Creative
Multimedia programming
Emerging Web
Technologies
K00143624
Keith McGrath
S.E.O
Practical (Search Engine Optimization)
for
the term “Creative Multimedia Programming”
May
2013
Well
I First set my blog up on Blogger:http://www.blogger.com/blogger.g
I
then set a large amount of time researching the best practices that I
could use to get the most amount of traffic through my blog. A number
of options were returned to me.
Content
The easiest one for
me to implement was “Original Content”. I know that if I was to
copy and paste content that is not mine and is on the web somewhere
else that the search bots would pick that up and disregard my blog.
This is a huge no no for S.E.O.
I set about writing
information about the course I am on but I soon realized that that
might appeal to enough people. How could I bring more interest on my
information.
Adding
images and video to the blog will add to the value of content that
google sees when its bots review your blog. So what I did was to add
a couple of images to each page of my blog. I thought that if I only
added two to each page that googles bots might see that as a nice
need blog and rate it a little bit higher on its listings.
I
have been meaning to add videos but I am reviewing the best way to do
this. Do I embed the video of link them from youtube? I will check
this later.
Keep
as many of the titles in your blog related to the subject that your
blog is about. Bots search the titles of the blog with more juice
that normal typed content. I tried to stick to this rule where
possible.
If
it was a website there would be a number of other issues to be dealt
with such as:
- Making sure that the website code is clean. (there is no need for this on a blog as it format by blogger)
- The site has to load fast. I am wary of this for a blog too so I am trying to put in as little content as possible but still put in enough content that will attract passing traffic on to my blog and to impress the bots enough that the will like my blog and put it high up the google search list.
- No broken bits of corrupt files in the blog. This is self explanatory but it is curtail for the optimization.
Links
to and From the Site
Well my thinking at
this point is to add links on to my site that most people could use.
What does everybody use? GOOGLE. My next trick was to come up with a
reason that I needed google on my site. Well....its my favorite
search engine. Next step was to name as many search engines that I
could think of and put links to them on my site so the entire list of
search engines became part of my blog.
Huge
Success!
No sooner had I done
this one simple trick and I could already find myself on page 3 of
google once I searched the term “Creative Multimedia Programming”.
Poaching
Specific Traffic
Now for my next
trick.....
Who uses the terms
“Creative”, “Multimedia” or “Programming”?
Back to my
researching. I googled these individually and I sieved through the
first few pages of results for each of the terms and I was able to
focus my attention to the results.
Creative top
responses were too general and varied and un specific to the project
so I grouped Creative Multimedia together and I found a much more
focused market for my self.
Obviously the
audience I would now be trying to attract with this term had the same
interest as The course I was doing. So, How could I optimize this?
Popular
Tools used in the CMP Community
Well the most
popular creative multimedia packages are Photoshop and Illustrator. I
needed to do a big spread on these then. Hey lets expand this and do
the entire Adobe suite. So that is what I did!
To get the most
fully optimized page on this I linked this page to Adobe and the
Photoshop community. I knew these would be big links that any google
bots would recognize and trust so I was on to a winner again.
My page was third
from the top of page 3 after this.
Google
Optimization Tools
Google has a number
of tools that can help someone optimize their own site or blog. These
will help the site get more recognition by the search engine
Site
Map My Blog
This
procedure just makes it easier for a search engines to index my blog.
This was again an not intuitive but with a little assistance (Thank
you John) I did this in google web tools. Webtools in google
automatically sets up a site map but to let it know that you want to
use that one you enter /sitemap.xml at the end of the blog address.
Easy as that when you know how.
I struggled with this on big
webtools. (John was not beside me at the time)
Social
Media
I
good way of getting more optimization for a blog is to link to as
much social media as possible. The idea behind this is that your blog
can get link juice from the bigger community. The bots searching your
blog will then detect that your blog is linked to that community so
your blog will be higher up search engines list than say a blog that
is not linked to social networks.
I
linked to my g-mail account and my hotmail account.
These
turned out to a great move for me as googles mail system is g-mail so
that got google to recognize the google link and of course google
trusts itself so that worked well. Another advantage of this link is
that it was very easy to do. (Nice one)
The
hotmail link was also a great link for two reasons:
- It is microsoft and that is a huge community and again it is a very trusted source of link juice.
- This assisted me with the bing search engine
SEO
Web Tools
I
have found a number of SEO toolkits that are all claiming to be free
and all claiming to be the best SO toolkit for the job. I do not have
time to test all of these so I will pick one and work with that.
I
found too many to list but here are a few:
The
tool I wanted to use is Microsoft SEO Toolkit do I set about it
straight away.
Microsoft
SEO Toolkit
(how
nice,
a free download)
From
my research it turns out that Microsoft make a SEO tool kit. I went
to download this kit but it is for windows only. Guess what I am
using. Yes, you guessed it, I am using a Mac. Well I will get back to
this at a later stage.
I
came back to this nearer the hand-up time and I was afraid that if I
changed too much at this time that my search engine position on the
list would be effected. I was on the top of page 2 so I decided to
leave it alone. I hope I do not regret this decision later.
Bing
Now,
how am I getting on in another search engine? I decided to try bing.
HUH…….nowhere……why
not?
I
could not even find myself up to page 20 so I gave up looking. I am
disappointed as I thought that if I was visible on google that I
would be just as visible on the other search engines. Back to the
drawing board here.
More
research on this was needed and I quickly found out that bing has its
own webmaster tools that needs to be set up just like google.
I
set up my webmaster tools on bing.
This
seemed a lot harder for me to get my head around. I kept getting to
the page where it said to verify my ownership. To do this I had to
embed the following HTML code on to my site:
You
can add a <meta> tag containing the authentication code to the
<head> section of your default webpage.
<meta
name="msvalidate.01"
content="5600B0FD131238B8CD8191D5C89454B5" />
An
example:
<html>
<head>
<meta
name="msvalidate.01"
content="5600B0FD131238B8CD8191D5C89454B5" />
<title>Your
SEO optimized title</title>
</head>
<body>
page
contents
</body>
</html>
I
could not do this as I had a blog and I no control over the coding of
it. I tried a few times but I could never figure it out.
The
other issue I had with bing was the site map. I could never get this
up and running either. I tried just putting /sitemap.xml at the end
of the blog address but this did not work for me either. I will come
back to this at a later stage.
So
far I can only find myself on bing if I actually put in the blog
link…..
I
did that a few times and I opened up the blog. My thinking on this is
that if bing had been at the site a number of times its bots might
just remember it. Well it was worth a try as I really struggled to
set up the webmaster tools on bing.It was just no intuitive at all.
Finally
I remembered that a good link will assist with the optimization I
must link to communities so I tried linking to hotmail.
I
did not notice any change after doing this so all I could do is wait.
Bing
Session 2
1
month later and just before hand-up I have checked my
blog on bing. I have updated it a few times since my last search on
bing…..yehaw ……. I am forth on page 2. I have a strong
suspicion that by linking to my hotmail account that it has a lot to
do with this big jump as bing and hotmail have strong microsoft
roots.
I
must admit it that other than my hotmail link I am not too sure how
this has happened at this stage as I have not done much in bing to
optimize my blog as I have been concentrating to get it high up on
google and until I checked it today I had never been higher than page
3 on google. Its up to page 1 now….
Other
Methods
Have
my own Hosting or Domain.
I
can use this method for this exercise as the brief was to use an
already established blog site and a list was given. I am using
blogger and I will not be changing it for now.
Linking
my other blogs
I
have two other blog’s
on blogger and I made sure these were all linked to the blog. That
might add a bit of traffic to the site. One of these blog’s had a
small bit of traffic but when I linked it but this blog quickly
passed it out.
Finally
I reviewed the blog
again to see if there was any other changes that I could incorporate
in to the blog or tidy it up a bit but as I was the forth search on
page 1 of google (The top 2 being the LIT course Creative Multimedia
Programming and the third being Emer Murphy from the class) and I was
on page 2 on bing where I had been no where up to now I decided to
leave everything just as it was. I am very happy with that!
No comments:
Post a Comment