Last week when Easton announced his SOAP (Scratch One Another Program), I was one of the first to jump in line. I took the one-minute survey and later that day, Liana Evans (SearchMarketingGurus.com) was assigned to SOAP this blog and I was assigned to SOAP Bill Belew of PanAsianBiz.com.

Li Evans did a fantastic job of looking over my site and sharing her tips on Search Engine Optimization with me (we’re talking about getting EXPERT advice for FREE – what are you waiting for – join in the party!). The following is her input and my status on implementing her recommendations.

Title Tag on your blog:

Right now it just stated “Essential Keystrokes” – most people don’t search for titles of blogs, or company names unless they are a household name (say like “Jeremy Shoemaker” or “Search Engine Land”) or have a little fame in a particular industry. Taking that into account, figure out 2-3 main keywords or phrases you want to be known for in your blog and work that into the title tag. Example: Essential Keystrokes | Tips & Facts on Web Design & Web Marketing | Reviews & Commentary from Keystrokes Design & Marketing” (Status: as you can see from the title bar, I have implemented this)

Banner on your blog:

Your banner has a lot of great keywords in it, the only problem though is that those keywords are embedded in and image that the search engine crawlers can’t read. If there’s any way to make “Essential Keystrokes” just the banner and the rest of what is under it actual “text” on the page, that might boost your rankings as well. (Status: very good point – I am most likely going to renovate this blog soon and I will separate the header then)

Incorporate Keywords into your post titles:

You have some great posts, but they need to get found and ranked! Here’s and example: “Essential Tools – Stixster Style”, my first question would be just reading the title “What kind of tools?”. Remember a lot of people read through feed readers and only get titles and maybe the first sentence of the post, you have to draw them in – give them a reason to read. So, for that one I’d do something like “Essential Blog Tools – Stixster Style” or maybe “Essential Blog Tools – Review of Stixster” . If you can see I’m trying to incorporate some more important keywords there. (Status – I will work on this one. It is the biggest challenge for me)

Technorati Tags:

If you can, incorporate Technorati tags into each of your posts. Basically, in essence, Technorati Tags are just like the depreciated “meta keywords” tags for pages. Technorati uses these to power their searches and when they list results for searches on tags within their system. A lot of bloggers use Technorati to do searches for blog posts. (Status – On posts where I used Qumana, there are tags. However, I did install the Ultimate Tag Warrior plugin and just have to configure the way it displays.)

Offer more than one way to subscribe to your blog

If you take a look at my blog – searchmarketinggurus.com on the right hand side I’ve got a list of linked images to make it easy for just about anyone’s feed to subscribe in just one click. The link you have makes it a few more steps, and unfortunately people today just want that “one click” to get it done. (Status – this will most likely fall into the category of things to incorporate into the next rendition of my blog)

Design Wise

This really isn’t my specialty area, but I’ll pass on a tool that helped me with my layout and getting tweaked to where people are actually clicking on things within my blog. It’s a service called CrazyEgg.com. I actually know the guys who run this company, and it’s a great tool. Plus, it’s free for tracking under 5k visits a month. It’s just a simple line of javascript code placed into your template and it starts working right away. (Status – I installed CrazyEgg on 5 of my sites a few months ago and used the tool. It is very interesting to see where people clicked. Ultimately, it wasn’t telling me anything I didn’t already know so I removed it.)

Ads

Google Ads at the top of your blog. I don’t know how much revenue you make from the blog, but you might consider moving those, or removing them. First they are the first thing a spider sees when they come into your blog (the spiders read left to right top to bottom), and what they read text wise first is considered most important to your blog. Second, consider your audience, do they really click on Google Ads?

Although it’s a decision every blogger weighs, for my blog, I have no ads right now. I have also made the conscious decision not to put up Google/Yahoo ads, because my audience wouldn’t click those ads … in SEO/SEM, (which is my target audience) we tend not to click on contextual ads. I am considering finding a sponsor advertiser to see if that would work – something related, but interesting enough that my readers would click over. Knowing your target audience will really help you weigh what’s important and how to go about the whole Advertising on your blog issue. Everyone is different, so take my recommendation with a grain of salt – those could be incredibly successful for you and therefore you might not want to take them down. (Status – I removed the top Adsense link ads. I will keep the others in there for now. As for the affiliate banners in the right column, they do get clicked but I may change them out to text links.)

Image Names:

If you can, name your images with keywords and use the alt attribute if you can, this will not only help design wise (if a blind person comes to your site, those readers they use, read the image name and the alt text back to them), but also could help you rank in a image search too. (Status – good reminder! This is something I know and preach myself. When it comes to my own blog, if I am in a hurry, I tend to over look it.)

So, are you convinced you need to join the SOAP party now? I would like to thank Li again for doing such a fantastic job reviewing my blog. Now I need to go work on SOAPing Bill’s blog.