Monday, 25 May 2009

Speed Blogging and Efficient Blogging

If we are to “succeed” (and this is a personal and subjective concept) on the internet with blogs we need to consider not only search engine optimization and all its facets but also how to put it all to use efficiently. Speed blogging and efficient blogging is more a necessity that a luxury and this is why.

First, lets get the concept of “success” out of the way. In this post success is deemed to mean getting the maximum number of visitors and page views and therefore revenue. For some people, though (and rightly so) it will not mean that.

As you gradually progress up the Alexa hill to the lofty ranks of the bigger established wiz kid sites you find yourself in the first division and you have to raise your game if you are to keep on going up that slippery slope. Sometimes these sites have more than one person creating the content and there will be a geek of a computer person who gets a head start on the likes of me and thee. We have to compete against this.

Provided you turn out quality, original content, the faster you do it the better; that is a no brainer and the best way to compete against sites where more than on person creates content. So, what does that mean? We have three major sources of knowledge from which we create content:

  1. Our heads (experience)
  2. Books
  3. Internet

If everything we write comes straight from our heads and no where else this is the fastest way to create. That is extremely unlikely and people who are looking for quick fixes can sometimes fall into the trap of doing just that; waffling on in a conversational way churning out unchecked information that is simply poor quality. So we need to fall back and rely on the internet. And books should, where possible, be used to supplement internet information for the sake of fresh information and to check the internet, which can be unreliable (but can also be extremely reliable).

Our Head

I find the old clichés are true. I have small windows of what I call “enlightenment” on problem solving and ideas when (a) in the shower and (b) after about half a glass of wine – absolutely true. These should be used where possible. Memory though is gradually damaged by excess alcohol consumption! Ideas should be jotted down as they are fleeting and can disappear as fast as they arrive. And they should be left to mature for a day to check if they are as good as first thought.

Books

I would guess that these are often ignored. I wouldn’t ignore them. Old books can provide new content under fresh circumstances and also stimulate new thoughts. Often book material will overlap with internet material but there are often small pieces of new information in books that are not readily found on the internet. Working with books is also easier than using information from the internet as it is a hard copy avoiding the need to jump from tab to tab or window to window when using websites for research. When you get to know a book you know where things are and working fast becomes a breeze.

Internet

Perhaps this is where the great savings in time can be made. I recommend these ideas for speed blogging and efficient blogging:

  • Use Firefox or Google Chrome. Firefox is the best. It loads quicker and is more reliable and;
  • Use tabs for new web pages (press Ctrl T for a new tab). This allows a series of tabs to be opened from various sources to which reference can be made as the blog post is being drafted. This is more efficient than new windows that blank out the other windows.
  • {note:I currently use Windows Live Writer for blog posts. If I am using images that I want to be stored on a Google server I use the compose window in Blogger and upload from there. If I want to draw tables I use Google docs and copy the table from the web (published table), not the code to the compose window, see these posts (a) Google Docs to Create Blogger Posts (b) Writing Blogs With Windows Live Writer (c) Creating Tables for Blogger Blogs.}
  • If you have been to a site before and want to find it again, you don’t have to search history or use Google search. In Firefox and Google Chrome all you do it click once on the URL in the address box at the top of the browser window, which blue highlights the web address. Then type in the first few letters of the website that you are searching for; Firefox finds the site and a list of alternatives. Click on the chosen one. You can scroll down the list and press enter if you wish. This saves time. In fact, in Chrome the URL box is the search box.
  • When writing articles, when I find the information that I want I copy it (wait, this is not breach of copyright – read on) and drop it into the page I am using (Google Docs, Live Writer or Compose mode in Blogger). I drop it in about 5 lines down. From there I can use it more conveniently as an information source before deleting it. If it is heavily formatted and is creative commons material, I go into html mode (Edit Html in Blogger) and drop it in there, which produces entirely unformatted clean text. You can also use the unformat button (an eraser) but I prefer the former method as it is more controllable and cleaner.
  • If you use similar pieces of text each time in every Blogger blog post and work in the compose window, use the template function. This reproduces the text in the compose window each time you make a new post. You can do this by going to Dashboard>Settings>Formatting>look at the base of the page “Post Template”. Type in there the links and text that are to be part of your standard page.
  • Pictures: Use Flickr creative commons images. Comply with the license to the letter. Download to desktop and upload to the page using Google Blogger image uploader or in Google docs or Windows Live Writer using the facilities in that software (very easy).

Speed Blogging and Efficient Blogging -- Further reading:

  1. Delete Images With Caution
  2. Google Image Search Builds Traffic
  3. Pictures With Captions in Blogger
  4. Speed Up Blogger Load Times

Speed Blogging and Efficient Blogging to Home Page

Page Rank Improvement

In terms of getting traffic to your blog, Page Rank Improvement is equally as important as ensuring that your web page is search engine optimized (at least to a minimum level: see: How To Get Traffic To Your Blog), perhaps more so. Judging by an interview with Matt Cutts, a Senior Engineer at Google, (or he was in 2005 and as far as I am aware he still is – who would leave Google probably the best employer on the planet?) this is the case.

Lets think of the basics: Google is a highly profitable business based on internet use. Internet use is founded on the fact that it is a useful service. The more useful it is the more it grows and so does Google and Google’s profit. It is that premise that underpins Google’s concept of Page Rank, which in turn is based on quality inbound links (backlinks). Sites that are the recipient of quality inbound links are good quality sites providing a useful service. Thus is what Google wants more of. And so do we and all internet users.

Here are two questions asked of him (from the website: http://www.seroundtable.com and reproduced under a creative commons license):

Question: Let's go back to text links.
Answer: Best links are earned, not sold or traded. You may not get what you pay for. He said, if someone is selling text links, they should give you a free test trial to make sure it works. They have both manual and algorithmic approaches to detect paid links. He said Google.com gets emails asking to trade links. The guy who came up with the pixel homepage thing, that was creative.

Question: Do you use the toolbar to figure out what to crawl and how often?
Answer: Nope. Its all pretty much based on PageRank.

OK, what does this mean? Answer: that inbound links are very important as it improves what Google call Page Rank. This, as I understand it, is a measure of a website’s worth or value on the internet. It is measured by the number of inbound links. This means the number of other sites referring to your blog by linking to it. By far the best links are those occurring naturally and voluntarily because these are genuine and “real” i.e. not bought or exchanged.

It is claimed, in the answer above, that Google can differentiate between “real” high value links from good Page Rank pages from bought links and there are a lot of online businesses selling high value links. These are links from web pages that have high Page Ranks. A high Page Rank is one above 3 (PR 3 or better is the target and the higher the better).

The more high quality naturally occurring inbound links you can get pointing towards your blog the better. If your blog (and web pages on the blog) have a decent PR, Google will favour it in listing pages (with decent PRs) higher in search result listings (note: this concept is disputed by the author, “Enviroman” - username, of the blogger tips and tricks site). Page Rank improvement ultimately comes about by writing good original content. That is the core of any website. And it is not really of any great value to simply regurgitate other people’s stuff. It is best to have an opinion, good or bad! One point worth making is that it is possible to provide your own inbound links, legitimately, by writing articles for other sites (article sites) and embedding links in those articles. The site that gains the most from this is the article site, however. Another way is to get listed in high page rank directories. These are good starting points. I wouldn’t listen to people who promote the idea that you can get instant thousands of backlinks (inbound links). This is not real and the Google algorithm will, I believe, spot this. It may even go against your blog or other website.

Once I did buy some inbound links but I stopped the process mid-stream as I realized the only way is to keep building good content, publicizing the website and using SEO as best as I know how. These are the three planks of success on the internet and the fourth flows from them: Page Rank Improvement.

Note: Anyone who leaves a comment of ten lines can leave a link to their site in the comment. While this page is the home page that means an inbound link from a PR 3 page.

From Page Rank Improvement to Home Page

Sunday, 24 May 2009

Sending Blogger Posts By Email

There are a number of ways to write Blogger posts, one of which is by email. The set up is easy. You can also write and upload posts by phone (SMS) text message but this is only available in the USA as at 24th May 2009. So how to do set up writing and sending posts to your Google Blogger blog by email and why would you do it this way?

Set up

Go to Dashboard, then Settings, then select Email & Mobile. In the Posting Options, Email Posting address, add a suitable word in the text entry box and save settings. This provides the email address, which can be accessed from the Dashboard (look just to the left of the blog title and you'll see an email icon, click that). That should be it. This post is being written on an email.

When might it be used?

My initial thought is for trusted friends to use if you gave them the email address. They could then post articles. Or, if you don't have broadband. This would avoid wasting online time (i.e. if you are still paying by the minute as for a phone call).

That is it. As I said this post was made this way. Sending Blogger Posts by Email is easy. Typical Google. Everything they design is made to function with ease in my experience. This counts.

Michael

The Tiger Human Conflict

The tiger human conflict is for ever on the increase. In this post, Human and Wild Cat are Forced Together , I referred to a leopard, in India, being forced to approach people and which was eventually killed. It would be as the human is the top predator.

The tiger is in equal danger and I have just read a report (http://www.thaindian.com) that confirms what I have been banging away at for a long time, that its habitat is being so radically eroded that it is almost bound to become extinct in the wild. The area of concern is the famous India’s Sundarbans. It is here where the tiger is making a last stand being forced to live a life different to that which is natural to it amongst the swamps and sea water (but nonetheless surviving). Once again the increased human population in the area and the shrinking size of the area (due to raising sea levels) is causing that classic tiger/human face off that can only lead to one outcome, more killed tigers.

The tiger is being squeezed on all fronts by us. The rise in sea level is due to global warming caused by us (or so it is reliably claimed) and the inexorable and unregulated rise in human population in the area combine to extirpate the tiger. India, try as it might to put the brakes on the tiger’s demise, is failing. This is due to many factors, the greatest of which is lack of commitment. OK, they are stepping up protection or to put it another way the authorities are doing more to keep the two species apart. It is a sad manifestation of the dysfunctional nature of the world.

We in the west cannot complain. We have done our bit and more to eradicate the tiger from the world. The tiger human conflict continues. We cannot, it seems, live in harmony. The tiger will be the loser.

i love twitter

Why do I love Twitter? Well for several reasons. Firstly, what happens on Twitter reflects, it could be argued, what happens in real life. People exchange small bits of information all the time through casual and sometimes fleeting pieces of communication. You bump into someone on the way to the corner shop (in the UK, there are no corner shops in the USA!); you might exchange a bit of information. It might be something that you had seen on TV. The other person makes a comment, which gets you thinking. Or it could be something that you have just done, are doing or about to do. The underlying concept is updating people on what you are doing and in doing so you are connecting with other people. That is how it might happen “on the ground”.

The beauty of Twitter and why i love twitter is that you can do this very same thing on a worldwide scale, across borders and cultures. The potential benefits are magnified enormously. I just think that we need to use Twitter wisely. Perhaps more wisely than some do at present. And I mainly mean being more selective and making what we say in the 140 character limit more meaningful. Which leads me to another benefit .

As we all know you have to say what you want to say in 140 characters. That can lead us to saying things that are very banal. Eventually that will work against us as people will stop following the posts. But the posts keep on coming. I wonder what the percentage of posts that are read and digested is as set against the percentage of created posts? Probably quite a low figure. This can tend to produce what I have called, “white noise”. It can be almost like spam. I wonder if the guys at Google could devise some programming that encourages us to limit our posts to ones that are more meaningful. People who make a post that convey no useful information at all should be discouraged as it dilutes the quality of Twitter generally.

But that is not to detract from the benefits of Twitter if used well. The better the quality of post the more likely it is that your posts will be followed rather than ignored. And banal can be funny banal but just plain banal won’t get read in my opinion. More importantly and perhaps this is the most useful aspect of Twitter is the “real time” nature of the posts. We can update people immediately on what is happening. It has this instant fleeting quality that is quite different to the usual blog or email.

One thing we should learn to do is to write as succinctly as possible to get the message across in those precious 140 characters. We can convey quite a lot in 140 characters but if we are careless we simply end up using normal speech which in turn means we are unable to convey useful information. The great downside with Twitter is that the limitation of 140 characters encourages speed. A post can be made very quickly, which translates to a casual approach leading to poor quality leading to a mass of worthless words. I would hope that Google can address that because Twitter is a very useful service.

Someone should devise a “Twitter language”. I don’t mean silly language with the word twitter in it but succinct ways of saying commonly occurring updates. 

Note: This post is an attempt to get Google to find a post that I make about Twitter! In truth I do have some doubts about Twitter. It just doesn’t seem to work in its current configuration. It might on occasions be very useful but it is swamped by banal communications that are diluting its effectiveness and quality.

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