Monday, January 2nd, 2012
It never fails to amaze me how easy it is to fall off the blogging habit. I’m not going to make any proclamations about my own habits. But since this is the second day of a new year, I think it is important to talk about the fundamental rule of blogging and owning a blog website: keep that content fresh. (I’m definitely guilty of not doing this all the time!)
It is my job to be on the Internet nearly every day. I read a LOT of blogs. I write very little since my time is consumed with others’ websites. So I may not be the one to be talking up how to make the habit easier. Merely, to focus my reader’s mind on the importance of this task.
What fresh content achieves for a site is two-fold: first, it makes the site more relevant to its readers. By narrowing the scope of the content of the site, readers readily trust the site for information. This is no small thing when you consider the proliferation of information on the internet. What makes you smaller, in this case, is what makes you more visible to your readers.
Second, search engines have programs that read your website. So they know when you are naughty and when you are nice. (Not really, morally.) The search engines like Bing, Google, and such, rely on the content of your site to make a generalization of your veracity. This sounds crude, but they have become very, very good at it. By simply taking account of keywords and their position in your content, the engines can take a snapshot of your “goals.” It sounds hokey and New-Years-ish to say goals, but they can sniff the direction that your site is taking.
Some tips on writing good content
These are some highly coveted tips, so don’t share them with your enemies or in-laws if you don’t have a good standing relationship!
- Make sure those keywords communicate the theme of the page and thereby communicate the message of the site. Simple.
- Try to cover ground that hasn’t been trod yet by focusing on keyword phrases that are less competitive on the Web. Yeah, this means some actual digging and researching. Haven’t had to do that since college, have you?
- Try to keep those keywords near the beginning of your page/title. It not only makes things easier for the reader to find, but the search engines eat it up, too.
- PERSIST! This has become my mantra for months now, since I read about some other web-folks taking the same stance. Do not be daunted by the lack of traffic. How long did it take you to find the info you are writing. If it is worth writing, then wait for your dessert and KEEP WRITING ABOUT IT!
Wednesday, April 21st, 2010
I’d like to think that Google and the other big search engines actually want to give us a good chance to get our websites in the places where we want them to be, i.e. the front page of relevant searches. However, as any developer worth his/her salt will tell you, this may be as easy as selling shoes to a man with no feet.
So if you are web savvy, and have a Facebook account, and Twitter, AND you want to increase your site’s page rank – here is some good news. You have the ability to increase your page rank with your Twitter and Facebook accounts for free. Yes. FREE.
Sound corny? Well, it kinda is – you have to really want to use Facebook and Twitter. In reality, if you consider your time to be an invaluable thing, then using this method to increase your page rank (and hopefully traffic) may not really be worth the time.
Ultimately, the most important factor to building the PR (page rank) is through link building. “Backlinks” give our sites the credibility that is the “Google Juice” that we developers talk about on our coffee breaks. Twitter and Facebook are only two more small pieces of this puzzle, only giving us a couple more backlinks for credibility. But they can be strong ones if you’ve developed a following on either social network (which I’m not going to even try to touch here!)
How does this work? Begin by setting up your account with either/or both social networks. Don’t forget to add your website’s address to your profile. Then start tweeting, facebooking, socialize, socialize, socialize. And include your website’s address(es) wherever you feel it is pertinent. This is very important, too. Where the content relates is also part of the ranking. Content is going to be the hook to your audience, as well as the machines. And search engines may calculate that you are trying to trick them through spam if you do too much link dropping and not enough content/relationship building.
So, remember kids… Play nice with each other and the ‘bots will play nice with you! (And have patience!)
Thursday, May 28th, 2009
Hi, here is a quick list of important Codex pages for the WordPress blogs:
For bloggers, the posts info is definitely the most important of the topics. And for beginners of WordPress, knowing about the SEO optimization of the blog will definitely be important (Intro to Blogging).
Admin Panels discusses the the use of the admin area. Not all of these panels will be seen by the bloggers, as WP restricts admin privileges at our discretion.
Pages are the static content of a WP site, and most likely require custom theme templates. You will see some code in the Pages codex. That is only for development purposes and might confuse new bloggers.
Quite a bit of the WordPress Codex is devoted to development of sites, as WordPress becomes more of a CMS. To delve more deeply into the code here are some of the most important areas for us designers and developers:
Knowing the template structure and how the Loop works are really the most important. With the help of the Template Tag index, an intelligent person can make a pretty cool, dynamic WP site quickly.
I’ll leave the thorny, weird programming to the programmers:
It is pretty easy to just write a “functions.php” file and leave it in the theme directory. Sometimes this amounts to writing a plugin, but it is probably wiser to put a plugin in the “plugins” directory, as a functions file may break over the upgrading of the site….
Rock On!!
Jeff
Tuesday, March 3rd, 2009
Well, Web 2.0 is not dead in the sense that Web 1.0 died, like in a flaming fart bubble from ‘ol Silicon Valley.
Rather, it is no longer taking over the scene from any other type of web. Most web developers agree that it is now time to move onto to something more 3.0, now that there is a Web 2.0 standard.
For all of you out there (and this included me until not too long ago) that are worrying if you are not geeky enough to understand what Web 2.0 was all about (and still is,) then check out this great lecture from Bruce Sterling on the Rise of 3.0 and the Demise of the 2.0: What Bruce Sterling Actually Said About Web 2.0 at WebStock ’09.
Wednesday, January 14th, 2009
WordPress is a great platform to create your first photoblog with, whether you need an advanced magazine format or a basic portfolio.
Below is a list of links for the broadest of topics, plugins, and themes for WP photographers.
1. basic: media library subpanel
2. shortcode
3. NextGen shortcodes
4. Grain Theme for WP
5. Yet Another Photo Blog
6. WordPress and EXIF data
As for photoblog SEO stuff: use the image file name. If your image does rank well on an image search the file name will normally be displayed below the image. So it’s a good idea to match the file name with the image. Use the ALT and TITLE attributes.
