Find some Nichols

I was reading Manny’s Blog and found a nice website about SEO by Chris Pearson. Pearson explains a couple of things you can do to increase traffic to your website. I really like his idea about providing Google images. He shows that in his webstats, about 50% of his traffic lately is due to people searching Google images. The keyword arena is fiercely competitive and difficult to obtain traffic; however, the Google images searches are less competitive. If you can provide images that people want, they will come to your site for the image, and there’s automatic traffic.

Some other ideas are to utilize dynamic title pages. Word Press is already doing that for us. I like his reason for using two site maps instead of one. One is XHTML and the other is XML (Google). The XML site map is supplied for the search engines to crawl your site. The XHTML site map is for making sure your pages are interlinked, and to help users find information.

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.

As little as 3 years ago, I’d never heard anyone say “Google it!” Now, it’s part of mainstream society. The electronic data revolution has unfolded in strange and beautiful ways. Information Architects were born to organize and categorize data on the html page, but over all, electronic data retrieval across the web is a problem. The free terrain of web space has become a melting pot of society, each bringing their own, unique character to the mix. We are currently looking at the accumulation of about 10 years worth of collective crap. Why? Because what we really want to know we can’t find.

NOW HEAR THIS: As we, the public, enter more and more crap into cyberspace, it has now become our social duty and moral obligation to diligently tag our information. Now comes another new word: folksonomy, introduced by Thomas Vander Wal. Folksonomy is when there is enough social tagging of content that categories emerge. Technorati is a website that is currently indexing these categories. It is reporting what people are electronically saying right now. Why? Because, if we can’t find it, does it really exist?