I’ve moved my blog around a lot over the years. I did this again recently because I realized I was getting 9th place in search results for my name. As a web admin I should be ranking higher simply because I know how to setup a site for good SEO.
So I decided to fix my site up and at the same time test a lot of the best practices.
Since i’m targeting Robert Pate as keywords, i changed the title of my blog from robertpateii to Robert Pate II. I’m not sure how google treats spaces, but I figured an exact match would be better than a psuedo match. I moved back to robertpate.net instead of robertpateii.com for the same reason.
Also .net made more sense to me, subjectively. I’m not a commercial enterprise. I’m not a networking company either, but at least it’s the right industry for me.
I also made sure I was redirecting everything to www so that there isn’t any duplicate content. Redirected all the old urls from when the blog was on robertpateii.com, and finally updated wordpress manually.
Oh and I posted this so that there’s some fresh content. In a week or two i’ll update this with my new google rank.
June 11th, 2011 Update:
6 days later and i’m now ranked 6 for Robert Pate, but google hasn’t picked up my new blog title yet. The ones in front of me are whitepages, linkedin, wikipedia, cstv.com, and justia.com. That’s not bad for having little content and no one linking to this site. There are 2 obvious next steps: go through all my online spaces and link to my own domain and adding useful content.
July 8th, 2011 Update:
See the SEO Update Post.