SEO effort for ERT

[Esopo]

I have a few suggesgtions for the "Search Engine Optimization / let's get some more traffic" effort.

In no particular order:

- Directory submission
There are quite a few free-inclussion directory that ERT could be listed at.
Also, find a DMOZ editor in the webdev/tech areas. (this is going to take some string-pulling)

- RSS submission
There are quite a few RSS search engines and directories for ERT's RSS feed.

- Link exchange campaing
Get links back and forth (best if only back and not forth) from related sites

- Press releases (as I saw suggested elsewhere)

- Article submission
Create a few articles from the threads we already have and post them at free article submission sites (and not inside ERT)

- Blog submission
Post member's pages to blog search engines and directories

- Familiarize all of our members with our current articles and tutorials so that they can post the links whenever they find it will help people on other sites. (kind of secondary)

I think we could properly define the efforts, keep track of them and stablish goals.
I can volunteer a couple of a hours per week.

[COBOLdinosaur]

I moved this to Soap box.  Proposed and consult is more for thins we might be voting on, and this is more of a broad discussion.

- Directory submission

Being done as we speak.  If you notice there are a few directories listed on the tech links page because they require a back link. I have posted on about 30 with a lot more to come.  Members could help the link posting effort by posting the link on any site that allows it... blogs, wikis, forums, newsgroup, ...  just about any link is better than none.

- RSS submission

The single RSS feed we have now is still pretty primitive.  Within the week I should have a page up with RSS options for selective feeds and eventually I will get the little RSS button on each forum so users will not even have to go to the options page. If anyone wants to take on managing the posting of RSS links around the 'net it would be helpful.

- Press releases (as I saw suggested elsewhere)

Not much attention gets paid to them unless there is something to announce.  I will look to using them for the announcement of contest etc... they will be part of the promotional effort, but to be effective they need to actually get published. I still have to compile a list of outlets for releases.

- Article submission

I would rather do that as partial RSS feeds or partial articles with a link back to the site for the full article to drive traffic to the site.  Posting articles on other sites is not going to bring much traffic unless they have to come to ERT to get the whole thing.

- Blog submission

Something I had not thought much about.  I am not much into the blog scene; most of them are crap, but if someone wants to manage such an effort; go for it.

- Familiarize all of our members with our current articles and tutorials so that they can post the links whenever they find it will help people on other sites. (kind of secondary)

Absolutely.  Anytime that a question on another site can be answered with an ERT link it is positive for the site.  I started posting link to my articles on the COBOLdinosaur site a couple of years ago.  Even though I have not been on EE for 6 months, I am still getting an average of 10 visitors a day off those links, and they are now getting re-directed to ERT.  A good quality link will keep on working for a long time if it is posted on a site with a good SE ranking, so posting links is good for the site.  I would also include, at this point, TOS.  They have a rule against posting competitve links like most forums, but they do not generally consider links to rellevant content to violate that rule.  So unless they indicate it is a violation, I don't see why it would be treated any different than posting links to Yahoo Groups or Microsoft forums.

I think we could properly define the efforts, keep track of them and stablish goals. I can volunteer a couple of a hours per week.

Glad to hear that.  Why don't you take charge of organizing the effort. Just let me know what you need.

One additional thing we need on the content side is to do keywords.  The most important thing on pages is the first H1 tag, but keywords are also important for a lot of search engines, and we have not keyworded those pages with articles, tutorials, etc on them.  What we need is for someone to go through those, and for each page come up with 10-12 key words that are mentioned frequently in the content so I can add the meta to the pages and help the bots.

Most of the forum is not going to get heavily indexed because the links use query format (?this=that format) and the spiders generally ignore those because they are dynamic content.  As part of the development of the next version of the software ww will change the way we deliver those generate those pages so we can do the links without the query string similar to the way EE and others do it with a reference number and .html extensions.

The biggest contribution that members can make to SEO right now is get links to ERT posted in as many places as possible.

[Kevin3NF]

Reasons you shouldn't update your site when you are really tired:

http://www.3nf-inc.com/links.htm

I got the link to ERT right, but put it as Experts Exchange...oops :)

I'll fix it tonight...

Kevin3NF

[COBOLdinosaur]

I got the link to ERT right, but put it as Experts Exchange...oops :)

 :sign5:

[Roönaän]

Might be nice to have a kinda mission statement, or grand-opening interview with the main crew, such that we can create quotes on our blogs. Our a press-release offcourse.

[Esopo]

My hope of laying out the efforts is to spread the work to all that can volunteer. I mean, I suppose you can deprive yourself from sleep for the next year, but perhaps we can lend a hand.

I’ll think of a way to create such layout, give me a couple of days.

More on my proposal:

- Directory submission
It is wise to keep track of the submissions.
Especially in the case of link-back directories, we should check in a few weeks if they have added us and if not delete them from our list. We should also consider adding them to a separate “other links� page. Most of those directories only require that the page is accessible within 3 clicks – that is easy to comply with - and none is really the kind of resource we want to keep on our main links page.

There is also the matter about the 250+ free directories that could be split in say 5 easily digestible chunks. I personally am not getting any traffic from those submissions (about 80 directories), but they do boost my PR (PageRank).

And that is another thing that I want to mention. As you said, and particularly about the blog submissions, most of such submissions will be crap in terms of traffic and the quality of that traffic, but they will all put a somewhat targeted link back to us.
For example,

- Press releases
As you stated, unless it is something appealing it will not get reprinted, so it is a good idea to make it appealing. But in the worst case scenario it gets out there in a page with your description and a link back. If you post the same press release to 20 free submission sites, you get 20 links back with the possibility of someone picking up the story.

- Article submission
Same idea about the links. I have seen a good article reprinted hundreds of times. That means hundreds of links back to the site from a clean easy effort. There is also the benefit of targeted incoming traffic from people who were technical enough to enjoy the article. Worst case scenario, none of the articles picks up; you still end up with some 20 links back from each article.

About the keywords,

Is our engine allowing us to set personalized meta tags for each page?
We could do some automated PHP process to generate and set the keywords, or we could do it manually with something available out there, such as this:
http://www.abakus-internet-marketing.de/tools/topword.html

Also, in my semi-experienced opinion, the sole most important phrase of a site is the title. I would strip as many non-keyword-y words from it as possible. For instance, this thread reads:

Experts Round Table :: View topic - SEO effort for ERT

9 keywords, 5 of them (give or take) are excess baggage.

My suggestion:
ERT :: SEO effort for ERT

5 keywords, 4 are topic related (and coincidentally the first one is related too)

Also, about those SE friendly URLs, I have noticed that Goggle and Yahoo have absolutely no problem indexing my site, even without the oh! so acclaimed google sitemaps. For example, try this search on any search engine:
netbulge php redirect pages

Yahoo, Google and Altavista will show you the article. MSN on the other hand gets it terribly wrong (sends you to the registration page for some insane reason).

My point is that, although it is much better to use search engine friendly URLs, it won’t stop a good search engine from properly understanding your site, especially if we use the Google sitemaps feature:
http://www.google.com/webmasters/sitemaps/login

[COBOLdinosaur]

- Directory submission

The policy as of now is:

They do not get a back link unless it is required or of significant advantage (like they start ot produce hits).  If they do not produce any hits they will get removed; which may also mean they remove us.

For now they are going on the links page but will end up on a seperate subsidiary page when I get to the point of splitting up the page.

We are not going to pay for better placement on directory listings.  I have not seen one yet that is worth paying for.

They are being done for page ranking enhancement, I do not expect them to produce traffic. On the relation blogs.  I don't have any issue with putting links on blogs for PR, but I don't want to see us putting a lot of effort into putting links on crappy blogs that have no following.  I think good blogs (and there are some good ones) can generate traffic if they relate to tech issues.  However I think a link on blogs that are filled with nonsense and mis-information are a negative, because when user see you associated with stupidity and ignorance it taints you.  So I think posting links on blogs is fine, if it is selective; not just on any blog that will let you post a link.  That probably applies to forums and news groups as well.  There is no benefit to being associated with sites devoted to proving that NASA did not go to the moon, or that have negative approaches as the basis fo their existance.

- Press releases

I think I like Roönaän's idea of developing something with the words of the Site Builders, then perhaps a press release with a link to such a page has some longevity as a general purpose Press Release, that opens some doors for later updates as we have things to announce.

- Article submission
Same idea about the links. I have seen a good article reprinted hundreds of times. That means hundreds of links back to the site from a clean easy effort. There is also the benefit of targeted incoming traffic from people who were technical enough to enjoy the article. Worst case scenario, none of the articles picks up; you still end up with some 20 links back from each article.

If we make RSS feeds available, which I am working on now, then every feed will have multiple links back to the site, and we don't have to do the work of getting a link posted, the work gets done for us be anyone who wants to use the content on their site.  The content providers we us in our feeds are not making that stuff available for any other reason then that it puts a link to their site everywhere that the feed is accessed from.


Keywords!

I have bookmarked the abakus page.  It looks like a usful tool. I used it on a couple of pages and the weighting on key words actually looks pretty good.  I think most of the content pages will be a snap to do usingi that tool..  They are pretty static so it is a one tim effort, and as new pages are added it will just become =part of the normal deployment.  The forum is tougher.  There is some code in PHPBB to do meta tags, but we are not doing any anaylysis of dynamic ocntent.  That is something we will have to add but the structure of phpbb is not real developer friendly at times.

The weight of the title is high and get strengthened when the title and the first h1 contain the same key words.  Right now we are not too far off optimum on the content side, but we need work on the forum side.

Google site maps are already on my radar along with other optimization topic from Google.

[Srirangan]

Roy,

Can you provide me with a bit of promotional text? I will be able to get good PR4 and PR5 links for ERT.

My blog is PR4 and I have a few forums that are PR5.

[COBOLdinosaur]

If you mean link description text, I use something like this:

Free support, training and tech problem resolution for IT professionals.  Featuring Articles, tutorials and code sets from the resident Mentors who offer support in our forum.


If you are looking for something more extensive I can give you that as well.