make are because they have recommended particularly good pages or I’ve ‘met’ them through this blog.

I was trying to think how I could repeat the event with a new post and spent a little while thinking what “they” want but, I don’t want to try and predict what people that come here will like, that’s not why I started this blog.

The best thing that I can do is, not worry about what Stumblers want and carry on making my blog for me for fun and writing about things that I find interesting without re-hashing stuff that’s already been done, if people like a post they will stumble it and if it’s good enough then sure as eggs is eggs, other people will and so on.

Overall, it was a good experience being bathed in hits for a short while. At least my server didn’t crash and it has given me some encouragement to carry on doing the things I like to do anyway and that’s plenty of geekery with a sprinkle of humour and a drop or two of nice pictures.

Thanks Stumbleupon! (and users) it was fun while it lasted!

I only started this blog a couple of weeks ago, I started well and changed the permalinks to /%year%/%monthnum%/%day%/%postname%/ which I thought was good enough but later, I updated my Stumbled WordPress Widget and modified the date to put the post first on the main page. but, of course, the permalink changed. grrr, my stats showed that some google hits 404′d on the old permalink, double grrrr

I ended up making another post with the old permalink title and linking it to the new one. phew

then, on one of my (unhealthily) regular trips to the Live plugin in wp-admin, I noticed a few real-time hits coming in to pages that 404′d because I’d edited their timestamp too…I had to do something about it and that’s how I found Dean Lee’s Permalink Migration Plugin. Once installed, you can change your permalinks to whatever you want and enter the old permalink style into the plugin settings in the permalinkmigration tab under options and it will automatically do a “301 Redirect”, also known as a Permanent Redirect for all the old links.

Search engines will see it as a ‘proper’ redirect and update their indexes and you wont lose any page rank!

I’ve seen on other blogs that /%postname%/ is the best format to use, one place said that if you haven’t changed your permalinks by now then it was too late!!

problem solved, thanks Dean Lee!, by the way, check out his msn chatbot, you can add it to your friends and chat with it all day! I had a chat for 15 minutes, it was quite amusing!

I’ve just read a great post over at Blog Success Journal about the top 10 plugins he uses, some of them are really useful for SEO. I particularly like the tags and google sitemaps plugins.

I thought I’d link to it from here because he gives a good description of each plugin and why it’s useful. It’s what sets it apart from all the other top 10 plugins lists I’ve seen!

There’s also a very useful script by Rob Mallon that you can use with htaccess to cloak your affiliate urls, I’ve not got any affiliate products on this site apart from my own elottery and uVme links but the script is useful to know for when/if I do.

At the moment, this blog is carrying on nicely! I have tweaked the template a little and I’m due to do some open heart surgery on it later this week to stretch it out a bit and the new feed is working fine. Now all I need is some subscribers to start using the new link, I’ve noticed quite a few hits to the original one so I think it should get some soon …

happy blogging!