Be A Useful Rescource To Get To the Top
There is a lot of talk about search engine marketing these days - and that really means getting to the top of Google. It’s a big topic - sometimes divided into two camps - White Hat and Black Hat. The goodies, who wear white hats, sleep with Google’s Wemastmaster Guidelines under their pillows. The baddies in black hats lie at wake at night thinking up ways to out-fox the search engines.
Here’s my firm belief - - and I suppose that it puts me in the goodie camp. It’s my rule of internet.
Most of the sites that come top in searches are are a resource of some kind.
The most visited page on Storynory is the archive. That’s because it is a repository of children’s stories. In other words, it’s a resource. Our most successful blog client - Quick Indian Cooking - is a resource of recipes. (I hope to bring you developments on the home cooking front in the New Year. )
The Wikipedia is huge because it is valuable mine of information. Other Wikis do well, because they cover their niches and serve as information centres for particular groups Some of the most popular podcasts are language courses.
Traditionally blogs present you with their most recent posts. This fine if they are very topical, and publish often. But I detect a shift out there that tries to put more value on the usefulness of the archive.
My prediction for 2008 is that more and more blogs - and later podcasts - will relaunch themselves in a better organised format that makes it easier to mine for information. Currently there are a number of magazine designs out there that are attempting to do this.
The elements of a blog-resource include:
- Longer posts with more educational content
- Series of posts on a particular topic - that build up into a step-by step tutorial.
- A Semi-Static Front page that highlights important categories and best read posts.
- A really well organised archive that is broken down into categories.
- Feature pages that highlight certain topics and posts
- Category Pages that have their own design and sidebar links relevant to that category
- Posts with “If you found this intersting, you may also like….” in the footer
I would be interested in any more ideas for improved organisation, as this is what I’m thinking about most at the moment. You might even see blog relations re-organised along those lines….
