SEO Cheat Sheet

Search Engine Optimization for Dummies

When I first decided that I wanted as many people as possible to read my words online, I turned to a brand I trusted: the For Dummies books.  Search Engine Optimization for Dummies is such a great book that the person I lent it to still hasn’t returned it.

Now I see that the For Dummies people have a cheat sheet online to help beginners start to plug their websites:

http://www.dummies.com/how-to/content/an-seo-and-viral-marketing-checklist.html

It's the stuff you absolutely must know about how to promote your blog or website.  Cheers!

Copying Copy

The point of a blog is to update it frequently, with interesting content that invites readers to stick around, leave a comment, and return to read more.

I don’t have that much to say.  If I had, I’d write a book.  The truth is, my noteworthy insights are rare.

Most of what you find here is what the legacy media would call evergreens, articles that you can hold in a drawer (or on a thumb drive) and run any time.  Many professionals already know what I tell you about the basics of SEO, for example.  It’s true--it’s just not really news.

Then why do people from all around the world read this blog? They can easily find information about SEO or public speaking on better-known, easier-to-find websites. 

Could it be the very obscurity that draws them here?  Search engines look constantly for fresh content, as we’ve said.  So everybody wants new words on their websites.

At the same time, search engines penalize duplicate content.  If they find the same text on multiple websites, the search engines figure that somebody’s trying to game the system.

So what’s a site owner to do?

a)      Write fresh material every day.  It doesn’t have to be newsworthy.  It just has to be new

b)      Find fresh material, um, somewhere else and copy paste it

c)      Find fresh material, um, somewhere else, and mash it through article rewriting software to change the nouns and the verbs

d)      Offshore the process

A relatively obscure blog like this one is a good place to find words to copy, because other people are unlikely to find it and copy it.  

I'm not really worried about duplicate content yet.  I am worried about looking ridiculous.  Spammers have run my press releases through rewriting software before.  The results would have been hilarious--if my name hadn’t been on them. 

If this blog is your, “um, somewhere else,” and you’re here to borrow copy, I can’t really stop you.  All I ask is that you

e)      Take only the evergreens.  They have better search terms anyway.

f)        Make substantial changes, like more than 40%

g)      Please, leave my name off your final product.

If you’re here to read, hi there and welcome!  Please leave a message and tell me what else you’d like to read about.

New Year’s Resolution, part 2

To follow up on yesterday’s post: yes, you do want to update your site frequently in order to woo (or wow) the search engines.

Not everyone has the desire or facility to come up with something fresh and witty every day.  As Gene Fowler once wrote:

Writing is easy; all you do is sit staring at a blank sheet of paper until the drops of blood form on your forehead.

 I don’t digress when I say that yesterday I grew tired of looking at all my excess labels.  If you scroll all the way down to the bottom of any post, you’ll see a few labels, words that I thought applied to whatever I was writing about that day.  They help bloggers organize their posts, and, yes, they help the search engines find the posts.

In the beginning of this blog, I was label-happy.  I made up new labels every time I mentioned new subjects, which is why I only had one blog entry labeled “food pyramid.”  It was like setting up a filing system with paper files that only contained one sheet of paper.  After a while all those files get in your way.

I did something about those extra labels, deleting a lot of them.

Here’s the funny thing: that was good for my search engine optimization as well.  The search engines can’t really tell if I’ve just added important and timely news to my blog (only you can do that.)

To a search engine “spider” a deleted label is as much an update as is a trenchant blog post.  So’s a deleted comma.  I could edit my site every day, deleting a comma tomorrow and adding it back in the next day.  The search engines would think I was making serious changes and would think my blog had hotter news in it than the completing blog at the next IP address, which didn’t make daily minor tweaks.

I’d rather add new and interesting blog posts, but even when I do something dull like administer my labels, it’s nice to know that even that may help one more reader find this blog.

Who's David Foster Wallace?

I heard a piece on Weekend Edition about a site called IWriteLike.com. You put in a sample of your writing. The site parses it and tells you which writer your writing style resembles.

I submitted this entry and IWriteLike told me I write like David Foster Wallace.

Who's he? Hee hee.

I write like
David Foster Wallace

I Write Like by Mémoires, Mac journal software. Analyze your writing!

Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt

Just finished reading Junk Science Judo: Self-defense against Health Scares and Scams by Stephen J. Milloy. Milloy seems to assume that poor science makes headlines because scientists, peer reviewers and editors do not understand the scientific method, and that if he just explained it, the scientific community and the media would see the error of their ways. They would refuse to report on inconclusive but alarming results.

How touching. Milloy does not know that there is an entire marketing technique abbreviated as FUD. FUD stands for Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt--deliberate dissemination of disinformation about a product or service in order to confuse consumers and dissuade them from supporting the competition.

Blogs make FUD easier than ever. If I wanted to, I could say disturbing things about my competition here on this blog, and encourage my friends to leave similar comments to boost the PageRank. I could moderate any ripostes from the maligned competition. And if I were truly devious, I could have other websites pick up my posting--websites that do not allow comments. No peer review, just my slanderous word out there in the blogosphere forever.

It's hard to get other people's blog posts taken down, even if they are blatantly inaccurate. Another blogspot blogger took some of my press releases last winter and ran them through a blender, but left my name and telephone number intact. They looked like real press releases, albeit written on hallucinogens. The purpose of those postings was to create links back to an Internet pharmacy site. See the "report abuse" choice at the top of this page? I complained to Google, which owns blogspot. I filled out their online form (the only way they allow complaints) but I when they requested it I did not send a scan of my driver's license because they did not offer me an encrypted transmission. Because I did not send it, Google has not acted. Stalemate.

Fortunately, the bogus press releases do not spread FUD, except on the question of whether I might be blogging while intoxicated. But I give this example to show how easy it is to post misinformation, and how hard it is to remove bad information. Who needs the New England Journal of Medicine or the Journal of the American Medical Association if they can start a free and anonymous blog and say whatever they want?

Do I believe everything Milloy writes about the inappropriate reporting of scientific studies? I don't know. And I find his web site, JunkScience.com, more strident and abrasive than the book. But I do think that as long as people are out there perpetrating FUD, we all need to be aware of it lest we wind up, as Milloy quotes Carl Sagan's foreboding

of an America in my children's generation or my grandchildren's generation...when clutching our horoscopes, our critical faculties in steep decline, unable to distinguish between what's true and what feels good, we slide almost without noticing, into superstition and darkness.

On a similar subject but from an entirely different section of the library, I also just finished reading How to Rig an Election by Allen Raymond and Ian Spiegelman. Raymond is the former top GOP operative who served time in federal prison for jamming the Democratic call center phone lines during the 2002 New Hampshire Elections.

Raymond did not go to the pokey for his political FUD. Having actors portraying urban men calling conservative, potentially racist, households to urge them to vote for the Democratic candidate, in order to scare them into voting Republican is just business as usual, I guess. Ugh. Between shenanigans like that and Operation Bid Rig is it any wonder The Star-Ledger, the largest paper in New Jersey, endorsed independent candidate for governor Chris Daggett?

Adrenaline gets our attention. But we have to keep questioning the source of the information that makes our hearts race, lest we be frightened into acting against our own best interests by cynical purveyors of fear, uncertainty and doubt.

Writing Blogs vs Books

Darren Rowse has written an interesting post today about the difference between writing a book and a blog. Rowse is the author of Problogger: Secrets for Blogging Your Way to a Six-Figure Income.

By the time the link above dies I hope I will have learned to use Permalinks.