HOEI

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 recently upgraded one of my laptops to Firefox version 2.0. This upgrade left me with a very weird Firefox startup issue. I suspected that maybe the startup defaults were different for this new version of Firefox. I knew there was an option for starting Firefox with all the same windows and tabs from the precious session, but that was not what I was experiencing. I was seeing the same thing every time I started Firefox regardless of how many tabs or windows were open during the previous session. Then checked my browser settings and found that there were eight URLs in the “Home Page” field on the Tools/Options/Startup screen. Each URL was separated by pipe character.

This image is an example of what it looked like. You can click the image to see a large view. The next thing that popped into my mind after finding this was to ask myself if this was a feature or a bug. I decided to exercise my searching skills to see what came up. I searched on: “firefox open multiple tabs on startup” and found my answer in the first result. The first hit took me to “The Sukhbir” blog where the explanation was given as follows:

“Load all the favorite pages in separate tabs. Then choose:

Tools> Options> General Tab> Homepage – Locations(s) > Use Current Page

Using this, Firefox will load all the current open pages on startup.”

So what this means is that you will get every single open tab added to the “Home Page” field in Firefox (plus some pipe character delimiters if you have more than one tab open) when you choose the “Use Current Pages” button in the Firefox version 2.0.0.4 startup options.

Obviously I did not realize this new “feature” existed until after this little incident. I normally would like to start Firefox with my iGoogle page as the first thing I see. Now that I understand this cool new feature I will rethink my Firefox startup options. Much like many other power surfers, bloggers, and web site developers, I do quickly end up with nearly a dozen windows and tabs in several browsers for various reasons. While Firefox is by far my bowser of choice, I do use many other browsers including Netscape, Mozilla, Internet Explorer, and Opera on a weekly basis. I will have to review my history to see what sites I open most frequently and then add them to my startup options.

Interestingly enough the third result from the Google search mentioned above led me to tech-recipes where I learned that there is a similar feature in Microsoft’s IE7 (with the new tabbed browsing feature). Since I have not bothered to upgrade a single PC in my house to Internet Explorer 7, I had no clue. I have used IE7 on a machine or two at work, but that is normally when sitting at a co-worker’s desk helping with a problem. This all made me wonder who came up with this idea first. I think it is Microsoft who can claim this feature first, but that is pure speculation. I could not find a reference in the Mozilla Firefox release notes back through version 2.0 where this feature was added. It seems to have quietly arrived on the scene since the last time the Firefox Help pages were updated on mozilla.org. I pulled a screen capture to show what I am referring to. You will notice the “s” missing from the “Use Current Page” button. The button on Firefox Version 2.0.0.4 reads “Use Current Pages”. If you know when Firefox actually added this feature then please let me know. I am curious who came up with this first. For all I know it may have been standard on something other than Firefox or IE for a while.

How do you manage blog post ideas? I’m not talking about the ones that pop into your mind while sitting in front of your computer. I am talking about those that pop into your head in the middle of the night, while you’re in the shower, while you are at work, or while driving your car.

I have been experiencing some episodes of writer’s block lately. However, I often think of ideas when I find that I am in a position that prevents me from posting to one of my blogs. I then find myself in front of the computer later racking my brain trying to remember that awesome idea I had earlier in the day. More often than not, these ideas have slipped away and never return. If they do return, the timing might be all wrong for writing a post on that idea if the original idea was based on a current event.

I have compiled a short list of ways to gather those great ideas:
While off line (with no access to a computer)

• Call and leave yourself a voice mail containing enough details to spark your memory
• Send yourself a text message
• Make an analog note (with pen and paper)
• Take a picture or shoot a video with a camera phone
• Use a digital voice recorder (many portable mp3 players have this feature)

My favorite has to be the digital voice recorder. This device can be used in so many creative ways. As noted above, many mp3 players provide a record feature. My favorites are made by iRiver. I am still trying to get used to the voice memo feature on my Treo 700P. I have used the Treo 650 for so long that I forget I even have this application on the new 700P.

One of the above choices should help with off line idea collection, but there are the times when you are at a friend’s house and BAM, an awesome idea comes over you while siting in front of your buddy’s computer.

While on line (at someone else’s computer)
All of the above plus:

• Send yourself an email or ask your friend to email you
• Use on line bookmarks
• Maintain an on line document listing your ideas
• Create draft posts in your blogging software

Bonus: I received an email from a blogging friend yesterday. Mama Grizzly asked me how I did something on one of my blogs and recommended that I write a blog post on this technique. Her recommendation reminded me that I have a ton of tips from my experience of more than ten years in information technology. I could easily be filling up this blog and Tech Land. Look at what LifeHacker gets away with in a post about using asterisks to filter searches in an open dialog window. I might be able to come up with a few hundred blog posts like that one. Thanks Mama Grizzly for helping me get the creative juices flowing!

The images on the left is a screen capture from The Land of Ozz before a WordPress upgrade. The image on the right is a screen capture just after the WordPress 2.2 upgrade was complete.

Step 1: Backup Database Tables and Files!!!

The first step in upgrading a standalone WordPress blog could not be more critical if you are using the default Kubrick theme on your blog. You can not simply backup the database and skip the files on your web server. You will likely make this mistake only once. I have customized the kubrickheader.jpg header image file, sidebar, header, footer, archive, and index pages. The most noticeable affect to the upgrade is the loss of the custom header image and any widgets manually added in the sidebar.

If you have already blown away/overwritten the files in your default WordPress theme without a backup, you have only a couple of options.

1. Recode in all of your widgets, scripts, and custom HTML
2. Ask your hosting provider to restore from last night’s backup.

Option one is my personally preference and it is going to be required to some extent if you are determined to stay with a default theme.   Loosing everything without a backup has happened to me in the past.  The bright side was that loosing all my custom code actually forced me into some much needed house cleaning of my sidebar.   I have never tried the second option and really don’t like that idea much anyway.

Please drop a comment if you are having problems with a WordPress upgrade or if you have some advice to add. Most of my blogs including this one use custom themes. Custom themes will “usually” not be overwritten when using an FTP client to copy your WordPress upgrade to the server. You still should not take chances and you should always backup your entire blog directory structure before an upgrade.

Today I am in an acronym creating mood. My first term of the day is called search landing information (SLI). Ultimately, SLI is what you use to improve your SEO. The SLI can be defined as a combination of:

1. The search word(s) used in a search engine that results with a person landing on your blog or web site.
2. The search engine used.
3. The visitors activity on your site.

When you host your own stand alone blog, you can see these specific statistics from a standard (free) Site Meter account. That is if your statistics are not whizzing by and cycling out of your view at light speed due to having a gazzillion visitors per minute. Even if you re seeing your stats disappear rapidly on Site Meter, you can still get a pretty good snap shoot in time. The visit details page Site Meter will give you all of this and more. You can also us free log analyzers against your raw domain data to gain information on common search words used to get to your site. Tools like webalizer and modlogan give fairly good results and offer much more than you can ever get come a tool like Site Meter. Don’t get me wrong, Site Meter is one of the greatest things since sliced bread, but it falls short on telling you how many people hit your feeds and how many people are pulling down you MP3s via iTunes if your into podcasting.

The inspiration for this post came from my reflection of my own statistics addiction after reading Help! I’m Addicted to Checking My Blog Stats. Don’t let Darren fool you with his “I remember doing the same thing…” spill. Go back a few weeks and take a close look at the graphic in Darren’s post titled A Secret To My Productivity Success. Out of the first fifteen sites Darren launches every morning, Site Meter statistics make up one third of them. I can imaging that his Site Meter stats whiz by at light speed.

Anyway, let’s face it. We must understand who we have visiting our blogs and why if we want to grow traffic? If your blog stats are anything like mine, then about 60% of your traffic is comprised of new visits. Google Analytics offers some great information about new vs. returning visitors. If you consider that 50% of my traffic comes from search engines, then we can conclude that about 30% of my blogs’ visitors are first timers coming from search engines. Of the visitors to my site I get many more page views from search engine deliveries. What the heck, let’s start another acronym out of that one. We will refer to these mortal visitors who land on our blogs for the first time from a search engine as a SED (Search Engine Delivery).

A SED is the backbone of growing blogs. This is where the fresh meat is coming from that you are hoping you can cook up with your FeedBurner. It should come as not surprise that the things your are most passionate about are going to be the things that bring in the most traffic. The number one search term landing people on this domain is “caden”. This domain continues to rack number one for searches on the name Caden on a regular basis in Google and Yahoo! with visitors landing on Caden’s Page which is one of multiple blogs on this single domain. Another notable is “goggle earth” which originally happened by a spelling mistake on an alt tag in my Tech Land blog. I also get my fair share of hits on a simple little Grill’n Time post for steak grilling temperature.

My favorite search word(s) to land a SED here in recent weeks was for “his foot up to his head”. The SLI shows that the SED landed on a post containing a picture of my son scratching his head with his toes.

Now, what do you think of those new acronyms?