My Blog
The personal blog of me, Tim Trott. What I get up to, photography, news and so on.
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Trials and Tribulations of SEO
Friday 29th June 2007
The internet is a very competitive market these days, and getting high rankings on search engines such as Google and Yahoo is becoming more and more difficult.
When I started this site 18 months ago, I only had a few pages, most of which was relating to my Honda Civic. I wrote a couple of articles about removing the radio (a task which is quite tricky) and removing the rear speakers (again a tricky task). I hadn’t even heard of SEO when writing these pages, but within 6 months they were ranked in the top 10 for Google. Today they both rank number 1. So if I can write a high ranking article with no knowledge of SEO, why doesn’t any of my other pages rank high now I know a few SEO tips?
There are a few pages relating to Astronomy and Photography that I have been trying to get higher rankings for since January, make a change… wait a month and see what happens. Sometimes hits went down, other times they went up slightly. Search engine ranking remained the same, or went down.
So where am I going wrong? Maybe the key is to unlearn my SEO knowledge and revert back to 1990’s style websites…
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This post is filed under Search Engine Optimisation by Lonewolf at 10:26am
Saturday 24th March 2007
Clean URL’s seem to be something of a buzzword these days, along with SEO, CSS, AJAX and Blogs. I have also jumped onto the proverbial bandwagon and completely rewritten this site from scratch using Clean URL’s and CSS with some AJAX and XML thrown in. And my blog will be up soon as well!
Clean URL’s are things that can benefit most sites, including this one. Most URL’s on this site consist of a page with a .php extension followed by a few parameters. For example my page on Astronomy Gadgets used to look like this: “doarticle.php?article=astro_toys”. After the move to clean URL’s it now looks like this: “/astronomy/reviews/gadgets”. This clean form looks professional, its easier to remember and type in and it is “Google Friendly”, that is Google does not like ? and & in URL’s and does not rank pages as high. Since most of my visitors come from Google, I want to be nice to it.
Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) are another buzzword at the moment, although its been around for donkeys years. CSS allows developers to separate content from layout and style allowing different browsers and platforms to see the content differently, sometimes with no style at all. Some PDA’s and Mobile Phones only show black and white text, so using css they can strip out all the layout and style to show the plain content. CSS can also make a site look good for people browsing with a desktop PC or Mac.
AJAX, or Asyncronous Javascript And Xml, has been used in a limited fashion on the contact me sections to send visitor comments to me without reloading the page. There is also AJAX at work on the Top Gear Quotes page where you can see a random Stig introduction quote.
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This post is filed under Search Engine Optimisation, Site News by Lonewolf at 7:48pm
Monday 2nd January 2006
Today I have been through every page on my site with the new W3c Validator and after fixing a few errors, every page is now valid HTML 4.01 and CSS is validated by W3C standards. 
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This post is filed under Search Engine Optimisation, Site News by Lonewolf at 4:52pm
