Successful Blog

Blogging Life Question 4: Blog Names

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For those who come looking for a short, thoughtful read, a blogging life discussion, or a way to gradually ease back into the week, I offer this Blogging Hypothetical Question.

Here you go. . . .

A friend is rethinking his brand-new blog, now that he knows a little bit about them.
He comes to you with two questions:

1. Is it a good thing or a bad thing to have “blog” in my name–such as Blogopedia? You’ve been around longer. Does that make it easier, harder, or just the same for the reader?

2. Suppose I choose a domain name now and want change my blog name later. I know people do it. I’ve seen it often enough. Does it cause any problems that you know about?
Is it okay if my domain name www.joescarideas.com doesn’t match with the new blog name Joe’s Rocket Lounge?

As a blog reader, not an SEO person, do these things make any difference to you?

–ME “Liz” Strauss

SEO–Link Checking Tools

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Practical SEO for Every Blogger

Checking Backlinks

Backlinks are an exciting part of watching your blog grow. Each link is a statement, a vote, that moves your blog a bit higher in the Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs). Here are some ways for finding out about your links.

Talk Digger
Duncan Riley introduced Fred Giasson’s Talk Digger in an article in the Blog Herald this summer and I’ve been using it since. It’s a quick way to check your links at Bloglines, Blog Pulse, Feedster, Technorati, Ice Rocket, BlogDigger, PubSub, MSN, and Google all at the same time. To quote Talk Digger: Talk Digger is a meta-search engine. It asks major search engines: “Who links that URL?” The results will then be processed and displayed on Talk Digger. This is a free web service developed by Frederick Giasson.

Who Links to Me
Another tool you may have seen around the web is WhoLinkstoMe. Paste the Who Links to Me linking code into your template. Click through the link to check your own or another site’s Google Page Rank, and links found by Who Links to Me, Blogrolling, Google, Yahoo, MSN, Technorati, and Icerocket.

Related Links
Nick Wilson at Performancing had this method to check what Google considers related links. Type in the Google search box: related: yourdomain.com . Then he suggests you review the links to see what kind of sites come up. You would want a strong theme to show through. Your goal would be to answer these questions with a “yes.”

  • Are most of the sites on same theme or topic as your blog?
  • Are there some authorities in your niche?

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THIS JUST IN:

Mark Wade of Blog Marketing, Blog Promotion for Newbies offered this addition to our list.

iWEBTOOL Backlink Checker

Ara Pehlivanian of the site of the same name offers this:

You might also want to check out the Firefox extension SEO Links by WebmasterBrain.

These should give you something to do while that turkey’s in the oven.
Happy Holiday if you’re having one. If you’re not, declare one.

–ME “Liz” Strauss

Related articles:
Check Google Backlinks Through Yahoo
SEO–Positioning Keywords for Readers and Search Engines
Don’t Buy that New Domain Name Yet
Checklist for Linking to Quality Blogs

SEO–Five Traits of Relevant Content

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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

SEO Optimizing Blogs

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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
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ME “Liz” Strauss, Eric Mutta

SEO: If Everyone Is Number One

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Practical SEO for Every Blogger

. . . People are giving out advice about ranking in Search engines, when they clearly know nothing whatsoever of the topic.

Worse, in extreme cases . . . they’re giving out information that is patently false, and could actually get bloggers into trouble with some engines. . . .

There are no quick fixes.

–Nick Wilson, Performancing, Misinformation on Search in the Blogosphere

I’ve been in and out of websites and blogs, following links on SEO from every search engine. I know I can spell SEO. I know a few other things too. There are people on the web who know much, much more. There are some who don’t, but say they do. There are a few who will propose that the metaphor in this photograph is real.

SEO in stone

This picture of Search Engine Optimization is a fantasy. I know. I made it. The only thing concrete about SEO is that the rules are always changing. This can be frustrating, but it’s very much worth supporting.

The alternative is that everyone knows the algorithms that search engines use to build their indexes and how each engine values criteria such as link popularity and themes. We really shouldn’t want to know everything. That would be wrong, as wrong as burning books is. Think about it. One of two things would happen.

    1. We would spend more time talking about search engines and even less time talking about readers and quality content. The conversation would become “how to fit the algorithms–how to pass the test.” More time spent discussing the test is less time spent on content. If the rules were available, we’d have no choice but to follow them. Ignore what everyone knows, and we fall off the listings. Suddenly search engines would be controlling everything we said. That’s if the system stood.

    2. The current information access system would completely fall apart. What happens when everyone is number one? No one is. Users would be left with thousands, millions of choices all ranked equally authorative and relevant–a universe of information with no indexing system. It hurts to think about it.

Eric Mutta and I are structuring this series with an eye toward what we really need to know as bloggers and what we can let go of. We’re looking for Optimum SEO that will keep the bulk of our time for attending to our readers and the content they deserve.

We’ll talk through the available resources and how things work. We’ll share plenty of information and places to get more. In other words, this will be Practical SEO for Every Blogger. Don’t be surprised if we all become better search engine users by the end of the series.

And if I meet someone claiming an SEO answer that is set in stone, I will say most graciously, I prefer mine etched in ice.

–ME “Liz” Strauss

SEO-OSE-SOE–When an Alternate Spelling Is Optimization

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When I do a link search on MSN for my personal blog, I always get that starred question Were you looking for . . . ? The same thing happens on Google, Yahoo, and most search engines.

I find it useful when I mistype a word, fun to follow when I’m on a link search, and funny when it’s unconnected to what I’m searching for. I didn’t think much about it, except to notice the number of listings under misspelled words.

In an October post written by Jamsi at Workboxers, The Overlooked Optimization Technique, Jamsi tells how with the Overture Keyword Tool, he used an alternative spelling as Search Engine Optimization. By removing a space and a capital letter from a keyword, Jamsi achieved a top three rank in the listings at Google, Yahoo, and MSN for an obscure blog.

The logic is simple and compelling.

It’s the big fish in a small pond strategy. Choose the less preferred spelling, and you’ll get more attention. Use the Overture Keyword Tool to make sure that you still have an audience. Then tag your post with keywords that will get you a higher rank in a shorter listing.

–ME “Liz” Strauss aka My Lis Straus