Can somebody who has had experience doing a bit of SEO, please visit explainstuff and let me know if there are any blunders I am doing? I don't want to look like a fool someday when some search engine chooses to do something horrible with my listing. The best review gets a Site wide link from explainstuff. The link is placed on a sidebar, so that it is available all through the site. Just to let you know explainstuff has a bunch (202 in Google, around 100 in yahoo and a few in bing and msn) of indexed pages, that's before I started adding the Programming pages this weekend. Ideal Review would tell me what are the GOOD that I'm doing and What are the BAD that I'm doing and What are the suicidal things that I'm doing. And throw some tips. Note: No adult, porn, explicitness, crude, etc etc will be linked btw.
Most SEO Pros make their living by doing this type of review. None of your CSS should be on the page, create an external CSS sheet. Your title is poor if you are targeting something, And both your Meta Desc and Keyword would be considered spam. The layout is poor but that is WordPress. In short, it is not designed to be a competitive SEO site. You should start by rethinking your Template design and the use of AdSense.
I would start with correcting the coding http://validator.w3.org/check?uri=h...(detect+automatically)&doctype=Inline&group=0
SEO TIPS Homepage title tag is not clearly focused on specific searches - do some keyword research to determine what you want to target. Categorize those keywords and go after the main ones of the homepage and category pages, and use the 'long tail' keywords to help keep you blog posts focused on topics that can bring you in search traffic. Blog post category names all have homepage title tag appended to the end - this makes them very long and again not focused. You can use a wordpress plugin which will allow you to customize the title tag of every blog post, or just set the title tags of post pages to be the name of the blog post and be sure to include keywords in the names of the blog posts. Linking structure would be better if it were category/postname - this would allow you to create keyword rich category names and have them part of the URL ALT tags - they exist but should be better focused on specific keywords rather than just a tagline. Attended SMX Advanced last week and ALT tags are more powerful then they used to be! Clean code - As mentioned previously, clean code also is nice but it's not going to make or break rankings (no evidence to support this). Overwhelming majority of sites on the Internet do not validate. I will say that the page is very heavy and takes a long time to load (lots of ads). If you want to make your life easy, you can pay for the Thesis framework/theme which will give you very clean code and more control over wordpress without having to mess with PHP includes. Footer navigation - add a footer navigation with text links to your main category pages - will give them more keyword rich internal links to distribute the PageRank from your homepage to the interior pages. Right now it looks like only the homepage has any PageRank, it's not being distribute to interior pages. Additional internal linking - looking for opportunities within blog posts to have them link to one another as well, focusing on the most important pages first. This will again give you a better internal linking structure which over time will help transfer Pagerank (link/authority score) throughout the site. OTHER TIPS Just as an aside, I don't know if putting so many ads on the site is the best approach. I think it would be more effective to use ads minimally to make it seem as though you were all about providing free and useful info, but embed affiliate links within the articles. This can further give you inspiration for specific articles and with decent SEO, you can probably make a lot more money than the pittance that Google pays through Adsense. Multiple top nav bars make the overall navigation unclear Shouldn't display Feedburner stats when you only have 4 followers Just a repeat of the above comment, but you have credit report ads on the site but I don't see any real content for credit reports. Why not create a few articles related to credit reports and only put those ads there, along with embedded text links? Not only will you have a shot at showing up for searches because of the dedicated content pages, you will also have a much better chance of getting people to take action and click those ads/signup. In general, the site is just extremely busy. You need to prioritize the content as well as advertising because the current design is probably creating an artificially high bounce rate. Too many conflicting messages are screaming out to the visitor. Hope this helps, now gimme my link!
You should first start with the usability of your site. I wanted to help you but sincerely you made my eyes bleed! The navigation is terrible, the fact that you have so many ads between the title and content makes it unreadable. Everybody wants to make money from their site but you have to create a user oriented site that people will actually read and come back. At the moment with your design I'm guessing that you have at least 90% "bounce rate". If you want to have a long term successful site you have to focus on your readers and not your advertisers. You have some good content but unless you allow your readers to actually see it without having an headache nobody will link to you naturally. The concept of the site is great and you have a great potential but stop thinking about $$$ for a while and think about your users!
I will close this thread on Sunday 06/21/09 11:59:59. Because I will be starting a new job from Monday, if in case I forget to close it, the best review posted before 06/21/09 11:59:59, will be given a site-wide link that will be added to Blogroll.
I suggest you read "What would Google do?". It points out the business values in giving things away. As crazy as it sounds, there's a lot of money to be made with giving things away for free. Anyway, I'm not looking to make any more money at this point, just build up my personal brand. So if I get some more links to my site in exchange for helping someone out, it's a win all around. If you chase money you'll never catch it...
Thanks a lot for his contribution. I did change a few bits based on all your comments. Though, I think I need to change a lot more, I think the contribution from brian-hancock was a very good feedback. Brian please gimme your link. I will add it to blogroll on Explainstuff. Thanks all! http://www.explainstuff.com