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Search Engine Optimization has become such a debated topic, it’s hard to find a technical blog that hasn’t touched the issue in the past (and i see no reason why this one should not). If you’re just beginning with SEO for your blog the four tools below are a great way to get started.

SEO Quake add-on for Firefox and Internet Explorer

The SEO Quake addon for both the major browsers helps your optimization efforts. From the SEO Quake toolbar you can see the Pagerank, Google index, Google linked pages, and similar results for Alexa and Yahoo for the page you’re viewing, as well as SEO information for links in search engine results. One interesting feature is an automatic keyword combination extraction from whatever page you’re currently viewing.

All in One SEO Pack Wordpress plugin

This plugin for Wordpress will optimize your blog to be crawled and indexed by search engines. It protects you from duplicated content, optimizes the entries titles and automatically generates meta information. The way Wordpress manages it’s categories and permalinks is already excellent and makes it very easy for search engines to crawl and index your site, and this plugin will help fill the gaps between some of the more technical aspects of SEO.

Website Grader SEO tool

This online tool will analyze your site on the fly and provide a report on where the site is lacking in Search Engine Optimization. It did miss some minor details when querying serverdome.org but provides good suggestions on where to focus you optimization efforts.

Google Adwords Keyword tool

This is a free tool by Google to assist advertisers using its Adwords network but we can use it for our own benefits. You can see exactly how competitive a keyword or a combination is, how many people search for each keyword, even how find out trends in keyword queries. While it isn’t a dedicated solution to optimizing keywords, this tool by Google is always my first stop when researching keyword SEO.

Conclusion

Like i mentioned in the title, the links above are nothing more than tools, and SEO has as much to do with tools and software as it has to do with creativity and knowledge. Third party software and plugins can help so much, but operating and writing with SEO in mind will take you to the next step. Blogs structure is generally excellent for SEO and most bloggers need do do very little to have their sites indexed and crawled by search engines.

One final tip

I’m surprised this is not mentioned more often in wordpress tutorials. When you first install wordpress, change the permalink structure to something simpler. For example yesterday’s post on ad placement had the following url structure: http://www.serverdome.org/how-the-top-bloggers-display-their-ads-percentages-and-numbers/. Having the name of the post as the adress instead of a string of seemingly random characters will help both search engines and readers. To change the permalink structure just log in to your wordpress installation, go to Options, Permalinks and as a custom permalink structure enter “/%postname%/” (without the quotes).

Blogging for money has become a million dollar business, top bloggers make thousands of dollars each month for paid reviews and displaying ads on their sites. I took screenshots of the visible portion of some of the top blogs and counted how much of that was paid space. The screenshots below are taken from a maximized Firefox window with three toolbars, at a resolution of 1280×1024. You can click on each screenshot to see a full size shot with the ad areas highlighted in red.

Problogger.com

Problogger runs two ad areas above the fold, one 477 x 70 banner and one 312 x 473 box with several ads. 17.76% of the total space is ads.

Copyblogger.com

One of the better designed blogs, copyblogger displays just one ad area with multiple smaller ads, at 280 x 483 pixels. Total screen real estate: 115.920 pixels, 11.37% of screen space. Of all the sites i tested, copyblogger displays the less amount of ads.

Dailyblogtips.com

Like Copyblogger, Dailyblogtips has a single ad area with six ad boxes at 284 x 467 pixel size. 13.01% of the displayed page was ad space.

Johnchow.com

John Chow is the most referenced blogger right now and has a total of 5 ad areas on the first screen of his blog. These include the donate link, “get reviewed on these blog” link and the such. 283.842 pixels for ads above the fold for a total of 27.86% ad space.

Stevepavlina.com

Steve Pavlina’s personal development blog. Still maintains a clean layout, mostly because of the adsense text ads. Three links including the donate button, a total of 206.820 pixels. 20.30% ad space.

Shoemoney.com

Adsense-like vertical ads and image ads to the shoemoney store. Two of the ads run below the initial page displayed. 14.69% of the total space was ads.

Conclusions

This was a fun thing to research, and i have to admit i was surprised by the results. Selling ads slowly turned from a way to pay server costs using adsense to a full time job marketing products for many bloggers. One of the things that should be noted is that there’s more than one way to do this test. For example taking a screenshot of the full main page and not just the main screen radically alters the results, some of these bloggers run multiple ads below the main screen, while others don’t.

1. Text link ads on your content (the ones with the double underline)

Yes they will draw my attention but only for the wrong reasons. The popup with the ad text that appears when you move the mouse over the ad completely spoils the flow of reading the actual content. There is so many of them even in the smallest amount of text that it proves a pain to move my mouse from one side of the screen to the other. And more importantly, it makes me not trust your normal links. When 80% of your page links are automatically generated and paid for, it sets the mood for the rest of it.

2. Preview screenshot popup on outgoing links

It’s all web 2.0 fun and games until you take a somewhat good idea (tooltips) and give it to the wrong people. First of all, there is no way i will ever manage to figure out what is going on from looking at a 125Χ125 screenshot, you might as well be showing me blurred images of catfish. Secondly, i don’t think i have ever paid attention to those screenshots after the first time i noticed they existed and said “wow, these might get annoying soon”.

If and when i want to stumble/del.icio.us/digg/whatever your site, ill do it myself. If you absolutely must have a million of these links, please keep them below each post.

4. Paypal donate buttons

Even the big guys have donate links, and if you’re giving something for free you depend on the generosity of others, but when there’s adsense, textlinkads and two paid product reviews on your main page alone, then the donate link seems a little too much. It reminds me too much of web cam girls posting their amazon wishlists so creepy old men will buy them stuff. This is a drop in the ocean compared to other pitfalls, but it annoys me to no end.

5. Only date based archives

If i find a blog i enjoy and want to read more, the obvious step is to go for the categories. Let’s say i just finished reading a marvelous post about catfish care on your blog and want to see if you have more catfish related content, the obvious choice would be to look at the categories on the sidebar, or on the tags associated with the post, not under “August 2006″. Date based archives are generally useless on the main page.

6. Partial feeds

The debate still rages on, but the general sentiment is that full feeds are way ahead. Publishing partial feeds to force me to load your ads wont help your cause. If you must offer partial feeds, then do us the courtesy of also offering a full feed option.

7. Ditch the default Wordpress theme for something better

There is a wealth of excellent Wordpress themes available to download for free. The default Wordpress theme might be well designed but reminds me too much of spam sites. If you can’t take 5 minutes of your time to upload a new theme, how can you convince me to trust your content?

Blogrush managed to make some waves in the blogosphere lately with their traffic widget. A lot of people are reporting success with it, but most of them have a few thousand readers a day and the possibility to get more out of the widget from their refferal network. Others report downright deceptive reports. So how did it work out for me? Well, it didn’t really. I had the widget on the sidebar for 9 days, and Blogrush detected 800 impressions during that time. For those 800 impressions i received a total of 6 visitors from the blogrush network, which amounts to 0,0075 visits per impression. You might think that 6 visits is better than nothing, but considering the screen space the widget occupies, it doesn’t seem that good of a deal.

I replaced Blogrush with MyBlogLog for now, but i have not given up on it yet. Blogrush emailed bloggers that they will be fixing some of the more glaring problems of the service soon, like improved categories and a manual reviewing process for new blogs, but we’ll have to wait and see for that.

MyBlogLog was aquired by yahoo lately and has the possibility for some huge growth. It is not made for generating traffic, instead it focuses on the community aspect of blogs.

Digg.com is the mothership of all the web 2.0 social bookmarking sites and can be a way to reach a huge number of people. In fact, digg is so popular that a story on the main page can get you more than 50.000 visitors in less than 24 hours. From all the social bookmarking/link sharing sites that appeared with web 2.0, Digg has the possibility to direct the most traffic in the shortest amount of time. In fact, traffic can so much that sites crash and go off line shortly after appearing on the main page, coining the term “The Digg effect” when this happens. If you’d like an overview of what happens to your site when you get on the first page of digg i reccomend these two sites: The Digg Effect: A Deconstruction, and The digg effect - a visual analysis.

How it works

Digg users submit stories that appear on the “upcoming” part of Digg. Registered users can vote, or digg, a story if they like it. Stories with many diggs show up on the main page of each category, and the top stories from each category on the site’s main page.

One of the advantages of having a story appear on the main page besides the obvious digg effect is the indirect traffic from blog than link to digg stories and widgets that display the latest stories from the site.

My own experience

During the last week i have been submitting stories to Digg. None of my stories made the first page, in fact none managed more than 5 diggs, but i still received a decent amount of traffic from the search and upcoming pages. Digg accounted for about 15% of my total referral visitors these ten days. Strangely enough, much of the incoming traffic came from their search engine and generally had a lower bounce rate than other pages. This chart shows digg traffic in green compared to traffic from other sites.

Some numbers

September 15 to September 24 traffic from external sources: Referring sites sent a total of 502 visitors via 30 sources
Digg traffic: 77 visitors (15.16% of total refferal traffic)

Keep in mind that this during a ten day period, with minimal work except for submitting the article. It is not a huge boost to overall visits, but submitting to digg is a great way to get your site out there and getting it noticed, even if it never goes anywhere beyond a handful of diggs.

Downsides to Digg traffic
Most people point out that digg traffic is usually single page views, users click on the digg links, quickly scan the page then press the back button to get back to digg. Despite that, the sheer volume of traffic one can get from even a couple of hours on the digg front page is staggering and more than makes up for it.

Using Digg
Signing up for a Digg.com account is instant and allows you to submit your own stories to digg or vote for stories already on the site. Stories you dugg and submitted appear on your profile page. When you are logged in you can use the “Submit New” button to submit a story. Digg automatically checks submitted stories for duplicates before displaying them on the site.

Get your friends to digg your stories
Digg will not penalize you for having your friends sign up and digg your entries, in fact it promotes networks of friends digging up stories. Stories submitted and voted on by your site friends appear on the “Friends’ Activity” after you log in.

Use digg!
Even if you don’t have the time to be an active contributor, the ten seconds it takes to submit a story can help you get traffic for your new blog, even if it never goes anywhere beyond the upcoming stories page. Aiming for hitting the main page on Digg is a noble (and rewarding) goal, but the upcoming pages will also help increase your readership and provide new readers.

We are celebrating(?) the first ten days of serverdome.org today. Getting this blog up and running proved both harder and easier to do than i anticipated. The technical part was easy, wordpress made everything a breeze and having experience installing and tweaking it for others certainly helped. Keeping up with a daily schedule was the hard part even during these first few days. I decided to keep a plan for the next thirty days of running serverdome and publish it here as an added incentive to stick with it.

Write at least one post a day
Making time each day for writing articles, my plan is to not only have at least a post a day, but at all times have at least the articles for the next two or three days already completed. Sitting down and writing a quality article to post that same day is almost impossible. The plan is 30 articles in 30 days without having to resort to top ten links posts to keep my pace.

Work less on the blog
I spend way too much time poking around analytics statistics, testing wordpress plugins and generally tweaking the site. It’s part of the oh my shiny new toy effect of having a new blog. I’ll but aside a few hours each weekend for improving the site and statistic crunching but stay away from analytics and the serverdome template during the week.

Write better copy
Sweet and simple. And hard when English is not your first language.

Improve on the Plickr template
Add support to the Plickr wordpress theme for many of the popular plugins like Flickr Album and Related Entries and rewrite part of the code to be more readable.

Things that would not deserve bold text on their own:
Comment on another blog once a day, fix some of the glaring SEO mistakes, remove or replace the blogrush widget with something better and finally open comments on the blog.

Most of the ideas here came from problogger.com’s “31 Days to Building a Better Blog” feature. If you’re just beginning with your blog and want something to read that will help you for a long time that is the place to start.

What’s great about Sunday blogging is that you can excuse yourself from doing any real blog posting by pasting links to other blogs and cleverly disguising it as content. I don’t know who though of that but what a great idea!

Through bloggerbuster, we get iconlet, a search engine for free icons.

The Continuing History of Amazon’s Tab Navigation by lukew.com.

Two great links from webappers.com. Website Grader, a free Search Engine Optimization tool to analyze your site and report where it’s lacking in SEO, and ilovetypography.com, font and typography blog.

Tags and categories in wordpress 2.3.

The ‘Coca-Cola’ Art Gallery is a collection of images that has been designed by leading artists and designers.