Anyone who’s serious about blogging – regardless of what it is they blog about – has found themselves consumed in the business of analyzing traffic. If not financial reasons or effective political messaging, mere vanity compels us to find out more about the people who visit our pages, especially since there are so many people who view blog after blog without commenting or contributing.
But between your web-host’s analytic software, log files, link popularity checks and a whole host of other sources, you’d think that getting to know your audience would be a lot less difficult than it’s proven to be. [...]
I’ve found this very annoying, myself: Google has indexed my RSS feeds, thus pulling some searchers into unexpected directions. I’m sure I don’t need to tell most people who concern themselves with SEO: when people end up somewhere they don’t want to be, they don’t look deeper and they don’t come back. They just leave. Joost de Valk of SEO Egghead proposes the following intriguing solution:
SEO Egghead by Jaimie Sirovich » Noindex, follow for RSS Feeds?
I won’t go in to why search engines seems to be indexing feeds — fact is: they do. The feed for my personal [...]
Many of us have a natural aversion to using things like link TITLE tags or ALT tags for images as ways of enhancing the SEO benchmark of our websites. This is owing in large part to the fact that those attributes have so often been manipulated by the “Black Hats” among us that we presume those things will either be ignored or penalized.
But even though there is a long history of abuse, that does not mean that simply employing these attributes automatically means Google penalties. The fact is that Google has focused more and more on not only [...]
It is always worth considering what changing your web layout will do to your hit rate. If you’ve been out there a while, you’re going to need to consider that there’s some guy out there with a page of yours either bookmarked or even linked on his page. When you delete that content and don’t follow up with a redirect, you suffer dead links and dead leads no one will bother to follow. Jaimie Sirovich picks up with the 301 “Permanently Moved” linking discussion:
SEO Egghead by Jaimie Sirovich » Cashing In With Legacy Link Equity
Your computer sucks. [...]
One point I did not mention on the other blog, which is definitely an SEO advantage of using the “sans w” address redirect:
Generally, your Pages Per Visit covers your entire website, but when ranking which pages get hit the most, once again www.yostuff.com is different than yostuff.com. Since Google Webmaster Tools allows you to set a Preferred Domain, it is logical to assume that the form of the domain that the Googlebot crawls is important to how it ranks pages. In fact, the above-linked blog post more or less spells this out exactly.
So, get out there, set your preferred domain [...]
LifeHack.org turns in a great roundup of tips on keeping readers and making a blog usable. The basics? Keep it readable:
Six Improvements to Your Blog – lifehack.org
Format Your Text- Take the extra time to write “pretty” posts, such as it were. Make it so that people can read what you’re typing, and do your best to keep the tone communicative, and not too dense. Translation: big fat paragraphs of dense text usually don’t make for “friendly” blog reading. (Look at David Byrne’s journal. Great stuff, but soooooooo long.) And get friendly with things like bulleted lists, shorter and [...]
