newmediaMike

Too much tweaking hurt my search engine rankings – Updated

So for the past week or so I’ve been on an SEO tangent. I’m studying everything I can get my hands on, I’m running videozine.ca through every SEO tester I come across, and I’m tweaking and tweaking and tweaking until tonight I checked for my most popular term, “vhs to dvd transfers” and I had fallen off GOOGLE!

I’m not banned or anything like that, I’m just not in the top 150 for that term. Yes I went 15 layers deep before I stopped, in shock!

What was showing up in the GOOGLE rankings is a two day old version. The robot must have come by a few days ago and spidered my site. I’ll have to wait another seven days now to see an improvement in my rankings! I’m NOT going to do anymore search engine optimizing for a month or so to see if my latest fixes take.

Damn I forgot how frustrating SEO can be!

Update - When I checked this morning I was back in my usual #6 slot. I’m wondering if Larry and Serge are investing in de-fibulators for all the Search Engine Optimizers who wake up one morning to find their listing gone! I’m still going to lay off the SEO for a while though!

Professional Blogs on “free” blog sites

Earlier this month I received an RFQ to create a new e-commerce site for a client. One of the provisions was we were to integrate their Blogspot (Blogger) blog into the new site – “as is” with the very unprofessional looking headers, graphics etc. Now don’t get me wrong, I experimented with Blogger a few years ago and it was OK for my personal rants at the time, and yes I did have a WordPress hosted blog last year, but a self hosted blog makes so much more sense!

First with a self hosted blog you get to use the awesome WordPress platform which allows for a great deal more latitude in designing and also implementing SEO.

I strongly recommend setting up a subdomain and placing the blog on the subdomain like I did when I set up a blog for videozine,  blog.videozine.ca this way you can still capitalize on your domain name and whatever brand recognition it may have.

I had to inform the client we could extrapolate the posts but the headers, layout, etc were not importable. I strongly recommended they consider placing a WordPress blog on their site and we would keep the posts, but we would create a new look for the blog to be more in keeping with the overall sites look, in essence staying on brand.

My bottom line on this – it’s OK to experiment with a company blog – hell you SHOULD have a company blog, but don’t put it out in the public, keep your name intact.