HOEI

Not so fast there cowboy!

I will step out on a limb here and say that there are very few people who build a publicly accessible blog or web site with the intent that no one will ever visit. While that was not my intent when I built Blog Community College (BCC) more than six months ago, the harsh reality is that less than fifty people total have visited the site since it was built. Well over half of the 42 unique visits to the site to date have come from me or my co-author Chad.

Site Meter stats more than six months after the first post.

There are a few lessons to be learned from this unplanned exercise in blog flop:

Publicity Required - Building a blog requires some very basic marketing if you want people to actually read the blog. We might start by:

1. Registering the site with search engines
2. Using BCC’s URL as my “Website” when commenting on other blogs
3. Notifying other bloggers of BCC’s existence
4. Emailing a  few friends

More Content -Only one video tutorial has been posted out of nearly a half dozen that are in various stages of editing.

Follow Through – Continue you what you start.  While I have not done very good on this so far I believe that this is a pretty good idea for a blog.  That said, there is no reason to sit on it.  It is never too late to follow though.

A flurry of comment spam has been going around in recent days with the following message:

“very interesting, but I don’t agree with you
Idetrorce”

There is no URL and the message is exactly the same on all the blogs where you find this comment.

What is this comment all about and who is Idetrorce?

In my humble opinion, this is a pre-attack campaign for a bigger spam campaign that will come in the next few weeks. The comment above would be okay on most blog posts since it is not trying to link people back to a product of service and it is just a polite disagreement. Once posted on a loosely moderated blog, the blogger might get a bad rap for deleting such a non threatening comment. Read the editors comments on the wormblog comment number 12.

“So I googled and found that it is indeed SPAM.

I am leaving it up though as I would never wish to be accused of deleting someone who simply disagreed with me.”

If a blogger does not block the email address and user name associated with this comment, then they could be opening themselves up to something much bigger coming down the pipe. That is just one man’s opinion. I am not afraid to delete and edit comments on my blog. I have even deleted some comments from people who agreed with me. When it’s my blog I will do what I think is in the best interest of my blog.

I do strict moderation on all comments on some of my blogs. There are very few terms I force moderate on here on this blog, but this user name and email address will be added to my list. I recommend you do the same with your blog. I just don’t have a good feeling about this Idetroce character.

In WordPress

Go to your Dashboard and select Options/Discussion. Scroll down and enter the user name, email address and IPs from this commenter. By the way, the IPs this person is sourcing from are out of Amsterdam.

Don’t forget to change the time on your WordPress software if you live in one of those areas that plays the daylight savings time game.  I have not yet found a plugin that automatically adjusts the blog time the way many operating systems do.

Do you have a blog? No. If not and you have the slightest interest in owning a blog then continue reading.

I will take you from where you are right now to owning a blog and writing your first blog post in three (3) minutes.

It’s Fast and It’s Free!!!

All you need is a valid email address and three minutes of free time. That’s it. Let’s get started by watching the YouTube video posted below to learn how.

Having trouble viewing this? Download a copy.

This is the first in a series of what will hopefully be many lessons on blogging. This lesson is as basic as blogging lessons get. The filming and editing on this lesson was done by me personally and is very basic. I have partnered with Chad from Chadfusious Says to get a more professional look and feel for Blog Community College (BCC) lessons in the future. Future lessons will include:

• Registering a domain name
• Adding a counter to your blog
• Adding pictures and videos to your blog posts
• Building a blog with WordPress
• And much more

Some of the filming of future lessons has already been completed. While Blog Community College is currently running on Google’s Blogger server, it will soon be transferred to blogcommunitycollege.com. That will be a lesson in itself.  Stay tuned for more from Blog Community College.

The following are tips I give to people who ask me how to get listed in search engine results. Most are pretty straight forward, but some can be a little intimidating. Don’t worry about those that are hard to grasp. Focus on what is easy and start asking questions to other bloggers and web masters concerning the harder ones.

Disclaimer: Most of these will only apply if you own your own domain name.

#1 Priority is to submit your URL to search engines:

If you do nothing else you need to register your domain with the big three search engines. This tells them you have a site that needs indexing by their crawlers (automatic web site content scanning/indexing tools).

It is believed by most seasoned webmasters that registering with the three big search engines (for free) will give you about a 95% coverage of all Internet searches since a large number of the smaller engines pull results from these three. You can verify this yourself by trying to register your url with some of the smaller search engines. The smaller search engines will often link you to one of these three pages to register your URL with them.

Google
Yahoo!
MSN Live Search

Learn from Google:

Note: Some of the Google resources require a Google account to view and use do if you are an anti-Google type then you are missing out on some very good information, tools, and most of all…traffic. The last time I checked, I was getting significant amount of my traffic here on HOEI from The Long Tail searches on Google.

Webmaster Tools – Starting spot for webmasters needing to learn about Google and general webmaster tools like the robots.txt files
Google Sitemaps – Sitemaps can be tricky to get formated correctly, but they are helpful in building credibility with Google.

As mentioned above, the sitemaps and robots.txt files lend to letting Google (sitemaps) and other search engines (robots.txt) know how often and/or if they need to scan each of your pages and folders based on how often you update them. Letting them know to not waste their time and resources indexing pages and folders that have not and will not be updated for a while makes them happy.

Suggestions for your site to get better search engine love: (in no particular order)

1. Interlink within your site where practical. (i.e., a blog post on this blog that mentions desktop friendly snack food might link to a post on Grill’n Time)
2. Make the title of each page match the content and URL of the page as much as possible. WordPress and blogger can do this for you. Check out http://www.hoei.com/2007/05/website-to-blog/ as an example. You will notice the title of the blog post matches what is in the very top bar of the browser at the top of your screen and the URL contains the post title text.
3. Do a keyword density search on your pages to get a better idea of what keywords will work best in your keyword META tag.

GoogleRankings Ultimate SEO Tool (My favorite)
SEO Book Keyword Density Analyzer Tool
SEO Tools – Keyword Density

Review what Domaintools.com has to say about your site:

From the whois search results on Domaintools.com, you want to try and get your Title Relevancy, Description Relevancy, and SEO Score as close to 100% as possible. Add alt tags to any images that do not already have them. A header image alt tag is a great place to plant keywords that might not show very well in your page text, but you want the search engines to find you with these words. There is also a text browser example in the sidebar of the Domaintools results page that shows you what your site’s home page looks like to a search engine at first glance. You have probably heard some folks talk about the text near the top and left of the page being the most prominent to search engines. This text browser will give you a glimpse of why you hear these tips.

I saw an article in the NY Times this weekend that pointed out how some companies are paying ordinary people to have their cars wrapped up like a NASCAR. The article states that folks get as much as $800 per month and free gas to place ads on their cars.  In most cases you are encouraged to obey the law and maintain a certain social standard.  That means no cussing, fussing, smoking, and certainly no consumption of competitor’s products or alcoholic beverages.  It is a good thing the cussing and fussing rules are have not been strictly enforced as a prerequisite for decals on the cars of Tony Stewart, Kurt Busch, Kevin Harvick, Robby Gordon and a few other lively NASCAR stars or these guys would be sporting “Sponsor Wanted” on their cars.

That said, I have been pondering another idea and wondering if anyone has already tried this. How well does ad space on cars and road signs work for driving traffic to a blog and/or web site? No…Really? I know all the major marketing companies know the answers to my questions, but that data is hard to come by without forking over some fat loot. Has anyone tried it? If so, how did you advertise and how successful were you?

I have seen some pretty creative billboards recently that actually left me browsing the URL from the sign. I am sure there is some degree of success, but is it worth the investment?