A blog on blogging, computers and such

One of the many signs of Google’s increasingly strong position as the number one search engine in the world, is witnessed in the lacking ability of Yahoo to make blog content searchable for its users.

I have just looked into the stats for my blogs. This is always interesting. But the single most interesting finding this time was that Google has delivered about 150 times as many hits to my blogs as Yahoo has. This difference is so large that it blows my mind. It really seems Google is running in circles around Yahoo as far as blog content is concerned!

I am unable to understand why. That is, I can see some explanations for it, but they only explain part of the difference, I think.

First off, I am using the XML Sitemap Generator for WordPress plugin. This automatically notifies Google and Ask about updates on my blogs, and they are both quick to index the content. But in order to update Yahoo I need an application ID. And the links in the plugin takes me to the Yahoo developer Center. And since I’m not a developer, I don’t register there. And no other info is provided by Yahoo either. So I dropped it.

I have tried to find out how to automatically ping Yahoo, but I am unable to find it on their pages. And info I have found elsewhere, doesn’t work because Yahoo have move their pages with no info about where it is now to be found. This, to me, is arrogance.

Second, Yahoo don’t seem to read sitemaps well at all. Both on my sites and on my blogs they serve up old versions of pages to users.

So, to me, it seems Yahoo is losing the battle because they simply are not adapting to the changes in cyberspace fast enough, and because they are arrogant. They expect site owners to go through a lot of trouble to find out how to best use them. Instead, they should recognize that they probably need us more (as a collective) than we need them, and be a little more humble and flexible. As it is, I think they deserve to loose the search engine war against Goggle.

Overall, I am very satisfied with WordPress as a blogging platform. The platform itself is relatively strict and stiff, even awkward to use, but all the plugins, widgets and improvements from the user community makes it great.

However, my relationship to WordPress is not unproblematic. Our relationship is not one of peaceful coexistence. In some regards, I am very dissatisfied. I have written before about lacking quality control with templates and plugins that are downloadable even from WordPress’ own site. Templates where columns drop down, widgets don’t work properly, and so forth, translates into grief and dissatisfaction with WordPress itself. I suspect I am not alone in feeling this way when I lose time and get annoyed because something is not working properly.

Lack of proper support for foreign languages is probably the one thing about WordPress that annoys me the most. I have a Norwegian language blog. Here is what happens: I publish a new post entitled “Nye bøker våren 2008″ (translated: New books spring 2008). Now, when this is saved using the title as URL, WordPress saves it as “Nye bker vren 2008″. In other words, it drops the Norwegian characters “ø” and “å”.

This may seem like a small thing. But then there is Google. Google supports foreign characters. Thus, when somebody searches for “bøker våren 2008″, they will not find my post, because my post (as far as Google is concerned) is about “bker vren 2008″.

Now, this really is annoying. How would American or English bloggers feel if their “books reviews” got listed as “bk rviws” or something similar? For a guy that takes search engine optimization seriously, this is so bad I can hardly even begin to describe it!

I really don’t know where the problem lies - in the code for the WordPress platform, the widgets, the plugins, the templates, or PHP itself. I am not enough of a programmer to know. But I do know that if WordPress wants to capture a part of the growing blog market, something needs to be done. WordPress ought to commit to supporting foreign languages, as well as doing something rapidly with respect to quality control.

– Peter

Here are two good resources on the proper use of title tags to drive traffic to a site:

The first article discusses both title and meta-tags:

http://www.searchbliss.com/seo-tools/search-engine-optimization.htm

The second article is more narrowly focused on titles:

http://www.seomoz.org/blog/best-practices-for-title-tags

The articles are good introductions to this topic. However, the advice to include you company or site name in the title tag of your pages is a bit too strong. My thinking is that usually it is best not to include it - simply because it is a waste of very valuable space! I would say that the ony exception to this rule is where you are willing to invest a lot - including your valuable title space - in building a brand name. For most purposes, say for blogs and most web sites that do not sell branded products, I would, as a rule, say that the name should not be in the title. For these types of sites, it is usually sufficient to display the name of the blog or site prominently on each page.

– Peter

One way to learn about search engine optimization (SEO) is to learn from successful sites. I have found an example of good use of the HTML “title” and “meta”-tags.

If you search using Google, with the keywords “books” and “reviews”, you will find that the number one spot is occupied by http://www.reviewsofbooks.com/ . Why this site, you may ask, and not, for instance, New York Times Book Review, or Amazon, Barnes & Noble, or some other large corporation.

Well, there may be several answers. However, one part of the answer is good use of title and meta-tags. Look at this:

meta name="description" content="Links to free and publicly available professional reviews of recently released books"

meta name="keywords" content="book reviews, reviews of books, book review site, professional book review, fiction, nonfiction"

title>Reviews of Books - Book Reviews

So part of what is happening is that the site uses title and meta tags very, very efficiently! They have chosen an extremely narrow range of keywords, and optimized for just two words - namely “books” and “reviews”.

Now, when I said “part of what is happening”, I did it because another reason they score so well is that the site also is frequently linked to - checking with Google I found 1710 links to the site (please note that this is a relatively low number for a site ranking at the number one spot - the New York Times Book Review, which is ranked number two on the same search, by comparison has 10500 links to their site).

So, what’s the lesson: Decide what to optimize on for a given page, and use title and meta tags efficiently!

Search Engine Optimization (or SEO) in my experience is 5% smartness, 95% work. Being smart involves having a strategy, basically a goal and a set of principles or rules about how to best achieve the goal. I try to implement the least time consuming and most important rules first, and then to do the more demanding tasks later.  Regardless of all the books written on the subject and all the advertisements by consultants claiming to have more or less scientific knowledge about SEO, I do not view SEO as a science. Search engines are based on science, but SEO is mostly art. The reaon, of course, is that the search engines don’t want us (or their competitors) to know exactly what they are doing. Therefore, there is far too much uncertainty and far too many unpredictable elements involved for anyone to know anything with much certainty when it comes to SEO.

Consequently, I think, I examine, I formulate rules, and I implement them, and I study the results. Then I try to learn from my mistakes and build on what seems to work. So far, from what I can see using my site statistics, is that using page titles with the most important keywords in them works well. The same is the case for the use of semantic URLs - that is, URLs for my web pages that use natural language and contain keywords. For example, a page saved as www.mydomain.com/bk1xxx1222.htm does not get as many hits as one called www.mydomain.com/nokia9920.htm

So for the moment I am spending at least an hour, sometimes 2 hours, each  day implementing these simple rules on my web sites. And it does help. Over the last month or so, I have observed considerable increases in the number of hits, both from Google and other search engines, on the pages that I have worked with. But it takes time to do the work, and it takes time before I begin to see the results as well.

– Peter

Search engine optimization (SEO) can be a lot of work. But a number of easy steps can take you a long way towards search engine visibility and drive a lot of traffic to your blog. Writing postings with an optimal length is one of these.

While there is a lot of speculation among people discussing search engine optimization that maybe postings that are too short are passed over by the search engines, there is no hard evidence of this. But there is, on the other hand, research that shows that longer articles have a steep drop off rate in readers after the text gets below the end of the first screen.

Also, there is considerable evidence that frequent posting affects ranking positively. And it is pretty easy to figure out that with short postings you will be better able to direct a reader to exactly that one little piece of information that will solve her problem through your keywords. Furthermore, longer posts also make it difficult to keep keyword density up. These insights imply that postings should be short, to the point, and frequent, rather than long and trying to make several points simultaneously.

There is no science as to what the ideal length is. The ideal length to me is somewhere in the region of 200 to 300 words. That means my postings can have substance - the “meat” readers want - while still being focused and tight. I may write shorter or longer, but overall that is my target length!

I have written previously, in the post Search Engine Optimization Starts with the Titles, about the important role your titles play in making your blog more easy to find for the search engines. In that post, I also said that good titles were even more important if you also changed the way your posts were saved, so that the URLs of your postings reflected the titles.

Now, I don’t know how to do that with all the various types of blogging software around, but here is how you can achieve this if you are using a WordPress blog (I found this advice on Chris Pearson’s site, so the credit for finding this out is his):

• In your WordPress dashboard, visit the Options tab.
• Next, select Permalinks from the sub-navigation menu.
• Under the “Common options” heading, you should see four buttons that correspond with the four available permalink structures for WordPress. Select Custom (the last one), and enter /%postname%/ in the text input field.
• Click on one of the two Update Permalink Structure » buttons, and you’re done!

Oh, and I suppose I took it for granted, but it’s certainly worth noting that using a semantic permalink structure on your site (as I’ve suggested here) is extremely beneficial to your overall search engine optimization. It’s literally something that everyone with a WordPress site should do.

So, that’s how it’s done. Among the tasks involved in search engine optimization (SEO), this is definitely one of the easier one. Nevertheless, as Chris Pearson says, it is also one which is highly important and is extremely beneficial.

– Peter

Finding the right tags to use in the titles of your postings, the text itself, as well as in you list of keywords (or tag list), is important. One part of it, is to find words that your visitors actually use when they want to find content like the one you have in your post. But Search Engine Optimization or SEO also means finding the exactly right words - the most frequently used words.

Finding the right words is difficult on your own. You can study your weblogs to see which words visitors use to find you. And you can look at the source code of your competitors to see which words they use to describe themselves. But in the end, using tools designed to see the frequency of various words or combinations of words in actual searches on the net, is a must.

Fortunately, a number of such tools are readily available. There are a large number of them available, actually. Some are free, some you will have to pay to use. In my opinion, there is little to gain by using the paid services, as the free ones really are amazingly good.

The ones which I prefer, and recommend, are Google Adwords and the SEO Book Keyword Suggestion Tool. Both of them are excellent - they will suggest combinations of keywords for you and show how frequent searches using each of those keywords actually are.

– Peter

In a previous post I discussed the important role the titles of your postings play in increasing visibility in search engines and driving traffic to your blog or site. That’s a fairly simple advice that is easy to follow and yet have large benefits.

Another, equally simple and important thing to do is to blog frequently. The reason for this is that the posting frequency is factored into Google’s calculation of page relevance. And the more relevant your site is, the higher it will rank. So, other things being equal, a blog that gets new post several times a day will rank higher than a blog getting getting updated much less frequently.

That’s why a number of the most popular bloggers write short posts frequently, rather than long posts infrequently. Also, this has been evidenced by many bloggers who have experienced drops in their traffic when they have reduced their posting frequency.

Search Engine Optimization or SEO is one of the most important factors in driving traffic to you site. However, mastering SEO to perfection is difficult. But some simple things you can easily do will take you a long, long way towards being noticed, simply because they are the most fundamental and important steps in Search Engine Optimization.

First, set up you blog so that your postings are stored by title. Many blog systems store your pages by date or number or some such system. Most blogging software let you change this default (I have done this in my WordPress blogs - it took 2 minutes). Find out how it’s done with your software, and do it.

Second, work with your titles. Make certain the main tags for your posting appear already in the title. The title is the single most important tool you can use use to increase visibility. This is especially true if you also make certain the post is saved using the title name. The reason is simple: Now your title, and hopefully your tags, if you follow this advice, is also part of the URL for your posting!

While working with the title, you must balance three considerations. First, the tags for the article should be there. Second, the title must be sexy so that people want to read the article. But also, thirdly, the title must reflect the content of  the post fairly well, otherwise your readers will grow vary of your titles and not want to return.

So finding great titles involves a huge balancing act. I am not always sure I do this well myself, but I am extremely conscious of the importance of titles and work to balance them, and I may well return and change the title a number of times after I have written a post in order to improve it. And I spend a large amount of time to ponder over alternative titles, even sometimes write down several alternatives on a piece of paper and look at and tweak them multiple times over several days.

I will write more about SEO ln later postings, because of its importance, but if you start by doing the two things I have pointed out well, I can guarantee that you are already one step ahead of most bloggers when it comes to being noticed and driving traffic.

– Peter