Another page that does well (a single posting even) is How to Win at Internet Checkers. If you type in Win Internet Checkers, it will lead to my blog posting in the #1 ranking in Google. It’s had 600 page views in the last 30 days, which isn’t bad for a single posting on a specific subject, with no other supporting inter-linked pages.

These pages performed well, despite not having the WordPress ‘tags’ shown. I’ve now added the tags back to the theme to see how the tags impact search traffic. This is the code added to the theme’s single.php: <?php the_tags('Tags: ', ', ', '<br />'); ?>

Drupal is a nice open source CMS (content management system), but it needs a few tweaks to have good SEO (search engine optimization).

If you already have Drupal installed, the easiest way to upgrade Drupal to be SEO friendly is this…

1. Download the ‘Pathauto’ module for Drupal. Choose the stable version (make sure you match it to your Drupal version)

2. Download the ‘Token’ module for Drupal.

3. Expand both files (might require expanding twice)

4. Use your FTP program to upload both folders into your ‘modules’ folder of your Drupal installation.

5. Login to your Drupal admin site and (if using Drupal version 6.x) click Administer > Site building > Modules

6. Scroll down and make sure ‘Path’ is checked, then scroll all the way down and check ‘Pathauto’ and ‘Tokenactions’, and make sure ‘Token’ is checked, if not already.

7. Login to your Drupal admin site and (if using Drupal version 6.x) click Administer > Site building > URL aliases

8. At the top, click ‘Automated alias settings’

9. Expand ‘General settings’ and select ‘Create a new alias. Leave the existing alias functioning.’ Because you want to update the old links to be SEO friendly, but not to break the existing links you’ve had. Select ‘Reduce strings to letters and numbers from ASCII-96′ as well.

10. Expand ‘Node path settings’ and in the first default path pattern field, change it to:

[title-raw]-[nid]

The above results in: www.domain.com/keyword-phrase-1

If the node number or another path isn’t included, it may be more vulnerable to hackers, so the code above adds the node # at the end. Refer to this site for a tutorial. In this same section, check ‘Bulk generate aliases for nodes that are not aliased’.

11. Expand ‘Taxonomy term path settings’ and check ‘Bulk generate aliases for terms that are not aliased’. You may also open the user path and forum path settings and likewise choose to bulk generate new aliases.

12. CLICK ‘SAVE CONFIGURATION’ !

13. Now you can log out and test your new SEO friendly URLs.

Here’s a basic example: Toastmasters website

This is a class I’ll be offering this week at Lower Columbia College in Longview, Washington…

NEW! Web Marketing Strategies & Search Engine Optimization
Increase traffic to your website, increase sales, and make more money online. Find out how to get free and paid listings in Google and Yahoo. Learn about online stores through eBay, Amazon, and Yahoo. Gain insight into email marketing and how to market through social media sites like Facebook, Linked-In, and Twitter. (Trent Mueller) $40

Three classes on Wednesdays, Jan. 14 – 28, from 7 – 8 p.m. in MAN 125, sign up for item number 2371. View the Lower Columbia College website for more information.

Do PR 10 websites really exist? Yes, they do, and here’s a short sample of them:

http://www.google.com (of course)

http://www.adobe.com/

http://www.w3.org/

http://www.macromedia.com

http://www.energy.gov

http://www.nasa.gov

http://www.nsf.gov

http://www.whitehouse.gov

http://www.real.com

Google has awarded at least 100 or more sites awarded the distinguished PR 10 status. Yahoo!, however, is not one of them. It’s interesting how Google gives its top competitor only a 9 of 10, when clearly Yahoo is far more prominent than any of the other 10 PR sites. In fact, Alexa still ranks Yahoo! still the most popular website in the world, not for searches, but because of how much other content it has. Maybe Google is a little too stubborn to admit that.

Google performed another Page Rank (PR) update on Monday, April 28, 2008. Some websites’ PR went up; others went down.

With this update, I noticed a possible favoritism Google lended to newer links from social media sites. One of my websites has 10,000 incoming links, but no ‘fresh’ links from coverage in the social news media in recent months. The result of this last PR update was that site was taken down a notch in the PR rating.

Meanwhile, I had two smaller websites receive PR increases with fewer, but newer links. The news content and links were published to Digg and other social news websites. Delicious, Stumble Upon, and other social bookmarking sites were utilized, along with a presence in the blogosphere in more in recent weeks and months. RSS feeds were used along with a WordPress blog and forum posts. These sites connected through the social media were impacted positively in the PR update- each moved up two notches on the PR scale. Not bad.

My hunch is that Google’s algorithm was tweaked to include more ‘timely’ link activity- especially valuing social news, bookmarking, PR newswires, and other sites showing reliably fresh content.

Wikipedia is simply a massive website that generates a significant volume of traffic. Since Wikipedia can be edited by anyone, why not edit it to your advantage?

If you run a business, your first step is to give your business its own dedicated Wikipedia page. Write text in a manner to make your page sound ‘noteworthy’. There is much Wikipedia content that doesn’t deserve its own pages, I wouldn’t worry about your site not ‘fitting in’. For instance, just for Star Wars, there are pages dedicated to Star Wars bounty hunters, fictional planets, and silly irrelevant controversies like ‘Han shot first’. If fiction deserves a page, surely you can make a strong case that your real-life business deserves its own recognition.

When you’re writing, make sure you include all of your business accolades and your own biography, if you’re the business owner. Sometimes newly submitted Wikipedia pages get deleted and sometimes they stick. If it gets removed, there’s nothing wrong with trying and retrying. One of my Wikipedia pages has been up for 2 years- and is successfully inter-linked with other pages in Wikipedia. That should be your goal.

My most successful Wikipedia edit was placing an external link to my website on a PR 7 page. This link is still there and brings about 600 visitors a month to my external site. If your link is actually relevant and provides value to the page, then it won’t get removed for link spam. And once your link survives a critical initial time period of a month or so, it may fall off the radar for some editors prowling to reverse people’s changes.

As far as the value of the external link itself, sure, the link has the ‘no follow’ attribute and in theory shouldn’t pass along any PageRank (PR) value to Google. However, the link still delivers good traffic and some SEO professionals argue that Google still favors being linked to from Wikipedia, even though it goes unreported.

One nice side-effect of being linked to from Wikipedia is you get a lot of incoming links from other Wikipedia clones. Especially nice for a new website, you can get a lot of incoming links in short order, by simply placing one on a popular Wikipedia page and having it ‘stick’. Since the Wikipedia content is in the public domain, other websites are free to copy to make their own websites and often do. So, what happens is you end up getting not just a link from Wikipedia, but every other Wikipedia clone. It can add up. A newly created website from summer of 2007 now has more than 400 incoming links from various Wikipedia clone sites. That’s a nice way to get a website off the ground, in terms of initial link building.

Take advantage of Wikipedia. Just because they have the ‘nofollow’ attribute doesn’t mean we should give up posting relevant, meaningful, external links. And if your page and/or link gets removed, try modifying to make the page more educational and more relevant and re-submit. Persistence will pay off. Eventually, you’ll find Wikipedia can be very good to you.