Key phrases, links, trackbacks, and Tiger Woods.
Are you new to SEO? For some time now, I have heard the phrase “Search Engine Optimization” but only had a vague idea of what is actually involved. I took a look at Google Trends and noticed that Sandra Bullock and Alex Chilton are both “Hot Topics.”
Additionally, I noticed that Tiger Woods is (still) high up in the “Hot Searches” category and that the NCAA is being talked about in March (go figure – I think I lost my bet already). So, I thought about this a bit and then decided to do some searches for more information about SEO and what I could do to get the first click on this blog from someone other than my mother. Not that I really yearn for exposure, but the communication aspect of blogging seems to be rather important.
As it was only today that I set out to get a better understanding of this rather large subject, I am not going to say that I am much of an authority yet; but I will share what I have learned in this posting. The first (seemingly promising) bit of information I found was on a website called selfpromotion.com.
Not exactly the prettiest site I have ever seen, but it does have enough verbiage to keep someone busy for a while. I read the home page and noticed that the author feels that there are at least 4 or 5 key concepts that I had not really considered. Funny, I was thinking the number would be higher.
One of these concepts was that the site needs to have a description. The description should be short and truly representative of the content that will be found in the site. Not really knowing what the content of this will be other than a list of things that I am interested in, I think that this will likely be rewritten a few times.
Anyway, I think I can use this in the text under the banana (the one in the top right of the page) anyway. So here goes:
Welcome to icebluebanana.com. Here you will find information about web technology, risk management, American culture (if that is the correct phrase), and any other obsession that we have at the moment. Please comment and email us with any ideas or criticisms. Have a good day!
Having completed that, it is time to move on to meta data. Up until reading the information on selfpromotion.com, I had been thinking that meta data was no longer important in web advertising. So, knowing that I am still not completely sure what this website will be focused on, I took a shot at coming up with some phrases to be used so the crawlers will love my site and rush me to the top of Google. I have my doubts, but here they are:
- learn technology,
- wordpress for blogging,
- struts2 and java,
- financial industry,
- risk management,
- javascript,
- apache, and
- do it yourself is fun
Next, I noticed that I need to be aware of what is between the title tags of the page. Apparently, some people feel that this will help me to garner more traffic, and it seems like an easy thing to pay attention to, so I thought about some key words that I wanted to include in my title. Here is what I came up with:
- key phrases
- links
- trackbacks
- Tiger Woods (actually, this came later – see the next section)
Next, I found a great article about writing a blog post and then another, both of which seemed to agree that I need to include something catchy in my first paragraph. Well, not being one to argue, I took a look at Google Trends and found the following five currently popular topics. I have no idea if this is what the authors of those articles meant. For all I know, this could actually hurt my chances of having a ton of traffic tomorrow morning(haha), but it did make it more fun to write the first paragraph.
- NCAA
- Search Engine Optimization
- Sandra Bullock
- Alex Chilton
- Tiger Woods
The article at selfpromotion.com also mentioned some things about linking to other sites. So, I decided to link to a few of my favorites and a few that I found while researching what to do next.
- www.dailyblogtips.com – they have a great article with 25 blogs about blogging. Hilarious.
- www.mattcutts.com – an intersting blogger. There seems to be a ton of information on his site.
- www.djangoproject.com - the great python-based web application framework.
- www.dojotoolkit.org – sometimes I like jQuery, but I always love Dojo.
- digg.com – still the site that I waste the most time on in a given day.
I noticed that speckboy.com had a link to icebluebanana.com here (at the bottom of the page). I did not know why this was on their website at first, so I did a Google search and found the word trackback. Then I thought “what the heck is that?” Then I read this (fairly old) article at cruftbox.com. Apparently, if a blogger references other sites, those sites will be notified in the form of a trackback. I am not sure how or if I will consciously take advantage of this in the future, but it does seem like a good thing to be aware of. This is something that I am going to have to think more about. I certainly will not be doing anything for this today. I found two more articles that were pretty good. One here and another here.
Once again, have a great day!
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