Tag Archives: content

How To

Making it to the first page of Google search results

As I checked my traffic stats over the past few days, I noticed a steady stream of traffic to my reviews of the WD My Book World and Pro Edition II hard drives. I was pleasantly surprised, but couldn’t figure out why. Other than publishing the reviews on my blog, I hadn’t done any sort of promotion. No one had linked to them so far (from what I could tell), yet the traffic was there. It wasn’t an outrageous amount of traffic, but nice, steady and regular. That sort of traffic usually only comes from one source: search engines.

I checked, and sure enough, my two reviews had made it to the first page of Google search results — the dream of any content creator. Here’s a search for WD My Book Pro Edition II, and for WD My Book World Edition II. Not sure how long they’ll stay there, but it’s really nice to see blog content make it to the front page of Google search, and even better, it’s a treat to see my own content make it there. 🙂

I thought I’d check on some other popular content and see how it ranks in Google’s search results. I logged into my FeedBurner account and looked at the most popular pages for the past 30 days. Here are the top ten pages at ComeAcross, in descending order:

In truth, I’m not sure just what it takes to get to the front page at Google. Let’s just say that it involves a fair amount of chance along with the the hard work. I steer clear of dirty SEO tricks like keyword seeding and other such nasty stuff. Also, I haven’t really spent a lot of time optimizing ComeAcross with honest SEO techniques. Other than using WordPress, which has certain built-in SEO advantages, and trying to write good content, I don’t do much to ensure that my posts get good ranks in the search engines. That’s why I find it refreshing to see that content is still king, and as long as one’s design isn’t egregiously awful, you’ll still get indexed just fine and bubble toward the top as more people find your information interesting.

Don’t assume though that I do nothing to promote my work. Remember, I just finished writing about how I promote it using Twitter and Jaiku or other microblogging services yesterday. Here’s part one and part two of that discussion. I also have other tools that I use, though I don’t use them often. I depend on my readers to do that — or rather, I prefer to let my content grow in popularity organically, without “cheating the system”. It’s probably a good idea that I discuss this in more detail in a future post — perhaps next week.

I should also say that I’m not dismissing SEO. It has its value, and if done right, can help push content right to the top. Some people swear by it, and have seen their traffic double. I should probably look into it in more detail at some point in the future. And good web design is crucial. Design may not necessarily matter to search engines (to some extent) but it sure matters to people. If your site’s design is ugly or hard to use, don’t expect many people to read through your content or return to it. By the same token, good web design alone won’t draw the traffic. Good content will do it. Keep that in mind, and thrive.

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Reviews

The music of Franz von Suppé

By coincidence, I heard two pieces written by Franz von SuppĂ© within the last 24 hours, and realized he’s always been one of my favorite composers, although I never knew his name. If you’ve watched cartoons, then you’ve definitely heard his Light Cavalry Overture, and chances are you’ve also heard his Jolly Robbers Overture. They’re both popular pieces, both are fast-paced, and both will make you smile when you hear them.

Franz von Suppé had to have been an optimistic, contented man to have written such beautiful music. There was no mistake in his choice of career. After all, he turned down both law and medicine for music. His father wanted him to study law in Padua, and his mother wanted him to study medicine in Vienna. I heard this on WETA yesterday, as they introduced his Light Cavalry Overture.

If you aren’t a fan of his music already, try it out. You’ll likely become a fan. And if you’re in the area, tune in to WETA. They have some pretty cool music, and the little biographic capsules they offer about composers are pretty nice as well.

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Thoughts

Keeping up with the news

It’s so easy to spread yourself thin these modern times… You’ve got news up the wazoo, 24×7, from a gazillion sources. On top of that, you’ve got blogs, with experts expounding on the virtues of this and that, and why it should matter to you, and you’ve got feeds of all sorts you can subscribe to, and podcasts you can listen to, and videos you can watch on these humongous video sites like YouTube and Google Video and Revver and plenty more. If that’s not enough, you can watch tens, if not hundreds, of TV channels, and the programming variety just boggles the mind.

Trouble is, most of this is garbage, and you can’t keep up with all of it. As addictive as it is to read a ridiculous amount of news, and be at the top of the game on many subjects, it’s wearisome, stressful and exhausting. It’s not seldom that I found myself bleary-eyed and listless after catching up on the news these past several years. And yet, I still didn’t learn my lesson, and wanted more, more, more. Well, you can’t have it all. It’s humanly impossible to stay plugged into many sources at once, and expect to get anything else done. You end up becoming part of the pipe, unable to contribute, overwhelmed by the information, receptive but useless, a consumer, not a producer.

I suppose if that’s all you want to be, that’s fine, but I’d rather make content, not consume it. I want to leave a mark, not go through life eating, sleeping and watching TV or reading the news. More than that, and I suppose on a more basic level as well, I want to get some work done, not waste my day away. So, for the umpteenth time, I’ve come to the realization that I need to cut down on my news addiction. It’s good to stay informed, but it’s better to stay alert. And it’s even better to get my plans accomplished. Which for me includes work, consulting, photography and blogging on weekdays. On weekends, more consulting, photography and blogging, reviews and sometimes, podcasts. And somewhere in there, I’ve got to squeeze in downtime with my lovely wife and a movie then and now. Not to mention that I’ve got other projects waiting on the back burner.

The thing is, reading the news in itself doesn’t take that much time. At most, it takes one to one and half hours per day. I don’t think that’s a lot of time. But, it IS a lot of information. And information processing wears you down, particularly when it comes from many sources. If you don’t believe me, try picking up a few tens of books, and rapid-read a few pages from each. See how you feel at the end of that little power session! When we read the news, it’s the same thing. We don’t notice it these days because it’s so easy to subscribe to a ridiculous number of various sources in news or feed readers. They aggregate all of that content for us in one place, and we just browse through and read. But it’s all written by different people, on different subjects, in different styles, with differing levels of emotion. Our brain has to adapt to each style of writing and process all of that information in a short amount of time.

Add to that the emotion we spend if we get worked up about an article. I’m guilty of that a lot. If I read someone’s getting abused somewhere, I’ll get mad at that injustice. Some days that anger will affect me for more than half a days, and truth be told, there isn’t a darned thing I can do to help that person or people other than share that article with my friends or on my blog. The amount of help that provides is questionable and depends on the situations. Some are helped by more media attention, and some aren’t. So what’s the good of getting worked up over them? I don’t know. I do know I can’t help it, so the only way for me to stay focused on what I need to do is to avoid those articles. Otherwise, I end up shooting myself in the foot and I can’t meet my goals.

So while it’s not about the time, although it’s nice to gain an extra hour here and there, it’s about the effect of the news on you or me. That’s why I’ve already started to pare down on the amount of news sources I read. I’ve cut a few out today, and will continue to cut them down till I arrive at a good balance between quality of information and time spent reading it. And I encourage you to do the same. Don’t think I hold myself immune from this. If you find that I don’t add value to your day, then unsubscribe. Far be it from me to waste your time and keep you from doing something useful.

Here’s to a productive use of our time here on earth, brief as it is!

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Thoughts

Here's to a few milestones

This weekend, I (or rather my photos) reached an important milestone. I/they crossed over 100,000 views. That’s amazing as far as I’m concerned. In the relatively short span of four months, I got to the point where I’m getting more than 1,000 views per day, and have now reached 100,000 views. It was just back in October that I passed 10,000 views, and here I am today.

I’m really happy with the progress I’m making, and even more than that, I’m happier that my photographic skills are visibly improving. I’ve learned so much in these past four months, and have benefited so much from interacting with fellow photographers, that my success is doubly sweet.

This next “milestone” is somewhat dubious, but it’s worth mentioning. A few days ago, I reached over 30,000 spam comments, right here on my blog. Yeah, it’s disgusting. But, none of them made it to the live site. All of them got caught by Akismet, my WordPress spam prevention plugin. I featured Akismet in this post I wrote at the start of January, and I meant every word I said about it. The only improvement I could make to it is a CAPTCHA. I find that more and more spam comments make it to the Moderation Queue instead of the Spam folder these days. Spammers are either using fresh batches of IP addresses or finding ways to sneak past Akismet’s spam filters. Still, NONE of them make it to the blog.

While I’m on the subject, I’d like to reiterate my very ardent wish that ALL spammers (in particular sploggers, spam commenters and feed scrapers) be flogged publicly. I would gladly volunteer to perform this duty myself. I think they all deserve it for poisoning search engine results, making blogs uglier, decreasing my content’s rank, and littering the Internet. I don’t know how likely this is to happen, but a fellow can dream, can’t he?

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A bit of site maintenance

I made time tonight to do a few things that I’ve wanted to get done for some time:

  • Introduce a new section called Faves, which displays my shared items from Google Reader. This is where I’ll showcase the posts I find really interesting and worthwhile to read from the various blogs and feeds that I’m subscribed to. I’ve been sharing blog items in Google Reader for months, and until now, they only showed up in a little box in my sidebar, but I wanted to present them a little better by dedicating an entire site section to them. They will all have links right back to the original items, and I’ve also included Feed Flares (through FeedBurner) that will allow you to subscribe to their particular feeds, Digg them and save them to del.icio.us right from the site. Yes, you’ll be digg-ing and bookmarking the original items, not my site/feed, not to worry about that. The intent is to promote these stories and their authors.
  • I did away with the Mobile and News sections. Judging by the stats, very few people were using them.

While I’m on the subject of site updates, I also wanted to let you know that I put together a unified/single feed for all of my content. I used the My Networks feature of my FeedBurner account (gotta love them!) and put together a single feed that gathers my ComeAcross, Zooomr, YouTube, del.icio.us, and Twitter content and packages it in nice little, eatable nibblets — well, they’re XML nibblets anyway. Rick, thank you so much for telling me how to do this! And, just in case you were wondering, I didn’t include my three Dignoscentia feeds. Since this will be a commercialized feed, it just didn’t feel right to include content I didn’t want to commercialize at all.

And yes, you can still subscribe to individual feeds for all of this stuff. Just navigate to the various site sections using the menu at the top of this page, and choose whatever feed you want. Not sure yet if I’ll feature this single feed anywhere on the site (other than this post), because I don’t want to confuse people. Many still don’t know what feeds are (sad, but true), so I’ll just wait a little longer and give it some more thought. Want to know the fun part? The URL for this unified feed is: http://feeds.feedburner.com/Raoul. Beautiful, isn’t it? 🙂

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