What I Learned about SEO in Two Years of Blogging

Written by Rolf

Fifty articles since my report on blogging last year, I am still not rich but I have made a number of changes to the structure of beRare. It can only get better from here!

The 2011 situation

In the meantime, I was almost banned from AdSense, since I had a post about the leaked photographs of a nude Scarlett. And although the pictures were very sexy, I removed the post and made amends with Google so I'm still in the AdSense business. So that was one thing I learned from AdSense: the phrase "Scarlett's boobs" is very popular. Other things I learned are more technical and in the past year I have implemented several of them.

On to last year's month-by-month report of 2011. January's pageviews is a particularly low number, because AdSense was disabled for some unclear reason until the 26th when I reenabled it.

2011	views	clicks	income
jan	524	0	0.01
feb	1388	6	1.16
mar	2596	4	0.24
apr	3507	3	0.30
may	2847	4	0.48
jun	2560	0	0.05
jul	2472	1	0.07
aug	3027	5	1.38
sep	3556	3	0.19
oct	3207	1	1.68
nov	2932	1	0.17
dec	2795	1	0.08
	31,411	29	5.78 EUR

In 2011 I had 76% more pageviews than in 2010 (but also 63% more articles), 11% more clicks but 23% less income. What is going on! I thought advertising was becoming more and more expensive, but apparently my AdSense account is not directly affected by it.

Optimizations for SEO

I have added not only 'Like' buttons, but also comments for Facebook for more social exposure. The most recent thing I've done, was (dynamically) rewrite the URLs of the posts to include the title of the articles. Apparently Google loves keywords in the URL of a webpage. This should have a positive effect on my ranking and increase the pageviews and as a result, the exposure, maybe backlinks and ultimately clicks and cash.

I started out with news.php?nid=140 in 2009 to article-140 in 2011, which was a lot less cryptic but still non-descriptive. Now in 2012 I possibly have the final solution with article-140-what-i-learned-about-seo-in-two-years-of-blogging. To suggest to Google and other search engines that the preferred URL of this article is the last one, regardless how they end up on this page, I include a canonical link in the header: <link rel="canonical" href="http://www.berare.com/article-140-what-i-learned-about-seo-in-two-years-of-blogging"/>

So, to help SEO (search engine optimization), the posts now have keywords and description tags, H1 headings, alt and title values for images, descriptive URLs and original well-structured content. That's pretty much all I could think of. Traffic should now get boosted by a factor 10,000! Right? We'll see.

Also, of course I am not a fulltime blogger, in which case I should produce at least 5 articles a day. I write 5 a month on average, so I shouldn't expect too much, I guess. I am a lazy Internet experimentalist so any additional cash I make from this blog is a bonus. Having said that.. 5 euro a year is quite disappointing. Does that mean that as a fulltime blogger I would make only 150 euro a year?

If I'm not homeless or at least webserverless (about the same nowadays) in the next year, I'll write another report in 2013!