Tyler Whitaker’s InfoTech

This post is another my in the ongoing series detailing how I’ll going to both increase traffic and page rank of tylerwhitaker.com.

Ok, so I had a little fun with the title of this post. But, I’m going to share with you my top secret Google keywords. These aren’t just any keywords. These are the Google keywords that rank tylerwhitaker.com in the top ten search results on Google. I’m not really sure if other Internet Marketers share this kind of intel. But, In the interest of setting the baseline for this blog, here’s the list:

Tyler Whitaker – Rank: 1  I think this is has a lot to do with my domain name. I’ve owned tylerwhitaker.com for years. Owning a domain name for a long time with your keywords is always a big help.

tyler whittaker – Rank: 2  This is a funny one since my last name is spelled with only one ‘t’. I must have some backlinks somewhere with my name mis-spelled.

is there a tyler whitaker anywhere – Rank: 4  This is a good question and most days I have a good answer.

racellete – Rank: 5  This is the name of a specific cheese and a popular meal I fell in love with in Switzerland. I tried to find a local Salt Lake City supplier of racellete when I got back. I wrote a blog post about it. I think racellete is a misspelling. The correct spelling is Raclette.

"s infotech" – Rank: 5  This must be a typing mistake. Some kind of truncated version of title of this blog. "Tyler Whitaker’s InfoTech"

flying dragonfly – Rank: 7  Last year a wrote a post about the RC Flying Dragonfly from Wow Wee. It’s a remote controlled plane of sorts that is shaped in the form of a dragonfly. This might be a interesting keyword to use for a future marketing experiment.

tyler "news com" – Rank: 7  I have now idea why I’m listed here.

apprentice tv show 2008 – Rank: 8  I recently posted my thoughts on Donald Trump’s Apprentice TV Show. This current 2008 season has a group of celebrities competing. To bad it’s not more about business.

whitaker business solutions – Rank: 8  This blog is about technology business solutions.

The next step is to increase the rankings of this site using some of these keywords. Stay tuned.

One of the first things I realized was that tylerwhitaker.com was pretty light on plugins. I have been running Akismet for spam (and it works great.) But the rest are new. If you know of any better plugins, please let me know.

Akismet
Akismet checks your comments against the Akismet web service to see if they look like spam or not. You need a WordPress.com API key to use it. You can review the spam it catches under “Comments.” To show off your Akismet stats just put <?php akismet_counter(); ?> in your template. See also: WP Stats plugin. By Matt Mullenweg.

All in One SEO Pack
Out-of-the-box SEO for your Wordpress blog. By uberdose.

Contextual Related Posts
Show last 5 contextually related posts on single blog posts, increase exposure By Mark Ghosh (LaughingLizard). I did some editing on this one so that it would work with my theme.

FeedBurner FeedSmith
Originally authored by Steve Smith, this plugin detects all ways to access your original WordPress feeds and redirects them to your FeedBurner feed so you can track every possible subscriber. By FeedBurner.

Google XML Sitemaps
This plugin will generate a sitemaps.org compatible sitemap of your WordPress blog which is supported by Ask.com, Google, MSN Search and YAHOO. By Arne Brachhold.

ShareThis
Let your visitors share a post/page with others. Supports e-mail and posting to social bookmarking sites. Questions on configuration, etc.? Make sure to read the README. By ShareThis and Crowd Favorite (crowdfavorite.com).

Twitter Tools
A complete integration between your WordPress blog and Twitter. Bring your tweets into your blog and pass your blog posts to Twitter. By Alex King. My Twitter account is tylerwhitaker come follow me when you get a chance.

What Would Seth Godin Do
Displays a custom welcome message to new visitors. By Richard K Miller. Richard is a good guy and I’m glad to support him and his plugin.

The last couple of weeks I’ve been doing some research into the field of Internet Marketing. Specifically, I’m interesting in blogs, SEO, Google AdSense (and other ad networks), webstores (amazon, eBay, yahoo, etc.), and keyword selection. While I’m finding a lot of content that is both good and bad, I’m learning that there is more art than science to increasing page rank and driving traffic. I think that is in part due to the secretive nature of Google’s page rank algorithm and those finding success using SEO techniques. Don’t get me wrong, there are definite steps and methods to follow.

So I’ve reached a crossroads of sorts in my research. I’ve learned a fair amount through passive research. And now I’ve come to the conclusion that to learn more I really need to become active in the field and run my own experiments.

I think that means working on this blog. Setting up a couple more highly focused blogs. And generally rolling up my sleeves and getting dirty. I hope to record my success and failures here as well.

So to set the baseline. This blog is currently at a Google toolbar page rank of 3. And sense I haven’t been writing much in the last few months, the traffic is next to nothing. I’m currently sitting at 4 feed subscribers.  I have upgraded to the latest WordPress, updated the theme, and installed a number of plugins. (More on the upgrades in another post.)

So on with the fun. Check back often to see my progress.

I keep hoping that Donald Trump’s Apprentice will deliver more of the insights from his book The Art of the Deal. But, the celebrity edition of the show is just more of the same. Robert Merrill has a great post on his blog about Trump’s decision to keep Omarosa over Tiffany. I couldn’t agree more. The problem with the Apprentice is the constant back stabbing and distortion of the truth. It’s great TV, but terrible in a real business.

Wow. It has been a really long time since I last blogged. I chalk that up to getting busy with life. I.e. spending time with the family, working with BDS, and taking some time off. I have kept up with my monthly column. You can see most recent articles on my articles page.