I was just reading Search Engine Journal on how to make it in the SEO community. I don’t particularly have any ambition here - I just want to optimize my own little corner of the internet. But I do think the tips are very useful for making it in any niche, and therefore building up your professional reputation and your blog at the same time. The two go hand in hand, of course.

I’ll pick out one quote and some headlines: You can read the original here.

Remember that kid you always used to make fun of in class for asking way too many questions and for sucking up to the teacher for that high grade? That’s what you need to do with the gods of (your niche)…Get out there and suck up to the influencers.

(Well I think that’s why I haven’t made it yet !)

Other tips, slightly adapted to make them more generally applicable

• Overpower the Forums and Make Friends
• Dominate your competitors by becoming the Go-to-Guy for ONE Niche
• Get published
• Create Your Central Site / Blog and just BUILD
• Make friends with your rivals
• Build up High Value Links to your site (by having good content to link to)
• Create Formulas and Simplified Ideas (of your complicated hard to understand subject)
• Start Your Experimentations (original research)
• Passion and Obsession - Go With It

To these excellent tips I would add:

• Meet people in real life. Go to all the networking events. Press the flesh. Hand out cards. Speak at conferences.

Alleluia ! Microsoft has seen the light ! The marketplace for its Zune Podcast player will list 1000 podcasts from November 13th. Podcasters will be able to submit their feeds from then on too.

My first impressions of WP-Super-Cache are that it’s really worth taking the time to install if you are using WordPress. I’ve got it going on Storynory.com and the pages are loading like lightening. Apparently the excellent WP Cache was still using PHP resources, where the suped-up version is creating HTML pages which load fast and are lighter on the server.

I should install it here too….  I know that I neglect Blog Relations, but it’s benefiting indirectly as it’s on a shared server with Storynory. One day soon I’m going to start devoting time to BR here, but at the moment running Storynory and keeping up with my nanny duties for our small son is all that I can manage.

Talking of the jump in visitor stats at Storynory, I also wonder if the latest version of WordPress has helped the site’s search optimisation.

WordPress 3.0 has better enforcement of content generation on the fly, so that you don’t get the same content on numerous different URLs. Some of it, we were doing already, like diverting www.storynory.com to storynory.com. But I also understand that the old WordPress was capable of creating pages with a whole load of different variations in the address. As is well known, Google does not like duplicate content. Eliminating it might have helped our search results.

Something that upgrading WordPress forced me to do, sort of by accident, was to change our archives. Storynory’s Archive Page is the second most visited page after the home page. I was using the very nice looking Ajax archives generated by Extended Live Archive, but because it was in JavaScript, Google couldn’t see the links it generated. ELA doesn’t work in WordPress 3.0, so now I have an HTML page, divided up into categories. This is generated using the WordPress tag ‘get_posts’. Effectively, it’s a site map, and I think that might have cheered up Google too.

I don’t know for sure if upgrading WordPress has helped Storynory’s SEO, but it certainly didn’t do any harm, and it has been a good month for visitor stats.

Hope you had a good Halloween, and weren’t caught by too many spells, or kids pestering you for treats.

Our kids podcast, Storynory, enjoyed a nice treat : a good jump in its visitor stats. A lot of it was search traffic coming into two Halloween stories, last year’s, and one we put out a couple of week’s before Halloween this year. I also added a Halloween tag for good measure, and made sure that the festival was highlighted on the front page.

It’s natural to think around holidays for children, but I would have thought that many blogs and podcasts could also benefit from a quick look in the diary to see what’s coming up. It’s important to be a bit early, so the search engines have time to find you.

Roll on Christmas…