If anyone is interested. I have decided to turn ranked1 into a blog about SMO or social media sites. I decided to do some testing to help me determine which social media sites worked best. I am using one site about lawnmowers and just turned another web design site I had into a website about celebrity gossip.

I guess I should clarify that neither are websites but both are blogs. Anyway I am hoping to slowly get into some detailed post about how I am using the different networks to drive traffic to the different blogs as well as make money off that traffic. And that is the purpose of ranked1.

I’m not saying that there is no need for on page optimization because it is important but I’m saying that it want get you traffic. It is important that you use SEO friendly url’s and it is good to use title tags, meta tags, alt tags, H1 tags, URL structure, internal linking, Content, site maps and the site is be usable.

But none of these things will get traffic to your site and are easy enough to add to a site. There is no reason to hire an outside firm to do what your web designer or CMS (content management system) can do at little or no charge. People hire an on site SEO firm thinking that they are going to see traffic to their site and many times this is not the case. The increase that can be seen with an on site SEO firm is very little in most cases and none at all in others.

Your return on investment would be better seen using PPC or going with a marketing firm that will work on getting links and traffic to the site as well as taking care of on site SEO needs. If I had a choice of hiring someone to handle SMO vs SEO, I would go with the SMO.

SMO (Social Media Optimization) will get both links and traffic to your site while on site SEO will not get either to your site.

I’ve always had a lot of respect for Chris over at WPW and today he mentioned a couple times the website Fark and how much he liked it. He also mentioned that no one had anything like Fark in the marketing industry.

I’ve asked my guys to look into creating a section on the site that will allow us to have something like Fark for the marketing and SEO community. I figure it can’t hurt to bad to give it a try.

I decided to do a little test now that my blog is optimized for the search engines. I wrote some text about custom website designs and I’m going to try and rank it for custom website design.

Here’s my thinking.

If the blog ranks well then I’m able to make a list of keywords and write articles about each of my keywords and rank those keywords in the top ten. But I guess step one is seeing how long it takes to rank my blog post in the top ten for custom website design.

I’ve decided to do a little search engine optimization on some of my blogs. I found a lot of information but very little information that told me where to go and what to do. Because of this I decided to start a list of some of the things I’ve done and how I went about doing them. The blog I’m using is Wordpress.

If you log into Wordpress and click on options, then click on Permalinks you will be taken to a page that allows you to change the way your url’s are shown. It’s best to do this in the beginning stages of starting your blog because once you change the way your url’s are shown, you will loose all incoming links going to your current pages.

You have three chooses, the first is the default setting, the second shows the date and title name and the third is a custom setting. I used the third and placed /%postname%/, this shows the title of my post in all the url’s and nothing else. I’m not sure if this was the best way, if I duplicate a post title I’m not sure what will happen. The second option might have been the better option but I did not want the dates in my url.

Next problem I saw was with the title of my pages, I downloaded the blog and went to the wp-content folder, then to the themes folder and then picked the template I was using. From here I went to the header.php page and changed the title to only show the title of my post but later found a post by bj that had this code

So I changed it to this.

After this I downloaded a plugin called SH-Autolink, I’m still playing with this but it looks like a pretty neat tool. Lets say I want certain keywords to link to information about those keywords. I can tell the blog that every time it sees the keyword PageRank it needs to link to an article that explains PageRank.

I cheated a little and made it link to my website design site every time it sees the words website design but that does seem to be the most important site for someone looking for a website design company to me. (-:

I’m still playing but these are the changes I’ve made so far and I thought someone might be able to use this, so I posted it here.