Ian M Rountree

Copywriter, Project Manager, Digital Marketing

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Archives for December 2010

SEO for Bloggers – Simple Discovery Tricks

December 21, 2010 by Ian Leave a Comment

One of the things analytics nuts love to obsess over is the effectiveness of our posts.

Which ones have the most clout, where did they get it from? Is it better to have more comments, or more tweets? Does traffic help?

The answer is yes; all of this helps. Comments, traffic, tweets, inbound links – there are a lot of things that give pages weight. But, as our sites get more traffic and tweets and so on – how do we tell, in an ongoing way, which of our pages is doing better than the others over all?

Here’s a trick; do a google search for the headline of your blog. In my case, it’s my name.so I searched, no-caps, no-quotes. Here’s what I got;

Google search snippet for "Ian M Rountree"

Interesting, yes? A post about Google Buzz (which happens to be riddled with musical references) that got a sidelong mention on an industry podcast, followed by one about Facebook which has seen a decent amount of mentions, followed by the most spam-addled article on my site.

What’s missing; the most mentioned post I’ve ever had, the most commented post I’ve ever hard, and the most linked-to post in my archive.

Then, I tried something different. Because we’re looking specifically for my site, rather than the various higher-powered social media sites carrying my name through my profile, I searched for my name – and added my domain behind it.

Google Experiment - "Ian M Rountree" ianmrountree.com

Notable: the layout is much the same, but now carries some additions; namely, the Screwdriver article which is still my top search driving piece, my most recent non-throw-away post (this review of the awesome Standard Theme 2), and a very thoroughly-commented on post about Google and China. All of these have seen strong authority signals – but none of them have had the same mix of reaction.

By searching your way through your Google Analytics (you DO use an analytics program, right? Don’t make Uncle Avinash angry), and your blog’s admin interface, you should be able to pick out the weight and mix of things lending authority to the top pages these kinds of searches return.

Verdict? The mysterious ether powering your page ranks relies on a clearly diverse mix of authority signals.

The things we bloggers think of as clear indications of “victorious posts” are not the same as what search considers a winning mix of authority. Taking advantage of easy metrics and hacking your analytics are both important to figure out what’s working from more angles than just the social media connection.

Now – grain of salt time. A one-off experiment like this tells is very little, other than that some unexpected pages have high authority metrics. What will prove more interesting is, in 2 months, I plan to repeat the experiment with some better recorded metrics about the posts I’ve written between now and then. If the same unexpected results appear again, then we’ll really have something to think about.

Your assignment; replicate my experiment, report what you find. You’ll probably be surprised.

Filed Under: Content Strategy Tagged With: blog measurement, blogs, ego search, google, google analytics, hack analytics, search engine optimization, seo, seo for bloggers, success

Examples of Progress – TRON Legacy

December 18, 2010 by Ian Leave a Comment

This is not a review.

I grew up with TRON being a massive force of innovation in the video industry. The ideas it presented – the way it presented them… It was a fantastic movie, for its time.

Many of my fellow Earthlings (that’s the Modern Earth Web Design team) and I attended one of the first showings of TRON: Legacy last night.

It was geeky. It was beautiful. It was a perfect extension and continuation of the original.

So, in honour of this, and of Video Saturday, here are the trailers for both of these movies. Enjoy!

TRON – Released July 9th, 1982

TRON Legacy – Released December 17th, 2010

How far we’ve come.

Filed Under: Personal Tagged With: disney, i feel old, modern earth, movies, reviews, tron, upgrades

FYI – Going Offline (Temporarily)

December 16, 2010 by Ian Leave a Comment

Holidays!

Everyone takes vacations, right? Well, I’m taking one – from blogging. I’ll be back at everything as of January 10th, 2011.

My family and my work both need my full attention. So I’m going to give them all of my time, for the next three weeks.

I’ve got a few posts in the can already, which will be going out as they’re scheduled, but if you see very little reactivity – that’s why. No #blogchat until mid-January. No commentary, except in my spare cycles.

I’m still around. Just incredibly busy. Find me on Twitter. Comment sometime, and I’ll reply.

Otherwise… See you on the other side!

Image by Lorna Philips.

Filed Under: Announcements

My 11 for 11 Post at Thoughtwrestling!

December 16, 2010 by Ian

While I have been very lax in contributing to Thoughtwrestling recently (sorry, everyone!) I whipped up a short list for the 11 for 2011 series.

Check out 11 Words to remember for 2011

Filed Under: Announcements Tagged With: blog expat, thoughtwrestling

Video Saturdays – Outcomes vs Effects

December 11, 2010 by Ian Leave a Comment

There are two ways to approach anything:

Either build a system so simply that there are no obvious flaws, or build a system with such complexity that there are no obvious flaws.

Take a gander at this Rube Goldberg machine.

It pours a bottle of beer into a mug. Simple, right? But that’s the outcome – a full glass. The operations are high in count, complex in their appearance, and all very precise in their execution. They all contribute to a simple outcome – so most of them are, really, unnecessary, aren’t they?

But what if we consider their explicit value, rather than just the explicit outcome? You can hear the people laughing – you might laugh yourself. You’ll never drink that mug of beer, but you can still enjoy the pouring of it in a way that far outstrips just watching someone fill their cup.

There’s value there… Right?

Filed Under: Content Strategy

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