A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to My Blog One Day

Filed Under Business Life, Community, SOB Business, Successful Blog, ZZZ-FUN | 21 Comments

Guest Writer: Tim Dungan (aka ptvGuy)

Not to be just another SOB, I had to come by and thank Liz personally for including me here in her collection of certified SOBs. I will wear my badge proudly. It’s such an enjoyable departure from the web development and public television stuff that I usually deal in.

Frankly, there are so many fun things about blogging that tend to get lost behind the business end of it. I hope you don’t mind if I share a few things here that I will never be able to write about on my own blog where I must maintain a certain air of “authoritative professionalism” (which is a nice way of saying “stuck-up, self-importance.”)

PageRank and search strings and keywords, oh my…

If you’re like me, then you regularly check your blog stats for all sorts of important information like who’s visiting your site, how often, and, especially, how they’re getting there. When search engines like Google send visitors your way, it’s important–and sometimes quite fun — to note the specific search strings that got them there. The idea, of course, is to analyze your keywords and optimize your content to get more visitors based on what they’re searching for and what draws them to your site, etc., etc. However, there are times when that isn’t such a
brilliant thing to do.

I, for instance, routinely blog about my own unique style of writing perfect code or what I refer to as “anal coding.” It, therefore, doesn’t take a whole lot of imagination to figure out the kind of search strings that often manage to bring visitors to my blog (”Anal journey” is one of my favorites.) nor to assume that they probably left disappointed. Like this blog and the award that made it famous, that
was something of a purposeful malapropism — in this case, the use of a negative term as if it were a positive thing to strive for. I hope to be half as successful at it as Liz.

The thing is, there are always certain search strings in the list that simply make no sense. You’re left asking yourself questions like, “How on earth did someone find my website by typing those words into a search engine?” I’ve tried a few of these (No, not the anal ones.) and gotten 30 or 40 pages into the results without finding any mention of my site.

If we assume that our stats are not mistaken, then we have to guess that somehow for some unknown reason and for a limited amount of time every once in a while, the underlying search engine algorithms simply stop to daydream. Why not? It’s a complex system. Given the choice between daydreams and occasional hiccups, I’m going with the daydream theory.It works for me. Then again, I’m of the opinion that PageRank is determined by who can flip a nickel closest to the wall, so what do I know?

Podcasting, the Ultimate Form of Ventriloquism

If you think about it — and it’s best not to–podcasting is about throwing your voice literally around the world. It’s a ventriloquist act. If your blog includes a podcast, then you too have the unique privilege of hearing your own voice coming out of cheap, tinny computer speakers. I guarantee that this will remove any delusions you may ever have had that you sound eloquent or suave or erudite or anything else other than nasally and annoying. Every time I finish a podcast now, I
go and give my wife a long backrub and thank her for tolerating that horrifying sound for all these years.

Another thing about podcasting is that one gets to discover certain habits about oneself that are better left unknown. For instance, I have discovered that I have a tendency to take in a particularly snooty-sounding, deep breath right before delivering a long, self-serving diatribe of a sentence meant to make me sound important. These are things we always notice about others and never see in
ourselves. It’s not pleasant.

And then there’s the kids…

I work out of my own home. Lucky me, huh?
This means that, at any given moment, my children are likely to burst through the door screaming at each other about who did what. We won’t even discuss what I’ve gotten to learn about myself from that. Suffice to say that I’m glad it’s not a live show and that I’ve been able to look up all sorts of information about how to edit an audio file prior to uploading it. (BTW, this has also saved the world from numerous bad puns, the odd moments when I burst into song, and even the occasional belch.)

Thanks Again

Anyway, thanks again for the award and allowing me a place to ramble for a moment. It’s good to be able to drop the professional persona once in awhile and just be me.

Tim Dungan

——-
Hey, Timothy!
Thanks for this lovely thank-you card.
You chose a way to say thanks that is so perfectly in keeping with the spirit of SOBs and everything about this blog. What fun and how nice that you would take time to do this on a Saturday. That means a lot to me.
Liz

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SOB Business Cafe 08-04-2006

Filed Under Branding, Design, Marketing, SEO, Successful Blog, Technorati, Trends | Leave a Comment

SB Cafe

Welcome to the SOB Cafe

We offer the best in thinking–articles on the business of blogging written by the Successful and Outstanding Bloggers of Successful Blog. Click on the title shots to enjoy each selection.

The Specials this Week are

Darren Rowse offers an interview with Dave Sifry on Blogging Popularity.

Dave Sifry on Making Your Blog Popular

Mike Sansone considers whether blogging can be called a conversation . .. really.

Is Blogging Really a Conversation

Christine Kane lays out 7 great reasons why you should forget about email until after noon.

7 Great Reasons Not to Check Email til Noon

Scot Herrick has a fabulous read on creativity and innovation as a strategy in today’s Cubicle Nation.

Creativity and Innovation Series

Ann Michael has Google’s number laid out in keywords.

Google Are Key Words King

Related ala carte selections include

Minic Rivera has some Blogging Times News for Artists.

Gawker Offers Free Ad Space to Artists

Please know that I include this last because everyone should see Susan Reynold’s wonderful art. Do click on it to see it full size. The image is amazing.

Susan's Wonderful Art

Sit back. Enjoy your read. Nachos and drinks will be right over. Stay as long as you like.
No tips required. Comments appreciated.

Have a great weekend!

–ME “Liz” Strauss

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SEO–Five Traits of Relevant Content

Filed Under Blog Review, Content, SEO, Successful Blog, Writing | 24 Comments

Practical SEO for Every Blogger

Five Traits of Relevant Content

Relevant is the keyword. Content without “relevant” is less than content. Who would want to post something irrelevant? Here are five traits of relevant content.

Relevant content is text.
Search Engines love quality relevant content. They love quality content because readers do. Content here means text, not graphics or photos. That’s where search engines and readers see pages differently. Readers “read” photos and graphics; search engine spiders crawl right past them. So under that photo or graphic include a caption explaining what’s in it.

Relevant content is fresh and free-flowing.
Search engine spiders are demanding creatures. They want original, relevant content to list for their readers–and lots of it. Provide original content with accuracy and frequency about topics readers search for, and your posts will be born relevant.

Relevant content is formatted.
When your document follows a structured format, a search engine can follow how topics relate. Relationships between topics establish that keywords aren’t just mentioned–they are connected and relevant.

  • title
  • h1–subhead that relates
  • paragraph(s)
  • h2–subhead that relates
  • paragraph(s)

Relevant content is linked–Links in, links out, and links to yourself are relevant.
Spiders crawl the web by following links. Links draw spiders to related pages from blog to blog and within your blog. Connections in content are inherently relevant.

Relevant content is error free and accessible.
Open HTML tags, gross errors in spelling, and unnecessary plugins trip spiders. Enough said.

Relevant content is what readers are searching for, what spiders are crawling for, what bloggers are blogging for–right?

I’d rather not blog than be irrelevant.

I think there’s a t-shirt in that.

–ME “Liz” Strauss

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SEO Optimizing Blogs

Filed Under Basics, SEO, Successful Blog, Tech/Stats | 50 Comments

Practical SEO for Every Blogger

It didn’t seem like a good idea to trust my instincts and pure research on a topic like SEO. I’m just not qualified to sort the information, into the good, the bad, and the ugly. I didn’t trust myself to tell which parts of a documents written in 2002 are still valid and which are way out of date.

Lucky for me a programmer and all-around good-guy, Eric Mutta, came to the rescue. He agreed to work with me on this series to make sure that I got the facts straight and to fill in the details that I was missing. Let’s let Eric have a word.

Eric, Tell us something about yourself and your experience with SEO.

My name’s Eric Mutta, though I am known online by some of my many alter egos, the most popular one being Teh Blogfather. I’ve been blogging for nearly a year now on topics in writing, computer programming and recently, just plain comedy.

I approach SEO from the perspective of a computer programmer researching search engine technologies, as well as from that of a blogger who’s trying to rank highly in the popular search engines such as Google, Yahoo, and MSN.

As a programmer I could tell you the mechanics behind search engines in general. As a blogger trying to make the top ranks, I could tell you about some techniques I’ve been using that have worked well.

Eric, what is SEO and why do people care about it?

SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization. That’s a bit of a misnomer, because SEO from the perspective of bloggers is not about optimizing search engines, but about optimizing blogs for search engines. . . .

Optimizing search engines would be equivalent to asking “how can I make Google produce better results?” Optimizing our blogs for search engines is equivalent to asking “How can I make my blog rank highly in the search results when a user types in a particular keyword or phrase?” The former is practically rocket science and Google’s rich because they cracked it. The latter is not rocket science and is something you and I can do by following some simple but effective tips.

SEO is important because when you rank well in search engines, more visitors can find your blog, visitors who can be converted to full-time readers.

Where would you tell bloggers to invest their SEO time?

HTML <title></title> Tags. The text you use for your page and post titles is one of the most important things in SEO. Search engines place a lot of importance in titles. Darren Rowse of ProBlogger talks about in his article The Importance of Title Tags in Search Engine Optimization.

<META> Tags. These tags contain information that is invisible to the user but used by all sorts of internet software, with search engines being the software of interest here. HTML tags are used for various purposes including describing your site, specifying keywords for your content, and copyright notices. Danny Sullivan of SearchEngineWatch.com explains it well in How Search Engines Rank Web Pages.

Content content content. People always say content is king and they are right, but they should in fact say targeted or relevant content is king. Search engines only go looking for what people want. If you don’t have that, they become blind to whatever content you have. In other words, blog on material that people search for frequently. Look at all the top blogs and you’ll see them doing this (e.g they cover politics, gadgets, celebrity gossip and even shoes in the case of the Manolo of Shoeblogs.com.

Thanks Eric!

Title tags, I’m still shaking. We’ll actually lay out some code you can copy and adapt in tomorrow’s piece. In the meantime you might also explore . . .

Search Engine Optimization Definition

UPDATE: SEE Yaro on Metatags and Keywords
deep dark blue strip A

ME “Liz” Strauss, Eric Mutta

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