kitschchaos.com

Introducing a new e-commerce category to this blog. I’ve already done one business tips post. And this blog is for chaos magic applied to e-commerce (or other commerce).

I’ve worked for 2 years as the web-master and Search Engine Optimizer for an online t-shirt business (I also designed t-shirts and printed many, jack of all trades I am), in that time I learned a lot. With this website I’ve learned a lot as well. Though it’s true, I have no Google pagerank yet, it’s coming soon (kitschchaos.com is mere months old, averaging 70 hits a day for the month of March, up several hundred percent from the previous month).

(update for May 9,09 -this site has had Google page rank 1 since beginning of April [index page] and an average of 134 unique visitors/day -Blog SEO works!)

Now here’s the thing with kitschchaos.com, the target market is being created – which is not the easy way to go. If I wanted easy, I’d work the fortune telling angle – it’s highly profitable in the current depressed economic climate (when all is lost – there still is hope). But I’m going after something I can feel good about, telling people how to roll their own divination, cast their own spells.

Now one cardinal rule is to target a hungry crowd. I believe there is a hungry crowd. The employee paradigm has failed – companies are shedding payroll and downsizing. But the opportunity to run your own business, only you can stop you! And an internet business, the playing field is level, it’s affordable for a broad range of people! The only thing that’s missing is an edge.

And there’s no shortage of people eager to sell you that edge. What this site is about thou8gh is a geniune edge no one else has considered. Chaos magic works!

So I believe in this site, I know it can and will blow up!

So let’s talk about SEO.

Search Engine Optimization. There’s the basic stuff, html links so spiders can crawl your site, and lots of ways to craft your keywords. Back links – get lots of back links. Yadda Yadda Yadda.

The rules are a changing. Google is altering their formula to do other things. I understand repeat visits will assume greater importance, for example.

Google is routinely altering how they rank sites. But there is a constant – and that’s Google’s intent. What’s Google’s intent? They want the sites on the first page of a search to be the BEST sites. Sites with really great and unique content, that people want to visit over and over again!

This is where ‘black hat’ vs. ‘white hat’ SEO comes in. The ‘white hat’ approach is to, more or less, make the website as good, as rich with quality unique content as possible.This is straight forward, write quality content or purchase it from freelancers.

The ‘black hat’ is focused on making a profit, the site is a means to an end and pagerank is achieved ‘by any means necessary’. Often this means doing stuff like cribbing from other’s writing to make ‘new’ articles (there’s software to automate this though I doubt it does a good job) and automating blogs with feeds from other blogs.

I personally recommend researching it all, there’s a lot of valuable stuff to learn from either branch of SEO. I’ll be sharing stuff I’ve found useful as we go along in this blog category.

the power of blogging

Why blog? Blogs enjoy special treatment in the world wide web.

• When you post a blog, it can be set up to automatically ping a server so your site is crawled immediately by web spiders and very quickly updated in search engines.
• By regularly blogging, you are gradually building an enormous and rich amount of unique quality content for your entire website.
• Your blog can be equipped with an rss feed, this is an additional distribution system increasing the exposure of your website. An rss feed also, critically, can be used to give or add content to another blog, giving you many valuable back links.
• There’s many SEO techniques unique to blogs (see all the links beneath every post to bookmarking sites, the relevant links to other sites are exchanged for relevant links to my site, the rss feed is pinged to multiple clients ..etc.

So obviously, Blogging for the SEO advantages, is a rarefied activity. You need to be able to write something someone else would want to read. And this is challenging for many people. It needn’t be though. If you can talk well enough, there are speech to text software packages. It is best if the blog is on a subject you have real interest in.

SECRETS TO SEO BLOGGING

I’m using WordPress and recommend it!

Here are my tips and plug ins for WordPress!

If you use WordPress, you can access these plug ins from the administration area.

• Akismet is an anti-spam plug in. This one is very important, for ever legit comment I get 10 or more spam replies. If you don’t want you blog littered with links to porn and gambling sites, you must have an anti-spam plug-in (Google will or may sabotage your ranking if you have links going out to porn, gambling, warez..etc.)
• All in one SEO pack is convenient, helps you target key words in your blog posting, streamlines the work involved.
• Easy Adsenser Adsense is one way to make some profit from your site, ideally it adds value though I can’t say I’d recommend many of the spell-casting services regularly posted here given this site is about doing magic yourself.
• Google Analyticator This allows Google analytics to access hits to this blog so your google analytics is accurate. I don’t understand why google analytics has different numbers from my server’s statistics – but Google offers tools my server does not. It’s critically important to have this data if you’re running a business!
• NoFollow Free Without this plug in people that are kind enough to reply to your posts get no SEO benefit from the back link accompanying their post. I want people to reply and I don’t  mind allowing them SEO credit for their link. When I post to other’s blogs I wish they’d offer the same courtesy. The purpose of ‘no-follow’ tags is to limit spam – but Akismet is quite good at that.
• Related Sites This plug-in adds my site to ‘the Blog Traffic Exchange’ – so my site will be posted on other related blogs as others are posted on mine. In practice it also gives links to related posts from my own blog – improving the functionality of the blog to new vistors. Good good good!
• Sociable gives all those links to bookmarking sites below every post. It also allows folks to print or email any given post. I use it to bookmark every new post to several sites as part of my seo effort and it’s been effective. Thanks especially to all the stumbleupon visitors plugging my site!

Now for the killer killer SEO blog tip!

Google trends This is THE killer SEO resource for blogging! What is it? Very simply – it tells you what people are searching for on Google on any given day. How is this useful? Simple – you find a way to relate your subject matter to the popular subject matter – and use the popular key words in your blog title!

There is an art to this. You need to familiarize yourself with the popular subject matter enough to at least keep your first paragraph on topic. This is for the folks new to your site looking for information on the key work you’re using – give it to them. And then you need to tie in the introductory topic into YOUR topic. Usually how I do this is I look at the list of popular search terms and use it as a catalyst for a chaos magic article. It’s not always one of the top ten for that day, and if I can make no connection I don’t use any thing from that days google trends.

If you look at my posts, the one on Watchmen, Google’s Autopilot, Zatanna and several others are posts the were generated by examing Google trends. And they have spiked visits to my site. And many of those visitors – have returned! -Because I write well – dammit!

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