This article is a little dated, I suggest you read my more recent posts in the SEO archive of my blog. A lot of what I said below is probably still true, but social media plays a larger part in search engine optimization than it did in 2006.
Neither do some webmasters it seems. I for one am not writing this article late at night alone in my room, at least not yet. Instead I'm at my mom's house with Hockey Night in Canada on TV and I intend to keep this relatively short. I'll reiterate the importance patience plays in search engine optimization/marketing and how search engine optimization is an ongoing effort not something you do once and then sit back and never think about it again.
My recent attempts to upgrade to the latest version of WordPress and Mint did not go smoothly. As a result my search engine rankings and my own web analytics may have decreased in quality. That said getting the Google Site Map plugin to work along with the fact that WordPress pings the various search engines and the general passage of time may alleviated any damage.
Most Popular MBA Classmate will not be updated anymore. Instead I will go back to tracking keywords related to my hobby site such as: Plaguemarine, Plague Marine, Plaguemarines, Plague Marines, Chaos Space Marine, Chaos Space Marines, and of course Nurgle. Searches were performed March 3rd 2006 from Deep Bay, Canada.
| Keyword | Google Ranking | Yahoo Ranking | MSN Ranking |
|---|---|---|---|
| Plaguemarine | 1 | 1 | 1 |
| Plague Marine | 1 | 19 | 14 |
| Plaguemarines | 1 | 5 | 8 |
| Plague Marines | 1 | 2 | 2 |
| Chaos Space Marine | 9 | 26 | 1 |
| Chaos Space Marines | 5 | 30 | 2 |
| Nurgle | 1 | 5 | 1 |
I decided to add Baidu to the search engines I'm monitoring. I don't expect to have a lot of incoming links as my site is almost exclusively in English. However I have a lot of content about China and it seems many of the visitors to my site are from Beijing. I used to think I was responsible for a lot of that traffic, but I've been back in Canada for over a week now and according to Google Analytics I still get a lot of traffic from Beijing. I also recently made available a PDF version of my paper on Baidu.
| Search Engine | Pages Indexed | Search Term | Links to | Search Term |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Ask | 118 | Muskie site:www.muschamp.ca | 8 | inurl:muschamp.ca |
| 170 | site:www.muschamp.ca | 35 | link:www.muschamp.ca | |
| MSN | 173 | site:www.muschamp.ca | 767 | link:www.muschamp.ca |
| Yahoo | 135 | site:www.muschamp.ca | 560 | link:http://www.muschamp.ca |
| Baidu | 1 | site:www.muschamp.ca | 0 | link:www.muschamp.ca |
Some of these numbers are a bit inflated. However, being an active participant in the blogosphere does increase your incoming links. I could do a lot more if I had the time, motivation, and energy. Blog Spam has become a big problem for some and lead to a lot of anti-spam comment techniques.
Another few months have passed and not much has changed in my life, but I decided to see if there were any major changes in the search engine results.