SEO Fun and Games
Posted by Kirk M on 11 Aug 2007 | Tagged as: Blogging
I have spent a very educational couple of hours playing with the SEO backend of things for Just Thinkin’. I did this using a combination of the Domain Tools Text Browser to monitor the description and keywords generated from my site, the percentage of relevancy of each and my overall SEO score (according to Domain Tools), the Firefox Web Developer Toolbar extension to check the source code and “generated” source code of my home page and adjusting my description and keyword settings using the All-IN-One SEO WordPress plugin I had installed several days ago.
The above Text Browser gives you suggestions on how to improve your site’s overall SEO score and shows you percentage of relevancy of your Site’s title, description and keywords. All you have to do to access this handy browser is go to the Domain Tools main page and type in your site’s URL into the search box provided. When your “Whois” page loads up, you’ll see the Text Browser over in the right sidebar. Just click anywhere inside the Text Browser to bring it up. Once it’s loaded you’ll see a small button in the upper left hand corner of the browser with an “I” on it. Click on that to bring up the “Optimization Notes” page and you’ll see what I’m talking about.
Anyway, without going into a lengthy explanation as to how I did this, that and the other thing and mostly because the lawn needs mowing, I managed to get my my blog’s SEO rating up from 92% to 97% overall with 100% relevancy for my keywords and description by adjusting these two items using the above WordPress plugin and monitoring the changes in relevancy by clicking on the little refresh button in the navigation bar of the Text Browser. Worked pretty slick.
The “Web Developer Toolbar” extension for Firefox came in handy when I discovered that no matter what I put in for my keywords, they never seemed to change in the Text Browser. By viewing the “generated” source code of my home page using the Web Developer Toolbar, I found that although my keywords were being correctly changed in the header, there was also another line of similar code generating yet another set of keywords lower down in the source code which were the ones I was seeing in the Text Browser. This finally led me to my tagging plugin that I had previously set up to generate my keywords and it was interfering with the SEO plugin. I changed the tagging options so the plugin wouldn’t generate keywords and voila(!)…the problem was fixed.
Now does this mean that I actually have an almost perfect SEO score? No, it probably doesn’t since I don’t know how valid the Domain Tools’ Text Browser really is especially in the present day confusion of what really works for good site SEO.
Now, does what I’ve written come across terribly confusing?
You bet it does…even to me which is why I spent two hours playing around like I did–for educational purposes. I’m still too light on the subject of SEO for me to be comfortable with it as it stood. What I mean is; you can have all the damn SEO plugins you can get your hands on but you have to know how to use them before they can be effective. Hence all the experimenting. I just figured I’d throw a post up about it so I can make any readers who happen to stop by scratch their respective heads as to what the heck I was doing.
Confusion loves company you know. 
Technorati tags: SEO, Domain Tools, keywords, WordPress SEO, SEO score
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2 Comments »
on 13 Aug 2007 at 9:18 am 1.Joost said …
Part of the fun of blogging (and SEO) is trying out all the new stuff and seeing for yourself if it works or not
on 13 Aug 2007 at 12:34 pm 2.KirkM said …
Hi Joost,
Welcome to my end of things here.
I absolutely agree, at least for an old computer geek like me (I rode Harley’s to balance the geek part out ya’ know) and SEO especially never seems to settle down…ever(!) these days. At least the northern New England way of “by word of mouth” is still an old standard you can depend on even though that kind of SEO takes way too long.
Good thing blogging came around or I would have been bored stiff. Oh, give Tommy a pat from me if you would.