Pro Interneter

I’ve been reading some things on different SEO blog about how you should optimize your blog homepage. Here’s a few things I’ve picked up along the way:

• Limit Homepage to show 5 posts
• Use links on your homepage sparingly - only link to the most vital posts
• On your homepage, Use excerpts from your posts. This will prevent duplicate data
• On your archives, Use excerpts from your posts…

I guess that’s really all I’ve got at the moment. Basically, you want to use your homepage as your landing page, and to hand out linkjuice to whichever posts you deem as the most important.

On Blog Project A:

• I created a “Hot Posts” list in my sidebar - to pass linkjuice to the important posts.
• I display full text for my latest 2 posts, and excerpts for the rest
• Limit display to 5 posts per page
• Got rid of “Most Popular” posts, because it wasn’t linking to post that I really wanted juice for.

Basically, you should have links on your homepage to whichever posts you deem most worthy. If something is important, you should plug it on your homepage or in your latest post - otherwise, let it reside in the archives. If you have 100 internal links on your homepage, you’re splitting your linkjuice by 100. It’s better to limit the links on your homepage, thus giving each one a bigger slice of the linkjuice pie.

Here’s some events coming up in our fair city.

New Year 2008
New Year 2008 : NV Penthouse Lounge
New Year 2008 : Champagne Supernova
New Year 2008 : Cruise

Sports Related Events
Chicago Hash House Anthrax Run
Holiday Sports Festival 2007
Paralympics Table Tennis Chicago

Holiday Activities
Navy Pier Winter Wonderfest
Chicago Christkindlmarket
Chicago Star Wars Exhibit

Big News
Chicago Smoking Ban
Downtown Chicago Casino
Chicago Cool Roof Grants

I don’t know the exact cause, but my Amazon Affiliate Google Traffic has jumped a bit today. The site is about 10 days old and thus far I’ve been getting between 0 and 1 Google Organic visitors per day. I’ve got a few hours left in Wednesday, and I’ve gotten 8 Google Organic visitors so far. They have all been on long-tail search terms (shortest is 3 words, longest is 9 words) which is fine by me. My end goal is to get some steady traffic, mainly from long-tail searches.

My hypothesis about why I have this little jump in Google Organic traffic:

1) Just dumb luck, it will go away tomorrow
2) I’ve been updating daily and things are getting around through the Google machine
3) People are getting anxious about Christmas and doing more gift-related searches

Anyways, this was a little exciting for me so that’s all I’ve got for now.

I didn’t do any work on my Amazon Affiliate Site this weekend. From Fri-Sunday, I had one organic Google visitor. I’m going to need to spend some time getting some backlinks to my site, just to help raise the relevancy. Right now I have a few inbound links from other sites that I own, but I need to widen that reach a little.

I have posted one item today and will post another item this evening. My goal is to post two items each day and that might eventually allow me to get the Google Webmaster Tools Fast Crawl Rate for the Amazon Affiliate Site.

In other news, traffic to Blog Project A dropped off over the weekend. There was a big event that I ranked well for and it was driving good traffic to the site, but now that event has passed. On Friday I had 140 visitors, Saturday I had 70, Sunday I had 53. Today looks like it is going well but you can never tell until the day is over since Google Analytics don’t constantly update their display. As long as I start to climb up again, keep posting relevant material, building my base of articles, things will go good for Blog Project A.

Continuing on my Amazon Affiliate SEO path… After some playing around, it seems to me that using “click here” might be the best option for my new Amazon Affiliate site. I’ve been running 2 updates per day. Yesterday I had 2 visitors via Google Search Traffic and 1 Amazon Affiliate Click. As stated in my Amazon Affiliate NoFollow post, I added rel=”nofollow” tags to all of my outgoing Amazon links, so that might explain why I had 22 click-throughs to Amazon on my first day - I think it was Google doing all the ‘clicking’. Compared with my Blog Project A, this is fair enough traffic. You really can’t judge much this early on, but it’s good that I’m getting 2 Google Search Results visitors already.

Using “Click Here” throughout my posts allows me add as many links as I want and I don’t need to worry about giving away all my keyword juice for the search terms.

Other News…
Blog Project A is going good and traffic continues to increase. There are of course a few posts that are bringing a lot of traffic, so I just need to make sure that I keep posting. This blog flows with the seasons, so the posts that are popular now will not be so popular as time goes on, but they will continue to be valuable.

I recently read DNSEO.net’s article about How to Eliminate Duplicate Content and realized that Blog Project A had 3 or 4 different pages where each post was showing up - Previous Posts, Monthly Archives, Category Archives, Actual Post Page - so I read that article and took a few minutes to implement the suggested changes. I doubt that I’ve seen any results from those changes yet, but hopefully that will help boost some of my pages even more in the SERPS.

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