Writings on web design and higher education from Missoula, MT

There are two kinds of users that probably read your blog: those that know what they are looking for, and those who don’t. Sure, this seems like a bit of an oversimplification, but it is probably more important than you know. Today, I would like to discuss how these two kinds of users are different, and how you can serve to cater to them while authoring your blog content.

The first—those who know what they are looking for—visit your blog either from direct traffic, a link from another website, or a search engine. These users probably don’t know who you are, nor do they care… they know what information they need, and have that goal alone in mind. These users are looking for very specific content, and targeting them is a great way to get your traffic up and maybe even convert them to the second group.

This second group is the kind of visitor that already knows they like your work, and are checking back up on you expecting to find more high quality writings. At some point they said, “this one is a keeper” and either bookmarked you, or subscribed to your RSS feed. For a blogger, this traffic is the most important. Keeping this second group of users interested is a great challenge for many bloggers, and here are a few tips to help out:

• Keep comments on. Comments build up a community, and add relevant content to your site for search engines to index. Try ending each post with a question for the readers to debate, or give feedback on to spur commenting.
• Write frequently. Every week is good, and every day is better. Once a month probably won’t be enough to keep people interested unless you are in a very small niche.
• Make it easy to subscribe to RSS. This means making an obvious link to your new post RSS feeds and perhaps your comments RSS feed as well. Everyone uses RSS these days, but many people don’t know it… be sure to tell them what RSS is some place on your site, or link to the wikipedia article on it.
• Clash a little. Everyone likes someone who agrees with them, but they love to get into a debate with someone who doesn’t. You will get all kinds of comments and links by roughing a few edges on your content every once and a while.

I hope these few tips have given you some ideas on how to increase your blog traffic and reader loyalty. Did I miss anything?

An SEO company whose services I have used in the past just underwent a redesign of their site architecture. Now powered entirely by the blogging software Wordpress, Netconcepts has turned their entire corporate website into a blog.

As Stephan Spencer, CEO of Netconcepts, said in his blog, I don’t think anyone has ever done this before for a major corporate site. Personally, I think it is mostly a PR stunt, with many of the advantages they claim being easily obtainable on several mainstream CMS platforms.

Stephan claims that now he can get exposure to more search engines because his site is a blog. Poppycock! Any good quality CMS out there (like what I use, Modx CMS) can output an RSS feed for recent content, sections, or whatever you like; this enables any website to be placed in blog search engines, which should be more aptly named RSS search engines (the non-blog portion of my site is in Technorati, for instance.)

Furthermore, I think Netconcepts is going a bit overboard here about marketing their site to any and every search engine. I would challenge them to produce two clients a year from these blog search engines… I just don’t think that’s where people that need to hire consultants do their looking. Even if they did, the most popular blog search engine, Technorati, is date focused, so their website exposure has already faded from the charts (a search for SEO yields nothing of them, and even a search for the tag Netconcepts produces only one result, in Stephan’s personal blog nonetheless!)

But their move to Wordpress is no joke either; it has some real benefits that many companies should consider:

• Tagging allows them to increase the breadth of their site without writing more content, allowing for more placings in the search engines. They call this the Long Tail of search.
• Being in the RSS search engines puts them in the face of the blogosphere, where bloggers may pick up on some new articles and discuss them.
• If they are smart, they will try to leverage the wordpress forum and become a featured corporate site. The traffic generated from such an announcement would be prime, not only involume, but also in quality (each of the Wordpress users a potential client and new inbound link).

If I was a fly on the Netconcepts wall this week, I would love to pick up on whether they are feeling restricted in their site architecture now that they don’t have a more flexible CMS (I know that is why I moved away from Wordpress as a CMS) and if the traffic they generate from RSS search engines actually lead to sales. If their conversion rate remains high, I am sure we can expect a report out on their site within a few months that will probably be syndicated across the SEO landscape.

What do you think of this new turnaround in CMS structure? Can it provide results?

Dear Google,

I use Gmail for Your Domain, and since the calendar function has finally been added, I am in love with this service. I do have a small request though, one that I believe many customers would like to utilize.

My suggestion is simple, integrate the calendar and email clients more fully; give me a checkbox when I set up an appointment to activate the email auto-responder during the time that I am scheduled for that event.

Thank you,

Dan Bowling

After browsing the internet, I have grown to hate ads. I discovered the FireFox extension AdBlock, which will create filters to remove content from web pages. I decided to add my own filters as I ran into ads arount the web, and I figured it is time to offer them to the world. Read the rest of this entry »

Wow, I just found Hamachi, which is the easiest VPN software I have ever seen. From their website:

Think - LAN over the Internet.

Think - Zero-configuration VPN.

Think - Secure peer-to-peer.

Access computers remotely. Use Windows File Sharing. Play LAN games. Run private Web or FTP servers. Communicate directly. Stay connected.

I’ll add two of my own:

It simply works.

It works simply.

I use it for file sharing, iTunes listening, and gaming. It even lets rendevous work on Trillian. Hamachi just rocks, Go get it.

In the world of SEO the title tag really is king, not to mention the fact that users see the title tag as the label to their bookmark. Because of this, a developer must spend much time making sure the title tag is well formed.

Luckly, the user’s mind and a search engine work very similarly to each other. The first words are the most important, and often the only ones looked at. Because of this, the true nature of your content must be first in the title tag. For pages this is the title of the page, for posts, the title of the post, and for my home page, a place where there is a hodge-podge of information, I decided it should be my name (so I actually show up in search results for my name). This means I have to first write a bit of PHP code to distinguish these different types of situations, and print some info in the title tag for each of them. Here is what I came up with: Read the rest of this entry »

Where did all the style go? No need to adjust your browser, today (April 5th, 2006) is CSS Naked Day. Read the rest of this entry »

I recently got my invite to Gmail For Your Domain, which basically lets me run Gmail as my back end to my personal domain email. I have been fed up with using the ugly webmail clients that come with my hosting company for a long time, but haven’t wanted to give up the luxury of my own domain name in my email. Enter Gmail For Your Domain, and my problem is solved. Read the rest of this entry »

I decided to implement the Fold Page Menus plugin for Wordpress on my site to allow me to give users a deeper navigational display than I previously had. It worked great, but with one problem, and I’d like to share my solution with the community.

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I switched over my feeds to feedburner today. I did this for several reasons, but most importantly of which is feedburners ability to track subscribed users and optimize compatibility between readers software. You won’t have to update the feed URL because I installed a great Wordpress plugin by Steve at Ordered List. If you are running Wordpress and are thinking of using feedburner too, I highly suggest taking a look at this option.

I noticed a while ago that there are two forms of punctuation that I like to use in my writing, the semicolon and th em dash (—). Semicolon is an easy one, because it is easily recognized in the standard character set, the em dash is another story altogether! Here I will show you how to add an em dash to your WP Quicktags in less than a minute (file transfer included!)

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KeepVid, a new web based service, lets users download videos from services such as Google Video, YourTube, Break.com, and iFilm.

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Recently I found Scuttle, another social bookmarking tool, but one that is open source, installs on my website and most importantly, is free. I like the idea of sharing notable bookmarks with my peers, and with scuttle, it may come to fruition much more easily than I had thought before.

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I recently installed the lightbox plugin for WordPress. I think it adds some neat functionality to blogging in general, and I have found that it incorporates greatly with my flickr account.

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Tag clouds (a form of Folksonomy) seem to have creeped into web applications all over the internet. First seen on Flickr, tag clouds showed great promise as a novel way to view user trends and graphically showing relative the popularity of tags (think categories, but on steroids). The question I am interested in is: do tag clouds belong in the blogosphere?

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