seo | Ian M Rountree

After This, Therefore From This

August 2, 2011 by Ian Leave a Comment

We’ve all heard the classic form of this problem – correlation does not necessarily imply causation. But, even knowing this, how often do we fall for it?

The internet followed where ARPANET began.

The internet became a craze in the late nineties.

LiveJournal followed on the text-file blogging craze of the mid-nineties.

Facebook followed on the heels of LiveJournal, and other networking platforms.

Twitter followed Facebook.

These are some really appealing matches to make, because they appeal to our immediate, emotional logic. Of course Twitter followed Facebook – it was a stripped down version of the same thing, for basically the same purpose. But was it? Similarly, did Facebook follow any other social network before it, or was it something new, bred from similar stock?

Take it a step further – if you tweet this post, share it to your Facebook stream, or give it a +1 or a share on Google+ – does it immediately follow that my traffic will increase? Further still – if I hadn’t posted this entry, would my site be getting any traffic today at all? Not necessarily – while I’ve been on an unintentional blogging hiatus for most of July, my traffic has only dipped a small amount, and my posts have been getting shared without my involvement. I’m not the only one to see this kind of behavior – Justin Kownacki did some forensics on his blog traffic when he got back into the blogging game, finding that traffic still happened.

So why do we post new articles? Why write on blogs at all if traffic does not necessarily follow?

Because there’s no black or white; new blog articles might mean immediate explosions of traffic.

They might get shared immediately, strike a nerve, and go viral. They might also take some time to gain uptake, and become search placement assets instead of social communications assets. We might also remix them eventually, with enough input from eventual comments, and build books or education pieces or seminars out of them. There’s no end to the usefulness of a large library of media assets sitting behind your domain. This applies whether you’re a well-meaning private person, or a multinational corporation. There is always potential, when information exists, that would not have existed if the information had remained unpublished or unused.

It’s so easy to trap ourselves into thinking either post hoc ergo propter hoc never applies, or always does; never anywhere in between.

After all, if I hadn’t a very large bank of past posts – nearly 400 at the moment – the natural search traffic and subscribers I have been gaining in absentia of new writing would not have existed. The ongoing interest in the history on my site wouldn’t have spurred me into thinking it was worth taking up the torch again – and I’m betting you might be in the same situation.

It’s about taking a long view, and in some cases ignoring the immediacy of natural steps to find the roots of current situations.

Post ARPANET, ergo propter Twitter.

No More Drafts

June 1, 2011 by Ian 4 Comments

I deleted fifteen drafts from my blog this morning. Some of them, I’ve been keeping around for nearly six months. Clearly, I would never write them.

It’s liberating, every now and then, to ditch the expectational debt of having too many unfinished drafts and move on. I don’t think we give ourselves enough chances to do that.

Drafts have their place, certainly. Setting things in motion, marking down ideas – these are good practices. However, living perpetually from drafts seems to make reacting to live events hard. How can we talk about news, if our post for today is already in the queue, and we’re unwilling to shuffle the queue back because we have a schedule?

In doing the editorial and SEO work for Hard Refresh, I’m now finding that working a draft from start to finish effectively takes practice. Nic and I are getting a decent queue of articles there, but we do still have some drafts – they’re not bad things by nature, but they do suck up a lot of cycles unintentionally. Being able to call something finished shortly after starting it is important; letting your brain stew on a half-formed idea while at the same time trying to keep the original idea’s form is not.

When considering your editorial calendar, drafts can save your life. Or, they can make you completely bonkers because your half-finished ideas starve the rest of your creative process.

Some practices I’ve found to help when dealing with drafts:

Keep a list of topic ideas separate from your in-blog drafts.
Only create drafts when you have well-formed ideas, but don’t have time to write.
Write the finished article within a set period of time, or delete the draft itself.
Be willing to push the schedule of drafted posts for reactive blogging.
Mark posts in a series where appropriate, especially if you can title them as such.

Doing this for my project blogs has helped keep me significantly less stressed over publishing. While it’s led to less writing here, it’s certainly led to better writing there – and better writing is what the job’s all about.

How do you keep your sanity without completely ignoring the idea of a draft?

Why Genesis Framework Rocks

May 27, 2011 by Ian Leave a Comment

I’ve used the Genesis Framework from StudioPress as the basis for my blog for a couple of months now, and am about to finish the fourth site I’ve developed on it. I need to say this: The framework rocks. Everything from the format, to the support from StudioPress, to helpful tools people have published have helped me cut down my modification and theme building time significantly.

Genesis is slick. Genesis is smooth. And, above all, it doesn’t always look the same – even when you’re using the same elements for design.

Here are the sites I’ve now got going, built on either Genesis itself, or one of its child themes.

The Dowager Shadow - Built on Genesis Framework — The Dowager Shadow

Ian M Rountree - Built on Genesis Framework — Ian M Rountree

Hard Refresh Blog - Built on Genesis Framework — Hard Refresh

Jazmine Rhomyk Gallery - Built on Genesis Framework — Jazmine Rhomyk

Yes. I like blue. Don’t judge me.

Why did I switch from Standard Theme to Genesis Framework?

SEO options – unless you’re using plugins, it’s the bee’s knees. Seriously – beyond just being able to designate title and meta descriptions, Genesis allows for built in redirects, which is great for link blogs.
Ease of design – Spending a lot of time building sites isn’t my goal – I want to get decent looking sites up quickly, so I can start filling them in with content.
Ease of modification – The above being said, I want to be able to iterate my work quickly. If there’s a feature I want to add, or a design change I want to make, I want to be able to make it on the fly. Genesis allows for that.
Updates and notifications – Really. What other theme tells you, on its own, when it’s ready to get upgraded?
The Showcase – totally for bragging rights. There are a lot of awesome examples in the SutioPress showcase of well-built Genesis framework powered websites. Two – and soon, I hope, three – of mine are there.

Genesis Framework can help wordpress become a proper CMS very swiftly.

Many of StudioPress’ turn-key themes make developing non-standard blogs a breeze. One of the troubles most people see with using WordPress in general is that so many WP-based websites look… Well, like WordPress websites. Getting away from the usual columned layout, and adding some flair is one of the many places where Genesis is a viking.

Check Genesis Framework out – it’s well worth it if you spend a lot of time working with wordpress.

5 Ways to Make Every Blog Post Count

April 25, 2011 by Ian 3 Comments

Bloggers toss out a lot of content.

We’re the serial monogamists of the writing world – forever working on a new article, loving it until we publish the next one, and moving on in an endless succession of text production. Our job, as Merlin Mann so eloquently puts it, is to “make the clacketty noise on our keyboards until the right words fall out.” The trouble with this is that eventually, even the best words don’t feel right, and we lose ourselves in the production.

“Oh,” we say, “I don’t really have to put the time into this post, because the next one will be published tomorrow.”

Bullpucky.

In Cranking, an essay on failing to prioritize a book on setting priorities, Merlin talks about the manner in which he’s developing his work for the book he’s under contract to deliver. He’s struggling, in part because he’s not an author. He’s a writer, sure, but as we’ve discussed before, authorship and writing are different things. Merlin’s having the issue many transitioning tradespeople have – he’s trying to apply the method that works in one medium to another, and failing (as he says, not me). Does this mean his book will suck? Quite the opposite – should it ever be released, I think it’ll end up being a canonical example of what productivity books are for; helping people get their work done better, quicker, sooner.

Why is this a big deal for bloggers?

Because I’m in the same boat, and I think a lot of you are too. While some people are diving back into the things that work for them, there’s a feeling that not everything we do actually counts. One of the thing that I read from Merlin’s essay, and some of the reactions to it, is that while prioritization is key, making the work you actually do more meaningful is a great way to avoid burnout, while being more productive.

So let’s talk about some of the things you can do – for yourself – which might just help keep you in the zone, and make sure the posts you publish are worth your time.

1. Limit the number of categories on your blog.

When you force yourself to write only about stated subjects, you automatically increase the likelihood that your articles will be more impressive over time. By keeping yourself to a strict regime of topics, and retaining an open approach to themes that address those topics, you’re going to do better work. If even a cinnamon toast can come back to creative work, for example, you’re on the right track.

2. Research is your friend.

Do your discovery! While not ever post requires fact-checking, looking into your subject matter can almost always provide some additional resources. Maybe someone’s already related food to sales pages, for example, and you’re writing the same theme from an entirely different voice. Referencing existing material can be as helpful for fact checking as it can be for making sure you don’t sound too old hat.

3. Make sure you’re filling in all the fields.

Search engine optimization aside, it’s generally a good idea to go for completeness. Have you referenced everything you need to? If you’re in an SEO-ready blogging environment, are you entering your own titles and meta descriptions? Have you tagged and categorized the blog post properly – or are you relying on your defaults to cover these things for you? Just like you can’t steal third base from first, you can’t expect a blog post to do well in search without some tender care. And, as much as we love social media, it really does contribute to the per-post feeling of ephemera.

4. Make every possible connection.

Cross-linking posts, and linking out to other bloggers, is important; links are part of how the web works, not to mention being important for SEO. At their core, however, links are a great way to expose new readers to your existing material – which will help you feel like the things you’ve done in the past actually mean something. More than just increasing the value of the work you do today, cross-linking your blog posts can also increase the value of the work you did last month, last year, or even further in the past.

5. Ask questions.

Unless you’re writing a research paper, don’t be afraid to leave things open to interpretation, and encouraging discussion. Even if you end up with an in situ comment count of zero, you might be causing ripples – giving people something to respond to can help then find their way as well, and may end up in some ancillary social sharing, a trackback, or other forms of off-site engagement.

Back to you – what have we missed?

There are a lot of ways to make your blog posts more effective – what works for you? How do you maintain interest, without feeling overwhelmed by the inner editor, or worse, by the inner apathetic? How do you make your work count for more than you once thought it might?

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;

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.

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.