Various people have, over the last few years, done studies into the popularity of authoring techniques - for example, looking at what HTML ids and classes are most common, and at how many sites validate. In December 2005, Google did an analysis of a sample of slightly over a billion documents, extracting information about popular class names, elements, attributes, and related metadata.

Just scanning this information is enlightening! The link to the study can be found at http://code.google.com/webstats/index.html.

Of particular interest to me was the meta data section. Essentially, the lack of use of quotation marks around values can be detrimental to a search engine understanding what the value is. So if your meta description is important to you, be sure to write it in the following format:

meta name=”description” content=”this is where you write your description of just over 150 characters or so”

Of course you would wrap that in angular brackets like all other HTML tags.

What I see as useful here is that Google can more easily pick up on tricks such as hidden divs, etc. What else is ironic here is that the majority of sites are using code that Google either does not comprehend or does not use - like meta keywords, revisit-after, etc.

Really a great read!

I am not too worried as this often happens to new sites - they appear in Google and then disappear.

A few days aga when I checked, there were no pages from ReviewedBy.ca in the Google search engine. Boo!

Thanks to the support team at Ace of Space web hosting, I realized that the .htaccess file that WordPress wants to modify is one that sits in the WordPress folder - we had been making sure that the properties were correct for that same file in the root directory!

So in order to enable permalinks on the ReviewedBy.ca blog, I had to create a new .htaccess file in the WordPress directory and set the proper permissions so that WordPress could write to that file.

One thing checked off the to do list ;-) Next is the meta descriptions and page titles!

On January 5 I indicated that I would follow a website that I set up called ReviewedBy.ca - follow it in the search engines and overall getting traffic to the site.

So just over 10 days later (I didn’t check any earlier), 2 pages from that domain have been indexed at Google, 21 at MSN (wow!), and 2 at Yahoo!

One of the things I attempted to do between the last post and this post was to enable permalinks on that blog so that the search engines would not index “www.reviewedby.ca/wordpress/?cat=2 ” but rather “www.reviewedby.ca/wordpress/digitalcamers” for example. It must be a problem with the host because I cannot get this to work properly and yet it is working on this blog, which is hosted elsewhere….hmmm..

Have to add that to the to do list.

The next thing on the to do list is to ensure that each page which gets indexed has a unique meta description - so far every page uses the blog description.

I’ll keep you posted on my progress with these two features and see if I can find a way to measure traffic for free since all of my Google Analytics accounts are tied up at the moment ;-)

Darlene

Call me a copycat. I think the title of my post might be the same or similar to one of Seth Godin’s many books, but I am not trying to steal his limelight and I don’t think he’d be too threatened LOL!

I am copying Jennifer Laycock’s idea though. She is on approximately day 27 of a 30 day plan to make some money by marketing a website without spending any cash. The name of her “project” is Zero Dollars, a Little Talent and 30 Days. I have found it very difficult to navigate between each of the 30 days, so may I recommend doing a Google search for “Zero Dollars, a Little Talent and 30 Days Day 1″, day 2, etc. This is how I managed to find all of the days.

I am going to apply this principle to a new website that I launched called ReviewedBy.ca. This is a hobby website that is in need of some more appropriate design, but that is going to have to wait until I start to get some traffic to the site.

It is really a learning site - an opportunity to play with WordPress in greater detail, AdSense Deluxe plugin for Wordpress and AdSense Gold, a software package and articles database to be used in conjunction with your Adsense account. I hear of so many affiliates making money via AdSense - to date I have only made a couple of dollars on another site that I have, a directory of Affiliate Programs - which, like everything else I start, is unfinished *grin*

So follow me through the adventure of getting ReviewedBy.ca into the search engines and getting some traffic!

Unfortunately I have used up all 5 of my Google Analytics accounts right now so will have to find another means of tracking traffic ;-)