Search engine optimisation (SEO) has a bad reputation. That’s tough for SEOs but unfortunately it’s a side-effect of black hat SEO techniques.

I haven’t knowingly used any SEO techniques as this blog is really just a hobby of mine. I enjoy writing for it, find it a good place to store my notes for future reference (hence why sometimes there is detail here that would not be useful to anyone else!) and like the feedback I get when someone else finds my content useful. I’m pleased with my site’s ranking (considering I’ve done very little to boost it, other than to write lots of posts) and although the advertising revenue will not let me give up my day job yet, it does at least cover the hosting costs. Even so, I’ve been intrigued when reading SEO articles in .net magazine (it seems that SEO is not a black art – just common sense really) and recently I’ve been checking out a few tools and methods which should help anyone to increase the placement of their site (it seems that I’ve been using much of this advice purely by chance):

• Firstly, check out Rand Fish’s article on 21 tactics to increase blog traffic.
• Next, write good content (hopefully then people will link to it).
• Avoid black hat techniques as the short term gain is unlikely to be worth the long term pain. Each of the major search engines has it’s own advice for webmasters (Google webmaster guidelines; Yahoo! search content quality guidelines; Microsoft Live Search site owner help: guidelines for successful indexing).
• The SEOmoz page strength tool gives some useful information about a page’s relative importance on the ‘net.
• Some of the SEO Consultants search engine marketing tools can be useful for analysing code quality and I found the check headers tool useful to validate that my duplicate domain names are properly redirecting to my primary site (i.e. using an HTTP 301 redirect code).

There are also a few more links that might be useful in some of my previous posts:

• Why have some of my PageRanks dropped?
• Why webstats are so interesting.
• Helping spiders to crawl around my bit of the web.

A few months back, I blogged that my Google PageRank had fallen through the floor on certain pages. I was also concerned that the Google index only contained about half the content on my website.

I don’t engage in search engine optimisation, but I have found out a few things which have made a huge difference to both the quality of the site and Google’s ability to find my content – mostly from Gina Trapani’s excellent help the GoogleBot understand your website article (it’s also worth checking out 9 things you can do to make your web site better).

So, what did I do? Well, I read that the GoogleBot can’t read JavaScript – that would account for archive pages that were not being picked up – so I removed the drop-down archive list; however it didn’t seem to make much difference so I’ll be reinstating it again soon. What does seem likely is that my archive page links were appearing too far down the page code (as another theory is that the GoogleBot only follows the first 100 links on a page – actually, that’s one of the Google webmaster guidelines) and a quick look with the Smart IT Consulting GoogleBot spoofer confirmed that the archive links do indeed appear way down the code. I need to rework the site sometime (better CSS and an improved site layout… though goodness knows when I’ll get the time) and when I do, I’ll set the archive links higher up the code (I’ll need to if I want the site to degrade nicely). By far and away the most significant change I made to the site was joining the Google Sitemaps program. I now use the unlimited version of the XML Sitemap Generator to produce a new sitemap each time I write a new post and Google is finding every one of my pages (there is also a free online sitemap generator available).

Today, entering site:markwilson.co.uk as a Google search brings back 626 results (up from around 250 in March) and the webstats also show an increase in the number of site visitors, so forget search engine optimisation – just give the spiders a little bit of help to crawl your site.