Starting Out

In about Dec. 2010 I re-bought michaelfokken.com (I had owned it when I graduated college, but didn't have the money to renew it.) Now that the domain has some age to it (one year), the search engines are liking it a little more.

In Dec. I created a subdomain called whatiscss.michaelfokken.com, which is a website to explain what css is for those that want to learn css. I made this subdomain to try to make my first million (really just to pay for the continual registration fee of my website). Realized that getting ranked on the search engines is a little harder than I thought. Then I worked a little bit more on ranking for the search engines for the subdomain and got it to page 2 on Google for What is CSS.

Then I started working on michaelfokken.com in about Aug. 2011.

• I've organized the blog into different categories
• Setup the webpages to be optimized for the search engines
• The h1 tag, meta description tag, and title tag have the words I want to rank for
• I wrote the content for the first page to have keywords I want to rank for (I've actually re-written the front page content 3-4 times already)
• The webpage addresses have keywords in them
• I finally got the design done and coded
• Created an RSS feed for my blog - Connected it with Feedburner.com
• Setup for people to submit comments
• Added social media share buttons on my blog
• Wrote 9 blog posts
• Setup Google Analytics, Webmaster Tools
• Created both type of sitemaps - A sitemap people can view and a xml sitemap for the search engines
• I made sure that any time some one types in just michaelfokken.com, it goes to www.michaelfokken.com

For external optimization:

• I've commented on about 45 different blogs
• Submitted my site to about 15 directories - directorycritic.com
• Created a twitter.com account (82 tweets, 9 followers, following 16)
• Created a delicious.com account (save 55 bookmarks so far)
• Started sharing and getting involved in social media
• Created Gravatar, Disqus accounts
• Shared my blog posts on twitter and a few on delicious
• Shared other interesting articles I found on twitter and delicious
• I setup my delicious account to (almost) automatically tweet on twitter, too
• Participated in a twitter chat with @Manta on local seo #MantaSMB - (recap)
• I visit a forum regularly and put a link to my site in the signature

Now for the more interesting things, I really haven't done any. One of the things I'm doing is contra-competitive timing (when everyone else isn't sharing their blog posts) and sharing good informational links, even if they are links to other sites, in my tweets. Also, I'm posting my good blog posts early in the morning so hopefully people will find them and reference them in their blog posts.

Write content that's interesting (at least I think it's interesting or else I wouldn't stay up past 2am for who knows how many nights to write. :) )

Once I write an article, I make sure to ask people to share it on facebook, twitter, their own blog, etc. It sounds like I'm begging people, but honestly most people won't think about sharing a website with their friends unless you ask them.

When I write my post, I try to make sure that it sounds like I'm just talking. I use contractions and I refer to you as you, instead of as the reader.

Since this is the beginning part of the documentation of what I did, I'm sure I missed something. But one thing that I feel is going to help me, is that as I come up with ideas to post about, I write them down in a master file called "Things to Write/Talk About." That way I should never have writer's block.