SEO... go

SMX West 2013 has wound down.  I'm saturated, but ready to get started blindly feeling my way through SEO.   This blog is a way for me to keep track of what I do right and what  I do wrong.

There's group consensus on the first step.  Build a small website where I have total control over the buttons and levers, and start experimenting.  

So I've got two (soon three).

I built the TeamCBC site several years ago to support my cycling team, yeah!, and to learn css, even yeaher!! 

Now to test it's standing, or ranking, in Google search results.   .... not very impressive, yet.

With the help of friends and search engines, I've found two utilities that seem pretty helpful in understanding what Google sees and thinks of my content.

First:  A utility that lets me see my page as Google sees it.  Jennette Banks clued me into this and documented it's usage on her blog entry Google Cache Hack: see what Googles sees.    You add it to your bookmarks, open a page, and then invoke the bookmarked utlity.... voila, your page seen through the eyes of Google. 

Hopefully this is not a shock.  When I invoked the TeamCBC site, it looked just like my site.  This is goodness.  However, when I invoked in on several of the community pages within IBM developerWorks, as well as the top abcnews.com page, I get the following 404 error from Google.. which can't be good.

I'll figure out what is going on and report back in a later post.

Second:  This utility from Google Webmaster Tools lets me see the keywords Google believes are relevant to the content from my page.  And note, this would be the content it can see: 

https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal


I enter the url www.teamcbc.com, in the website field, Google returns keywords it believes are relevant.  Quite a shock.  I get a lot of keywords associated with "tours" and "vacations".   "NC cycling" is about #25 in terms of relevance.   

Seems Google and I don't see eye to eye, yet.