Blog Relations

Social Networking is a powerful way to build up your contacts to help you in your professional or personal life, and to get your site known.   Here are our top tips for social networking.

1. Write a blog and post regularly -  blogs are the most personal social network tool.
2. Go to meet-ups of like-minded people in your area.  Take lots of business cards.  Blog about them before, during and afterwards.  Research events at upcoming.
3. Link to relevant sites, especially blogs, from your posts.  The owners will notice you.
4. Take part in online conversations – comment on sites – pick up the debate on your own site.
5. Set up a Flickr account for your pictures – and join relevant groups on Flickr – and befriend like-minded people on Flikr.
6. Work at social networking sites and services such as Facebook, Twitter, Friendster.
   Organise or help organise an event or regular meet-up for people in your industry – for example, Geek Dinners here in London.   As the organiser everyone will get to know you.
7. Use Google Reader to follow what your network is up to.

It’s amazing how many sites just aren’t visible to search engines. view the site without pictures, and there is nothing there. Here are our tips for making your site visible to search engines

1. Avoid putting any text into pictures or flash (apart from masthead).
2. Meta Tags. There are only two meta-tags that matter: Title and Description. These appear in Google search results:
   
   

   Search result uses title and description

• Your pages should have a descriptive title. So if your name is Joe Blogs you might want to add a few words describing what you do. If where you are located matters, add that too: “Joe Blogs: Paddington’s Pain-Free Dentist”.
• Google can scan your text to generate its own description for each page: if you write one yourself, keep it under 25 words.
3. Avoid URLs that are made of numbers and symbols. Try to get a URL for your site that contains one or two key words (eg http://Quickindiancooking.com.
4. Submit a sitemap to Google and to other search engines. WordPress has a plugin that can do this for you.
5. Once you have submitted a sitemap, sign up for Google Webmaster tools – this will give you more information about how Google sees your site.
6. Never copy content from other sites such as Wikipedia – your content must be unique or Google will consign you to the Outer Hebrides.
7. Use Google Analytics to analyze your traffic and where it is coming from.
8. Avoid duplicate content on your own pages (and similar e titles for pages).
9. Use good headlines
10. Keep your site well structured – search engines like good structure.
11. Link to your most important content from the home page
12. Keep your most important content at a high level in the structure – not three levels down.
13. Don’t fill up your site with affiliate marketing
14. Never hide any text on your page.
15. Write alternative text (alt text) for images.
16. Link out to top quality and highly relevant sites. Never exchange links spammy sites and be very wary of anyone who approaches you with a link swapping idea.
17. Submit your site to high quality directories such as http://www.dmoz.org/about.html
18. Ultimately what will drive you up Google are high quality sites that link to you – and that will depend very much on your content and your social networking skills.
19. Have patience – Google takes its time to rate you.

Further Reading

Google Webmaster Guidlines
SEO Book - by Search Guru Aaron Wall
Search Engine Journal

Don’t we all both Love and Hate the internet?   A website can be a place  that entertains and enlightens you – or it can turn your hair gray with frustration.   Here are some of our tips for use-friendly sites.

1. Get Straight to the point – Avoid splash home pages that are meant to impress, go directly to content.
2. The masthead should have a tag-line of  about half a dozen words that says instantly what your site is all about.
3. Important information should be in the top part of the page so it’s in view even if user’s window is not enlarged
4. Fewer words are better – and information should be broken up into short paragraphs and bullet points.
5. Each page should have a title so it’s easy to know where you are on the site
6. Main Navigation should highlight which page / section you are in
7. There should be contact and about pages – so visitors know who you are and how to find you
8. You should be able to find home from any page
9. Keep main navigation consistent through the site – don’t go changing it on different pages
10. Keep the search box prominently up at the top
11. Larger sites sites should have archives

More Reading

Jacob Nielson

Don’t Make Me Think – A common Sense Approach to Web Usability by Steve Krug

The conclusive proof – for me – that Feedburner’s customer service has gone downhill since it joined the Google behemoth in May 2007.

When Feedburner (which does everything for your RSS feed) was still independent, I could post a question on its support formum and receive an answer within half an hour. Even if it was only : “we’re on the case” it gave you the feeling of a great company that cared about its users. The real answer would follow swiftly.

I have a problem that’s bugging the hell out of me. 24 hours after posting the question:

Zilch.