Search ‘Michael Lipson’ on search engines and you will find that I’m not as popular as I think. I had done little (nothing) in terms of SEO on my blog, because I frankly didn’t see it as “that important.” It didn’t bother me until I noticed that on every search engine, except google, I am found in the top three results for ‘Michael Lipson’ whereas on google I am on the third page.

My ego aside, the other Michael Lipson’s were all more deserving of the listing rank. However this is the internet and thus my playground, so my ego matters where it wouldn’t in real life. Taking a practical step, I decided to implement some of the tricks I have learned and see where it got me. If nothing else, maybe I’ll get another quarter out of my ad links.

My first step was to use a wordpress plugin to create an XML sitemap, while trivial to most bloggers who (like me) have their content continuously updated, it provides search engines a guide to crawl the site. This was done in about 5 minutes, and submitted to google. Next was adding robots.txt to my home directory, which was done equally as quickly.

Robots.txt allows ‘spiders’ to crawl the site, which gathers information for search engines. Again, this only took minutes to do and will do nothing but help, even if it is minuscule. Unlike other scripts, WordPress doesn’t include a robots.txt in their install.. I believe Joomla and Drupal CMS platforms do include formatted ‘robots.txt’ files.

The next thing I did was install All-in-One SEO plug-in for wordpress. This has several features, however the strongest is automatically generating meta information for posts. More precise information with less hassle, you can let it take the reigns and write away. Again, this took about 5-10 minutes to install and setup.

At this point, I was done with the site itself and thought it was time to get some inbound links going. I have read a lot of different opinions about the best way to do this, legitimately atleast. It is important to have links refering to your site, but at what cost? I choose to only publish a link to my site from social networking sites, and leave it off my clients sites. To me it adds clutter (I’m one to talk with how my blog looks) and gives off a less professional vibe, I don’t need to mark my teritory. That being said, I think that this is why google places my site on the 3rd page of ‘Michael Lipson’s’ while other engines rank me on their first page.

Now, I need to mention this because a lot of people want to be the top hit on search engines with little to no effort.. you are only as strong as your content. There is no substitute for strong content, because it leads to followers. My blog will never be first on any search engine for any of the topics I write about.. but I can push to be the first on the list for ‘Michael Lipson.’

-written from my G1 using wptogo, so please forgive typos and absence of links for the time being