You may note that I’ve spelled the title of this blog post in the series about making money from blogging, the American way.  This is on purpose, because this blog post is all about optimizing your blog for the search engines, which means trying to get the most numbers of searchers to find your blog in the search results.  And that means getting over yourself on the UK/US spelling thing!

Before we go there, after my concern about being de-indexed, I’ve been talking to @GuyLevine who is an SEO and Adwords expert and an old friend of mine.  He has worked out that the only reason the proportion of my traffic from Google on this particular blog is only about 20% rather than 50-60% is because most of my traffic here arrives after specifically searching for “nicola cairncross” or “nicola cairncross blog” or “nicola cairncross mentoring”.  If you take out those specific searches on my name, the search engine traffic calculates at more normal levels.

In fact, ironically, my traffic averages are starting to climb now, so this daily blogging is starting to have the desired effect.

So onto Day 20 of Michael Dunlop’s “Create A Blog” 30 day plan.

The first recommendation is to install the All-In-One-SEO plugin over at DigitalMarketingBrighton.com – tick.

I’ve been using this plugin for years and it’s brilliant.  Free, but they do encourage you to make a donation, which is only fair.  The main thing to watch out for, is that every time it needs upgrading, it becomes disabled in the Settings page, so you have to go and enable it again.  I presume this is so that you will see the donation box again but it’s a bit annoying.

The other thing to watch out for is to keep your Blog Title and your keywords under 70 characters.  This is as recommended by the handy Firefox AddOn called SEO Doctor which adds a useful little bar at the bottom of your screen (or adds itself onto your Alexa toolbar if you are using that.  However, when you install that addon, it can make it tricky to login to some sites (like GoToWebinar) using Roboform, so I keep it disabled most of the time, and only use it when I set up a new blog, to get as close to 100% score as possible.

Michael also recommends a great article on Yoast.com so get yourself over to Michael’s blog and check it out, using the link above.

Anything else you can do for SEO?  As well as using great keywords in the title of your blog post, I always repeat them in the first line of the post and the Post Tags which you should be filling in religiously each time.  I should probably go down and fill in the All-In-One-SEO boxes too, but that’s a step too far for me.  Not sure if there is any real benefit in doing that – perhaps someone out there could enlighten me?

The other thing I’ve done of course, is install the MaxBlogPress Ping Optimiser Plugin which is making sure all the blog directories are pinged with each new post – but not more than once an hour, so I don’t get banned as a blog spammer.

The other thing I’m going to do now I’m blogging regularly over there is install the Feedburner Feedsmith plugin and get that working.  This over-rides the native feed for your blog and makes it much more user-friendly.  They have been bought by Google so it can only help with indexing.  Then I need to get adsense on the blog and the feed – that’s todays job then.

Google Position Update: For search term “digital marketing brighton” we are not showing at all right now, have previously been indexed at Page 8, Position 5 for about a week.  Can’t find any listing for “internet marketing brighton” yet.  We are getting junk comments which are being fielded by the Akismet plugin, so we are showing on the radar.

Traffic Update: Averaging 1 unique visit per day after 20 days, with peaks of 8-10 people.  I’ve scheduled more blog posts which should help.

Mailing List Update: 3 in total, 1 unsubscribed again.  Need to write an autoresponder follow up series (or amend an existing one! although MD has not said to do that yet)

Earnings Update: I am recommending BlueHost, Subliminal Power & my own Spartan Marketing Masterclasses on this blog so far.  Earnings to date: £10 from joining an affiliate programme.

Overview: With these tragic traffic figures I wouldn’t expect any subscribers or earnings.  Need to be patient and see what the next 10 days of the plan brings, in the way of traffic getting action.

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