Blog Relations

The Telegraph’s Business Diary has a great piece about businesses that unintentionally come up with URLs that have the word “sex” (or related) in them.

The Economist noticed in the nick of time that the name of its new blog economicsexechange might be misleading.

Powergen was supposedly considering opening its Italian web presense with powergenitalia.com.it

But there are some URLs that have made it onto the web.

Search for agents representing stars like Paris Hilton at whorepresents.com

Buy a pen at penisland.com (It’s actualy gay dating).

Consult a shrink at therapistfinder.com

Get changed at dollarsexchange.com

Google looks at words contained in the URL pretty closely, so these these sites presumably do well for non-relevant traffic.

I’m glad that Mallika is doing well with her Quick Indian Cooking blog. She wrote her first post on September 21st, and you can see from the active comments that she’s building a following with her fiery style. We helped her set it up, and give her a little advice about the technicalities of blogging, but Mallika came up with a great idea. It’s a niche (Indian cuisine) but it’s a subset of an active blog community (cooking and food). This means she’s part of a network and that’s the life blood of a blog. Top food blog Noodle Pie gave her a rather cheeky but welcome link recently.

The following table from Google Webmasters tools shows that she’s already showing up well for relevant search phrases. This shows the importance of having a well focused subject to blog about, as well as a good url, title, and description, all of which Google loves.

I’m in the mood for SEO tips. Most site owners realise that in-coming links are all important to Google. You can’t get enough of them. It’s less obvious that out-going links can help too – well at least I’m fairly certain that they do.

When Google looks through your webpage, it pays particular attention to links. It rates these higher than ordinary content. You can tell that this is so, because search results tend to show up links in the brief summary of content.

So to use an example (as usual) from our own work – on Storynory we are publishing an audio book of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. It’s our biggest project and we want people to find it. There are loads of other audio books about Alice, so the competition is strong for a search phrase like “Alice in Wonderland Free audio”.  In the post, I’ve included three outgoing links to the best Alice background sites I could find on the net. This is a good service to our users – it also helps us with Google.

Incidentally, I’ve also made sure that the key words appear in the URL. I hope these SEO tips help people. I knew nothing about this subject a year ago, and Search Optimisation Companies charge a lot for their wisdom. It’s largely true that common sense and good content win through in the end.

Another short word about Quick Indian Cooking. Its author, Mallika, came up with the title and URL – even though we said she would never find a free address as good as that. But beforehand, we advised her to look for a URL with key words for search in it. It’s really important to get Search Engine Optimisation right from the start. Google looks at the URL and then the title at the top of the browser before most other other things. It takes a few months to kick in, but when it does, it’s hard to beat a site that has those vital key words in its url. Look at the success of cheapflights.co.uk for example. When people start to link to the site, they are likely to use those words, and reinforce the effect.
So this is our top SEO tip. Get the web address and title optimal for search.