I encourage my clients who blog to blog often. It’s a good idea, as long as the quality doesn’t falter, of course
I’ve just failed to post for almost a whole month owing to extreme busyness. My apologies.
Let’s hope I can get properly back on stream again.
May I blow my own trumpet a little?
I’ve just noticed that Dangerous Thinking is No 1 on Google.co.uk (Web) for SEO copywriting blog.
Can I lay claim to Dangerous Thinking being the top blog on SEO Copywriting in this country?
Not a huge surprise following Google’s takeover of FeedBurner, but very welcome nonetheless. Google has made the full FeedBurner PRO stats package available for free to everyone.
I use FeedBurner on my blogs as well as our clients’, where I see its strengths more as a promotional tool than a stats package. Yet, of course, there are some very useful metrics that you won’t find in Google Analytics or elsewhere.
Some people have been anticipating a merging of FeedBurner stats with Google Analytics. That would be very welcome – I find I end up getting different figures from different sources, and therefore value integration – but somehow I wonder if we’ll see it.
From time to time we see sites that have bespoke blogs. Indeed, for many reasons that I shan’t go into here (profit?), suppliers of Web sites often offer their client a bespoke blogging application.
While in some cases, such a solution may integrate better with the rest of the site, the leading blogging platforms such as WordPress and Movable Type are mature and powerful, offering just about everything you’d need. For what it’s worth, I’ve used both over a period of many years but I choose WordPress these days. Indeed my two most used blogs (Dangerous Thinking and Meals on Blogs) are both WordPress-based.
If you’re planning on using on a blog for SEO reasons, there’s one absolute killer in favour of using one of the mainstream blogging platforms – they have reliable protection against comment spam, when some of the bespoke platforms we’ve seen do not. (I’m assuming the bespoke platform will generate clean HTML, offer RSS feeds and give you comparable publishing flexibility.)
Why am I stressing comment spam protection? If you’ve not run a blog before and haven’t suffered under the onslaught of porn and dodgy pharmaceutical vendors, you may not appreciate the true implications of not having spam protection.
Earlier this year, Bad Behavior (one of the anti-spam measures I’ve experimented with) reported over 3000 attempted comment spams in just 7 days on this very blog. Think about the overhead of deleting each of those manually. I just let the software do the business.
So before you allow yourself to be lured into having a bespoke blogging package installed for you, at least be very clear you will have adequate comment spam protection. Whether I use Akismet alone, or a combination of Akismet and Bad Behavior, the result is the same – no comment spam finding its way on to this blog. And hardly any intervention required from me.
With comment spam out of the frame, it allows me to get on with blogging. I’m sure that’s what you’ll want to do with your blog, too.
Read/Write Web lists new and specialized search engines. Interestingly, they claim that each of the 100 betters Google in one particular feature. I wish them luck and eventually a significant part of the search pie. Competition is what the market needs.
Have you tried any of them?
Most people are aware these days that a blog can do some good things SEO-wise for a site.
Written properly, with interesting and valuable content, a blog can be magnet for relevant incoming links. Make no mistake, these are very valuable.
So, how do you best support your corporate or e-commerce site with a blog?:
Place the blog on your main domain – a subdirectory is fine (http://www.yourdomain.com/blog), though.
Try to avoid using a subdomain – like http://blog.yourdomain.com. Your main site won’t get all the possible value or leverage out of the links to your blog.
Don’t start your blog on another domain entirely – That means you shouldn’t use hosted services like Blogger or Typepad if you’re blogging for business reasons. I know, I know. My blog isn’t hosted on the Web Positioning Centre domain, but there is a good reason for that. Dangerous Thinking is a venerable old blog, going back more than five years and has a large number of mature links. Moving it elsewhere would mean losing them and starting again. Instead, I link back to Web Positioning Centre.
As I continue to sort out my presence online, I’ve peeled off the Food and Drink content from Dangerous Thinking, and launched Meals on Blogs at www.mealsonblogs.com.
Meals on Blogs has been going for a few weeks now, and the content works a lot better away from Dangerous Thinking‘s business focus.
Please have a look and tell me what you think.
Dualit, makers of shiny metallic kitchen stuff, came up trumps today.
Part of our espresso machine broke over the weekend, so I called the company helpline. As I fully expected, they had better things to do on a Saturday than waiting around for my call, but I did leave a message on their voice mail.
At 10:55 this morning I got a call, apologizing that they hadn’t got back to me before!
There were no questions about how long we’d had the machine, or what I was doing with it when the piece broke. Just another apology that they were waiting for the part, and a promise that they’d put one in the post just as soon as they were available. No charge.
That’s what I call customer service.
I’d certainly buy again from them – our Dualit toaster has been brilliant.
A few months ago I thought I’d found my Holy Grail of Getting Things Done. A realisation that a wiki solved many of my information handling problems, followed by a later connection with Pimki – Assaph Mehr’s potentially great cross between a wiki and PIM. A series of e-mails led to us developing an idea of how Pimki could become a brilliant framework for GTD.
I’ve been using a mixture of Palm Desktop and Pimki for the past few months, while Assaph develops Pimki 2.
Trouble is, Instiki, Pimki’s underlying wiki, has lost its focus recently. It’s getting a MySQL backend to sort out its Madeleine (sp?) storage problems, or maybe it isn’t. To be honest I’ve lost track of what is going on. Alas, it does seem there’s precious little development-wise happening, and the Instiki mailing list has become a depressing place for me as Instiki seems at best to be moving sideways.
Assaph has said he’s moving Pimki on to another platform, which is great news. But my Palm sync started getting even sicker, I was getting further and further from having even a working GTD system – let alone the one we’d discussed.
I spent a large part of a weekend looking for another wiki that would allow me to do what I wanted – have my projects, reference material and NAs all in one place. No luck. Besides, most wikis are for geeks who love doing arcane things on servers.
For some reason, I looked back at Backpack from 37 Signals and found it had moved on considerably since I had my early-adopter’s play with it some time ago. Over the past month or so, I’ve developed the best implementation of a GTD system I’ve yet had.
I started writing it up as I had a couple of requests for further details after a posted to I mailing list. Watch this space…
I’d like to wish my readers, family and friends a Happy, Healthy, Peaceful and Prosperous New Year!