You might ask yourself this question. I am! I have a blog with some 80 posts on it about strong topics, including SEO and I tend to have a verbose writing style so I am not short of a word or two to index, so why am I receiving so little search related traffic on vincentroman.com compared to others blogs of I run, such as techtalkpoint.com and applemactutorials.com.
Spotting The Problem
The answer it seems would be in Google Webmaster Tools. The evidence is that elements within the design of the blog, and which are replicated on every single page are being given TOO MUCH weight within the context of the blog itself. How do I know this? Because in the “Keywords” category under “Your site on the web” in Webmaster Tools, I can see the top terms for my site, and the relevance my site has for them. Top of the list is “icon” with 100% relevance. EEEK!
Fixing The Problem & Driving More Traffic
So how do I go about fixing the problem? Well my initial effort was to simply remove the word icon from the ALT tags in the image icons of the links in the “About …” section (to the right in the sidebar), but this seems to have done little over the last couple of weeks to change anything. My current line of thought is to remove the images/icons/links altogether and shift them over to single profile-focused page “About Me”, where, surprise surprise, people can read a little more about the “Man behind this blog”.
The thought of simply adding a rel=”nofollow” also appealed but at this juncture I am not convinced that would be enough to dampen down the importance and density of such irrelevant terms to my blog. General sentiment is that only “major surgery” would fix the current symptoms, and so cutting and pasting the HTML code out of the sidebar and into a page seems like the only way to go.
Another less elegant, though perhaps more user/content friendly would be to add the social icons in via JS so that the robots do not read that content. It means the icons et al will appear, but it also mean that there will be a flicker int he content as it likely loads in in 2 parts, first via the page itself, which will render and then, potentially with a slight lag, the social media icons appended to the “about me”.
Why? Oh Why?
This might at least reduce the keyword density of terms such as icon, twitter, facebook, etc but does it make for a better user experience? I am not sure it does, which, frankly speaking, sucks! If only it was possible to block out sections of content on a page to robots, much like you can target content for the optimisation of AdSense placement, but then no doubt dubious webmasters would use such functionality for less than desirable ends.
Anyhow, I will see how things go, and with luck will see an upshoot of traffic to the blog for more pertinent terms, such as “Facebook Connect Troubleshooting” and “Steps to Good SEO”.
Share
I am, for want of a better word, a web developer. Practising since '96 and
focused on front and back-end work with a slant for optimisation.
I love music, art, and helping people, traits which I hope are borne out here.
Read more about me and this blog on the 
No Comments so far ↓
There are no comments yet...Kick things off by filling out the form below.