Pro Interneter

Today for the first time, I noticed that Google Webmaster Tools has offered me the Fast option under the Set Crawl Rate section. I was able to set the crawl rate for this particular blog to Fast, and it will remain set to Fast until Feb 28, 2008 - at which time it will apparently revert back to normal. I would expect at that point that if the Fast Crawl Rate has served a purpose, then Google will allow me to set my Crawl Rate to Fast again.

The blog that received this Fast Crawl Rate is a blog that I have been steadily posting on and have been getting a fair amount of Google Search Traffic (20-30 visits per day). I don’t know exactly what factors play into the Fast Crawl Rate ranking, but it seems to more than simply having steady postings. I usually post once per day, Monday - Friday. I have had other blogs that see this level of posting, but had yet to receive the Fast Crawl Rate.

Other than this blog, I have two blogs that I am regularly posting on. I make it a goal to post on these blogs once per day, Monday - Friday. Anything else is a bonus.

Blog #1 is targeted at a small niche. I have gotten a good amount of incoming links (from 15+ external websites) and have a PageRank of 3.

Blog #2 was started less than a month ago, has few (less than 5) incoming links and does not have PageRank yet.

With these stats, I was surprised to find that over the last few weeks, Blog #2 has been getting “significant” traffic from Google searches. While not any staggering numbers, I am getting about 15 Google (organic) visits / day on Blog #2, while getting about 8 organic visits per day on Blog #1.

Basically, Blog #2 is a lot newer, has a lot less posts and lot less web capital, and is getting double the Google Organic traffic. I credit this to the fact that Blog #2 has a much larger Niche, and thus gets searched a lot more. If I pick a topic and write a post, do some good SEO and target it around the niche, the post usually gets ranked highly for specific search terms.

Choosing a bigger / more popular niche allows you to get more organic traffic. If you want to blog in a small niche, that is fine - but you will have to work a lot harder to drive traffic to that site. Choosing a big niche lets you get a lot of long-tail search results which will eventually start to add up to steady traffic from the search engines.

A good tool for niche research is Google Trends. Type in a few different niches and see the difference between terms such as ‘running’, ‘make money online’, ‘digital camera’, and ‘movies’. You’ll see how big the difference can be between a big and small niche.

I am starting the Ultimate Karaoke Song List. If you are look for the Top 100 Karaoke Songs, this is a great place to start.

Top 100 Karaoke Songs…
Africa - Toto
Angel is a Centerfold - Rick Springfield
Brandy (You’re a Fine Girl) - Looking Glass
It’s Raining Men - The Weather Girls
Son of a Preacher Man - Dusty Springfield
Take On Me - A-Ha

I recently released my first real mini site, Cheap Web Hosting Dedicated a few days ago. Over the last few weeks I also started several different test sites via subdomains on existing websites. I’ve tried a lot of different things to get these sites listed in Google, and while there doesn’t seem to be any sure-fire technique, I’ve found some things that seem to work.

Social Bookmarking
Using social bookmarking sites such as Delicious work great. Even better is to go to OnlyWire and setup an account. Only wire lets you submit to many different social bookmarking sites all at once. It takes some time to setup because you have to register for each individual site, but once it is running it only takes a second to submit your new website to 10-15 different social bookmarking sites.

Google Webmaster Tools
One thing you should definitely use is Google Webmaster Tools. Get your site setup there and register your sitemap so that Google knows where to look. This will help Google in finding all the pages associated with your site.

Google URL Submit
Google does have a page that lets you Submit a URL to the search engine. This will not make your site show up instantly, but it is another way to get it on the Google radar.

External Links
As usual, getting links on other websites is a huge advantage but seems more necessary once you start working on SEO - though it can still be helpful when trying to simply get your site indexed.

Note:These aren’t fully the same steps that I would take when starting a new blog. Blogs tend to get listed a lot faster (it took me 4+ days to get CheapWebHostingDedicated.com listed).

While none of these items garuntee that you will get listed in Google anytime soon, combined they provide a lot of ways for Google to access your site.

My first real “mini site” has gone live today. I have been doing some research about different possible niches, good domains, affiliate programs, etc. Right now the site is running but likely won’t get any traffic for while. I have done the requisite submissions to Google Webmaster Tools and setup Google Analytics.

To do research for my niche and URL, I started playing around with Google Keyword Finder and using GoDaddy’s bulk url submission form to find terms and domains that were available. I just started with one niche idea and let things flow freely as I would search, and then another idea would come to me, or grow from a previous idea.

This site will certainly need some tweaking and probably a few additional pages, but the core is there. I’m going to wait a while and see if the search engines do anything with it. There is a specific search phrase that I am targeting, and I plan on running a blog contest and some other marketing to help promote the site. Linkbuilding is the main goal here.