I realized this in itself is something which most marketers eventually run into some time or another throughout their career. Inevitably I came to the conclusion that a balance must be met between time spent on general SEO maintenance and the decision to pack up shop and move on.

Determining the point at which your focus needs to shift

I believe there is a point that many sites reach where the increase in rankings begins to slow down drastically.  Of course this is completely dependent on the niche you are in.

Many niches you target may have the potential to start ranking on the first page within a month. In reality however, the majority of niches you target are a little more competitive and just take more time to get high rankings.

It’s these particular one’s that I’m talking about here and eventually a decision has to be made to stop spending too much time working on them in order to continue the growth of your business through the creation of more sites.

I believe this point in time can be accurately calculated…

The best way I have found of determining whether a site has reached that point, is when one of your top keywords is ranking within the top 100 and after building at least 2 powerful backlinks, no change occurs in the G rankings. A week should be given to make sure things have had time to propagate successfully.

It’s at that point in time that I make a decision to push back development on that site to -

1. One post/week
2. One backlink/week(either through article marketing or other more secret methods that I keep to myself )

Why I believe building more sites is more important than ranking for your current sites

In my experience, internet marketers are a lot like archaeologists in the idea that we are always looking to discover a new, profitable niche. In reality not every niche you market in will be profitable, therefore an emphasis on expansion into new niches must be the biggest focus for all IMers.

After building a multitude of sites, the one thing that stands out is the conversion rate on my selection of niches and let me tell you, it’s not that good!

For every 10 sites I build I’m lucky if one or two of them ends up making considerable money. As a result of this one discovery I had to come up with a way of determining when to decrease my time and resources on a site. Hence the time point mentioned above.

If you are currently in possession of one or more new sites that have hit the wall(for lack of a better term), then seriously consider following the method I have mentioned here.

Josh

Alarmingly it could be said the majority of people in the blogging community would say the main reason why WordPress has taken the reigns, is because of it’s ability to function well with such a diverse range of plugins, plugins which are born almost daily out of arguably useless ideas.

Th truth of the matter is that the majority of the opensource(paid as well) plugins tend to sidetrack bloggers from the really important stuff. Mainly, “how does my site fair amongst my competitors in the SERP’s?“

If we were to run a study on all the WordPress blogs out there, attempting to find out the percentage of blogs perfectly designed for search engine listing versus those who aren’t, I’m sure most of us wouldn’t be surprised if the numbers were something like 5% good versus 95% bad.

The current number of plugins in the official WordPress.org repository lists 6,705 active. It would be nice to think the overwhelming majority of these plugins were beneficial to the average blogger, but the truth is perhaps the opposite. Mainly the number we currently see before us is a result of a community members’ desire to market their own ideas through cheap, poorly designed scripts, manifested as WP plugins.

Countless blogs are being hacked everyday as a result of poorly written code on the authors behalf. The crazy thing is, if people were aware of the actual requirements necessary to creating a near perfectly optimized WordPress blog, they would more than likely steer clear of around 6,700 plugins listed at WordPress.org.

Which brings us back to our initial question, the one that this entire blog has been designed to answer…”Why is WordPress considered the leading platform for online bloggers?”

It’s simple – It has the least amount of unnecessary script out of any web-based platform, intern allowing all spiders to crawl it’s pages easily and effectively.

In saying this however, there are some things you can do to slightly improve the onsite SEO on your blogs to help gain a useful advantage over your competitors.

If you haven’t noticed already I’m currently using the Thesis theme by DIY Themes, whose intentions were to create a WordPress template set on filtering out the main problems associated with WordPress blogs, that is when taking SEO into consideration.

One malfunction in the WordPress script is it’s lack of ability to easily silo a sites Page Rank or link power.

As a rule of thumb, most blogging experts would normally agree the majority of the Page Rank streaming into a site should funnel as directly as possible into the post pages. This helps improve the chances of having your most important pages appear as high up in the SERP’s as possible.

The default settings of Thesis automatically passes a No Follow tag on all archive associated links except the category pages. This effectively means that all Page Rank flooding into your site will ONLY pass through the Category Archives before reaching your individual posts.

If you took some time to delve inside a blog struggling in the search engines, you would probably notice that a large amount of page rank is being unnecessarily directed to pages which serve no purpose when taking into consideration which pages are useful in the SERPS and which are not.

Another problem alot of blogs tend to encounter upon indexing and which indeed has an easy solution, is the Home link appearing in the header on every page.

The anchor text ‘Home’ will straight away force a spider to associate that particular keyword with your blogs home page, thereby almost nullafying any attempt you have made with your foreign links by inserting a useful keyword of which you should be trying to rank for with your index page.

Changing the anchor text of the Home link will effectively force every page to funnel page rank to your index, automatically targetting a keyword you are attempting to have it listed under in the SERP’s.

Before this post blows into an all out report I’m going to put an end to it there. The mission statement of SEOdrift.com has been published, therefore all future posts you see from here on out will in some way incorporate in that initiative.

Remember to keep up to date with everything. If you don’t have time to spend reading about all the latest news to do with SEO and WordPress, then don’t! Just subscribe here!

Until next time,

Josh Stanton
SEODrift.com

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