SEO Analysis of Blogtrepreneur
October 8, 2007 by
Adam
Filed under
SEO & Rank
I’ve always wanted to rank highly for the phrase “entrepreneur blog“, but have never seemed to be able to climb into the Top 5 in Google. After reading an analysis of Carl Ocab’s Search Engine Optimization by David Elefant, I messaged him asking if he would be able to do the same on his Make Money Online blog for Blogtrepreneur.com. He kindly obliged, and you can find the analysis here.
I just wanted to blockquote some of the things he mentioned for emphasis, and to help you guys know how to rank highly for your chosen keywords or search phrases:
The keyword density for “Entrepreneur Blog” in the blog is 1.2%.
Keywords are not found in the domain name. Nothing can be done about this.
One h1 tag includes the keywords. This gives extra points.
The Meta Description and Meta Keywords all contain at least one mention of the targeted keyword. Well done.
None of the Img “Alt” Attributes contain the keywords.
The conclusion of the article, is that I wasn’t ranking so badly after all! In order to try and further increase my rank, I can add more backlinks with the desired anchor text, try to add more related outbound links, and not sharing the IP address with other domains. Thanks for the analysis David!
UPDATE: Turns out I’m ranked 6 at the moment for the term! Woohoo 
I might be dumb at reading google, but it looks like you are #5 to me bud.
Adnan,
Congratulations on getting to #6. Do you have any ideas for getting more inbound links?
Congratulations on getting to #6 on Google. I found the review of your site to be very insightful.
Before I started blogging I picked out a keyword phrase that I wanted to rank for on Google. Since then I’ve been working towards that slowly, but surely. What’s your opinion on running a contest requiring users to link back to you with keyword phrases? Would you consider this to be a shady practice?
I’m completely about maintaining the integrity of myself and my site.
Rob,
I would discourage that. I think David Airey said that was part of the reason Google penalized him (running a contest with specific anchor text). It seems like Google’s been on a kick recently to penalize people for things like this.
I can’t access your analysis. It says 404
Congrats! I think you did a great job, keep it up. Thanks for sharing.
Nice work Adnan! Does it send much traffic?
Does sharing an IP with other domains REALLY hurt you that bad?
I don’t think being on a shared server can really affect you. Sure, interlinking from other domains on the same IP won’t necessarily be as good as if they were on separate IPs, but having your own IP (either from a dedicated server or purchased just for your site) is not going to make much difference in my book.
@ Jason - hehe yep I was number 5 for a tiny little period, but moved back down to number 6 again. I’ve realised that the 5th spot isn’t out of my reach - at the same time though (answering Matt’s question), the term “entrepreneur blog” sends hardly any traffic anyway, so I’m not missing out on much (around 1-2 uniques per day at the mo).
@ Steven - thanks mate. I think I’m going to take it slow - if new people want to link to me, I’ll ask them to change the Anchor text to “Entrepreneur Blog”. If any of you guys do have links to me, changing them to that would be much appreciated
@ Rob - I also did the same as you in the blogLOUDER competition. I don’t think I’ll be trying it again, and as Steven said, that competition was probably another factors resulting in his ownage. I think it would be defined as blackhat and not organic - it’s up to you whether you want to risk it or not!
Discount Web Design - very strange. The analysis seems to have been removed from the site. I’ll enquire about that - thanks for notifying me.
Thanks Super Aff Blog and @ Bush, I’m not really an SEO expert. Hopefully Sarah’s comment answered your question, but you’d have to do a search on Google for that.
Cheers Sarah
Some really good points in that analysis … especially the thoughts about the alt tags … people hav ebeen saying that and saying that for years, yet there isn’t one blog in a hundred that takes the time to use optimized alt tags … me included. There is no doubt that search engines pay attention to the Alt Tag … how much is debatable, yet, since the tags themselves cost nothing, what can one lose?
With regards to the dedicated IP? I have no idea if it makes a _lot_ of difference but I have been thinking hard about getting one for a long time now … I hate seeing my WhoIs show up that I’m hosted with goodness knows how many other “little guys” … and I know when I check a site I am thinking about ‘trusting” … as in spending money … I consider a shared IP a negative factor … maybe not a show-stopper, but not a confidence builder either. With a decent host they don’t cost much … might be worth a shot.
Forgot to add the other lesson so often forgotten … it’s trivially easy to rank for terms no one serches for … and the average ‘Net “cruiser” can’t spell or refuses to spell (Hi Mr. Schoemaker), so I would really think hard before trying to rank anything like the “E” word. Can you imagine how many average Americans (many college students and college grads) Jay Leno would have to interview before he found _one_ who could spell entrepreneur, much less use it in a sentence?
I’m suprised it wasn’t mentioned during your analysis but personally I’d change your sidebar headings to h3’s. At present they’re h2s, on your front page, all of your post headings are also h2s, what are more important because right now you’re telling the search bots that they’re all of the same importance
hey Congrats Adnan…. thats some feat! I’d remember entrepreneur blog next time!
It looks like you are number 5 right now for your keywords. Sounds like you have some good advice. I have two questions the first being how many outbounds links is right amount to have and second how does not sharing an ip address help you and how do you know if you are sharing an ip address?
I see you as spot #5. Either way, congrats. Interesting read on the analysis.
Congratulations, you’re in the top five, or at least when I search you up.
I’d also recommend following SarahG’s advice about the h2 and h3 headings.
Anyway, thanks for posting this, it reminds me that I must work more on keyword density and using my keyword in image tags as well.
Keep up the great work.
404 error… can’t see it
VERY informative post…. and a great example of the community (aka comments) offering equally great information! Thanks Sara G!
You’re on number 5 now.
Great insight in your blog.
You’ve done really well with putting together your blog.
Cheers,
Carlo Selorio
404 error for me
You are #6 for me
Have you moved up past position 5 yet? I am very interested to find out how you are doing with it?
Well that’s quite interesting that commenter #23 either has the same name as me or decided to pick my name at random to post his comment.
I see you at position #5 in Google…so congrats!
Congrats on the high ranking. I appreciate the useful information you provided.
@ Dave - yeah the ALT tag is very important, and LOL - it’s true - the word “entrepreneur” is quite hard to spell, which is why I had some reservations about my domain name!
@ Sarah - thank for that, I hadn’t really realised - I’ll go and change that up now!
Thanks Pearl, Ron and Tay.
To the guys seeing the 404 error, I’m also getting that too, so not really sure what happened there, I think the analysis got deleted which was a shame!
@ the real Rob Schultz - wow that is weird and I hadn’t noticed. Maybe it’s a weird coincidence in that he’s got the same name as you. Other than that, I can’t really explain it!
And in terms of ranking position, turns out I’m no. 7 now, which just shows how vulnerable you can be to Google fluctuations!!
Thanks for all your comments guys and sorry for the late reply.
I have to ask - why optimise for “entrepreneur blog”? It doesn’t seem to receive very much traffic.
Congratulation on achieving top rankings for such a difficult keyword.
LOL, congratulations indeed. But I have to agree with Caroline that the words are pretty low key stuff. Why not go for something bigger like ‘Make Money Online’. Thanks.
congratulations Adnan, great job. i guess you already know how to get up there. hope that i could achieve that one day with my future blog. in the meantime i need to take a look around here and there and grab the knowledge needed so when i start my blog later on it will be smooth sailing.
Here’s something I’ve been pondering about for a while. How do you make your blog popular and generate traffic if you have great, original content but are competing in a very established niche where most of the niche’s websmasters know and use the techniques that work? In my recent attempt at internet business blog called hochstadt.com, I found some really tough competition. There are just so many websites out there selling themselves selling themselves as expert sources on the subject. Does anyone have any ideas on this? Lilly
Ive always found its very hard to get my SEO right on my website:
http://www.ifreebies.co.uk
Well done on the rank 6 in google
This is my site. My site’s page rank got down from 3 to 1. Do anyone know the reason? and if anyone know how to improve page rank please inform me.