I posted a little while ago about my attempts to optimize my blog for search engines. I think it’s working. Take this example. This morning, I linked to an article on Prince of Petworth about a new restaurant opening in Columbia Heights, CommonWealth Gastropub. Now, PoP is a near-deity in the greater Columbia Heights/Petworth/Logan/Shaw area. It’s a good blog. I read it regularly. I, on the other hand, am a relative unknown who complains too much. PoP went to an early preview at CommonWealth and took pictures, then wrote an article about the experience. I linked to the article, and offered very limited commentary. Now, go do a little Google search for commonwealth dc gastropub. you will notice that item seven is my post. The first item from PoP is item 23, and it’s not even a link to the most recent article. So, on one hand, you have a good blog that did some real journalism. On the other, you have a blog, where half the readership was at the author’s wedding, that just linked to the real journalism. But I show up first on Google.
Tag: seo
Hey, people like Drupal and SEO
A bunch of hits on the last post, especially for a Friday night. It looks like people are watching stuff tagged with “Drupal” or “SEO” or something like that. Anyway, at the advice of the commenters, I’ve replaced trackback with pingback, which requires less (no) effort and still accomplishes that two-way link between me and anyone who happens to link to me. I also tweaked my robots.txt file. So, we’ll see what happens. Now I just have to keep writing things that people find interesting. Or, you know, start.
Drupal, SEO, and you
I’ve been getting annoyed by a few things about this blog. First, in the last sixty days, exactly 28% of the pageviews on the site are one page – the community bitch page about Vector Security. The percentage is even higher if you include some other random pages that come up on a Google search for “vector security” and related terms. Which brings me to the second point – Drupal’s default “Clean URLs” are crap for search engine indexing. If none of this makes sense to you, stop reading now. Go read something else, like Bad Astronomy Blog or Whatever or any of the other millions of blogs out there. Some of them are certainly talking about something that interests you. But if you’re interested in what I’m doing to help people find me, read on. I want people to find me based on stuff I write about a lot – complaining, sports, probably some politics when we get closer to November. I appreciate the people who come here looking for Vector Security, but that’s not really my focus here. So I took some steps to become more search-engine-friendly. SEO, if you will. First, I installed multiping. By default, Drupal isn’t that good at pinging Technorati and whatnot. I think you can set it up with cron, but I don’t understand cron, and don’t feel like learning. Multiping takes the cron out of pinging. Now, Technorati gets updates whenever I post, and they can share my posts with the world. Then I added trackbacks. Trackbacks are one of those things, like the Metric system, that sound like a really good idea, but depend on widespread adoption to really succeed. But I figure it can’t hurt to be trackback-enabled. And I added pathauto. Now, the link for this post (As opposed to the link to the front page) is complainthub.com/blog/drupal-seo-and-you instead of complainthub.com/node/943. This is much more informative, and I think it’s much better for search engine indexing. So we’ll see how it goes. Either it will be awesome, and my traffic will go through the roof, or it will be exactly the same. Or somewhere in between. I’m betting on somewhere in between.