Written on August 10th, 2005 at 03:08 am by Darren Rowse
Google News Adds RSS
enternetuserss and RSS addicts everywhere are jumping up and down in their boxer shorts because Google News has finally added RSS feeds to its service! Wooohooo! I’ve just spent the last 30 minutes adding a series of feeds to my Bloglines account and am looking forward to seeing how it works. Hopefully this will eliminate quite a few News Alert emails each day and speed up my blogging.
Found via Blog Herald
Written on August 10th, 2005 at 01:08 am by Darren Rowse
Search Engine Optimization Tips for Blogs - Site Themes and Design
Time for a couple more tips for the Search Engine Optimization Tips for Blogs Series:
- Themed sites - One of the growing theories of SEO that I’ve been reading about recently is that you are more likely to rank well if you have a substantial amount of pages on a similar theme. ie a niche topic blog will probably rank higher than a general one that covers many topics. Build a blog with over 200 pages of content on the same theme and you’ll increase your chances of ranking well as SEs will see you as an authority on the topic. The take home advice here is to keep to some kind of a topic/niche/theme for your blog. Of course not doing so doesn’t mean you’ll never rank well - it’s just another factor to consider.
- Site Design - Search Engines like well laid out, well coded and easily to navigate sites. Make sure your pages validate (I need to work more on this) and that they are viewable on all major browsers. Search Engines don’t tend to like too much Flash, Frames or Java Script in your site - keep it simple and clean and their robots will index your site a lot faster and more accurately.
Written on August 9th, 2005 at 11:08 pm by Darren Rowse
31 Days to Building a Better Blog - Day 9
We’re up to day 9 in the 31 Day Project and there has been an influx of reader submissions. I’m not sure what brought them all on but I’m happy about it because there are some great posts among them. THIS is why I started the 31 Day Project - what an amazing bunch of posts! Here they are:
- Lisa’s written a great post on Building a Better Blog - Six Do NOTs (looking at what not to do)
- Miha from My Money Blog has submitted a post titled Search Engine Optimization Tips for Beginners
- Nick also has a tip on Blog Search Engine Optimization
- Markus has a post about publishing at the right time
- Jon has written an interesting post titled Anything That Can be Measured, Can be Improved which is a great look at some of the stats Bloggers should be keeping an eye on
- Duncan has written a post on Design Theory for New Bloggers
- PC Doctor has a wise post titled You’re going to spend a lot of time talking to yourself in the beginning
Write your own blog tip and let me know about it so that we can add it to the growing list of blog tips at the 31 Days to Building a Better Blog Project Headquarters
Written on August 9th, 2005 at 04:08 pm by Darren Rowse
T-Shirt Competition Finalists - It’s Time to Vote
I’m pleased to announce the five finalists for the enternetusers T-Shirt competition.
You can see them all close up at the enternetusers shop.
Apologies for the delay but with 60 submissions, a few hiccups with cafepress and with needing to get the entries all up to a printable quality it took a bit longer than I’d hoped for to get things this far.
I wan to extend a massive thank you to all participants. The quality of submissions was great and it was a difficult choice. Thanks also to my two other judges who helped narrow the field. We chose the following five for a variety of reasons including design elements, adaptability for printing, what we thought people would buy and how it fitted with the rest of enternetusers. Of course this is just our opinion and there will be discussion about what we left out of the mix.
I will also add that a couple of entries withdrew due to lack of time to get their entries up to print quality. I may feature some of these later on as stickers or on mugs.
Vote for your favourite and show enternetusers a little love in the process by buying your favourite in the enternetusers shop.
The winner will simply be the design that sells the most number of items in the enternetusers Shop. Each design has 26 options for purchase ranging from bags, to T-Shirts, to hats, to mugs. The winner will be declared 14 days from now at this time of the day. So vote for you winner today by making a purchase. In doing so you also help enternetusers a little by both promoting it and sending a couple of dollars our way (it is literally only $2 or so per sale) Those of you who want to promote these T-shirts and make a little money off them can join Cafe Press’s affiliate program and link up to my shop if you wish.
So without further ado let me show you the five finalists and declare the voting for the final winner to be open. Each design below can be viewed in a larger size by clicking the image but it probably is worth looking at them on items in the Shop to get a better feel for them.
Finalist 1 - I’m a enternetusers - submitted by Abe
Finalist 2 - Giving Words Worth - submitted by Chris
Finalist 3 - Blog Job - submitted by Ray (who doesn’t have a blog)
Finalist 4 - pro blogger - submitted by Retz (it has a back design too)
Finalist 5 - Helping Bloggers Earn Money - submitted by Stan
To see the finalists and options for buying head to the enternetusers Shop at CafePress.com
Written on August 9th, 2005 at 10:08 am by Darren Rowse
Search Engine Optimization Tips for Blogs - Using Keywords
Having looked at Offsite Search Engine Optimization Techniques I’ll now turn my attention to examining some of the factors you might like to keep in mind as you develop your blog - (or Onsite techniques). There are many of these and it might take a few days to get through them all - bear with me.
Keyword Rich Content - identify a few keywords for your article that you’re hoping will get indexed highly by Google. Don’t pick too many but consider the question ‘how do I want people to find this post in Search Engines?’ What will they type into Google if they want information on the topic you’re writing. The answer to this question will give you a hint as to what words you’ll want to see repeated throughout your article a number of times.
These keywords will need to be the most common words used in your article. Use them in some or all of the following ways:
Of course you can go over the top with keywords in posts and let it destroy your content - but if it fits with what you’ve written tweak it to include the words you are targeting a couple of extra times. Most SEO experts recommend getting your keyword density up to between 5-20% - I think 20% is probably bordering on massacring your content.
One last word of warning and disclaimer (because I can just hear the comments on this post already) - don’t sacrifice your readers experience of your site just for the sake of SEO. Yes keyword density can be important in climbing the search engine rankings - but more important is that your content and design are user friendly and helpful to readers. There is nothing worse than a site that is stuffed with keywords - these sites come off as cheap, nasty and spammy - don’t fall for the temptation.
This post is part of the Search Engine Optimization Tips for Blogs Series
Written on August 9th, 2005 at 09:08 am by Darren Rowse
‘Behaviors of the Blogosphere’ Study Results
Rick E. Bruner has pointed to a fascinating report into Blog Reader Behaviour (pdf) that has some very promising findings for those of us exploring blogging in the commercial sphere. The key findings of this study by ComScore are:
- 50 million U.S. Internet users visited blog sites in the first quarter of 2005. That is roughly 30% of all U.S. Internet users and 1 in 6 of the total U.S. population
- Five hosting services for blogs each had more than 5 million unique visitors in that period, and four individual blogs had more than 1 million visitors each
- Of 400 of the biggest blogs observed, segmented by seven (nonexclusive) categories, political blogs were the most popular, followed by “hipster” lifestyle blogs, tech blogs and blogs authored by women
- Compared to the average Internet user, blog readers are significantly more likely to live in wealthier households, be younger and connect to the Web on high-speed connections
- Blog readers also visit nearly twice as many web pages as the Internet average, and they are much more likely to shop online
Related article: Gawker’s boss Nick Denton talks about the results as someone who was part of commissioning the report.
Written on August 9th, 2005 at 08:08 am by Darren Rowse
Redesigning Blog Templates
I just stumbled across a useful page for those wanting to give their blog a bit of a design overhaul - it’s a blog tutorial on Blog Templates using Photoshop. In it they talk about how to design header banners/logos, give photos borders, make button etc. They also give a lot of useful links to help in the process.
Written on August 9th, 2005 at 02:08 am by Darren Rowse
Search Engine Optimization Tips for Blogs - Off Site Techniques
This post belongs to the SEO Tips for Blogs Series
As I mentioned in the previous post, SEO experts tend to divide search engine optimization techniques into off site and on site techniques. Off site techniques are as the name suggests factors from outside the site itself (and usually on other sites) that impact the blog’s ranking in search engines. Many of these factors are outside the blogger’s control - however they are useful to know. The most obvious and probably most powerful offsite factor are Inbound Links.
It is generally agreed that the links that point to a website are one of the most powerful way of climbing Search Engines results pages (in fact many argue it is THE most important factor). - To put it most simply - every link to your site is seen by the search engines as being a vote of confidence in your site.
Ideally Speaking - The best inbound links are those that are from higher ranked sites than your own that are relevant to the topic you are writing about who link to you using relevant keywords. Whilst you may not have complete control over who links to you these are the types of links that you should be dreaming of.
How to generate quality inbound Links?
Of course whilst most of us know this it doesn’t make getting such links any easier - its in the hands of others in many cases. So how do you get such links?
If you’re looking for link exchange/buying/selling programs you might like to look at systems like:
- Link Adage
- Text Link Ads
- Link Worth
I’m sure there are other off site Search Engine Optimization techniques that I’ve not covered here - feel free to add your own suggestions and experiences in comments below. My next posts in this series will move onto describing various on site techniques.
Written on August 8th, 2005 at 06:08 pm by Darren Rowse
Reactions to MSN Filter
There has been a bit of a buzz around the blogging community in the past few days with the release of Microsofts blog publishing network - MSN Filter - a network of blogs looking to give the inside scoop on music, sport, TV, style and technology. MSN describe it as:
‘our team of bloggers will filter the best stories, photographs, links and other interesting tidbits that you’ve sent in, as well as items that they’ve dug up.
This is an opportunity to share your insider knowledge with the Filter community and take a chunk out of your 15 minutes of Internet fame.’
It’s reader driven content edited by nameless bloggers.
The response to MSN filter has been varied ranging from the bored (rafat at Paid Content writes ‘my reaction: ho hum’) to the ‘thrilled’ reaction of Jason Calacanis:
‘Now, I’m thrilled MSN is in the game because at some point soon I’m sure they will make these Filter sites and/or Start.com the default homepage for tens of millions of MSN/IE users. Tens of millions of folks will reach our blogs via Microsoft’s RSS reader and meta-blogs. The alternative—which we are living with right now—is our blogs are no where to be found on the MSN, Yahoo, Google or AOL home pages. Having these big players move blogs to the top level will be huge for blogging.’
Another blogger writing on the topic is Richard MacManus at Read/Write Web who bounces off Jason’s post wondering who will be the first out of Google, MSN, Yahoo and AOL to put blogs on their front page:
‘My money’s on Yahoo and AOL. Indeed I have hopes that both of them will fulfil my dreams of getting paid for my writing, by opening up and inviting truly independent content creators into their fold.’
My reaction to MSN Filters is that it’s a logical move that corresponds with Yahoo! getting into Health Blogs. I’m still not sure what I think about search engines having their own content sites are but know that its bound to happen whether it’s ‘right’ or not.
My initial reaction to MSN Filter is that i’s pretty bland and boring - without too much personality. I think not naming the bloggers is a bad move. From my own experience I know that my most successful blogs are generally ones where I’ve identified myself or at least injected some of my own personality into them. I guess MSN are wanting to concentrate more upon the content than the profile of their bloggers - the name ‘Filters’ I guess gives some indication of this.
My hope is that rather than trying to dominate the blogging community that MSN (and the others who will no doubt follow) will interact with it. True blogging is generous with it’s linking and builds relationships - hopefully we’ll see this continued with the big guns interacting in the medium as publishers.
Written on August 8th, 2005 at 05:08 pm by Darren Rowse
Search Engine Optimization Tips for Blogs
Search Engine Optimization is something that makes many blogger’s heads spin - I know this because every time I write an SEO article I get comments from bloggers telling me that its too big a topic and that they’d rather just write ‘quality content’.
Whilst I’ll never argue that quality content should be anything but a first priority in blogging, the fact is that there are many millions of pages of great writing languishing around at the bottom of search engines results pages that deserve to be read by many but which rarely see the light of day because their authors have failed to understand that just a few simple tweaks in the writing process could see them ranking considerably higher.
So it’s time for another series - this time on Search Engine Optimization for Blogs!
People often ask me ‘how do I get ranked number one in (((insert favourite search engine here)))?
My answer usually starts with - ‘I don’t really know what I’m talking about….but….’
You see whilst some of my blogs rank very highly on different search engines - I often don’t really know why. Much of what I do is educated guessing and experimentation. I do read a lot of other people’s advice on the topic, but the more I read the more I realize that I’m not alone in my guess work - virtually every article I read is a ‘best guess’ of some kind.
My main advice to people wanting to optimize their blogs for Search Engines is to keep it simple. Start with quality content on a specific topic and then tweak it using the best current advice going around.
When I think about SEO for my blogs I tend to divide the things I focus upon into two parts - offsite and onsite search engine optimization techniques. Offsite techniques are more about what others do on their websites in linking to you, onsite techniques you have more control over as you write.
Over the next week I’ll share around 20 Search Engine Optimization Tips for Blogs. I’ll post a link to each one on the 31 Days to Building a Better Blog and at the end of the series will post the complete post in a single post to have it all in the one spot. As I go feel free to leave your comments, suggestions and experiences - but keep in mind each post is just part of a larger holistic approach.
I’ll finish by encouraging bloggers not to be overwhelmed by Search Engine Optimization. Whilst it can seem complicated and can become something of an obsession for blog owners you should know that blogs have many of the things I’m going to write about built into them and are more often than not pretty well set up for SEO. What follows in this series is intended as a primer or a background briefing on some of the issues we should be aware of - don’t fall into the temptation of becoming an SEO addict - rather file it away and allow it to naturally impact the way you blog.
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