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Learning SEO: Search engine optimisation from a beginner’s perspective

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As most of you reading this will know, search engine optimisation, or SEO, is the art of promoting websites in order to achieve high levels of traffic and visibility from ‘organic’ web searches. The ideal outcome of good SEO is to appear as high as possible in the Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs) for key words and phrases.

I am not an expert on SEO. Until two weeks ago I couldn’t have told you the importance of good SERPS (or even what that meant!), how simple SEO changes can make a difference or even who Matt Cuts or Rand Fishkin or Aaron Walls are. I am most definitely not a substitute for top quality SEO training. What I can offer is a fresh pair of eyes and a beginners perspective on SEO and some of the most important things to take away in the early days when faced with massive treasure trove of information that is available.

Three core practices of SEO

There are three principles that are central to most SEO texts I have read:

  1. Understand how your pages will look to a search engine spiderMost search engines index content through the use of web-crawling software called ‘spiders’. Most of the time this is done without human intervention at all. As spiders only search text (which includes things such as alt variables in image tags), it is important for you to know how your page looks when only scanning the page source. This understanding allows you to tailor your content for machine scanning while still keeping it attractive for your human readers.
  2. Have the how-to knowledge and the access to change your pages in order to optimise results for each search engine you want to rank highly onSEO is not a set once and forget type of activity. It requires a lot of fine tuning and tweaking in the early days so you need to be able to have the access to make constant changes to how your pages are set up, which requires both the knowledge on how to do it and the access to your server to make the changes. One happy side benefit of these SEO changes is that they can often make your site easier for humans to read/search/understand as well.
  3. Stay away from Black hat activities if you are in it for the long haul The search engines are not at all shy about penalising or even banning sites they feel are gaming the system and abusing the search engine guidelines. If short-term ‘cut and run’ gain is your aim, I guess black hat stuff might be for you. If you are looking to build a long-term investment with authority and status, you should think twice before delving in to the darker arts.

A top notch collection of SEO tools to help you practice these core principles are available at SEOBook.

White Hat v Black Hat

If you’re as new to this as I am, talk about ‘white hat’ and ‘black hat’ SEO can be confusing. Just like in a classic Western flick, white hats are the good guys and black hats are the bad guys. If it seems very Spy vs Spy well, that is because it sort of  is when you think about it.

White Hats

White hats tend to follow the guidelines of a search engine and try and stay within the rules. The aim here is to have quality content for users as a base and then work out the best way to make the site attractive and accessible to spiders and other search engine crawling mechanisms. The aim of the game here is to build authority. White hat is the long term view with the long term payoff.

Black Hats

Black hat activity is all about circumventing the rules, often for short term gain. Short term gain is the key here as black hats have to keep one step ahead of the game as the search engines keep changing the rules and tweaking their algorithms to shut them out. Some black hat techniques include using hidden text (for example tiny fonts or text the same colour as background) and ‘cloaking’, or making a web page look totally different depending on whether it is being looked at by a spider or a normal web surfer.

There is an excellent conversation between a black hat SEO and a white hat SEO at SEOmoz that should provide you with a good overview of the different philosophies.

Looking forward

My short summary above covers only a small part of the SEO industry but is a good place to start for the complete SEO newbie like myself. In the future, I will look at some basic design and optimisation issues that can make a substantial change in your blogging philosophy while remaining simple enough that even I can implement them without too much hassle.

Photo credit: vivalibre574

Keeping The Faith: 3 Tips to Staying Motivated In The Early Days

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Starting a blog is an exciting event with new ideas, new material and new audiences waiting to be discovered. It does not take long however for that first flush of excitement to begin to fade as you start to settle down into the serious business of creating content. It can be difficult to remain motivated as the full complexity of your chosen task begins to unfold in front of you, but it does not necessarily need to be this way. Below are the 3 most effective methods I have experienced to maintain the rage when you begin to wonder if it is going to be all worthwhile.

  1. Set yourself achievable and realistic goals on posting frequency. In the early days, when you are brimming with new ideas, it can be tempting to go all out and commit all your ideas to the screen. You may well benefit from a more scaled down approach that helps you provide content on a consistent basis. Your main sources of information will help inform you as to what is realistic and achievable. News-of-the-day can easily support (if not demand) daily and multiple-per-day postings. Flagship style content that is more considered and analytical, or tutorial style content can support weekly posting.

  2. Ignore the stats (at least for a little while). It can be hard to get an audience in the early days (in fact, I continue to struggle). Watching that stat counter climb painfully slow one visitor at a time can be demoralising. While it is tempting to regularly check the stats several times a day “just to see who stopped by”, you may be better off checking every couple of days or even once a week. The chances are that on a weekly basis, your stats will continue to rise. This way you can enjoy the motivation of increasing traffic while maintaining a sense of perspective on the scale of your stats.

  3. Take time out to reassess your goals and achievements. There is nothing wrong with pausing to reflect on where you are going and where you have come from. It is a valuable exercise to see if the direction your blog is heading is the one you originally envisaged. If it is, great! If it isn’t, it’s not the end of the world. Maybe this is an opportunity to move off into a different, more exciting direction, or perhaps it is the right time to refocus on what it is you hoped to achieve in the first place. This is a position I find myself in with one of my own blogs and this process has had the unexpected benefit of reinvigorating my desire to keep on posting.

What techniques did you use when you first started blogging to keep you motivated through those early days?

Father Braun originally uploaded to Flickr by katievision. Used under a Creative Commons licence.

Pros and Cons on using Blogger as a noob

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It is possible that there has never been a better time to be alive when it comes to the proliferation of platforms out there that can be used to blog: WordPress, Movable Type, Typo, Livejournal, Myspace, tumblelogs like Tumblr and Content Management System platforms like Drupal and Joomla. Firmly nestled in amongst these platforms is the much maligned yet often adopted Blogger.

What I hope to provide here is a simple balanced argument as to the merits and otherwise of what is still one of the most popular ways to publish a blog – Google’s Blogger.

I am not going to attempt to answer the question: “With so much choice available, why do people still use Blogger?” As someone who maintains and contributes to several Blogger blogs, I do have my own opinion on that which I will save for another time. I am also not going to enter into a WordPress vs Blogger or any other [insert platform of choice] flame war. I simply do not have enough experience in the wide range of options to make an informed choice.

With the formalities out of the way, I present to you the pros and cons of using Blogger as newbie blog writer.

The Pros – why Blogger is good for newbies

  • It is simple to use with a what-you-see-is-what-you-get interface that allows anyone familiar with a word processor to navigate the Dashboard and get started. It is unintimidating and provides little to no barriers to entry.
  • It is part of the Google stable of products and integrates very smoothly with a number of complimentary free Google owned and/or branded products that are perfect for blogging such as Feedburner (to monitor statistics on readers of your news feed), Google Analytics (to monitor statistics on visitors to your blog) and Picasaweb for hosting pictures for your blog. Having said that, there is nothing at all stopping you from using these tools with non-Blogger sites.
  • Speaking of Picasaweb, using Blogger gives you access to up to 1GB of space to use just for pictures. There are other options such as Yahoo’s Flickr (which provides free unlimited storage with other usage restrictions or a paid Pro account), but Picasaweb (and Picasa on the desktop) works seamlessly with Blogger in a way even your Grandmother could work out. You also have the ability to upload your video direct to your blog and the video is hosted on Google’s servers.
  • Blogger provides free domain name hosting for all blogs. If you don’t have a name, it will hold your hand through the process of acquiring one. This is a very nice added feature.
  • The might of Google is squarely behind the development and maintenance of the product. One benefit that might not be high on the list of newbie bloggers (but probably should be) is that Blogger is hosted on Google’s own servers, making it almost impervious to Digg and Slashdot like effects where sudden high levels of traffic can bring other servers to their knees in seconds flat.

The Cons – why Blogger is bad for newbies

  • The low barrier to entry encourages mediocrity. This might sound harsh but it is true to some extent. I’m not advocating that everyone should return to hand coding their blog by candlelight, but I have found in my own experience and in talking to other bloggers that when you have to put some effort in to make a post, you are more likely to make a considered post rather than just rapping off some words to fill the space.
  • It is a locked platform and it can be difficult to move your content off Blogger if you decide in the future to move to another platform. The onus has shifted to other platforms to work out ways to import Blogger content rather Blogger providing an easy to export content (eg allow all posts to be exported in an XML file).
  • It lacks many “add on” features enjoyed by other platforms such as strong theme development communities, plug-ins and trackback capability. These are all things that other platforms such as WordPress take for granted. You may find the greatly reduced number of options a liberating constraint, but if you are like me and many others, you will find yourself hitting the limits sooner rather than later, which can be a very frustrating process.
  • The small numbers of the Google development team can never hope to compete with the many thousands of interested weekend hackers who work to further develop and extend the open source platforms like WordPress or Drupal (and soon, the latest version of Movable Type).

Conclusion – a zero sum game?

It’s not easy to declare that newbie bloggers should or shouldn’t use Blogger. While Blogger is frowned upon by “serious” bloggers, it does have some significant benefits in free hosting, 1GB of free storage for images, storage for video and industrial strength armour-plated servers that can survive most any traffic burst. Free domain name hosting also goes some way to counteracting the snide remarks and indignant sniffs whenever a blogspot.com domain name enters the picture.

On the other hand, Blogger has a limited feature set that will restrict the serious blogger as they begin to mature and adopt loftier aims (and if you’re reading this on Performancing, no doubt this includes you!).

While it comes down to personal preference, the above is my contribution to helping newbie bloggers do something I didn’t do when I started – make an informed choice.

WTF NOOB originally uploaded to Flickr by gws. Used under a Creative Commons By Attribution Sharealike 2.0 licence.

Go Easy on the Eyes: Use Images in your Posts

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A well placed image can make or break your latest blog post. I’m sure it has been mentioned on Performancing many times in the past but I feel this is worth mentioning again as a reader, I continue to be confronted with screen after screen of unrelenting text.

Although many of us read for leisure, reading is not necessarily an easy thing to do, particularly if it is screen based reading. Screeds of text can be exhausting, both physically and mentally. Images within a blog post help to break up the flow of the text which, strange as it might sound, actually helps to improve the flow of your blog.

That’s enough of the why you should use images. Now it’s on to where you can find them.

It is preferable you don’t just yank photos from any old site, just because you like the image. Apart from the copyright issues, it is also tad rude. Having said that, it can sometimes be surprisingly difficult to get images from a corporate source. It is amazing how many places release press releases without an image or do not have have some images available for reporting purposes. Apple’s PR is a good example of how to do this well. Use PR images where you can. The quality is almost always excellent and formatted with online use in mind.

Another good source of cheap, good quality images are stock photo places like iStockPhoto. This gives you easy and quick access to a wide range of photos at an accessible price. Just be sure to check the licensing agreements as these change from service to service.

If you are like me and either too cheap or can’t afford to pay for blog fodder, Flickr is your friend. The default license for Flickr photos is a Creative Commons one. Remember that this is only the default license and many uploaders choose to reserve their rights so check the status before you use any pictures. The best option (and my own little secret weapon) is the Flickr advanced search. The advanced search lets you select only Creative Commons pictures. As an advanced tip, sort by “interesting” rather than “relevant” for some images you might not have ever thought to use but once you’ve seen them, you can’t imagine ever not using them.

As always with images, please be sure to attribute appropriately (and in the case of Flickr, please also respect the Community Guidelines).

With those tips above, there is no reason not to regularly use images to spice up your valuable written content on your blogs. Remaining easy on your readers’ eyes improves the chances that they will come back for more.

b&w tired eye originally uploaded to Flickr by izzie whizzie. Used under a Creative Commons By Attribution-Sharealike 2.0 license.

Help Your Readers: Reduce Virtual Clutter

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As I reassess my own blog designs, I have come to the conclusion that clutter is a state of mind that doesn’t just stop at your desk. It is virtual too, and it has a big impact on how I as reader perceive other writers’ blogs. I have begun studying other people’s blogs for design ideas and I have come to the conclusion that there are 3 main culprits for blog clutter. I’m probably not sharing anything new, but the following often detract from my reading experience:

  1. widgets
  2. long posts
  3. too many ads, or ads in the wrong places

Keep in mind that I’m not perfect and I’ve often been guilty of the first two. It is by making these mistakes that I am learning to be a better blogger.

1. Widgets

I don’t have a problem with widgets as an idea. Some of them are quite useful and I understand that WordPress, for example, is so strong partly because of its range of useful add-ins. However, it’s all about the context. If the widgets don’t help the story your blog is trying to tell, should it really be taking up valuable real estate? For example, if you have a tech blog, do you really need a widget keeping everyone up to date with your latest Jaiku or Twitter micro-post?

2. Long, long, posts

Use expandable post summaries. Please. I know not all platforms use them (Blogger for one doesn’t, unless you are prepared to have a half-useful XML hack-around), but if your chosen platform permits it, use them. Large chunks of text make it very difficult to scan the front page looking for relevant material. Post summaries allow the casual reader access to a wider range of your content, which can only be a good thing.

3. Too many ads, or ads in the wrong places

Ads are fine, but place them nicely. If you want them in the sidebar, that’s fine. If you want them between each post, okay. If you want them in the header or footer, go for it (although if your page goes off the screen, I may not see any in the footer), sure, why not. What clutters the screen is when all of the above options are exercised. I understand why you have put the ads there, but I’m here to see your content, not to have third parties try to sell me something.

While I’m on the topic of ads, if the ads are too large and intrude on the reading, I’m just going to switch off. If you look like you’re trying to sell me something I didn’t come to buy from you, I’m switching off. If every post is divided with ads, splitting up the content inside a post, ruining my reading flow, I’m probably going to surf away. Keep the ads simple and relevant and I’m much more likely to click through on a couple. Flashy, intrusive and all over the place is likely to just push me away.

What pieces of virtual clutter distract you?

Am I just wasting my time?

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Ryan’s Note: This is an important post, loaded with important, deep-level questions. We all need to take gut checks from time to time. And I for one have found myself asking the same questions and dealing with the same issues.

The question should be an obvious one. If I am to continue with my blog, it would need to be significantly reworked with a proportionate investment of my time and effort.

I pondered if this should be a question for the forum but I couldn’t think of an appropriate place. It also appeals to my sense of humour that my first post on my Performancing blog is one that questions whether I should be bothering at all.

I have been a casual reader of Performancing for well over a year now, largely via the main feed. I’m not a pro-blogger (actual or aspiring) but I have found many interesting tips here that have, at various times, improved my blog (to my eyes at least).

My problem is that my free time is becoming more and more of a rare commodity between working, being a father and husband and studying part-time. Researching subjects and writing used to be fun but it is now less so. Sometimes it even seems like a chore.

It started off as fun. I never aspired for greatness or huge traffic, which is a good thing because I’ve got neither. In just over a year I have a blog that only has 150+ posts, traffic that struggles to maintain double-digit visitors, no community (so few comments I wonder if having comments turned on makes a negative impression) and, according to feedburner, I have between 5 and 10 subscribers (although sometimes that spikes up to 30 for a day or two for no reason I can see).

The more news feeds I subscribe to, the less inspired I feel. There are so many good writers out there with better leads and information that can analyse and report on issues that interest me much better than I can. It’s depressing for a (very) small time blogger like myself.

I know there are many things wrong with my blog: standard Blogger template, too broad a focus, no linkbait, no time to market it or do the comment thing on other people’s blogs. I’m sure there is much, much more that could be dissected and analysed.

I thought about submitting for a reboot but I don’t think there’s enough to work with to make it worth anyone’s time. Therefore, I’m not looking for a reboot here. I’m just looking for honest opinions. Is there anything in my writing that would indicate that reworking and relaunching my blog would be worthwhile? Is there some sort of spark, something buried deep or am I just wasting my time? Should I just write it off as a fun experiment and let it go?

There are no ads so I’m not trying to drive traffic or increase revenue with this. I just need an opinion from people who do this sort of thing for a living.

Pixelated Dreams – http://www.pixelated-dreams.info/ – the current first page is an accurate reflection of the malaise that has struck me in recent weeks. There’s probably better stuff buried a bit further in but I no longer feel like I’m in a position to judge.

The Sitemeter stats are publically accessible so feel free to poke around through the sitemeter link at the bottom as well if you so desire.

All comments are welcome, positive or negative. If anyone does stop by to take a look and share a thought or two, your time is greatly appreciated.

Shane