Co-taught by a geek and an author, this Writers.com ten-week class
provides a blog beginner with the tools to grow more serious.
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Feedback: (Mike) Q&A, tech troubleshooting
Before we plunge into the nebulous craft of search engine optimization, let's review how the Innertubes work. People dial in seeking two things: entertainment and information. Typically, they start hunting with a search engine, like Google, Yahoo or Microsoft Live. These deploy robotic "spiders" to look for content. They examine a given page and then move on to process pages linked to it, thus crawling the Internet.
How Amanda childishly likes to envision the spiders...
The bots have a hit-list of URLs, called "the seeds". That's why submitting your site to search engines is Very Good Thing: it lands you on the crawl frontier (which is possibly the most awesome jargon of this week's lecture). On Google's About Page, look under the yellow header "For Site Owners," top right. Click "submit your content to Google". Other engines, like Yahoo, have similar submission links.
Once spiders target your site, they romp all over the sucker. Their goal is to determine authenticity (that it's not a link farm) and suss the level of authority. These factors drive where your blog appears when people come sleuthing. In other words, they influence your ranking.
The science of this remains very hush hush, because search engines don't want spammers and scammers to stack the decks. Google's algorithm allegedly weighs 200 factors. Hackers waste a lot of brain cells trying to divine these trade secrets (but hey, like Mike, they have IQ to burn). Some general rules are universal, however.
Spiders give more weight to terms in:
They also measure frequency. So good web writers stress the terms important to readers – and ones they're likely to search upon. A search engine analyzes how often these keywords appear in relation to other words in a web page. This principle – pushed too far – is why a lot of web text is cringeworthy. Marketers, in particular, grow obsessed with repetition and other strategies for search engine optimization (SEO). They're writing for robots, not people – and it shows.
Don't be that author. No one likes a keyword stuffer. In fact, some engines kick the worst offenders – spamdexers – right off their indices.
The big G accounts for nearly 75% of Internet search traffic. So how to best charm its bots? Especially when the company keeps its 200-point weighting system top secret?
While keywords are crucial, many pages share the same terms in their titles, headers and content. So Google casts its net wider, examining inbound links – and their source's authority, measured by PageRank. You can download a toolbar widget that reports on this status. I dislike clutter and thus prefer a free checker, despite the irritating sales pitches (ignore those).
Let's examine a few:
Does this mean we're muppets, incapable of teaching a new media workshop? Nope. The class site's still wet behind the ears – just over a month old. It also has few inbound links, loads of outbound ones and hasn't been submitted to search engines: a perfect storm, really, of PageRank (PR) misery. So do as we say, not as we do...
Personal sites tend to score lower, especially homepages such as Mike's, as he monkeys around with his code too much... Also "no one pays me to update my personal page, so it languishes in the gutter most of the time."
Notice that traditional media outlets still rank very high. For all the "death of journalism" ballyhoo, our society relies on news sources just as much as ever ... maybe even more than ever. We still look to the pros to filter the data stream and convey the important bits accessibly. Does it really matter if they're called "reporters" or "content curators"?
Anyway, enough on that whole upheaval, which could be a class unto itself. Think of PR kinda like high school. Attention (inbound links) boosts your status. Attention from a popular kid, like The New York Times, has even more juju. And attention from the bad kids – link farms – doesn't help on the scramble for cool.
So, to review: inbound links drive traffic to your blog, increasing readership. This is Very Good. We like. And inbound links from authoritative sites also can improve your PageRank (or, as Mike says, "they give you Googlejuice!"). The better your PR, the higher your blog appears when people search, which brings – you got it – more readers!
Time to inspire links and pump up your PR and inbound linkage.
DO: Generate original content, which encourages links.
DO: Add your blog's address to your email's signature file.
DO: Post links on social media sites like Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn (more on these below).
DO: Participate in bulletin boards and list serves on your topic. Again, include your blog's URL in your signature.
DO: Comment thoughtfully on blogs relevant to your topics. Curious readers will click though – track this via Analytics or Sitemeter referrals – and stick around if they like your stuff. Eventually you may even befriend fellow bloggers, who might then promote your work via posts and BlogRolls.
DON'T: Expect sites to reciprocate links. Showcase work you find relevant to your readers. Any competent blogger will notice a traffic spike, if you introduce a significant amount of readers. He or she may return play... but it could take time or never happen at all. Be generous with your juju. Offer it without strings. The karma almost always flows back in...
DON'T: Get sucked into link-trading schemes. Google sees right through that game.
DON'T: Get frustrated if you're not adding hundreds of new readers a week immediately. So much of successful blogging is about building a community. That takes time. Keep adding original content and good outbound links. Participate on other sites and publicize your own.
As a recent New York Times article noted, "Richard Jalichandra, chief executive of Technorati, said that at any given time there are 7 million to 10 million active blogs on the Internet, but 'it’s probably between 50,000 and 100,000 blogs that are generating most of the page views'."
On the one hand, that can seem a little discouraging. On the other, you have a chance – with little start-up cost – to compete with media giants. Take FiveThirtyEight: A site run by a baseball-stats nerd, a poker player, and a documentary filmmaker has a readership akin to the Houston Chronicle's, according to Joshua Benton at Harvard's Neiman Journalism Lab.
According to the Wall Street Journal, 1.7 million Americans make money blogging and 452,000 of them derive a majority of their income from it (read more about e-jobs here).
Blog's aren't a Golden Ticket. But they're darn close.
Basics of nabbing higher rankings
URL's, headers and page titles are important in Google's eyes. Make 'em descriptive and precise as possible, as we discussed earlier in class. If your blog requires major search engine marketing, consider registering a domain name that features important keywords. Just be aware this can create some extra hackwork for custom headers and other Blogger standards.
Don't hide your content behind images and Flash. Generally this is not a problem with Blogger, unless you video-post often. If so, entice Googlebots (and readers) with introductory text, which summarizes what's behind that play button. Again, specific details help. "A funny clip" is weaker than "Mystery: Sharks Missing at the Seattle Aquarium".
On that note, time out for a predator smackdown:
Now don't you feel better about the economy? At least you're not being drowned by an animal with the density of a wet Kleenex...
For posts primarily about images or video, teaser text brings context and gives the search bots more traction. Tech enthusiasts also use correct <title> elements and alt attributes. However, this is complicated in Blogger without editing an entry's HTML.
Make sure permalinks are enabled (Dashboard -> Settings -> Archiving -> Post Pages -> Yes). This gives search engines a permanent location to find a given entry (other bloggers too, so they can link to your entries). When a page moves, it generally loses its existing PR juju. (Ways exist to avoid this if, for example, you are migrating from one blog platform to another, but they're complicated).
Mike's sage adviceSeomoz.org consulted 37 experts about playing nicely with the world's top search engine (full report here). Following are the ten most positive factors they cited. Note how most revolve around links and keywords.
A lot of businesses promise improved search engine ranking. Not all of them are crooks, but precious few aren't. In general, avoid:
Learning a little about SEO is the best route, even for those developing a monetized, professional platform. A few weeks of DIY will teach you the right questions to ask, when hiring an expert.
Roll up your sleeves and start experimenting. That's what the Internet's all about (aside from porn and pictures of cats, of course).
Cyberspace is a boundless realm, teeming with content. But not every reader arrives at its shores with a precise goal or topic in mind. Some want to noodle around, following recommendations. Blogrolls help with this, obviously, but merry wanderers can also turn to aggregators. These are sites that stream syndicated web content into one location for easy viewing.
To use a house-hunting analogy, a URL is like driving to see a property for sale around the corner from your friend's office. You know exactly where you want to go. Searches are akin to asking a real estate agent. She'll present a lot of options, but will push certain ones based on a hidden agenda (her listings, white elephant properties that won't shift, the condo unit her brother-in-law built, etc.). Or you could search online at some site like Zillow: I want a 5BR Craftsman in Ballard, Seattle, under $500,000 (good luck! No, wait ... the recession's hitting even here. Buy now, while supplies last...).
Zillow's collecting data from many sources – different Realtors, house valuations, Google maps, mortgage-rate reports and calculators – and serving it up one-stop-shopping style. Which is unfortunate, because Amanda's real-estate-nut dad can't stay off the thing...
Anyway. Aggregators save a lot of time and hassle. Ones like Kayak.com can search 140 travel websites at the same time. GoogleNews trawls 25,000 outlets to create a personal newspaper – and even keeps tabs on topics of especial interest. And GoogleReader can check all your favorite blogs and assemble a digest of unread posts. So you could click once to catch up with 30 sites. Nifty? Oh yeah, baby!
The blogosphere has a host of aggregators, naturally. Some of the top dawgs – worth notifying about your blog – include Technorati, Digg and StumbleUpon. They show what's being searched, linked and commented upon most. Some track your tastes and suggest new sites. If any one of them highlighted your blog, traffic would spike through the roof. Seriously, bandwidths have tanked. So consider taking the time to submit your blog.
This can work for you – or not, entirely, as my friend Marie Javins points out. This wildlife observation post and another one earned her several hundred hits from a sex aggregator.
"Can you imagine?" she asks. "Who is out cruising for lion porn?"
Her site, No Hurry, has never been cited by the biggies like Technorati. But she explains that "when WarrenEllis.com mentions me, the traffic goes OFF THE CHARTS. He has a huge following. He says something like 'Marie Javins is back from Kuwait and blowing up Peeps in her microwave. Go and see.'
"And I get 800 hits in the next three hours."
Most search engines have "submit your site" links on the home page somewhere discrete. Look under "About Google" for details. Likewise Technorati and other aggregators have straight-forward sign-ups: some just ask for the URL, others require you to fill in some account details.
(Alerting these sites is much easier than adding Google WebMaster Tools, which we covered week four, by the way. It's a good, quick first step, if you have just a few minutes to devote to SEO.)
Too blitzed to throw your hat into the big pond of Technorati? Instead, build your audience through friends ... and friends of friends ... and friends of friends who once dated your coworker's cousin. That's the beauty of social networking sites like Facebook (the pet du jour), MySpace (kinda tweeny, but still au courant) and Linked In (a professional tool).
As of February 2010, Facebook has 400 million users; the average one spends 55 minutes a day on the site. A lot of online energy is massing there now. Grab that tiger by the tail to promote your blog.
But don't make it all about promotion. Would you go out for beers and only talk about your work all night? No? Then don't abuse Facebook as just a pulpit for your fabulousness. Mix things up with witty asides about your awesome new media class and that wacky Jamaican cabdriver with the Confederate flag on his shirt, who insists "someone has to play the Controversial Negro" (my friend, the writer Litsa Dremousis, reported on this recently – and the comments delved deep into race relations. FB may be ephemeral, but it also tightens the bonds between us, as these Newsweek and New York Times articles point out).
As we noted last week, take heed of the 80/20 rule. Experts agree that readers respond best when only one blog post in five is a plug. Some grey area exists, certainly, such as writing in your field of expertise without explicitly pushing your brand. But by and large people are online to be entertained or to solve a problem: don't clutter the scene with relentless hustling.
Once you're a Facebook member, you can post items, like links and status reports (synopses of what you're doing). These show on your wall, potentially alongside comments from folks on an approved list of friends. I note my new blog entries and traffic always spikes.
More people commented in the semiprivate (invitation only) forum of Facebook than on the original Road Remedies entry. While that's frustrating – I like a good comment-field furor – that "FB" link brought loads of readers: at least 10x the norm. As the song almost goes, "then I saw the faith and I'm a believer!"
I experimented with a lot of Facebook applications that promised to automatically feed new blog posts on to Facebook. To date, they all sucked or looked ugly. But posting a link takes mere seconds. On your profile page, click the box that asks "What's on your mind?" Icons appear underneath for photos, video, events and links (the thumbtack). Press the thumbtack, then paste in the permalink's URL. Your headline and initial text should load: you can edit these, if you like. You can also choose which image to display.
I won't pull punches: Facebook can be a massive time-suck (an average of 55 minutes a day!). People you'd long forgotten tap you for Farmville showdowns and send you digital bouquets. It's absurd. But this – and other social networking "Web 2.0" sites – are where a lot of the action's at: don't miss it all.
Twitter is a step more streamlined: basically it only broadcasts 140-character snippets, calls twits and tweets, along with pictures, mainly uploaded straight from cell/mobile phones. Readers can "follow" (subscribe) to specific feeds like amandacastleman or search for topics (indicated by hashtags like #iran09). Sounds insipid, of the "what I had for lunch" ilk, right? And it can be ... case in point, the lady who inadvertently landed her 15 minutes of fame for this instant classic: "I am totally serious. My Ob/Gyn was IN my vagina and an earthquake started rattling the room!" Less than two hours later, CNET was interviewing the hapless over-sharer.
On the flip side, good content – like Alaska Airlines' tweets about flight availability and airport access during a volcano-eruption alert – wins praise from users and the industry both. And often the medium's ahead of the press pack these days – or goes where reporters can't. A tweeter scooped every news outlet on the Hudson River plane crash. During the Iranian election protests, the government prevented foreign journalists from reporting, then locked down Internet access. Via proxy servers, word snuck out on Twitter and other 2.0 social media. The BBC explained the trend, while Boing Boing egged the cyberwar along.
Mashable calls Twitter the world's new water cooler. A look at its most popular 2009 topics shows the scope of the conversation, from Michael Jackson to swine flu, Google Wave and #drunkwords. Tools like Trend Tracker analyze the buzz and can help predict what topics will hot up. Sites like Alltop take it a step further and publish news digests based on intel like this. In turn that makes them great sources of ideas and authoritative links...
Convinced? Pick a user name, then start scouting for folks to follow (meaning that you subscribe to their broadcasts). Many will return the favor by following you. And thus the network starts to grow...
You can tweet via a website or mobile phone via the site itself, text message or software like Twitterific, Feedalizr or iPhone app Twinkle. Be creative with words, omit nonessential ones and rely on abbreviations to make your 140 characters convey as much original material as possible. Use URL shorteners like tinyurl or bit.ly to compress long links. Retweet – forward – dynamic posts by folks in your network. Hash-tag your topics (yes, it's tedious, but it attracts new audience members). Be wary of software like Tweetdeck, which can push your content to other social media platforms (note: many Facebook users dislike the compact, hash-tagged comments, especially as such tweets tend to be more promotional). Here social-media expert BL Ochman offers some tips on good Twitter practice.
As a narrative writer, I don't find microblogging true competition for blogging or more in-depth journalism. Two-line posts won't satisfy my yen for plot arc, even if we go all six-word Hemingway: "For sale, baby shoes, never worn". But I agree with writer Don George, keynote speaker at the Alaska Media Show:" A great Tweet is still a great piece of writing, it’s just a different medium."
A quick look at a few terrific posts, some by the "twitterati":
Check out the creme de la creme at the Shorty Awards, given each spring to top tweeters:
Twitter is a great tool for pushing information – and harvesting it too. Reporters and bloggers solicit sources and find story ideas via the site, just like CNET's Dawn Kawamoto jumping on the `OB/GYN earthquake angle. Here you can read about the conversion of New York Times tech guru David Pogue, who especially praises the intelligence-gathering aspects. Let the stream of information flow both ways...
In a time when email fatigue is rife, many folks are resistant to Twitter and social media: "Not another computer obligation!" remains a frequent complaint, along with "why work more for free?" But these are great tools for bloggers and writers alike: for branding, sourcing material, reading to keep your expertise current, finding interviewees, attracting an audience, building community, honing your pithy writing chops. Self-promotion. Self-expression. Storytelling in dynamic new ways.
I hid from Twitter and Facebook for years, cranky and overwhelmed. In fact, colleagues had to shame me publicly to explore these sites ("You call yourself a new-media instructor?"). Now they've become essential to the daily flow of my business and personal life.
Why not give it a try? You can always close your accounts, if they prove to detract more than they add...
Blogger's pushing its social-networking widget Followers: possibly because the behemoth won't be happy until it controls every facet of our online lives. This device slots into the sidebar of every new blog, in fact. Graphics-heavy, it displays teeny profile shots of your publicly declared blogfans. Empty, it's but a pitiful thing: may I suggest that y'all follow each other to experiment with both sides of this equation (you can opt out later easily enough)?
Should followers have a Blogger account, it'll show them a Reading List on the dashboard, reminding 'em to check out your latest efforts. It'll also funnel a subscription into Google Reader, if they have an account. More details here on following and also "friending".
Google insists: "The Followers widget is a great tool to help you grow your blog's audience. Readers often visit a blog and enjoy it but fail to return. Additionally you should put your followers widget at the top of your sidebar so more readers will notice it."
I disagree, at least about its placement in the prime top-right real estate. Context seems far more crucial than a visual shout-out to readers. Plus, overemphasizing followers has a whiff of desperation: "I'm good enough, smart enough and, gosh darn it, people like me!" But, increasingly, Internet users want to see and be seen. So I'd advocate a Followers widget for any ambitious blogger – it's a community building device, after all. Then experiment with its position.
To add this widget, go to Layouts>Page Elements. Click "add a gadget," then scroll down to Followers. Hit save. To kick this popularity contest to the curb, go to Layouts>Page Elements. Click "edit" under "Followers" and delete. On Page Elements, you can also drag and drop the gadget into a spot that suits your style.
Another helpful device is a subscription widget, which allows readers to sign up for emails or a digest of your posts (this can also be a handy back-up for you ... or a way to print the class lectures easily, albeit, sans images). Again, go to Layout>Page Elements, hit "add a gadget". Search for "email subscription box" and install. Drag and drop to the desired placement in the sidebar. You may also want to add the subscription device found on the front "gadget" page: this allows readers to tap into posts or comments via various aggregators.
Burn your feed, add a subscription/email subscription widget to your blog, claim your blog on Technorati Feedback: (Mike) Q&A, tech troubleshooting
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