how to get google to be totally in love with you... ;-)

What we were talking about just before the class broke up today, made into a little blog post for you:

1) Good, focused, (and if at all possible) original content. This is the one and only and penultimate thing that counts! Without good content, forget it, it just won't happen. What you have on your site simply has to be of interest to others - either specialist groups or general entertainment, but it has to be really good stuff! And my general hunch with this is that specialty sites are far more likely targets to get hits, since there is bound to be more search engine activity related to a specific topic, than there will be to general chit chat.

2) A large site will have more material for the search engine to find. Very simple logic really. If you have 100 posts it is far more likely that you wrote about something that somebody out there is searching for than if you have only 10. The larger the easypeasy site gets the more search engine results we get, no doubt about it. When we had only 10 posts, we had none. Nowadays with over 100 posts under our belts we have at least 5 or 6 a day and very often many more, sometimes as many as 20 even...

3) Make sure your site is structured well in terms of navigation. Even the best content in the world is useless if folk have to work too hard to get to it, they will simply not bother and leave and never come back. And needless to say, forget about them recommending it to anyone else... Read Selim's excellent post on navigation to get more insight on the matter here >>>

4) Post often and consistently. In other words, not silence for a whole month and then 10 posts all at once, but more like 3 posts a week, and every week. Remember that you can also write a whole batch and then pre-date them. I am not exactly sure how or why this makes a difference but a site which is consistently active seems to draw more traffic, a thing which I can tell very easily from the site stats of my own blogs. 

5) Make sure your meta tags are in perfect order. More on this here >>>

6) Make sure your post title comes before your blog title. More on this here >>>

7) Make sure you have a lot of links to other sites, either inside the posts or as sidebar elements: Your courtesy to others is likely to generate courtesy in return by them linking back to you - after all, this is how the internet works...

8) Use social networks efficiently. Tweet your blog and also post it on facebook, linkedin etc. Also if your site's content is at all relevant, start creative network accounts such as on youtube, Flickr, deviantart, vimeo etc. Use the groups within these domains to put out videos and photos and link these back to your site. 

9) Finally, be patient! It will take some time for people to find you - anything up to 6 months to even a year, depending on how fast your site is growing and on how good your content is. Usually you will hit the really big visitor numbers only after one of the major portals or blogs, one that covers the same area of interest on which you are focused, spots you and blogs you. This will take time. Just keep on posting and once you have enough good stuff it will happen - count on it.

.................................................................................................................................

image tracking

Here it is folks:

http://www.picscout.com/

This site lets the owner of an image find out where and how their images are being used. It also lets web designers locate the owner of a photograph to contact them about licensing. 

If you link back to an image by right clicking and copying the URL (inline linking), then you are OK, since the software would only track the image back to the original website. And in any case, there seems to be no plagiarism involved when you do inline linking as this article on wikipedia tells us.

However, if you download an image into your computer, play around with it a bit (resize, crop etc) and put it back online - then you are toast! Or could very easily be if the owner of the image were to set their mind on checking on things.

I am not sure if this would also work with highly processed and manipulated images, however I would err on the side of caution and stay away from such practices altogether. For one thing, regardless of whether you get caught or not, it is not the right thing to do. Second, why take the risk when there are literally millions of images online, which you can use under the proper creative commons licenses? Read more on where to find them here.

.................................................................................................................................

content = design: fireworks!

One of your classmates just sent me the link to her blog: From what I could gather from her mindmap she is thinking about designing a site on all the things that inspire her in life. Fair enough, I guess... But then in her very next post she is talking about a specific thing which inspires her - fireworks!

So, here is the thing: If you don't know her at all (which, obviously most of her readers will not), what would you rather read about? Fireworks in particular, or a medley of all the things which inspire her? My choice would be fireworks. A fascinating subject where she can go in-depth - and that is what makes the big difference here:

"Fireworks at Swindon", courtesy of Stephen Gunby

As she is building the site she will also be learning - which is at least half the fun when creating a website. There is a whole history there for one thing. Local customs which I am sure must have developed around fireworks all around the world, fairy tales and myths which they have probably brought about. There would have to be writers and artists and musicians who featured them in their work. Not to even mention the whole technological aspect. Huge big industry, after all. Must some active technologically there.

So, she has a subject there which would allow her to develop a specialized site, which people who have a specific interest in this subject would bookmark and put on their RSS feeds in a nano-second. She would get re-blogged by them and even more people would come to read and see what she has to say. It is a subject which she can take as far as she wishes, there is certainly enough material there for that. It will also involve doing research and rooting out information online, all the good stuff which I think of as good web design to begin with: In other words, she will be able to focus.

And the importance of focus in terms of design is that if you have a focused subject - such as fireworks - then you also have a great opportunity to focus your visual elements. Good design is about visual continuity. It is about creating a visual language where every component of your structure goes with everything else. Focused content will bring this about almost naturally. Images of fireworks, videos of fireworks, background and typography which complements them...

So, in many ways (if not in fact all-ways!), content = design. Brings about design...

YAYYY! Fireworks! Go go go!

.................................................................................................................................