Dearest clients, friends, pals– past and present:

I know I’m just a lowly intern, but I’m a really formidable beggar, so here goes.

Want to help DriveTraffic grow? All you have to do is submit a customer satisfaction review to an online SEO company review database.

There are tons of companies listed in there, but when I scrolled down to find “DriveTraffic,” I was sad to see she was missing. And I know from working here that DT can swim with the big boys.

It’s really quick and easy– takes two minutes. Merci beaucoup.

I was just reading Danny Sullivan’s blog post entitled The Joy of Vacation Rentals Searching on the Web (not) and couldn’t help but feel sorry for him - we’ve all been there - looking for travel information on the web and being faced by spammy sites and otherwise difficult to navigate sites.

Danny’s post reminded me of a previous student in one of my Search Engine Marketing courses who had a vacation home available for rent in South America I believe it was. It was almost impossible to achieve top 10 rankings for her targeted keyword phrases due to the amount of competition for those phrases by directories who have tons of vacation rentals available.

My philosophy to her was if you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em - pay the money to get yourself listed in the top directories and if there were too many directories, making the task too costly, choose the vacation rental directories that offered visitors the best bang for their time - lots of stock, well organized and a credible appearance.

By the same token, one cannot just submit to vacation rental directories and wash their hands - you must continue working at your site to ensure it has a credible look to it and offers a good user experience in terms of navigation and finding relevant information.

Read Danny’s post about SEO warning flags going off while perusing the content of a website and then take a moment to ask yourself if these flags are going to go off when an SEO looks at your website.

Even if you are low in the search engines, visitors can find you. If you offer a better user experience than the top 10 websites, you may end with more customers than the top sites end up with. It’s all about user experience.

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