Successful Blog

Great Find: Absolutely Del.icio.us Tool Collection

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Folksonomy and tag categories got your eyes crossed?
Has social bookmarking started controlling you rather than the other way around?

The Addiction

Hi. My name is Liz and I’m a social bookmarker.
At first I just did it on the weekends to keep track of a few sites and articles I liked. Then I started social bookmarking to get new ideas. Soon it became a daily habit–once, then twice, then many times a day. I got to recognize submitters names and tastes. I started submitting myself–things I saw that I liked.

Social bookmarking utilities were both a great boon and a great downfall to my productivity. I could go there to find a passel of spectacular ideas. But more and more I found myself lost in an enchanted forest, thinking I’d leave after the next look, or the next, or maybe the next. The disorganization of the folksonomy became an addiction–I kept thinking the next title I saw might be the fabulous prize I was looking for. It was intellectual gambling.

That’s when I knew I needed help, and I found it at Quick Online Tips.

The Prescription

Finally, someone has collected tools and tips from all over the Internet to help Social Bookmarking addicts.

Great Find: Absolutely Del.icio.us – Complete Tool Collection from Quick Online Tips
Type of article: List of posts on tools for using Del.icio.us
Permalink: http://pchere.blogspot.com/2005/02/absolutely-delicious-complete-tool.html
Audience: Anyone wants to make the most of social bookmarking
Content: This list offers well over 100 posts that discuss how to use del.icio.us to get the most out of it. You’ll find the Beelerspace Beginners Guide as well as the popular Slacker Manager post, the Several Habits of Wildly Successful del.icio.us users. Most of the hints and helps here will work with any social bookmarking utility you use.

Click the screenshot to begin a new life of tackling that taxonomy.

If you try this at home, don’t read the entire list at one sitting. Choose one or two to explore each morning. Then come back to tag my best work to share with your friends. 🙂

Benefits for the “Magic Middle Man”

Social bookmarking is a powerful tool for research, idea generation, and promoting your business. It’s a great way for those of us in the Magic Middle to exert our control as an audience. Learning how to use it efficiently and effectively can

  • boost personal productivity,
  • offer ideas to promote your brand and your business,
  • provide a venue to showcase your best work to a wide audience,
  • and has an immediate, if short-lived impact, that may gain a few new readers.

Of course, I exaggerated the downside of social bookmarking at the start of this article, but the temptation to spend too much time exploring is also very real. How do you keep social bookmarking from eating up your time? How do you use it to its best advantage?

–ME “Liz” Strauss

Related articles:
Great Find: Controlling Your Online Identity
Stand-Alone Trackback Tool from WhizbangTech
WhosWhoo?! at Yahoo?

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
deep dark blue strip A

ME “Liz” Strauss, Eric Mutta