I’ll type up a bio one day… really. 

I thought I was pretty much done with all the search engine optimization on car-wallpapers.net, however on my religious daily reading of Matt Cutt’s blog, I had a realization hit me like a brick. Meta tags! While the indexable content of the site was diversified and dynamic to provide a nice sized landing spot, the title, meta-description, and meta-keywords were all static! There was a single php template file I was referencing for the header of every page in the site, and that header template file had those tags hardcoded. Oh no, this will not do… I dug in to the code again. Now when you view the browse page (by category, tags, or tag-filter) or view wallpaper page, it adjusts the title of the page for accurate readings on the SERPs (ie, instead of the fluff promoting the site, it shows the description of the browse page related to their search query). It also adjusts the description based on the page you’re viewing (also for SERP [search engine result page] output purposes), and the meta keywords are dynamically adjusted to mix the generic wallpaper-oriented keywords with content-related keywords based on the individual wallpaper or category being viewed. On the view wallpaper page, I even went as far as rewriting the flow of the page to add all the tags attached to the image in the meta-keywords. This way if a search engine crawler reads the page, in addition to reading the keyword landing content at the bottom of the page, it is further emphasized by the meta tags supporting it. Hopefully this will raise our returns in the SERPs for very specific wallpaper searches, such as “e34 wallpapers”, rather than just the generic “BMW wallpapers” search. Also, Google is more likely to assign pagerank to inside pages that are not a clone of the homepage’s meta information.

Also, while I was working on the meta tweaks, I realized that search engines (Google especially) place a pretty high importance on the alt tags of images. Then I realized that on the view wallpaper page, the only place the tags are visible in the indexable content are as the anchor text from the tag links. This means when you view an e34 BMW wallpaper, the text “e34″ does not appear anywhere as plaintext on the entire page, and anchor text is not weighted very heavily for a page’s own content, as it’s more accurately describing the content of the page it’s linking to. Based on these two facts, I went in and added an ALT tag to the large thumbnail on the view wallpapers page that describes the category the wallpaper is in (such as BMW), as well as all tags attached to it (such as e34). While this still isn’t plaintext, it’s solving the missing-alt-tag problem, as well as adding more dynamic content to each view page. If I added the link list in plaintext on that page, it’d begin to detract from the usability and friendliness of the page. There has to be links to each tag page, and rather than duplicating the entire list, it’s better design practice (and more focused toward the users) to only have the link list. While the ALT tag isn’t as effective as plaintext, it’s definitely a step in the right direction and in this situation the best of all possible worlds.

I just noticed a pagerank (a website’s ranking of importance, in Google’s eyes) shift. Car-wallpapers.net just went from a PR0 to PR2, and hot-car-sites went from PR0 to PR4! That’s double United Bimmer’s PR2 ranking, and HCS has only been online for a few weeks, as compared to UB life of well over a year!

I just (finally) received my invite to join Google Analytics.

It’s now running on a few sites, including United Bimmer.

I just realized that when the search engines read car-wallpapers.net, the homepage has plenty of content to hit on, but each subpage looks nearly identical. The filenames of the pages are different (for different Makes), however the SE-readable content (non-images) is just a bunch of random resolutions. Then when you actually view the wallpaper, there’s slight differences in the filenames, but overall, most of the text is the same. Granted the pictures are different everywhere, but I’m afraid of being penalized by a search engine because of this setup.

In my effort to diversify the subpage content, I added the original filesize to the view-wallpaper page. While this page has very little text to start with, adding another nearly-random number will mix it up a bit. The main search engine optimization upgrade I made though was to the browse pages (by make and by tag). It’s a bit more server CPU intensive, but I think it’s worth it. At the bottom of each browse page, it has a tag-dump of all the tags attached to all the wallpapers shown (that page only). This is great for search engines to pick up on because if the server name is car-wallpapers.net and the filename is browse-bmw.html, having text content with keywords like “wallpaper”, “e36″, “m3″, etc. will direct the exact traffic we’re looking for to us. It creates a dynamic (though tagging) search engine landing spot that sets us apart from the non-tag-enabled wallpaper galleries (the rest of the internet). For example, if someone searches for “e34 wallpaper” on Google, looking for just that, we are the ONLY wallpaper gallery that return a valid result. Actually, by that search United Bimmer’s e34 forum is returned on the first page as well, which shows how SEO fine-tuned our forum is also, haha, but I digress. Most wallpaper galleries are setup to land search queries on the car make name (Subaru, BMW, Nissan, Ferrari, etc), and on rare occasion, you find them narrowing the pages down by model (M3, 350Z, etc), but with our innovating tagging system, we can narrow it down to every single detail… and now that our tags are integrated with the browse pages, this creates even more possibilities.

While car-wallpapers.net is still not very deep in Google, it’s doing great in other search engines. And the fact that it’s actually surfacing at all (especially Google, known for it’s rigorous website acceptance levels), is quite impressive. Also, car-wallpapers.net has only been online for a little over one week, but is already receiving about 300 unique hits a day, with no advertising beyond a post in a few forums a week ago, and no backlinks besides the United Bimmer homepage (PR2, not to impressive).

And on another note, but the same topic, hot-car-sites.com is dominating MSN results. While Google strongly dislikes that site, look at some of it’s MSN search query result placements:

#1 – hot car sites
#1 – hot car
#1 – hot car topsite
#1 – car topsite
#1 – car topsites
#1 – car rankings
#2 – car sites
#3 – top modified cars

Considering the site has been up for only a few weeks, that’s very impressive. Granted those are not the most popular search queries, but it’s definitely a start. All three sites (UB, car-wallpapers, and hot-car-sites) are also all hosted on different IP addresses, so the interlinking between them should be beneficial on the search engine front.

Another small search engine tweak I made today was on the United Bimmer homepage. I found the top-downloaded BMW wallpapers changed fairly infrequently, so I changed it to display random BMW wallpapers instead. This accomplishes two objectives. First of all it further diversifies the United Bimmer homepage. No one wants to see the same content (especially graphical like that) static for long periods of time (which is why we eliminated the old rarely-updated homepage). By mixing up the wallpapers, someone may see an image that catches their eye one day and download it. The second objective of the switch is for that of SEO. When Google crawls the car-wallpaper.net homepage, it’s already pinging the most-downloaded images fairly constantly. To do the same from the UB homepage would bleed more PR to a select part of the site (only those 4-5 pages) and hurt the overall e-stickiness. By showing random samplings of BMW wallpapers from the more-frequently-crawled UB homepage, it exposes more of the insides and guts of car-wallpapers.net to the search engines, increasing the exposure of landing points. While those few pages might not return as often, it’s a quantity over quality focus with a site of this dimension. In time, the entire site as a whole will increase in importance, rather than just a select few parts. This is better in the long run.

Now the only thing I have left to do is wait, which isn’t very fun. hah

I just added a few more categories to car-wallpapers.net, per the request of members:

-Mazda
-Koenigsegg
-Nissan
-Other

Anything other makes should go in the Other category, and after enough of one make accumulates, I’ll create a category for that make and move them all over.