Find some Nichols

So now you’ve carefully chosen your keywords and you have placed them in your content. Keywords appear in your titles and also in your URLs. Expect to see a rise to the top? Not so fast. There are lots of web pages ahead of you.

Now lets explore the long-tail theory. You may have chosen keywords that are too broad or over used by the web population. For keywords to be effective, they have to be more specific and more tailored than the other websites. Example: your site is about boats, and you have used the keyword boat. Boat is too broad a keyword; zero in on a niche’ market. Change “boat” to a type of boat, like “Super Air Nautique”. This will get you out of the flood of “boat” words, into a more narrow stream.

Keywords are words that describe your site.

Keywords have to be carefully chosen to represent your site. No longer can web designers depend on metadata to describe the site. Search Engines have become sophisticated enough to go beyond metadata, but no one really knows exactly what the algorithms are for searches.

It’s believed that linking is favored by search engines more than anything else.  If other people like your site enough to directly reference it using a hyperlink, that has credibility, and you move up in the search result rankings.

Besides inbound links, the search engines “crawl” through the website looking for what the site is about so it knows how to index it. If you choose your keywords carefully, you can attract your desired readers. Just make sure that the titles you use (page or otherwise) contain the keywords you desire. Same goes for URLs, so think twice before you name your next HTML page.

I am testing a trackback. If I understand it correctly, I refer to Susan’s blog here, and her blog recognizes that I have talked about her post, and refers back to my blog (?).

She wrote an article I really like while she was looking for general answers.

I claimed my blog at Technorati then I had a look around to see what the heck it really is. Spiders! Everywhere! It’s an index of blogs that get crawled by spiders for content, and makes that content findable through searches. I can immediately see why this is important. While I don’t really care about most of the CRAP people blog about, what if I wanted to know what people thought about a particular product before I buy? I can’t trust the seller, so I turn to other buyers opinions. The average Joe’s blog can be lost in the big sea of Google and Yahoo, but Technorati makes it findable. It has the pulse of American (worldly?) culture right now, and is an indication of what general, public opinion is today. It’s easy to use and even has a cute sidekick, the mini. It’s a window that stays open on the desktop with a refresh every 60 seconds for up-to-the-minute hot topics. When the blogging society starts using Microformats, I’ll be able to zero in on product & movie reviews. No more listening to the paid TV critics, whom I often suspect are endorsed by the parent companies of the movie makers. I will trust the OVERALL thoughts and blogs of the every-day average Joes collectively, before I trust a seller.

I have learned much about how to create findable websites from my professor Aarron Walter at the Art Institute of Atlanta. There is so much content on the subject of SEO, that I decided to create myself a to do list and share it with you here in an abbreviated version:

1. Define keywords and insert them into H tags, metatags, filenames, and link titles
2. Link to my classmates blogs, and hope that they reciprocate
3. Use microformats and XFN to identify my professor and classmates
4. Create a sitemap; Google Sitemap Generator has WordPress plugins
5. Change WordPress permalinks to display date and name
6. Modify header.php file to display the title of the post instead of just “blog archive”
7. Validate pages for XHTML strict
8. Claim blog at Technorati
9. Register site with search engines

This is just a summation of SEO white hat tactics. More detailed information may be obtained directly from Aarron Walter’s site.

I decided to install Mint; my first analytics package. After passing the compatibility testing, I paid my $30 to get an activation key emailed to me. I retrieved the key and went back to Mint. It thanked me for purchasing Mint. Then I didn’t know what to do. I expected some instructions, or at least a “download” button on that same screen. It took me several minutes to find the download area.; it’s labeled “stay up to date” which lead me to believe that was for upgraders. The readme text for the install is 3 printed pages, which I thought “you’ve got to be kidding”, but the actual instructions for a new install was only a couple lines, and the rest of the reading was for upgrading. Other than being annoyed that I couldn’t find the download button, the install was fairly painless. I think I’ll like it better tomorrow, or at least when I can see some hits. It’s pretty depressing to see all zeros in all categories. I feel a new motivation to get my newly learned findability techniques implemented.

Special considerations have to be made when dealing with Flash sites.  The very first question is do you actually need a Flash site? Flash sites are not indexed by search engines, so the site is virtually unnoticed. Google is the exception, there are cases where Google has looked into Flash and can read and index the links according to Matt Cutts, Software Engineer at Google (searchenginewatch.com). The only other known search engine rumored to index Flash is all the web.  Gregory Markel, Founder of Infuse Creative, gives some advice on the subject. He said to “think movies, not sites”. Use the flash movie to deliver great content, but keep it in the html page. I like the advice from Scott Gilbertson to. He wrote an article on Webmonkey. You may very likely be serving data to your site from a database anyway, so use PHP to detect what is looking at your site.  If it’s a browser, then bet it’s a person and serve it your Flash site.  If it’s a spider, serve it up some raw data that spiders like (yummmm… spider food!!)