No One is Helping You Out? – Let’s Steal Our SEO Strategy from The Big Boys!

To be a successful blogger, it is compulsory that you are blogging with some strategy in mind. Without strategy you have no pre-defined milestone, have no clear objective and goals to be achieved in the future. Use intelligence with strategy.

If you want to be a successful blogger, you need to follow some Guru’s advice and instructions. They will obviously share their experience with you. But what to do in a situation where no one is really helping you or he is not sharing his success secrets. Why not to use some intelligence here to help yourself, instead begging for help. Here I have a solution, why not to steal some clues from blogging gurus. What would you say, isn’t that a good idea? I am totally against of such type of practices like stealing etc. Actually we are going to do some in-depth analysis but I am naming it stealing because we are doing all this without permission of owner of blog. So let’s steal some ideas and clues to find out answers to our questions.

First of all we need to list at least four or five blogging Gurus for our project IGI (I am Going In – My favorite Pc game by codemaster ).

After making a list of four to five Big Boys, this is not Big Boy of Bollywood alledged Star Amitabh Bachan; but is A Big Blogger, we are going to analyze the SEO strategy of these Big Boys.

Friends, sitemap submissions to search engines play a vital role. In my opinion, almost 70% of future site ranking depends on it. A good sitemap with a proper configuration is vital. If your site map is not properly configured, then all your hard work is in vain, let me say that again.  If your sitemap is not properly configured, then your hard work is in vain!

Basic Sitemap Setting:-

The WordPress plugin for Google sitemap has many options in which there are some basic settings. Set these settings as per your liking, for instance, notify Bing, Google, Ask etc. Building mode has two options and I recommend marking a check in both check boxes to decrease our time wasting our efforts. Then come to post priority setting. Better to select don’t use automatic priority calculation. Manual prioritizing is good option. We have values ranging from 0.0 to 1.0 where 1.0 is the highest value.

Now Stealing the Setting from Big Boys:-

Here we have analyzed and observed the Big Boys blog for the setting of:

• Tags,
• Categories,
• Achieves,
• Author pages,
• Their change frequency,
• And Priority for indexing.

Let’s start our mission. We will analyze the sitemap setting of big blogs from their sitemap.xml. For this purpose open the internet explorer, type the site name followed by “/sitemap.xml”. It means that complete address would seem this;

www.yourbigblogger.com/sitemap.xml

and you have output stating all hidden and compulsory settings from which we found answers of some important questions.

• Shall I include tags in sitemap?
• Shall I include category in sitemap?
• Shall I include achieve in sitemap?
• What should be change frequency?
• How much prioritizing number should be allocated?

After analyzing the Big Boys sites, we found that, they have included tags and categories in their sitemap, resulting in increased number of indexed file in search engine and increased internal site links, a definite SEO Boost.

Archive was not included by most of Big Boys while others did. It might be they have some solution to avoid duplicate content. My recommendation is not to include archive in your sitemap to avoid duplicate content. Analysis also gave us an inside of priority ranking of their site contents.

So our recommended setting for sitemap, after analyzing the Big Boys is;

• Include Tag and Category in site map with 70% (0.7) daily change priority.
• Don’t include archive in sitemap. Give it 0.0 priorities.
• Don’t include authors’ page in sitemap.
• Posts and static page should be given same priority with daily basis.
• Allocate 100% (1.0) priority and daily or hourly change frequency to your home page.

1. Survival Strategy in First Six Months of Blogging
2. Lets get Second Click, Reduce Bounce Rate