2006 Dec 04 - Mon

Ping Weblog

I used the ping_weblogs_com found and described at Get Noticed by Pinging site. The referenced page also lists a number of services to ping.

Adding a ping to weblogs.com was reasonably simple, except that I forgot that I can't do a $ping_weblogs_com in the text article, but had to do it as part of a flavour file.

And as I didn't want to do it as part of a regular article presentation, as it may extend the page load times, I had to create some separate flavour files. I then activated the plugin in the story flavour.

Now I'm all set with to ping Weblogs.com.

BrutalHogs has a ping flavour to help a little with the manual ping process. But I think that Ping-O-Matic probably takes care of most things, even if it is only manually for now.

[/OpenSource/blosxom] permanent link

Adding an RSS Template to Blosxom

The RSS template/flavour supplied with the original installation of Blosxom doesn't really conform to modern useage. At The Unofficial Blosxom User Group, mention is made of Hal Halvorsen's A better RSS 2.0 template for Blosxom.

He mentions it might take ten to fifteen minutes to configure. In actual fact it was easier than that. I copied his flavours into the root of my blog directory and made the following changes:

• story.rss20: added .article to fn in two places, since that is how I suffix each individual blog article from a url perspective
• head.rss20: changed the copyright notice
• foot.blog: changed my index.rss link to index.rss20 for my xml tag

I was able to validate the feed with Weblogs.com Feed Validator.

So, in actual fact, adding the feed ability and documenting it in this blog took maybe fifteen or twenty minutes. Easy.

[/OpenSource/blosxom] permanent link

Keywords for Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

Search engines like keywords, keywords that are balanced, not overused, not underused. Both copy writers and site designers need to be involved in optimization of keywords and phrases. Once appropriate keywords and phrases have been determined (more about this in another entery), copy writers need to work them into the text of the website. In addition, the keywords and phrases can be incorporated into meta-tags of the page, but I've heard that you can't overboard here, nor can you rely only on meta-tags to carry the day.

Another trick is to incorporate the keywords into web site structure and navigation. For example, on one my pages I discuss a set of HD-600 headphones by Sennheiser. The page references the word AudioPhonics and the directory structure in which the article rests has that word as part of the path.

That article has a Google rank of 7 or 8. It has reached that rank within a few weeks of posting. However, that page is actually about the Sennheiser HD 600 headphones, and if I do a search on that phrase, page rank is very very low. It is somewhere between 140 and 745,000. So, in effect, people will land on that page due to a search of the nebulous topic of AudioPhonics rather than the more specific topic of Sennheiser HD 600 Headphones about which I wrote.

Because there are so many other pages out there that have Sennheiser HD 600 in the title bar, which my page doesn't (I'm going to have to move to different blogging software to make that happen), they probably enjoy higher rankings. However, an appropriate title is only one of many attributes a search engine will use to compute a page rank.

Those other pages also probably use meta-tags.

Those other pages may also have inbound links of one form or another to gain them extra visibility.

Those other sites may also have related content that helps a search engine's related content matchers. (I'm still finding out about this one to see how true it is).

But you'll also note that when doing a search on the phrase 'Sennheiser HD 600', a bunch of other kind of related pages show up: ones that have a portion of the phrase repeatedly, ones that include the phrase in passing but related to similar equipment, and ones that have them in the url somewhere.

So, after having mentioned what search engines like, we'll see what happens with this page in the page rankings in a few weeks for the search topic 'Sennheiser HD 600'. I've mentioned the product multiple times within the text of this document, which is what Search Engines seem to like. I'm still missing the text in meta-tags, the title, and the url, but we'll see how things go. It will be form of double irony that people come here because they searched for 'Sennheiser HD 600' when in fact this page is actually is about Search Engine Optimization, in another form: Optimzation for Search Engine Findability.

In summary, if you are looking for visibility and findability, each page you write needs to be hand crafted with these various techniques in mind. And even if you've crafted a page for a certain phrase, you may find a search engine likes it differently based upon user's search patterns and preferences. But if you watch these patterns, you can use them to your benefit to further enhance your findability.

[/Personal/SoftwareDevelopment/HTML/Findability] permanent link