Trend Setting to the Top

In this series I am going to build a site from scratch and show you many of the steps I take to get a site to climb the search engine rankings. In many ways it’s going to be like looking over my shoulder as I show you what you have to do to get your own site to the top positions.


Read the full article here: Trend Setting to the Top

For more discussion go here: Blog Article Discussion

This is a great idea. It would be very useful for newbies.

I take a very Analytical approach to SEO, I guess this comes from working in a research background.

I would like to so, not only what you are doign being recorded but also taking and recording relevant data such as

Domain name issues
When registered
How long registered for
When submitted to search engines
When Indexed & Spidered
When content added
When listed
SERPs
Competition analsysi
Data Center Watch

I am doing something similar for 4 test sites in a test I am running on recirpocal linking. Its quite interesting to see how random things get when there are 4 control sites!

hmmm... great idea - but in practice there are volumes of problems in this approach.

Most people coming here have a website and developing a blog on blogspot detracts from that.

Or rather I should say the first step is missing:

blogspot is a webring [a generalized concept - that gains power from all links towards all blogs in the ring - but you don't own them - Google does] you gain the value of links but you can't use them for anything other than affiliate Adsense value.

You can take blogger and add to your own website thus your own commercial value but then you don't get the power of blogspot linkage and most owners' blogs in this arrangement die a slow death right from inception. [course there are many exceptions].

Additionally in both instances you can't edit the core code - which is IMHO is flawed for SEO value - you need "far more links" than most other blogging technologies to gain the same ranking value.

My first step with any informational CMS is to strip the code and dump the rubbish - I can get twice the ranking value out of using half the same links as anyone using straight off-the-shelf.