SEO starter-kit – Master the headline

Post frequency is a huge factor in your site's ranking, which determines how high it appears on search engine indexes. Naturally, prominence there builds readership. In week six, we'll explore nuances of this voodoo, called search engine optimization (SEO). But for now, let's focus on a few simple steps to juice up your blogs:

• Write early. Write often. Unlike your instructors' personal blogs. (Do as we say...)
• Shorter linked entries – published daily – are preferable to a long essay weekly.
• Kick off with enticing language, rich with specifics – especially the keywords folks might search upon. Soup up those headlines!
• Ditto the first 25 words, which also appear on the search engine's index pages. Make 'em count.

“On a value-per-word basis, headline writing is the most important writing you do, explains Jakob Nielsen of Weblog Usability. “Descriptive headlines are especially important for representing your weblog in search engines, newsfeeds (RSS), and other external environments. In those contexts, users often see only the headline and use it to determine whether to click into the full posting.”

One-deck headlines are preferable. Employ precise language – or poetic, if that's more your thing. But think about baiting readers away from their tax returns, tennis matches and the latest Tina Fey vehicle.

Some of the best headlines spring fully-formed from the ether. But certain formulas exist for less inspired moments. As the travel-writing teacher Louise Purwin Zobel points out: "Everybody likes a title that talks about saving money or time; a title that promises improvement in health, creativity, or prestige; a title that hints of the newest, the latest, the most up to date; a title that tells you the article will tell you how to do something. You – either spelled out or implied – is a very important word. The title should be intriguing, startling, or thought-provoking and usually no longer than six words."

Engaging headlines ask a question, use clever punctuation, alliteration, a pun, or onomatopoeia, advises Poynter's Sara Quinn.

Adding, deleting and repositioning sidebar elements

Design-wise, the skinnier column is called a sidebar – and generally houses elements like:

• About
• Ads
• Archive
• Blogroll
• Greatest hits
• Suscription box
• Syndicated content via RSS feeds (headlines, tweets, and so on)
• Widgets, aka "gadgets" (embedded programlets – often interactive – like clocks, calendars, Flickr slideshows, etc.)

Bloggers can manipulate these elements easily without knowing a scrap of code. We'll walk you through some basic options this week.

Hang on, what's a blogroll? Sushi?

n. A list of blogs. A blogger features a list of their favorite blogs in the sidebar. Derived, it would seem, as a pun on logrolling.

These can be a powerful network-building tool, as Ink on My Fingers proved. My British friend Susannah Conway began this blog while mourning a lover's sudden death. Her style was highly poetic and confidential. "It became a refuge for me," she confesses, "a place I could share my heart while also finding my way."

Conway unfurled a mighty list of online comrades. Comments poured in. Intimacies blossomed. "I discovered an incredible community in blogland, and it was a trip to the States to meet up with some blog friends in 2006 that rekindled my passion for photography, something that had started many years ago." She wound up switching careers and now tries to share more passions than sorrows.

Her blogroll's shrunk by 60–70% since 2005, I'd wager. She splits it into two components – photography and inspiring – one for each sidebar. Note their placement, midway down the page. That's wise. For a diary-style blog, readers should first encounter information about the author and what to expect (descriptions, tag clouds etc.). Once they're hooked and scrolling, then give your peeps a shout-out.

Good in moderation, don't let your blogroll reach absurd lengths or you'll resemble a link-farm. Devoid of content, these sites are the equivalent of ghost-nets, adrift and tangled with the drowned corpses of baby porpoises and narwhal "unicorn" whales.

OK, maybe I exaggerated a little... But they are pretty annoying. Their architects feed off the creative energy of others. They write a program that harvests headlines and wispy excerpts – usually under 25 words – with hyperlinks to the original material. And ads. Lots and lots of ads, which is how these talentless ghouls piggyback profit.

Stop skeezy link farms now!

Wouldn't that be nice? Unfortunately, this form of spamming isn't illegal.

Hey, I want one of those blogroll things!

Happy news: you don't have to program this wondrous thing yourself! Blogger – and other platforms – have plug n' play "widgets". Here's how to set one up.

1. Click the Layout tab
2. Just under the header lies a powder-blue link "Add a Gadget" Do it!
3. A pop-up window appears.
4. Blog List is smack at the top. Click that plus sign.
5. Pick a title. Enter this in the top data field. I've gone with "Student Shout-out," since it's a little zippier than just "Blogroll".
6. Pick a sorting option from the drop-down menu. I prefer alphabetically: it's easier for repeat readers to navigate.
7. Decide what else you want to reveal (icon, snippets, titles). I just run with titles, because I don't want to distract readers too much. Mike really digs viewing the most recent post time and date. Each to their own...
8. Hit the button "Add to list" at the bottom left.
9. Paste in URL. Make sure you get the whole thing, including the "http://" bit.
10. The "Edit" link – beside each blog title – allows you to do just that.
11. Click save.
12. Back on the Layout Page, your blogroll's probably popped up at the top of the sidebar. This is bad. You should be the star there with the "About Me" section at the top: visitors need this information to evaluate what they're reading. So it's time to drag and drop. Click on that box and shuffle it into a better space.
13. Click the big ole orange "save" button, top right.

On the class blog here, we've added some students' URLs already (more to come). The blogroll is exclusively for sites being workshopped in class (one per person). I'll note other projects or additional test blogs under "Other Online Efforts".

Comments below, if we've overlooked your submission, please!

Linktasia – connecting your blog to the larger world

A blog without readers is the sound of one hand clapping. A veritable cul-de-sac on the information superhighway... Blogs wilt in a vacuum and thrive on community. And the quickest way to build that is via links.

As CUNY media professor Jeff Jarvis notes in The Guardian, we are “witnessing the millennial clash of media models: the content economy v the link economy. Online, content is valueless if no one sees it: content that isn't linked is the tree that fell in the forest no one heard (or turned into print).”

And so. Link. Linklinklink.

Link to your old posts, creating a conversation, a camaraderie. (These are internal links.)

Link to others with specific click-through terms. (These are outbound links on your site, inbound on the recipient's).

Link to friends and resources. But avoid long spammy blogrolls: too much is too much, not the new black.

How to link and create permalinks

Oh yeah, we really should discuss that.

1. Make sure you're in "Compose" mode on the Posting page. Click that top righthand tab if you're not.
2. Type the word you want to display.
3. Select it with the mouse.
4. Click the green globe icon on the beige bar above. It displays "Link" if you mouseover.
5. A new window pops up. Paste in the URL.
6. Hit "OK".

You can also handcode the html or generate it via a What-You-See-Is-What-You-Get (WYSIWYG) program. More on those later.

To encourage inbound links, give each post a unique URL address (permalink). That way webmasters and other bloggers can direct readers to a specific entry like Tremolo Lovesong of the Yukon Mosquito instead of the main Road Remedies page, which features the post du jour.

To make all this magic happen, go to Blogger's Settings>Archiving, then select "enable post pages".

Students often ask, "how do I encourage people to link to me?" The workshop will explore various strategies over the next eight weeks, but following are a few places to start:

• Write specific, original posts. Don't echo chamber.
• Link to notable blogs. Drop the author a note, thanking them for a great entry and alerting them to the headcheck.
• Make thoughtful comments on sites with similar or relevant content. Your profile links back to your blog, encouraging traffic.