A bit of a setback today: I’ve actually dropped to 8th place, as Victor’s old site has suddenly jumped up ahead of me! I’m not quite sure how that happened; it’s certainly unexpected. Nevertheless, I will continue to plow ahead and do what I can to drive perton.com to the top!

Day 2: Fixed my metadata with All in One SEO Pack
I’m not a big believer in the power of metadata to influence ranking. But it’s one of those baseline things that you just have to get in line. and this plugin makes it pretty painless.

I’ve been doing a lot of SEO work lately, but one thing I haven’t been optimizing is this site. The result: Although I’ve owned this domain for 13 years, and have hosted a site of one form or another here for most of that time, I’ve now dropped to 7th position in branded search (a search on the word perton), behind not only the U.K. village of Perton and its associated Wikipedia page, but behind several institutions in that town, and even behind Victor! Clearly, something is wrong here! So, I’m issuing a challenge to myself: using all of the SEO tools at my disposal, I aim to improve my position during the next 30 days. Ideally, I’ll be in the #1 spot at the end, though I do know I face daunting odds. However, it’s not impossible. At the very least, I should be able to bump the Perton Middle School and Parish Council to lower spots. I’ll blog about my efforts here, and at the end of the month, we’ll see where I rank. And now, to work!

Day 1: I’ve added a byline to the template for individual posts.
This probably won’t help much, but it won’t hurt, and it’ll at least get my primary keyword into every single post on this site.