Tag Archives ⇒ blog

Upcoming Conservative and blog travels

June 16, 2007
· Martin Kelley

My F/f Thomas T emailed me about the Blog­philadel­phia hap­pen­ing next month in down­town Philly. It sounds like it could be sil­ly and inter­est­ing at the same time so I’ve signed up.

Per­son­al stalk­ers mak­ing sum­mer plans should keep mid-August open. It looks like my blog/IM/Twitter/Facebook bud­dy C Wess Daniels and I are going to add yet anoth­er social media to our reper­toire and actu­al­ly meet face to face as co-presenters for an evening event at Ohio Year­ly Meet­ing Con­ser­v­a­tive. Along with Ohio’s David Male we’ll be bang­ing on that ever-popular “Con­ver­gent Friends” drum. I’m not sure I’ve ever actu­al­ly giv­en my two cents on the term and the phe­nom. I’ll prob­a­bly post about it in the lead up to the August event as a kind of prepa­ra­tion. Any­one with­in road-trip dis­tance of Bar­nesville is invit­ed to come over Fri­day evening the 17th to hear the talk.

And speak­ing of Con­ser­v­a­tive Friends, every­one should check out the great newish web­site called The Con­ser­v­a­tive Friend, an unof­fi­cial out­reach ini­tia­tive of Ohio Year­ly Meet­ing. It’s sim­ple but attrac­tive, walks that fine line between truth telling and humil­i­ty with grace and has a won­der­ful sense of humor and self-awareness that sneaks up on you as you read through. Now who knew Ohio Con­ser­v­a­tives had a sense of humor? Seri­ous­ly, it’s real­ly nice work.

I’ll be miss­ing the Con­ser­v­a­tive Gath­er­ing of Friends being held in the Lan­cast­er, PA, area next week­end. I’d like to claim that mon­ey and time is keep­ing me from attend­ing but it’s hard to argue that when I drove by its meet­ing site only a few days ago just to look at trains. Well, let’s just say at this moment of life, my spir­it need­ed fam­i­ly time more than Quak­er gath­er­ing time. I hope it goes well; if any Quak­er­Ran­ter read­ers do attend I’d love to hear their impressions.

SEO Myths II: Content Content Content, the Secret to SEO

February 27, 2007
· Martin Kelley

When­ev­er
I talk with fel­low web design­ers, the issue of “SEO” invari­ably comes
up. That’s techie slang for “search engine opti­miza­tion,” of course,
that black sci­ence of mak­ing sure Google lists your site high­er than
your com­peti­tors. Over the years a small army of shady char­ac­ters have
tried to game the search engine results.

I’ve always thought such tricks were pathet­ic and bound to lose over
the long term. Search engines want to fea­ture good sites. It’s in their
best inter­est to make sure the sites list­ed are the ones peo­ple want to
see. A search engine that returns unsat­is­fac­to­ry results quickly
becomes a has-been in the search engine com­pe­ti­tion. So as soon as a
site such as Google notices some new SEO trick is skew­ing the rank­ings they tweak their secret search algo­rithm to fix the SEO loop­hole.

Just Give Google the Content It Loves

In the­o­ry it’s easy to make Google, Yahoo, MSN and
the oth­er big search engines hap­py: give poten­tial vis­i­tors site
they’ll want to vis­it. For­get the tricks and spend your time putting
togeth­er an amaz­ing site. Search engines like text, so write, write,
write. 

I’m look­ing to join a web design house, which means I’ve been
inter­view­ing with slick web devel­op­ers late­ly and when­ev­er they ask me
the best way to increase SEO for their
clients, I tell them to start a blog. They look at me like I’m an idiot
but it’s absolute­ly true: two blog posts a week will end up being over
100 pages of pure con­tent. All of these sites full of Flash animation
get you nowhere with Google.

Just a note that any kind of text-rich web sys­tem can achieve many
of the same results – blogs are just the eas­i­est way yet to get content
on your site.

Presenting What You Already Have: Blog your Water Cooler Chat

When I talk to peo­ple about start­ing a cor­po­rate blog they quickly
start telling me how much work it will be. Bah and Hum­bug – your
com­pa­ny’s life is prob­a­bly already filled with blog­gable material! 

I used to work in a book­store where I did most of the customer
ser­vice, much of it by email. About two or three times a week I’d get a
par­tic­u­lar­ly intrigu­ing query and would spend a lit­tle time researching
an answer (most­ly by look­ing through the index­es of our books and
search­ing the arcane sites of our niche). This research did­n’t always
pan out to a book sale, but it marked our book­store as a place to get
answers and gave us a com­pet­i­tive advan­tage over Ama­zon and its ilk.
Each of my email answers could have eas­i­ly been refor­mat­ted to become a
blog post. By the end of a year, I’m sure the vol­ume com­ing from these
obscure search­es would be quite high (see yes­ter­day’s Long Tail Strategy
post on the Hit­Tail blog for an account of how atten­tion to search
engine’s one-hit-wonders helped achieve a wide­spread key­word dominance).

When­ev­er some­thing new hap­pens that breaks you out of your routine,
think about whether it’s blog­gable. At the book­store, a new book would
come in and we’d spend ten min­utes talk­ing about it. That conversation
reached half-a-dozen peo­ple at most. In that same ten min­utes we could
have writ­ten up a blog post say­ing much the same thing.

Last Spring a con­tro­ver­sial arti­cle appeared in the local newspaper
that tan­gen­tial­ly involved my employ­er. That morn­ing my workmates
gath­ered togeth­er in the recep­tion area for the bet­ter part of an hour
trad­ing opin­ions and wise­cracks. After about five min­utes of this, I
slipped back to my office and wrote my opin­ions and wise­cracks down
into my blog. I hit post and came back to the recep­tion area – to find my
work­mates still blath­er­ing on, natch. My post reached hun­dreds and took
no more time out of the work day than the recep­tion pontifications.

Humans are social ani­mals. We’re always blog­ging. It’s just that
most of the time we’re doing it ver­bal­ly around the water cool­er with
three oth­er peo­ple. Learn to type it in and you’ve got your­self a
high-volume blog that will add invalu­able con­tent and SEO mag­ic to your site.

Mix up your content: Tag Your Site

Last­ly, a point to web­mas­ters: it usu­al­ly pays to think about ways
to re-package your con­tent. My most recent­ly expe­ri­ence of this was
tag­i­fy­ing my per­son­al blog over at “Quak​er​Ran​ter​.org.” Every time I
post there a Mov­able Type plu­g­in fish­es out the key words in the
arti­cle and lists them after­wards as tags. These tags are all linked in
such a way that results send the term through the site’s search engine
to give back an on-the-fly index page of all the posts where I’ve used
that term.

Tags are like cat­e­gories except they pick up every­thing we talk
about (when we use them aggres­sive­ly at least, and espe­cial­ly when we
auto­mate them). We don’t nec­es­sar­i­ly know the cat­e­gories that our
poten­tial audi­ence might be search­ing for and tag­i­fy­ing our sites
increas­es our key­word out­reach expo­nen­tial­ly. My per­son­al blog has 239
entries but 3,860 pages accord­ing to Google.
It’s the parsed out and re-packaged con­tent that accounts for all of
this extra vol­ume. This does­n’t increase traf­fic by that near­ly that
much, but last month about 30% of my Google vis­its came from these tag
index­es. More on the mechan­ics of this on my post about the tag­ging.

Neat idea: postcard for World Peace

February 22, 2007
· Martin Kelley

A project from Esto­nia, a “blog of post­cards for world peace”:http://postcardworldpeace.blogspot.com. From the site:
bq. The idea is sim­ple: Send us a post­card from your country/city (or any post­card you want) writ­ing in the back­side a mes­sage of peace to the World. All the post­cards will be uploaded in the blog, and there will be a record of how many post­cards per coun­try we receive (includ­ing a map show­ing the coverage).

Blogging for the Long Tail

January 20, 2007
· Martin Kelley

One of the neat­est obser­va­tions to gain pop­u­lar­i­ty in the last few years is that of The Long Tail, first coined a few years ago by Wired mag­a­zine edi­tor Chris Ander­son (here’s the orig­i­nal arti­cle).
He noticed that the inter­net had opened up access to nich­es – that
search­es and nation­al dis­tri­b­u­tion net­works had giv­en new mar­kets to
obscure and small-market prod­ucts. The clas­sic exam­ple is Net­flix, the
direct-mail movie rental ser­vice, that has a huge cat­a­log of titles,
the great major­i­ty of which are so obscure that no local video rental
store could afford to car­ry them. But Net­flix actu­al­ly rents them all
and if you add all these low-volume rentals togeth­er you’ll find the
total vol­ume exceeds that sea­son’s blockbusters.

I
learned just how strong the long tail can be a few years ago when I
worked on Quak​erfind​er​.org, a meeting/church look-up ser­vice. For the
first year, the site got mod­er­ate traf­fic from search engines. Google
was­n’t able to index the actu­al church list­ings because users were
required to type towns and postal codes in to get results. The only
search engine vis­i­tors we got came in on very gener­ic phras­es like
“find quak­er meetings.” 

Sus­pect­ing
we were los­ing a large poten­tial audi­ence, I redesigned the site so
Google could index each and every meet­ing (adding a few tricks so each
list­ing trad­ed links with half-a-dozen oth­er list­ings). Once the change
was in effect (help from our pro­gram­mer), those old gener­ic search
phras­es were still the most pop­u­lar. But now we got small num­bers of
vis­its on thou­sands of terms which we had­n’t hit before: “Quak­ers
Pough­keep­sie” and “Quak­er Church­es in San Fran­cis­co,” etc. This was the
long tail in effect. Our vis­its jumped four­fold with­in a few months
(see chart). The long tail made us much more vis­i­ble. (More on the Googliza­tion effort in that year’s ana­lyt­ic report.)

A great new traf­fic analy­sis ser­vice is called Hit­Tail.
Like many oth­er pro­grams it tells you what search phras­es have brought
traf­fic to your site. But what’s cool is that it gives
sug­ges­tions – key­words it thinks will bring even more vis­i­tors in. Some
of the sug­ges­tions are fun­ny. For exam­ple, it thinks I should post
about “tra­di­tion­al sweat lodge songs,” “tick­lish armpits” and “how to
dress with per­son­al­i­ty” over on Quak­er Ranter.
But it also thinks I might con­sid­er post­ing on “small church local
out­reach ideas,” “new online mag­a­zines” and “chris­t­ian quakers.” 

If
all one was wor­ried about was sheer traf­fic vol­ume, then a post on each
key­word might be in order. But this would bring a lot of ran­dom traffic
and dilute any focus the blog might have (I already get a lot of
traf­fic on a par­tic­u­lar non-typical post that I wrote part­ly as an SEO exper­i­ment).
My guess is you should go through the Hit­Tail sug­ges­tions list to find
top­ics that match your site’s focus but do so in lan­guage that you
might not nor­mal­ly use.

I might try some exper­i­men­tal posts on
my per­son­al blog soon. I’ll def­i­nite­ly report back about them here on
the Mar​tinKel​ley​.com design blog. In the mean­time, check out Hit­Tail’s blog, which has some good links.

Betsy Cazden’s new site

January 5, 2007
· Martin Kelley

I’m pleased to announce that my lat­est free­lance project has just launched: Betsy​Caz​den​.com. There’s noth­ing par­tic­u­lar­ly rev­o­lu­tion­ary about the tech­nol­o­gy behind the site or its design, but the Quak­er geek in me is so hap­py to see it. Long-term read­ers will remem­ber my excit­ed post Fel­low­ship Mod­el of Lib­er­al Quak­ers, writ­ten after read­ing Bet­sy’s Bea­con Hill Friends pam­phlet Fel­low­ships, Con­fer­ences, and Asso­ci­a­tions. Bet­sy is one of the small num­ber of Quak­er his­to­ri­ans will­ing to take on con­tem­po­rary his­to­ry and her obser­va­tions can be quite insight­ful. I hope she’ll find an even wider audi­ence with this site and the blog that she plans to add soon.

The new aggregators

October 13, 2006
· Martin Kelley

A look at the new class of “Sin­gle Page Aggregators.”

Way back in 1997 I was one of dozens of lots of web design­ers trying
to fig­ure out how to bring an edi­to­r­i­al voice to the inter­net. The web
had tak­en off and there pages and links every­where but few places where
they were actu­al­ly orga­nized in a use­ful man­ner. As I’ve writ­ten before,
in Decem­ber of that year I start­ed a week­ly updat­ed list of annotated
links to arti­cles on non­vi­o­lence, a form we’d now would rec­og­nize as a
blog.

About
eigh­teen months ago I start­ed a “links blog” of inter­est­ing Quaker
links, incor­po­rat­ed as a side­bar on my pop­u­lar “Quak­er­Ran­ter” personal
blog. I even­tu­al­ly gave the links their own URL (Quak​erQuak​er​.org)
and invit­ed oth­ers to join the link­ing. I always stum­ble when try­ing to
tell peo­ple what Quak­erQuak­er is all about. The best def­i­n­i­tion is that
its a “col­lab­o­ra­tive­ly edit­ed blog aggre­ga­tor” but that’s a horribly
tech description.

The rise of blogs is cre­at­ing the neces­si­ty for these sort of theme-based aggre­ga­tors. This morn­ing I stum­bled on Orig­i­nal Sig­nal, a new site that organzes the best Web 2.0 blogs. A site called Pop­URLs does the same for “the lat­est web buzz.” A site called Solu­tion­Watch has writ­ten about these in Track­ing the web with Sin­gle Page Aggre­ga­tors. We’re all on to some­thing here. I sus­pect that some­time this fall some clever per­son will coin a new term for these sites.

I am the King of Folksonomy

September 1, 2006
· Martin Kelley

I just relaunched my per­son­al blog a few days ago, mov­ing it from non​vi​o​lence​.org/​m​a​r​t​ink to quak​er​ran​ter​.org. I plan to write a whole big piece about it in the near future. But my access logs just picked up some­thing amazing.

An
impor­tant part of the redesign was an auto­mat­ic key­word generator.
Posts were run through a script that auto­mat­i­cal­ly pulled out keywords
from the text. My 2003 arti­cle, Going all the way with Mov­able Type gen­er­at­ed the fol­low­ing tags, which appear as links after the post:

Fol­low­ing the links takes you to similarly-tagged arti­cles. At least
that’s the con­ceit. When you fol­low a tag’s link you’re sim­ply doing a
site search for that key­word. A lit­tle htac­cess rewrite mag­ic is making
the result look like it’s a sta­t­ic cat­e­go­ry page.

“Fine and well” you’re think­ing, “big deal.” Well, here’s what’s
cool. There are 225 entries on the Quak­er­Ran­ter blog. Google’s just
gone through and indexed the site and is now claim­ing it con­tains 1300 pages.
Each tag is being indexed as its own page. Every time I men­tion any
inter­est­ing term, it becomes a page that Google index­es and deliv­ers to
its searchers.

Which brings us to today’s cool piece from the access logs. In
Decem­ber of 2004 a rather inno­cent post on Quak­er Ranter became the
cen­ter of a mini-whirlwind on the polit­i­cal blogs when it mentioned
that I had got­ten a call from a CBS News pub­li­cist inter­est­ed in Non​vi​o​lence​.org.
All polit­i­cal blogs get pub­lic­i­ty calls from news and opin­ion think
tanks try­ing to sug­gest (or plant) sto­ries but no one’s sup­posed to
talk about it. I only men­tioned it because it was so unusu­al. One of
the blogs denounc­ing the lib­er­al con­spir­a­cy my post revealed was the
some­what slimy Lit­tle Green Foot­balls. After a few weeks the
denun­ci­a­tions died down. 

But this morn­ing, some­one looked up lit­tle­green­foot­balls in Google and came to my site. Because of my auto­mat­ic key­word gen­er­a­tor, tags, and static-loooking links, I’m now the num­ber two entry, on two three-year old posts, now relo­cat­ed to a days old quak​er​ran​ter​.org. Cool. 

This mix­ing and match­ing of con­tent and rich manip­u­la­tion of data is some­times lumped togeth­er in the cool bu zzphrase folk­son­o­my.
Note that none of what I’ve done is a trick­ing of Google. Every tag is
real­ly going to a page with that con­tent. These are “nat­ur­al” and
“organ­ic” search results in the lin­go of SEO. I’m just pre­sent­ing my infor­ma­tion in mul­ti­ple for­mats that appeal that the widest array of audiences.

For what it’s worth, I don’t think I deserve #2 sta­tus for
“lit­tle­green­foot­balls” and I don’t think Google will keep it there for
long. It’s a bit odd that they have ele­vat­ed that par­tic­u­lar term so
high and no oth­ers tags seem so stratospheric.

Positive Results:

As of Feb­ru­ary 2007, Google index­es 3,540 pages
on Quak​er​Ran​ter​.org, a blog of only 239 posts. In Decem­ber 2006 30% of
my Google vis­its were to one of the “tags” page. Recon­fig­ur­ing the blog
in this kind of tag-intensive way has more than dou­bled search engines
vis­its, again in a very nat­ur­al and organ­ic way. Adding tags has simply
made what I’ve writ­ten more acces­si­ble to search engines. Very cool.

Negative Ramifications:

Short­ly after installing this new sys­tem, my servers started
peri­od­i­cal­ly crash­ing (about once/week). The prob­lem would be multiple
MT-Search process­es over­load­ing the memory. 

My guess is that a search engine spi­der came along and started
index­ing all of the tags. Each link ini­ti­at­ed a search query in Movable
Type. The built-in search for Mov­able Type is just not able to handle
this vol­ume of traffic.

I installed Fast Search to solve the prob­lem (tip of the hat to Al-Muhajabah). It took awhile: Fast Search required a MySQL upgrade at my host. After that I need­ed to install these plu­g­in fix­es.
Then it was fine-tuning the htac­cess files. It was been more work than
I ini­tial­ly expect­ed and the tag results now for­ward to a fun­ny URL that Google does­n’t love as much.