Tag Archive for 'seo'

Does belonging to a ‘Planet’ site increase or decrease traffic?

Published
by
Pedro Timóteo
1 year, 8 months ago
in Blogging
. 3 Comments

A question that arose among members and possible members of my new Planet Atheism is this: won’t people start reading my writings through the Planet, and never visit my blog again? In other words, won’t it reduce traffic?

Traffic is important to many kinds of blogs (and sites in general). Maybe you are supported by ads, either as a main source of income, or just as a little extra cash every month. Maybe your blog is more about the comments than the posts themselves. Maybe it has other interactive features, which won’t be seen by anyone reading it through the “Planet”.

So, the question makes sense.

My own experience of being a part of a Planet — in this case, Planeta Asterisco, which aggregates this very blog — has always been positive. It hasn’t made me “famous” :) , but I notice that I get readers from the aggregator, that other members themselves sometimes comment on my posts, and so on.

But you can consider the following factors:

  1. losing any traffic should be incredibly rare, if it happens at all. Any regular readers you already have will probably keep reading your blog the way they’re used to.
  2. belonging to a Planet will increase your readership; depending on the Planet’s success, it may increase it a lot. An increased readership, even if many of them don’t actually visit your blog frequently, has many advantages; among others, they are likely to link to any posts of yours they find interesting. And comment on them (which, incidentally, means they visit your blog after all). You also begin to slowly build a “name” for yourself.
  3. you can gain a lot in terms of search engine optimization (SEO). The aggregator includes permanent links to your blog, and to each individual post. Since many of the Planet’s members will also link to the Planet itself, it will probably soon be very well positioned in terms of SEO, making links from it valuable. As a result, you get more visitors from search engines.
  4. you get other members of the Planet as regular readers (since most tend to read the Planet themselves). They all have blogs about (mostly) the same subject as yours, which increases the likeliness of they expanding on your posts in their own blogs, linking to yours. Again, more readers (coming from their blogs), and SEO gains (because of the links).
  5. if you’re afraid of being part of an aggregator, then you should be afraid of having an RSS feed at all, shouldn’t you? :)

Optimizing page titles in blogs

Published
by
Pedro Timóteo
1 year, 10 months ago
in Blogging and Blogging software
. 7 Comments

If you’ve read the Blogging Tips series, you’re surely aware of a part of it called The Importance of Titles. Titles (meaning what ends up between the <title> </title> tags) are one of the most important, and most ignored, parts of SEO, these days. Not only do search engines use them to rank pages, but they’re also what actually appears in search results, and a bad title is much less likely to be clicked on… even if the content is exactly what the user wants.

In case of blogs, the blogging software, typically, inserts the blog’s name and post title automatically, which is a start. But can it be improved? That’s what I wanted (and still want) to investigate.

By default, WordPress uses the common Blog title - Post title format. Which, as any “serious” blogger should know, is a pretty bad idea. People are interested in the post, not in the blog, at least at first. The blog’s name will be the same for every single one of your posts, and if it appears first, people will probably ignore that entry in the search results.

Again, nobody searches for blogs. They search for posts.

Which, of course, suggests that reversing the order is a good idea… and it certainly is. Themes like K2 do it automatically (though that one inserts an “at” between post title and blog name, which I don’t like — though it’s easy to change, of course), and there are also plugins like Optimal Title to do it.

But is this the best we can do? It’s what I’ve been doing until now, but… can we go a little further? What about removing the blog’s name from individual posts (not from the front page, of course)?

Not only should this be better in terms of SEO, but it should make search results more appealing. After all, hopefully, the post’s title should be — and be just — what the user is looking for.

I’m trying it now on Way of the Mind, where I seem to be doing most of my experiments these days. :) Of course, it will take a few weeks for Google and others to re-index every page and show them with the reduced title, but hopefully the results will be good.

I’m pretty optimistic about this one, so it will probably happen to my other blogs soon. :)

Introduction to SEO #2: what is SEO?

Published
by
Pedro Timóteo
1 year, 11 months ago
in Introduction to SEO series and Search engine optimization (SEO)
. 0 Comments

(NOTE: this is part of the “Introduction to SEO” series)

SEO stands for “Search Engine Optimization”. It’s the art of making as many people as possible arrive at a particular site - preferably those who are interested in it.

Sounds confusing, doesn’t it? OK, let’s try a different definition: SEO is the name for a number of methods for improving the chances of someone searching for the subject of a site, and having that site appear in the top search results.

Better? :)

Basically, there are two kinds of SEO:

  1. On-site: what you do in the site to make sure search engines index it optimally.
  2. Off-site: having other sites link to yours.

Each of the above will be expanded in the next two parts of this series.

You can also divide SEO in two other kinds: “white hat” (”honest” techniques) and “black hat” (less honest techniques). I will only write about the former. The latter require more effort, are effective just for short periods of time, and will, in the end, harm a site in terms of SEO, since search engines try to fight (and punish) those kinds of techniques.

Some examples of those: splogs (spam blogs), spam comments in blogs, “keyword stuffing”, hidden text (for instance, text and background of the same color), different content presented to users and to search bots, etc.. Like I said, these methods are increasing less effective - if they’re effective at all, these days - and almost always end up doing more harm than good. My suggestion: forget about them.

In fact, it is because some self-styled “SEO specialists” believe that SEO is using those increasingly inefficient methods, that sometimes people say “SEO is dying”. It isn’t. It’s just that most dirty tricks don’t work anymore. The methods I’ll talk about in the next two parts still work perfectly. :)

Search Engine Submission Software Promote your web site into thousands of engines with our easy to use software.

Coming soon: big list of "blogs about blogging" feeds

Published
by
Pedro Timóteo
1 year, 12 months ago
in Blogging
. 0 Comments

In a way, this is related to my previous post, Reading blogs away from my computer… because the blogs I most enjoy reading on my cell phone are the “work” blogs, those related to my work (blogging). For some reason, I always find the time and the will to read them when I just have my cell phone and no other means of connecting to the world. :)

So, I’ve been building a list of such blogs, which includes the usual suspects like ProBlogger, but also some other interesting ones, some of which I discovered just days ago.

The main condition is that they must have full feeds (they’re meant to be read in my phone!). I currently have more than 30 in my list, and I think others will find it as useful as I do - even to add to a “normal”, non-mobile aggregator.

I’ll be posting the list here, soon, in both OPML format (which you can import in any aggregator), and as a list of “./r2e add” commands for rss2email, which I currently use to convert feeds to email, to read on my phone. It still needs a few touches, and I know of some more blogs I want to investigate, first.

By the way, if you (yes, you!) have a related blog (about blogging, writing, monetizing, site promotion, seo, etc.), updated regularly, and with full feeds (this is really essential), feel free to let me know - I may add it to the list, if it’s not already there.

Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 2.5 Portugal
Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 2.5 Portugal