Life in Ronda, Learning Spanish, Property in Spain

In SEO terms, managing bounce rate is not often talked about, most 'experts' tend to focus on off page optimization that usually involves minimizing reciprocal links and gaining relevant one way links.

For the last couple of weeks I've been taking a look at my stats on this site over the last four years, and a couple of other sites I own that are younger.

What I've been looking for is a way to improve my SERP (Search Engine Result Page) position, or improve earnings from passive sources such as AdSense.

Internal links improve pageviews
The interesting thing I've discovered is that there are several pages on this blog that have a good number of backlinks and have their own unique title, description etc. Read More

A while back I wrote about SEO using social bookmarking and blog communities and since nearly a month has passed I thought I'd update my notes on the subject

I've been most happy with Blogcatalog this month, it really seems to have powered ahead to the extent that I am now actively working my Blogcatalog profile. I think the very fact of mentioning it in my last post attracted a lot of visitors who then added me as a friend, and the widget helps too. You may have noticed I've been more active in the Blogcatalog forums and I've updated my profile and joined a couple of groups.

Next month I'll be keen to see how Blogcatalog continues to develop for me so I think I'll be making use of the friend feature more to drive more traffic and increase subscriber numbers. Strangely though, Blogcatalog traffic increases haven't increased the number of comments, and commenting is something I'm really monitoring, BTW thanks to Paul and Jillian for taking an interest. Read More

For a couple of years now I've been playing around social bookmarking sites, blog communities and other widget type sites like Blogrush, and for almost as long I've been meaning to write up my thoughts about them. Well, at long last, here it is.

Technorati and SEO
I started with Technorati like most bloggers do, I even have all of my tags set to the Technorati standard so they get read properly by the Technorati spider, and it wasn't until I did this that I noticed any traffic from Technorati. I'm one of the fortunate few who use Serendipity as my blog software so I have a plugin that automatically converts my tags into the format they use, and this really is absolutely necessary if you hope to get any serious traffic.

Technorati users seem to work almost exclusively on tag searches. Out of interest, almost all traffic I get is to entries with descriptive titles, and doesn't seem to have anything to do with the description or first paragraph so if you want Technorati traffic, use tags and write good entry titles.

Social Bookmarking
I've also tried Digg and del.icio.us which can be great sites for gaining backlinks and traffic but need to used wisely. Both of my profiles are examples of how not to use these sites if you want to be successful. Let me tell you why, I haven't really used their services for anything other than a half hearted attempt at self promotion, and if I was serious about using them I'd be digging or bookmarking worthy sites within my keyword niche as well as a few of my own entries. In terms of traffic, I get nothing from either of these sites but I'm going to change the way I use them both and try to improve that. Read More

Here are some search engine optimization tips for Ning networks, which are relatively easy to get into Google's search results, the reason being that Ning itself is such a large domain and new networks simply need to be linked to from the Ning site to be found.

So, let's assume you have a new Ning network and want to promote it, what do you do? You could contact me to help you with promoting your site. I've had some success in the SEO world, and I make a substantial part of my income from SEO, but I digress, keep reading for some free tips.

Getting Your Ning Network into the Search Engine Index
First of all, most SEO experts agree that getting backlinks to your site is a quicker and more reliable way of getting the search engines to index your network. Backlinks are links to your site from another site, and the quality of these is determined by similar or complementary content, and whether the backlink comes from a site that follows the rules correctly. Read More

A good friend of mine, Paul Dillinger over at CR Solutions, a Costa Rica based search engine optimization expert has just released a new SEO ebook filled with SEO tips and tricks, and it's available for free download.

Paul and I have been doing a lot of the same SEO experiments for a while now and I can confirm that what he writes in this ebook is no-nonsense get to the point stuff you need to know if you want to successfully market your website.

Paul's ebook builds on and explains the 4 must use SEO pointers for bloggers that I wrote about back in October last year, and generated an immediate boost in my traffic when it got stumbled. Read More

When it comes to SEO, I'm no expert, I know what makes sense, I take a lot that I see around the 'Net with a grain of salt, and whenever possible I experiment, and I take advice from experts. So far I've done OK, I usually rank in the top half dozen pages for most of the major keywords I'm targeting, for example a search for 'serendipity templates' will usually find me pretty quickly.

The thing is though, doing SEO on your blog is one of those intangible things that a lot of people don't do right, or aren't able to measure in isolation from normal organic popularity of their blog. Measuring the results of your experiments is easy with regular HTML pages which don't have commenting functions, usually aren't updated all that often, and don't usually take advantage of the built-in social networking that comes with having a blog. Read More