In my last post I told you about how I setup this blog. Now let me continue penning down my 13 days journey with Sulumits Retsambew. I don’t have a very strong SEO background; I am a web developer who is jack of all trades. I possess some theoretical knowledge of search engine optimization but wasn’t able to put that in practical. Sulumits Retsambew provided me a platform where I can test and experiment my SEO knowledge. And after 13 days of journey I came to learn many new facts about SEO. Let me share them with you.

What Lesson I Learnt?

1) Search Engines may take time to index your site: Well this is the first thing that I learnt from my experience with sulumits retsambew. After I created my first post I informed Google about the sitemap location using webmasters tools. I also submitted my website to some of the search engine directories. But, my website appeared over the search engine after a week. I was very much worried during that week that why my website isn’t getting indexed by Google. Then I realized that my site was quite old and I had not updated it for long and that’s why Search Engines might have reduced the crawling speed. So the lesson I learn from here is that “Patience is the key to Success”.

2) You can’t afford to stay idle when in a SEO contest: This is the second lesson I learnt from this contest. When you are participating in a SEO contest there are thousands of other participants against you fighting for that No1 position. So you cannot afford to stay idle in such a competition. You need to come up with new ideas to bring your entry up in the rankings and you need to keep feeding the efforts to maintain the position.

3) Don’t loose hope: Hope is the keyword that can make you win the contest. Never loose hope. If no one visits your site or no one comments over your blog or you loose your higher rankings, whatsoever be the condition never loose your hope. The efforts given in will show their results sooner or later. Always keep a positive attitude towards your contest entry.

I learnt many new things in this contest it is really interesting, but along with that fun I had to face some problems too. But what’s life without any problem, all we need is to figure the way out. Sailing ahead in this journey I have gained strong motivations, positive attitude and complete dedication to move ahead in this competition. Even if I don’t win this contest I know I have learnt a lot from this.

Cheers!

It has been 13 days since I entered sulumits retsambew contest, and this journey had been quite dramatic to me. In these 13 days I learnt many new things, I faced some serious issues and I introduced some changes in my daily routine. So, let me pen down my experience with sulumits retsambew till now.

The journey begins when I decided to dive into this SEO contest with my personal blog i.e. http://www.gautamchadha.com. I had this domain with me for past one year but didn’t get enough motivation to start a site on it. This contest gave me an opportunity to initiate this blog.

After choosing the domain, I started my search for a theme. I searched many sites for free wordpress themes and met my destination at SkinPress website, where I found a theme called Wcute. As the name suggest this theme is quite cute. The grass over the top of the header gave quite a fresh feeling. The marching twitter bird with a follow me slogan was also a perfect fit. It has a clean look and is quite nicely integrated to twitter. It had almost all qualities of a good wordpress theme. But nothing is perfect. There was a flaw in this theme that I noticed when I previewed this theme in my browser. The images took long to load. So, I thought of optimizing the theme.

Optimizing the Wcute Theme:

I downloaded the theme onto my desktop and checked all the image files. I saw that the header, footer and some other images that consist most of the artwork of the theme are PNG files. PNG files have large file size as compared to that of JPEG and GIF files. This is because they have overhead of storing the transparency information of every bit.

But, after a quick analysis I saw that except for a few small images rest of the large images has no transparency in them, so it was waste to store them as PNG files. I quickly converted the files from PNG to JPEG format as there was no transparency requirement. If there would have been some transparency involved the GIF format could have helped us in this. But using the JPEG files gives us the crisp image quality as that of PNG and would reduce the size of file to a very large extent.

After converting the files I started tweaking with the CSS file so that it points our newly created JPEG files instead of those bulky PNG files. This was very easy; I opened the CSS file in a text editor and searched for the file names that I converted from PNG to JPEG and replaced the extension of the file from PNG to JPG. This is because I didn’t changed the file name I just saved them with a different extension using Photoshop. And just for precaution I checked the template files too for any reference to the images that I changed.

After optimizing the theme for quick loading I tweaked the sidebar of the theme. By default the sidebar was showing categories, archives and blogroll. So I edited the sidebar.php file to customize it and added Recent Post and Tag Cloud to it and removed the blogroll from the code. To do the modifications I searched the wordpress documentation for the code for the above modification.

Later I did minor changes in the CSS file to change the hover color in the title of the blog post and also the color for the bold elements. And after these tweaks the theme was ready to be used.

Installing the Plugins:

The next major task was to choose what plugins to install. There are numerous plugins available over the wordpress site to extend the functionalities of the site. I installed and configured the following plugins over my blog:

1) Akismet: This is a preinstall plugin in wordpress. It helps to identify the spam comments that you receive in your blog. All you need to do is activate this plugin and provide it with wordpress.com API key. You can freely obtain this key by registering an account on wordpress.com.

2) All in One SEO Pack: As the name suggest it is a single plugin to take care of most of your onsite SEO tweaks.

3) Google XML Sitemaps: This plugin generates XML sitemaps that can be submitted to the search engines and can be read by the web crawlers. It also automatically submits the created sitemap to the search engines.

4) Sociable: This is another important plugin. It adds social networking icons below your posts so that the visitors of your site can submit any post they like to the social bookmarking websites. You can manually turn on or off over a particular post or page.

5) FeedBurner FeedSmith: I used this plugin because I wanted FeedBurner to manage my RSS feeds and subscriptions.

After installing these plugins I was ready to start posting over my blog. And so I created my first post on my blog, “Diving into Sulumits Retsambew”. I will continue this article in its next part.