For the past few weeks, I have been working on the suggestions in the Website Grader report to improve search engine ranking. In the Off-Page SEO section of the report, besides the all-important inbound links number, there are two seemingly relevant items: being listed in dmoz and in the Yahoo! Directory.

I started with dmoz, as it was referred to as “the largest and most comprehensive human-edited directory of the Web”, which sounded impressive to me. For some reason I found it hard to define the category for my blog; finally, I chose Business: Marketing and Advertising: Internet Marketing: Marketing Services as the best fit. Unfortunately, dmoz does not acknowledge a submission and they do not offer any alternate method to follow-up on it, hence the only thing to do is wait. But as of today, waiting has not worked and my blog has not been listed. I guess I could try again, as suggested in this interesting article on the subject.

As for the Yahoo! Directory, I shunned from it after I found out there is a substantial fee for their service ($299 is substantial to me). Instead, I opted for submitting my blog URL for free to Yahoo! Search.

Other actions I have taken after the suggestions in the report: I have added the Alexa traffic rank button to my blog (there is nothing to brag about my rank just yet) and submitted one article to Digg; I bookmarked on del.icio.us myself, maybe something I should not have done…  I also added the Twitter Follow Me button to the side. The little blue bird looks good there, I think.

A rather puzzling statement from Website Grader is the one about “Too many images found”. There is not much to do except for ignoring it: the pictures I have are the gravatars of the top commentators and the image for the e-book cover in the opt-in form. They stay!

One thing that has botehred me a bit is that I could not get the Website Grader badge to show my updated grade after all the above actions (it got up to 82). Since I could not establish the root cause, I decided to remove it. Something similar happened with the Alexa rank button, but this one updates automatically now. I might give the badge a second chance…

There is always more that can be done but I think I have addressed the Website Grader report sufficiently. I should now go back to focus on getting links and continue commenting on other blogs.

Gosh! It took me too long to post again…

I have found that the All in One SEO Pack plugin and the report I got from Website Grader can complement each other nicely to help me improve the search engine ranking of my blog.

To set up the plugin, the three main fields, Title, Description and Keywords, also known as metadata, can be appropriately filled in based on the suggestions in the report. In the case of my description, I had to make it shorter, since it was way longer than the recommended 150 characters. But most important, I came up with a completely different title for my blog. I changed to “Notes on blogging and list building”, which includes two keywords with which the search engines can have a better idea of what my blog is about. This title can still be improved but I think it is better than the old “The blog of Jose Perez” , considering that my name is a very common Hispanic name…

After these few changes I requested a new report for my blog. Website Grader gave me a 73/100 grade this time, a modest 4 points better than my initial rating.

According to the report, my grade could benefit from listing my blog in DMOZ and the Yahoo! Directory, as well as bookmarking it with del.icio.us and submitting articles to Digg.com. But also according to the report, the main course of action for me is to work on increasing the number of inbound links to my blog, that is, getting more sites to link to it. The Superb business blogs & sites list I already have can help me a lot, I just have to post more often in those places and identify additional ones to list. I should also continue to post on forums, since Google Analytics tells me I’ve been getting links from the two places where I’ve been participating.

And one more step I’ve just taken that can bring me more links (by bringing in more visitors) is setting up the KeywordLuv plugin. Again with the help of my friend Vance Sova from Learn List Building, I will learn how to make the most of this tool that rewards commentators by separating their name from their keywords in the link to their website, giving them improved anchor text.

Well, I’ll keep scratching the surface of SEO. It’s worth the effort!