Blog Relations

I’ve spent the weekend coding up a new theme for Mallika’s Quick Indian Cooking blog.   It was a bit of a team effort.  Mallika and her photographer husband Andy mocked up how they wanted it to look.  I did the CSS and put it all into WordPress (using the ultra flexible Sandbox theme as a base).

It has a bit of a web-magazine look about it – with a slick YouTube video in the sidebar,  and post highlights using custom fields. 

I have a few things on the to-do list left – such as a different sidebar for inside pages and a better archive page.   But overall,  I think it’s a nice new look for Mallika’s blog – and I have a feeling that she is going places with her Quick Indian Cooking.

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:

1. Longer posts with more educational content
2. Series of posts on a particular topic – that build up into a step-by step tutorial.
3. A Semi-Static Front page that highlights important categories and best read posts.
4. A really well organised archive that is broken down into categories.
5. Feature pages that highlight certain topics and posts
6. Category Pages that have their own design and sidebar links relevant to that category
7. 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….

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.

I was asked today how you get started in blogging – is it enough just to dash off a few ideas and hit publish? Well here are a few things, apart from actually writing, that I believe will help you get started.

The assumption is that you don’t just want to write your thoughts into a vacuum. The main point of blogging is to take part in an online conversation with other people in your field. You may have lots of reasons for wanting to do this, but most professionals understand the importance of networking.

Find out who else is writing in your area. This means doing so searching around using the leading blog search engine, Technorati.

Get Google Reader. The art of blogging is to link to other bloggers – so you plug into the online conversation and build your network – to do that you have to read other blogs. How do you follow lots and lots of blogs when you have hardly time to read the newspaper? Simple get yourself an RSS Reader and subscribe to their feeds. That way you can read all the blogs in one place. Google Reader is probably the one these days.

Burn your feed with Feedburner. Feedburner makes your feed easy to subscribe to – so rout your feed through it. You will also find a host of useful stats and online tools come with feedburner.

Make your feed easy to find These days browsers auto discover RSS feeds – so make sure that the header of your blog points to your new Feedburner feed.

Get on top of categories and tagging Categories and tagging make your blog easy to navigate, they also help put your posts into the general mix of other blog posts on similar subjects. People will find you in places like Technorati. A good idea for WordPress bloggers is to get the Ultimate Tag Warrior plugin.

Make your archives friendly In a similar vein to tagging, people will stay with your site better if they can naviate your achrives well. WordPress users should consider the Extended Live Archives plugin.

Fend off comment spam This is partly about making sure that the settings of your blog do not allow people to dump loads of links in a comment, and its also about getting some good anti-spam tools such as Akismet.

Make Your Blog Google Friendly Again a plugin comes to the rescue - Google site maps which helps Google find all your pages, but it’s also about making sure that your blog follows some basic Search Engine Tips, which I’m going to write up soon.

Monitor Traffic You are soon going to want to know all about your visitors. There are an array of tools to help you including sitemeter, Google analytics, and Google for webmasters.

There is more, much more I could write here – but I think that’s a enough tips for now. I’ve got to get on with optimising a blog for a client – and as you can see, it’s rather time consuming.