There is a lot of strategy behind choosing your URL. It needs to make sense for your website or blog. It needs to be short. It needs to be available. It is best to be a “.com” to be remembered. It should avoid the use of too many dashes “-”. It needs to be memorable.

So, with all of this, how does SEO play out? It’s a tough battle. You have to balance your consumers with the search engines… oh, and also play the game of trying to find that perfect URL. I’ve spent hours at it before. It can drive you nuts. But, despite this, do not forget SEO.

When I came across blogginghelp.com, I snapped it up. Why? Because I knew that “blogging help” was going to be a strong search phrase. And an easy site name to remember. So, here it is. I lucked out. But I also played the game well.

Over at seroundtable.com, they talk about another element. Length of URL. I try to stick below two words when choosing my actual domain name, but for SEO purposes it’s also important to remember that the URL on your blog will have a ton more attached to it in permalink format. Here’s an easy rule of thumb to help you out. The most important element is the name of the article, not it’s location in your directory.

So, make sure your permalink includes the /name-of-article and consider the /year/month/day portion optional.

This will hopefully ensure that the URL is picked up for the right reasons by the engines, and easily, but it also makes the crawling path easier for the bots. The difference it will make is minute, if anything, but it also makes for a nicer looking permalink, so it’s a good little tip.

Technorati Tags: blogging, url, seo, blogs, websites, domains

A domain name search tool that could have saved me a ton of headache recently.

It is suggestion based - will give you available domains based on a set of topic keywords or a sentence. Simple interface. Very Google-esque

Try it - DomainsBot

Via Darren Rowse

Darren talked a while back about various SEO techniques you can employ. I thought I’d share a few I’ve found useful.

Inbound Links are the most important factor to consider. But, you cannot control it. And asking for it is a no-no (most of the time).

How do you get people to vote for you (link to you)? My tack - write good stuff. Then communicate. Let IM be your friend. Most bloggers share a heck of a lot of personal information. If you like what someone writes, comment. That is a basic step. Email is the next. Get that rapport going. Once these relationships are in place, you have someone interested in what you write and in you - and that’s a powerful thing.

Other tips from Darren:

I would recommend that if you write a quality post on a topic that you know will interest another blogger that it might be worth shooting them a short and polite email letting them know of your post. Don’t be offended if they don’t link up, but you might just find that they do and that in addition to the direct traffic that the link generates that it helps build your own page rank in the search engines.

Directories - Another way to generating inbound links is to submit your links to directories. I know of webmasters who swear by the benefits of such a strategy - the first thing that they do when starting a new site is to do the rounds of directories - submitting links to key pages with appropriate keywords in the links. There are loads of directories out there - many of which offer a free submission…

Inter-link your Blogs - Increasingly bloggers are starting or joining blog networks to enjoy the benefits of multiple sites and writers working together…

Great tips for websites and blogs alike. Be you. Write what drives you. Have fun. Talk. Blogging is as much about social networking as it is about the stuff that gets written.

So, I’m giving Google Sitemaps a shot. I have some new blogs which may or may not be sandboxed, or just may not be fully indexed. So, I decided to try a Google product to get that indexing rolling along.

Google Sitemaps is Google’s way of jumpstarting the indexing process. Instead of just coming across your website or blog through some other link, this gives them direct information of when to go. For Google, this means more content. For publishers - perhaps faster indexing, shorter sandbox. Who knows.

Search engines such as Google discover information about your site by employing software known as “spiders” to crawl the web. Once the spiders find a site, they follow links within the site to gather information about all the pages. The spiders periodically revisit sites to find new or changed content.

Google Sitemaps is an experiment in web crawling. By using Sitemaps to inform and direct our crawlers, we hope to expand our coverage of the web and speed up the discovery and addition of pages to our index.

Adding blogs to Google Sitemap is the easiest method of all, since blogs can be easily discovered by following links and have dynamic content. So, all you need to do (basically) is sign into Sitemaps with your Google ID, add all the blog files (xml, rtf, feed) to the list, then wait for Google to visit. It took a day or so for them to visit all 10 of my blogs, but now they are all in there.

According to the Sitemaps page that was created for me (kind of like an account management page), I’ve been indexed by Google on all blogs (old and new) for about 4 hours. For the older blogs, this is not really important. Google crawls the site a lot since I update a lot. For the newer sites, it’s good. I’ve been crawled, but the frequency is low. Now, I can manually force a crawl from the Sitemap page. Not bad.

Will it create any difference in the frequency of crawl? In full indexing? In being sandboxed? It’s too early to tell. But, when I know, I’ll let you know.

One thing to note - there was an error in Google having a look at my Drupal-based site. It’s the one site where we don’t produce the code (Drupal does) so it’s going to be a pain to find out where the stumbling block was. Stumbling blocks are not good because they can result in only partial indexing.

So, give it a shot. Let me know. Anyone have any more tangible results than these?

Technorati Tags: google sitemaps, google, sitemaps, SEO, sandbox, indexing, crawling

There is nothing worse than bad PR and bad email marketing. I’ll admit that effective email marketing requires a lot of data capture, interaction and real 2 way value. Not an easy task, to say the least. However, it really irks me when it’s obvious no effort has been put into building that relationship with me. Why send me email if relationships are not what you want?

Well, here is my part of the dialogue. To Insider Pages: your email marketing sucks.

• You sent me spam. I did not ask for it.
• You capitalized on the buzz around Martha Stewart in a lame attempt to get my interest.
• You spent more time designing your newsletter than writing it.
• You don’t know I blog. You’ve never read my blog.
• You could have asked me to help you market your product. You assumed I would, but I won’t.
• You thank me for using your product. I never have.
• You send me email about Yoga. Never tried it.
• You don’t ask me to engage. The email is push only - you don’t want to hear back from me for anything.
• You don’t have a blog.
• You don’t use RSS to disseminate local reviews.
• You’ll likely never read this.

Don’t send a blogger an email you don’t want published. It’s going to be something I do from now on out. If you want me to try your product, ask me. Engage with me. I likely will. Don’t spam me.

Rules of the blogosphere:

1. Listen.

2. Engage.

3. Respond.

Let’s see if this gets their attention.

How not to do email marketing:

Martha’s Misfortune:

Not Using Insider Pages

Dear Arieanna,

“If everyone in the U.S. were to walk briskly 30 minutes a day, the incidence of many chronic diseases would be cut 30% to 40%.”

- TIME Magazine

Nice statistic, but what are you going to do about it? With Atkins filing for bankruptcy, it’s obvious that grapefruit and low carb diets are fads that fade. Our members know that it’s fitness, not just dieting that matters. Want a gym where you’re not just another body? Michelle B. of San Francisco compares her gym to Cheers:



“ This is a neighborhood friendly fitness center, where people really do know everybody’s name. A very clean facility and the atmosphere is very personable. ”



Celebrities will do anything to get their fitness fix. Case in point: Martha Stewart. Despite house arrest, Martha snuck to her yoga class, assuring three more weeks of home confinement. Perhaps Martha should have had the Yoga class come to her? Kim R. of Seattle has the perfect solution for Martha’s unique situation.



“ YogaTeam has a few options for your company and can teach an excellent yoga class anywhere from a cafeteria to a hallway to someone’s private office…They’re also available for company retreats and private tea parties at your office or home.”



Had Martha used Insider Pages , she may have been able to avoid more hard time in the slammer..er her luxurious Bedford, NY estate. Guess that anklet has been weighing her down. Take advantage of your freedom and get walking!

Thanks for making Insider Pages the best way to find local businesses!

Jen B.,

Your Neighborhood Insider

Technorati Tags: spam, email marketing, bad pr, pr, email, worst practices

DMNews has the scoop that the Google AdSense program is testing topic targeting in order to make the ads more effective for advertisers and publishers.

AdSense is testing a program with a few publishers, letting them send more “signals” about their Web site, to better tailor ads. Though AdSense already uses signals based on the content of Web sites, such as headlines and font sizes, to generate ads, this would let advertisers tailor ads based on their users’ demographics and other signals, which are yet to be determined.

This is, partly, topic specific information. I would tell them I had a coffee blog for Vancouver Coffee - easy enough. For this or for Blogaholics, I might want to relay more pertinent information such as demographics. Ads for this site revolve around starting up blogs, but most of you already have blogs, so that’s not very effective. But if I could relay information I know about my readers and about those who find me through search engines, I could get better results.

The program is in beta right now, but it sounds good. It will need high level fraud protection to function properly, but it has legs.

There is also a test going on that allows advertisers to more than double the text included in the ad. Interesting to see how that would work. Would they pay more per click since it chews up more room? Who knows. Would it improve CTR? No idea. It would be rather cluttered, though.

Via ProBlogger

Feedster has answered the Calacanis Challenge and come up with the Feedster Top 500 for August, 2005. The announced:

Today, Feedster launched the FEEDSTER Top 500, a ranking of the most interesting and important blogs in the US. The ranking is achieved by taking into account factors such as the number of inbound links over time; if the blog has been recently updated; and the elimination of obvious non-blogs that have appeared on other top-blog lists. [bolding mine]

Ok, first, why in the US? Why the restrictor? Especially since it was not effective, and blogs from all over are included. Why were blogs eliminated for appearing on other lists? That biases the list. And obvious top-bloggers are included, so how was it determined who would go and who would stay? Using inbound links and recent updates in no way eliminates the bias determined from the older bloggers - it’s the same metrics.

“We left out professional news sites, aggregation systems, and some fairly static web sites that happened to have feeds but don’t ‘feel bloggy,’” says Mr. Johnson. “This sort of filtering is a different screen than what we use to categorize news versus blogs in Feedster search and is much more subjective. Our first iteration of this list solves the staleness problems and not-a-blog problems that others have faced.”

Well, not completely. The determination of what is a blog and what is news, is, as stated, arbitrary. Would I count Boing Boing as a news site or a blog? I’d be borderline on that one, but would definitely think it more news than blog based on the volume. And DeviantART doesn’t seem anything like a blog to me.

The list is indeed longer and perhaps more diverse due to this, but the metrics of the list are still the same. From this, I don’t think the list lives up to my expectations or those of others. Perhaps if a step had been added to add the description of the blog or the topic categories, it would prove useful. If diversity was a goal, as stated, then it must be described. Looking at names of blogs does not tell unfamiliar readers that the blogs are diverse in topics - the names are often arbitrary.

Read more of my comments and suggestions on Blogaholics.

Via Read/Write Web

Update: Scott Rafer notes that the inclusion of “US” in the press release was his mistake and is not actually a part of the list. The wiki URL has been corrected from Scott’s post.

Technorati Tags: feedster, top 500, calacanis, feedster top5 00, lists, a lists, top blogs

A couple great new blogging tools: King Ping and Talk Digger

New Ping Service - King Ping. King Ping was developed in response to a time when Ping-O-Matic wasn’t working and Frédérick Giasson really wanted to ping the search engines to submit his stuff.

As far as I can tell, it’s a great service. I received fewer submit errors using King Ping than I have with others, so that made life simple. As far as I can tell, there is no manual way to ping without going to the site, but perhaps we’ll see that in a future release.

Anyway, give it a shot.

Frédérick also created the new Talk Digger program, which is a great way to see who is talking about you and what you write. It looks at the major search engines to see the number of inbound links (and where from), trends, and other interesting stats. Better yet - you can get results via RSS. The interface could use some sprucing up, but the results are pretty good.

Technorati Tags: king ping, pinging, ping-o-matic, ping services, blogging tools, metrics, rss search, search, talk digger, trending, technorati

Hill & Knowlton have a new blog policy set to embrace employee blogging in the right way.

The new employee blogs will be embraced under the name of “Collective Conversation: Hill & Knowlton’s professional blogging community,” with this preface.

Like many other companies, we believe that blogs have the potential to become powerful communications tools. We have created this community to give our consultants the opportunity to participate in the blogosphere, to listen to and learn from our audiences, and to contribute their own vast insight and experience on topics related to our industry.

Whilst the blogs within this community are written “professionally”, the views expressed by the authors remain their own and do not necessarily reflect the views of the company.

All of the blogs are linked to centrally with a description. If you follow the links, you’ll see interesting tabular representations of the blogs, the number of posts, number of comments, team vs. individual, and the overall pride the company is taking in highlighting and supporting their bloggers.

Here is the aforementioned policy:

* I will acknowledge and correct mistakes promptly
* I will preserve the original post, using notations to show where I have made changes
* I will never delete a post
* I will not delete comments unless they are spam or off-topic
* I will disclose conflicts of interest (including client relationships) where I am able to do so
* I will not publish anything that breaches my existing employment contract
* I will distinguish between factual information/commentary and advertising
* I will never publish information I know to be inaccurate
* I will disagree with other opinions respectfully
* I will link to online references and original source materials directly
* I will strive for high quality with every post - including basic spellchecking
* I will write deliberately and with accuracy
* I will reply to emails and comments when appropriate, and do so promptly
* I will restrict my posting to professional topics
* I will write on a regular basis, at least once each week

Why is this good? It’s open. It’s brief. It’s clear. And it’s easy to follow.

Take this. Modify it. Make it your own.

Via Buzz Marketing with Blogs

Technorati Tags: hill & knowlton, blogging, business, professional blogging, blog policy, revolution

Google news has opened the door to syndicate results. Each news page and news category contains a link for feeds in RSS or Atom. Keyword results are also now syndicated.

I am especially happy about the keyword syndication and have been waiting for it. I subscribe to a whole ton of keywords/key phrases for the many blogs I write on. However, some topics are tricky, and searches of PubSub, Technorati and others often yields spam blogs (arg) or irrelevant content.

For example, a search for “coffee” on Technorati (search/tag) is something I’m very interested in for my coffee blog. On the search side, I get every comment made about having coffee in the morning or jumping off to a cafe. On the tag side, I get all the blogs I already subscribe to. So, nothing new. Nothing relevant. However, if we jump over to Google News now, the search yields some good stuff - some studies, news, press releases and market changes - all of which yield new fodder for my blog.

The downside: the feeds look like crap and there is no way to change it. Small summary only, including links to all “related” items. I agree the latter is great, so I don’t get the same story a million times, but I really do like my full text.

Here is what a single feed item looks like:

Via Steve Rubel and Blog Herald

Technorati Tags: Google, RSS, Atom, Feeds, Syndication, News

Chris Pirillo has a funny post on how not to get fired for blogging. Pretty sure some would be good strategies. No pub sub is going to pull up the misspelled company name, after all. Granted, that provides someone else in the company has to know about blogs and care about the company’s place in the blogosphere.

Here are my favourite tips:

10. Cats. Write about cats. A lot.

9. Always mispell your company’s name, just in case someone else is savvy enough to use (a) a search engine or (b) a keyboard.

8. When you talk about your co-workers, pretend you’re writing about a magical far away land of gnomes. Give them names such as “Whitey the Clumsy” or “Snitchbug.”

4. Learn to love garlic, as it will repel pesky co-workers (as well as the ocassional vampire).

Technorati Tags: pirillo, blogging, business, fired, cats

Tris was one of the lucky ones to break the release of the new Blogrolling Hot 500. This comes as a result of all the buzz about lists lately. Heck, I’ve even been buzzing myself.

Jason Calacanis set out asking for the top 500 blogs out there, and this is one of the contenders to win his load of cash.

The Hot 500 is a doable challenge out there for any blogger. You can make it on. And it’s not too hard. Those at the bottom only have one link - we can all get that!

I am not going to say this is the solution to the list issue. It’s not. It still contains bias and it still isn’t topic specific or with descriptive information to help you navigate. After all, the list is there for others to benefit from. It’s not enough any more to just listen to the “cool” people - we want useful, valuable content in the area we want to know about.

Anyway, have a scan of the list. It’s more useful in some ways than the Technorati Top 100.

Technorati Tags: lists, top 100, top 500, hot 500, blogrolling, calacanis

BlogHer Session: Blogging for Business

Speakers: Lisa Meyers Brown, Susan Getgood, Christine Halvorson, Mary Smaragdis

Flickr pictures

How to be successful:

1. Define your topic

2. Hit an emotional chord, not just intellectual ones

3. Use banners to your advantage to grow your traffic

4. PR works

5. Maybe ignore the ROI and focus instead on changing attitudes not sales

6. Corporate culture must foster trust and internal dialogue

7. Have a policy

8. If you don’t want it to be in a press release, don’t put it on a blog

9. Be risk tolerant - goes with trust

10. High level executive support

11. Be open to the value of community

12. Be willing to let go of some editorial control

13. Show you are committed to it

14. Keep the motivation high, and this can include helping with topics

15. Write about what you know (topic and opinion)

16. If you allow employees to blog, allow them to do it whenever with the caveat that the rest of what they do needs to be done

17. Speak to your niche community of readers, if you know who they are. Otherwise be more broad.

18. What is your mission? Stay true to it

19. Is it a product blog? An ‘on the scene’ blog?

20. Find the great writers in your company, no matter what they do

21. Do not be afraid of having opinions.

22. Express honest opinions on competitors, but don’t push it

Who should do it? You, your employees or (ack) your customers? Strategy comes into play here, of course. You can also do all three.

If you have evangelist customers, ask them to be a part of a customer blog. They must be customers present online, of course, and this is especially true if fan sites build up. You also must make it fun and easy for your bloggers to write. After teaching them how to do it, perhaps, you can also provide inside scoops and help interaction build through comments. You can also engage with fan sites, rather than starting up all new customer blogs. It need not be controlled within to filter your news.

Stonyfield Farms blogging came about after the CEO worked on the Howard Dean campaign and saw the benefits of blogging.

BlogHer Live tracking page

Technorati Tags: blogher, bloghercon