Concrete Forest

Great tips on building pages efficiently…. http://developer.yahoo.com/performance/rules.html

Building on what we did for mugstate.com we’ve built teeshirtstate.com.

Both sites use Zazzle stores and are customized subsets filtering the Zazzle RSS feed to populate the sites.

Additionally we’ve created an index to allow the visitor to drill down into the products by state, and in some cases by city.

One of the things we did to try to help with SEO was incorporate the drill-down product selection information into the title and the keywords of the page.

One of the things I’ve been trying to do is improve search engine placement for my own sites through some search engine optimization (SEO).  I wanted to experiment on myself to see if I could get my own business more highly ranked in Google for a few web designer  / web developer search phrases.  One of the things I did was register a few domains that had portions of the search phrases I was targeting in them.  Then I built web pages at those domains featuring the same phrases while describing my services using the phrases as keywords and title tags. Then I built links from those domains to my main site (to try to inherit any value I might be creating).

And I did a couple of other little things that I’ve decided not to tell you about

On a weekly basis I run a series of batch reports to analyze where I am in Microsoft, Yahoo, and Google.

I managed to crack Microsoft fairly quickly and get some good results, I even had two of the top three with different domains on one search phrase for a while….. but success at Google eluded me (and I didn’t really care all that much about Yahoo – sorry Yahoo).

Today I checked my batch reports and found I actually was #1 on Google for the search phrase “Web Developer NJ”,  which I thought was a decent search phrase for me to score well with.

Maybe next week I’ll plummet to #100 for no apparent reason, but for now I’m celebrating my success.