Nate Desmond's Online Portfolio & Resume » SEO

MarilynMoll.com Redesign Completed

Nate — Wed, 05 Aug 2009 23:28:21 +0000

Today I have officially completed my redesign of MarilynMoll.com – the private blog of The Urban Homemaker‘s owner. After about twenty hours of work, I took the blog from a basic WordPress blog with all the original defaults to an search-engine-friendly, social-media-optimized, and (hopefully) visitor-welcoming blog.

What I Accomplished

Updated the WordPress version from 2.3 to 2.8.
Customized the Atahualpa Theme to match Mrs. Moll’s main website, TheUrbanHomemaker.com.
Setup a Feedburner RSS and email feed to boost reader retention.
Optimized the permalinks for search engines.
Added social bookmarking buttons at the bottom of each post to aid in site promotion.

What I Learned

I now understand how to use the Plesk platform better.
I learned how to use desktop-side ftp clients whereas before I had only used server-side ftp programs.
I gained experience in CSS because I used it to modify the Atahualpa Theme.
I practiced using HTML by creating the subscription widget.

This was a great learning experience, and I am grateful for the opportunity to hone my web design skills. Because I enjoyed this project so much, I hope to do more similar projects soon.

Ranking #1 in Google

Nate — Mon, 13 Jul 2009 16:50:20 +0000

Obviously, this online resume is only useful if people find it, so I have been working on optimizing this site for search engines.

Now, when someone searches for “Nate Desmond” the top result is my online resume! Gaining this position was pretty simple because “Nate Desmond” is not a very common name and there are fewer than 511,000 results competing for this term.

Main Reasons

This website is located at NateDesmond.com. The URL of a website plays a major role in SEO.
The website’s name is also “Nate Desmond” with the subtitle “Online Portfolio & Resume”. Once more, the title is a major help in SEO.
Finally, the WordPress theme I chose is highly SEO optimized. The entire WordPress platform, in fact, is built to make Google happy.

Obviously, those are only a few of the reasons. Other inportant points, such a backlinks, did play a part also.

Next… “Nathanael Desmond”

Now that I have ranked well for “Nate Desmond”, it is time to start working on “Nathanael Desmond” – my full name. This one will be slightly harder because it is not mentioned in the URL or site title, but I think it will be possible. Currently, my Twitter account is listed on the first page (result #6), but my resume is not even listed yet.

Time to get back to work…

DFS Search Visits Growing

Nate — Thu, 09 Jul 2009 13:48:12 +0000

Over the last couple of months, I have done a lot of SEO work on Debt-free Scholar. Slowly but surely, that work is finally starting to pay off. Between May and June, the number of monthly search engine visits more than tripled from about 500 in many to more than 1600 in June.

Yesterday, a new level was reached. For the first time ever in the history of DFS, more than 100 visits were received in one day from search engines. To be exact, DFS received 101 visits… mostly from Google, although Yahoo, Bing, and a few other small engines also sent some traffic.

Here is the screenshot of the traffic growth seen using Google Analytics: