February 2007 Archives

Whenever I talk with fellow web designers, the issue of "SEO" invariably comes up. That's techie slang for "search engine optimization," of course, that black science of making sure Google lists your site higher than your competitors. Over the years a small army of shady characters have tried to game the search engine results.

Just Give Google the Content It Loves

In theory it's easy to make Google, Yahoo, MSN and the other big search engines happy: give potential visitors site they'll want to visit. Forget the tricks and spend your time putting together an amazing site. Search engines like text, so write, write, write.

I'm looking to join a web design house, which means I've been interviewing with slick web developers lately and whenever they ask me the best way to increase SEO for their clients, I tell them to start a blog. They look at me like I'm an idiot but it's absolutely true: two blog posts a week will end up being over 100 pages of pure content. All of these sites full of Flash animation get you nowhere with Google. (An aside: I've been having fun going after the keywords of some of the design firms I'm interviewing with. I've actually been pretty successful. I am the king of Minotola Web Design, muhahahaha!)

Just a note that any kind of text-rich web system can achieve many of the same results--blogs are just the easiest way yet to get content on your site.

Presenting What You Already Have: Blog your Water Cooler Chat

When I talk to people about starting a corporate blog they quickly start telling me how much work it will be. Bah and Humbug--your company's life is probably already filled with bloggable material!

I used to work in a bookstore where I did most of the customer service, much of it by email. About two or three times a week I'd get a particularly intriguing query and would spend a little time researching an answer (mostly by looking through the indexes of our books and searching the arcane sites of our niche). This research didn't always pan out to a book sale, but it marked our bookstore as a place to get answers and gave us a competitive advantage over Amazon and its ilk. Each of my email answers could have easily been reformatted to become a blog post. By the end of a year, I'm sure the volume coming from these obscure searches would be quite high (see yesterday's Long Tail Strategy post on the HitTail blog for an account of how attention to search engine's one-hit-wonders helped achieve a widespread keyword dominance).

Whenever something new happens that breaks you out of your routine, think about whether it's bloggable. At the bookstore, a new book would come in and we'd spend ten minutes talking about it. That conversation reached half-a-dozen people at most. In that same ten minutes we could have written up a blog post saying much the same thing.

Last Spring a controversial article appeared in the local newspaper that tangentially involved my employer. That morning my workmates gathered together in the reception area for the better part of an hour trading opinions and wisecracks. After about five minutes of this, I slipped back to my office and wrote my opinions and wisecracks down into my blog. I hit post and came back to the reception area--to find my workmates still blathering on, natch. My post reached hundreds and took no more time out of the work day than the reception pontifications.

Humans are social animals. We're always blogging. It's just that most of the time we're doing it verbally around the water cooler with three other people. Learn to type it in and you've got yourself a high-volume blog that will add invaluable content and SEO magic to your site.

Mix up your content: Tag Your Site

Lastly, a point to webmasters: it usually pays to think about ways to re-package your content. My most recently experience of this was tagifying my personal blog over at "QuakerRanter.org." Every time I post there a Movable Type plugin fishes out the key words in the article and lists them afterwards as tags. These tags are all linked in such a way that results send the term through the site's search engine to give back an on-the-fly index page of all the posts where I've used that term.

Tags are like categories except they pick up everything we talk about (when we use them aggressively at least, and especially when we automate them). We don't necessarily know the categories that our potential audience might be searching for and tagifying our sites increases our keyword outreach exponentially. My personal blog has 239 entries but 3,860 pages according to Google. It's the parsed out and re-packaged content that accounts for all of this extra volume. This doesn't increase traffic by that nearly that much, but last month about 30% of my Google visits came from these tag indexes. More on the mechanics of this on my post about the tagging.

RSS feeds are the lingua franca of the modern internet, the glue that binds together the hundreds of services that make up "Web 2.0." The term stands for "Really Simple Syndication" and can be thought of as a machine-code table of contents to a website. An RSS feed for a blog will typically list the last dozen-or-so articles, with the title, date, summary and content all laid out in special fields. Once you have a website's RSS feed you can syndicate, or re-publish, its contents by email, RSS reader or as a sidebar on another website. This post will show you a ridiculously easy way to "roll your own" RSS feed without having to worry about your website's content platform.