Probably the most ambitious search engine ranking experiment yet.

I looked in Google adwords search engine tool for high value medium high volume search terms in respect of expenses management software.

I exported fifty of tbe better ones into a text document, and then copied them directly into namecheap’s domain availability search tool.

Out of those still available   http://expensemanagersoftware.com and http://expensesmanagementsoftware.com were the most promising, so I registered them each for a year.

I then wrote a new article on the main website for the Time Worked software, gave it a menu link, and sent out a tweet via su.pr.

Next step was to divert these urls to the Time Worked site, and see if they generate some visitors.

Prior to taking these steps, TimeWorked would not come up at all if the search term ‘Expense Manager Software’ was entered into Google.

I will have to wait a day or two to see if this achieves some visibility for the Time Worked site in search results.

But – as an indicator – kStats results a few moments after the tweeting this article are as below:

Time	IP	Page Viewed	OS	Browser
18:01:37 / 12-13-2011	184.72.131.60	/using-su-pr-and-twitter-to-ga…	unknown	unknown
18:01:36 / 12-13-2011	184.72.131.60	/using-su-pr-and-twitter-to-ga…	unknown	unknown
17:59:02 / 12-13-2011	184.72.131.60	/using-su-pr-and-twitter-to-ga…	unknown	unknown
17:59:01 / 12-13-2011	184.72.131.60	/using-su-pr-and-twitter-to-ga…	unknown	unknown
17:55:10 / 12-13-2011	72.44.32.2	/using-su-pr-and-twitter-to-ga…	Mac OS X	Firefox 3.6
17:53:58 / 12-13-2011	184.72.187.14	/using-su-pr-and-twitter-to-ga…	unknown	unknown
17:53:48 / 12-13-2011	74.123.148.55	/using-su-pr-and-twitter-to-ga…	Linux (Ubuntu)	Firefox 3.6.8
17:53:31 / 12-13-2011	216.168.43.104	/using-su-pr-and-twitter-to-ga…	unknown	unknown
17:53:21 / 12-13-2011	74.112.131.148	/using-su-pr-and-twitter-to-ga…	unknown	Firefox
17:53:14 / 12-13-2011	46.51.236.125	/using-su-pr-and-twitter-to-ga…	unknown	unknown
17:53:11 / 12-13-2011	184.73.126.115	/using-su-pr-and-twitter-to-ga…	unknown	unknown
17:53:00 / 12-13-2011	180.76.6.225	/page/3/	unknown	unknown
17:52:55 / 12-13-2011	89.151.116.53	/using-su-pr-and-twitter-to-ga…	unknown	unknown
17:52:53 / 12-13-2011	184.72.47.71	/using-su-pr-and-twitter-to-ga…	unknown	unknown
17:52:53 / 12-13-2011	89.151.116.53	/using-su-pr-and-twitter-to-ga…	unknown	unknown
17:52:52 / 12-13-2011	46.20.47.43	/using-su-pr-and-twitter-to-ga…	unknown	unknown
17:52:52 / 12-13-2011	204.236.152.171	/using-su-pr-and-twitter-to-ga…	unknown	unknown
17:52:52 / 12-13-2011	65.52.0.229	/using-su-pr-and-twitter-to-ga…	Windows Vista	IE 7.0
17:52:51 / 12-13-2011	199.59.149.164	/using-su-pr-and-twitter-to-ga…	unknown	unknown
17:52:51 / 12-13-2011	174.129.106.224	/using-su-pr-and-twitter-to-ga…	unknown	PycURL 7.21.3

Using su.pr and Twitter to gain search engine indexing

Search Engine Optimisation – even the words sound tedious, and if you go down the list of things that you need to do in order to Search Engine Optmise your site, you could almost lose the will to live.

However the basics are easy, and no matter what your business does, getting your site to get to page one results of Google for a couple of mid range search terms is very achieveable.  A key method is to use page titles, and page content that fit search terms that you would like your site to rank highly for.

For example for the search term below gets a position four result for a website that has been up for less than a month.

Search Engine Optimisation using Page Headers

Using a page title, in conjuction with a domain name timessheetsoftware.co.uk pointing to a certain page in the website, again gets a position four result:

If you go for a page title with a longer tailed search term, a top result can be achieved:

Needless to say, if your site is clean: ie has original content, lacks affiliate links, and is well structured using a standard content management system, this all helps.  You can go down the route of link building, or any other of the many SEO techniques out there – but if you do the basics of relevant page titles, and original hopefully helpful content, you have already won 80% of the battle.

Using Page Titles for Page 1 Search Engine Results

Firstly what is Salty Droid about?

A. Salty Droid – http://saltydroid.info is a site focused on the abuse of internet marketers who make too much money, and written by a looser who failed to make money himself, and therefor spends his time abusing those who are more capable and more successful than him.

B. Alternatively Salty Droid is almost an art installation, where the Salty Droid robot, the alter ego of a certain Jason Jones, adopts a language that is so extreme that it can be nothing but funny – unless you are the sad victim of one of his tirades.

C. A third view is that there is an element of validity in both A and B above: Jason Jones must have gone down the internet marketing path, did not make much money, saw that some things stank, and started to get self righteous, and decides to use some legal training to always stay just on the right side of the law.

…or something else.

You have to look at the site to make up your own mind.

Ordinary Joe’s view  is that Salty Droid is more effective than the FSA in derailing internet fraudsters.  The outrageous language in a way goes hand in hand with the outrageous methods that are used to exploit generally vulnerable people into parting with their money for useless information products, or ‘frauducts’ as the Droid defines them.  Also the tone of the site seems to be based more on genuine moral concerns rather self righteousness.

As to whether Jason Jones is really Jason Jones? Who knows.  Having a pop at people who make huge amounts of money online, and yet hide their contact details, is not something for the faint hearted.   Having a pop at Scientology is not for the faint hearted either – but Salty Droid has a go, and correctly compares the marketing techniques of Scientology with those of ‘syndicate’ internet marketers / gurus*.

Jason Jones, crusader that he is, should keep his real identity hidden as much as possible.  And, finally, if you want to get a very amusing self expose of internet frausters in action, you could do worse than to see this video of Andy Jenkins and Jeff Walker discussing deceptive advertising tactics.

But what is he up to?  Well – he probably will monetize his site in some way – it is generating a good following, and thereby opening himself up to accusations of hipocracy.  Who cares.  If a site is built on a good principle, offers useful information to the internet browser, and has a large community of followers, it should make the owner some money.

*Fortunately there are more sites debunking Scientology than praising it, and there is just enough out there to keep this sinister organisation struggling, an unfortunate journalist working for Panorama had a very rough ride when getting down to the nub of the organisation – see the programme here.

Salty Droid the alter ego of Jason Jones

This site has had large numbers of spam comments, all of which had to be manually deleted from time to time, so it was time to replace the WordPress comments with Disqus, and have Askimet anti spam activated.

Installing Disqus to WordPress took about ten minutes.

(a) going to Plugins and searching for Disqus

(b) downloading it

(c) registering on Disqus using the JustOrdinaryJoe twitter account

(d) creating a Disqus JustanOrdinaryJoe web page account and user name

(d) registering for an Askimet account

(e) going to the comments section, and activating Disqus, along with Askimet.

You will see the new Disqus comment box below each article.   Just add your positive / negative / entertaining / informative / relevant feedback there!

Disqus and Askimet: hello comments, bye bye spam!

I started off with Joomla, creating websites such as this Boardgame and  this Consultancy site, using Artisteer to generate the basic template.

I then used WordPress, and the Atualhalpa theme, for JustanOrdinaryJoe.

Nevertheless Drupal manages to deliver a both more corporate and internet contemporary look and feel – more so than both Joomla and WordPress.  Also the standard type settings, and font definition, seem to be better.

However using Drupal, moving from other CMS systems, was a real struggle. Nothing was really quite the same, and it was not obvious how to do things.  However it is worth the struggle – Drupal’s block management structure is user friendly once it is familiar, plus I believe if Drupal was the first CMS I worked with, Joomla and Drupal would seem equally opaque.

I needed to create a site with a corporate presence, for a new software product. Having tried a number of different templates, and dropped Artisteer as a template generator, as it seemed to lose some of the standard Drupal functionality, I then found a Drupal template called Mayo.  Based on Mayonaise, which can be used for anything.

The result is here. The logo was designed using PowerPoint and taking a screen shot using the microsoft snipping tool.  Mayo’s great strength is that it allows the user to change layout and colours without having to go into .css style sheets, which suits me perfectly as a reluctant programmer.

From an SEO perspective, Ordinary Joe, as a WordPress site, is performing well enough in the light of the number of similar sites out there.  According to AWStats most visitors seem to come via a direct link though, either via RSS feeds, or just typing the URL in, rather than from search engines – which indicates visitor loyalty, which is a good thing, but leaves room for improvement for SEO.

The strategy game site, which is a Joomla site,  is performing well from an SEO perspective – appearing on the first page of Bing and Yahoo.

For Google, it needs to be ‘Fibonacci Game’ for the site to appear on the first page of results, rather than the more generic strategy game.  Who knows what element of the Google algorithm causes this.

For the consulting site, which is in Joomla CMS, the competition is fierce, however for realclarity, and some useful relevant search terms, the site comes up on the first page.

For Drupal, the very basic site that has been up for a month or so, here, SEO results are very minimal; not surprisingly.

And for the new site, timeworked.com covering the software program, we will see how it climbs the results.  Again it is a competitive area.  Once the site is more complete, I’ll do some tweeting, and also point some further URLs to it (I have registered a number of URLs that are relevant to the site content).

So, in conclusion: Joomla is as good as WordPress from an SEO perspective.  For Drupal, the sites need more time, and more work, prior to a verdict from an SEO perspective being reached.

….ONE WEEK LATER; UPDATE:

After a week (with no website submissions, however linking a couple of other domain names to link to pages in the site, such as timesheetssoftware.co.uk ) the new Drupal site timeworked.com is performing well on Bing:

And also for Yahoo:

For Google, for the shorter search terms, the website is lost on page four or five.  But for the longer search terms relevant to the site it comes up on page 1.

So – in conclusion, WordPress, Joomla and Drupal all perform to an equivalent level from an SEO perspective.  It is not always easy to move from one CMS to another, but each of them, once you get used to the formats and protocols, are easy enough to manage.

Also – it might be that submitting websites to Search Engines is a waste of time.  Search Engines will find and rank websites easily enough on their own accord.

Finally – if you can uncover some extra domain names that are relevant to your site, it is probably worth doing.  For an outlay of around $10 a year, per domain name,  the odds are that they will help generate visitors via natural search and more cost effectively than pay per click.  Below is an example of a search term generating a Google first page result for timessheetsoftware.co.uk.

The Drupal struggle versus WordPress and Joomla, and how good are they on SEO?

Having had JustAnOrdinaryJoe online for over a year now: the average visit time has doubled, the number of clicks per visit has trebled, so the content is offering some value.

Adsense however is not really performing however.  This is perhaps a good thing – as the standard of ads shown can be dire.  A very frequent one is ‘Top tips for a tiny Belly!’ or ‘Drop Three Dress Sizes’ – which has carpet bombed the internet for years, and most often leads to products offerings that do not give much value if any to the consumer. Adsense shows the weightloss ad on this site because of a post about Facebook spamming and ironically, this post, which  mentions it by way of example – however the ad itself has no relevance to the readers of this site.

There are frequently though good standard Ads for reputable and relevant products.  Yet no one clicks on them.  Why?  Because if the content is engaging the visitor, the visitor will not click on the ad, as the ad represents less value than the content.

So: what do people do to make money out of Adsense?  I have heard that their trick is to write senseless stuff.  If promoting gambling, or sex, or any other common or desperate human desires, does not conflict with your ethical viewpoint, revenue can be generated.  The common feature of these money making sites is that their content is dire: almost unreadable, and only  just on the verge of making grammatical sense.  They do have the sharpest SEO operators working on them however.

And what happens.  The visitor gets to the site, starts reading, gets quickly bored, and then sees the attractive ad which was just what he or she was interested in anyway, and then clicks it!  Hey presto, the site starts to generate revenue.

The other way for Adsense to work is of course to have a very large number of visitors: but still, expect cents rather than dollars to be coming in.

To get Adsense to work you need to write senseless stuff!

There is something not quite right with Facebook security at the moment.  People’s walls are no longer quite as personal.

A good and rather health conscious friend just posted:

if you want to lose weight you should try HCG! I lost 10 LBS in the last 10 days! [Plus a spam link]

..and had to comment “Not sent by me!”

Then there are series of fake mentions in the form “XYZ mentioned you on Facebook” that are being emailed out, and then you only find the message on your wall is a garble of names and nonsense.

Yet this is a billion dollar enterprise?

It will could disapear into a puff of smoke if these security breaches are not resolved with a sense of urgency.

Facebook getting Spammed to death!

Installing plugins to WordPress and activating them is easier than for Joomla or Drupal.  I have just spent about half an hour installing the three plugins below:

To get going, I simply selected the Plugins option, from within WordPress admin, and then started browsing the link to popular plugins.

W3 Total cache is designed to improve the performance of this site for visitors.

WordPress SEO does useful stuff like create site maps – which are something that search engines love. Also, when ever an article is posted, Google, Bing, Yahoo, and Ask are automatically ‘pinged’ – sounds great!

Finally Sexy bookmarks by Shareaholic was fun to have found – the result is now at the bottom of every post on this site.  Click it to share this page by your social media of choice!

Adding Plugins to WordPress

Next step is to try some Search Engine Optimisation / SEO.

Currently a search on Google for “clickword” does generate a result, so the site is no longer sandboxed.

However, with clickword not in quotation marks, no result is generated. Also, for some of the website copy – “ClickWord will help the small to medium sized business with a small budget to get an internet presence that provides tangible results” – putting it into a search engine also got no results.

So – having confirmed that ClickWord is performing pretty poorly on Google, now is the time to try to improve.

I’ll use my JustOrdinaryJoe su.pr account to send out a tweet relating to the about page.

Firstly I’ll tweet this page:

And after about five minutes, Google had already indexed it (& the search was without quotation marks):

I’ll wait about ten minutes, and then check the search engine results for ClickWord.

….ten minutes have passed, and ClickWord.co.uk does not appear for the phrase concerned.  This could be due to the URLs not being optimised, or other reasons – Ordinary Joe will check and get back to you.  Stay posted.

An experiment in SEO and Drupal part III

I firstly re-logged onto my new clickword.co.uk site.

To see what it looked like at the start of part II please see the image from the first article on this series here.

Working around the Drupal administrator section is rather like working on a puzzle for the unintiated.

But pretty quickly, to add content, just go to the Dashboard, and click Add Content.  There is a choice of Basic page or Article – I entered some copy for both.

To go into the details of the next steps would remove the fun of ‘unpuzzling’ it yourself*, and getting to know Drupal is an enjoyable challenge, rather than frustrating.

However, keeping it short, after about an hour’s minutes work (not withstanding the copy which I had written in advance), I as a fairly unititiated user**, had managed to get to here:

I removed the user login section and added a menu with a couple of links.

Using CPanel email manager, I setup a new email address webteam@clickword.co.uk

Part III will be to add some further content and change the look and feel a bit.

*There may well be Drupal videos out there that go through these steps – however if there are a good number of people who would like access to more ‘how to’ on this topic I will create more reference material.  Please email in the first instance.

** Note: I have spent some time working on WordPress and Joomla sites, so the ‘logic’ of what goes on in a CMS was familiar to me.  If you have never worked on a CMS before,  the learning curve will be steeper.

An experiment in SEO and Drupal – Part II