Friedbeef’s Tech

Guest post by Aidan Henry, edited by James Yeang

Everyone wants to improve their search rank and drive more qualified traffic. Bloggers are no exception. However, blogs should be treated differently than ordinary websites. Blogs function as content management systems (CMS) and therefore require a different type of optimization than traditional non-CMS driven sites. Having said that, let’s take a look at the top 5 ways to increase your blog’s search rank:

5. Provide descriptive categorization or ‘tags’ for every post.

With most blog platforms, an author is given the ability to categorize ‘tag’ a given post. This provides context and meta-data. These tags facilitate reader navigation, as well as thorough indexing by the search engines due to internal navigation.

4. Acquire external back-links to your blog.

Search engines are not going to index or crawl your site unless you have back-links. In addition, the more back-links you acquire, the more often your blog will get crawled. Back-links are also a great way to drive direct, qualified traffic. The best way to accomplish this is by commenting on your blog posts and reciprocating blogroll links with other bloggers.

3. Blog post URLs should be optimized with keywords.

In other words, a blog post URL should look as follows:

www.domain/post-title - which is meaningful… rather than something like www.domain/?p=122 which is rather meaningless to most search engines.

Most of the big platforms number individual posts or provide IDs by default. However, the post title format should be an option with most blog platforms. In a case where no keywords or descriptive text is used in the post title, a descriptive, custom ‘post slug’ may be the answer. Once again, this option is available for every individual post in Wordpress, as well as other platforms.

2. Focus on simple page Title tags

Every post Title tag should be worded the same as the post title. What this means is that the blog name should NOT be in title. This is of my opinion. I do not believe branding to be a big attraction for small blogs - especially on the search engine results pages. The content is what drives the traffic. Therefore, focus should be placed on simple, well-described page titles.

Because the blog name is placed in the page title by default, replacing the title tag code (usually found in your header) with the following pieces of code will help solve this problem:

Movable Type blog:

<title><$MTEntryTitle$></title>

Wordpress blog:

<title><?php if (is_home () ) { bloginfo(’name’); } elseif ( is_category() ) { single_cat_title(); echo ” - “; bloginfo(’name’); } elseif (is_single() || is_page() ) { single_post_title(); } elseif (is_search() ) { bloginfo(’name’); echo ” search results: “; echo wp_specialchars($s); } else { wp_title(”,true); } ?> </title>

1. Ensure that your META descriptions are unique for every post.

The META description tag may very well be the most overlooked aspect of blog SEO. By default, most blogging platforms simply pull the generic META description given to the homepage. This means that an individual post is not as well optimized as it could be and that the description is inconsistent with the content within the post.

• If you run Wordpress, install the META description plug-in to solve the problem. This will pull the first 25 words of the post and use them as the META description.
• If you run Movable Type, use the following code to solve the problem and create a default META description: <meta name=”description” content=”<$MTEntryBody words=”25″$> …” />

NOTE: ‘Pinging’ is also a huge component of blogging. A ‘ping’ essentially lets a blog search engine know that you have updated your content or added a new post. This will prompt a new crawl of your blog, ensuring that you appear in the results when users search for recent, relevant topics. 

If you can implement these 5 little changes (or have already done so), you’re well on your way to driving qualified, search traffic. The last step is to write high-quality content on a consistent basis. All the best and I hope to hear some success stories in the months to come.

Based in Canada, Aidan Henry runs MappingTheWeb.com, a 9Rules blog about Web 2.0.  Want to do a guest post for this site?  Just drop me a line.

[tags] SEO, google, search, blogs, keywords, tags [/tags]

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Carbon offsetting is the new environmental buzzword around town.  Al Gore’s preaching it and Rupert Murdoch’s adopting it, so here are a few ways you can implement it from a tech standpoint…

1. Save Energy by Switching Colors on Google

BlackGoogle.com is a site which allows searches and results on Google to be displayed against a black background.  How important is this?

“An all white web page uses about 74 watts to display, while an all black page uses only 59 watts. I thought I would do a little math and see what could be saved by moving a high volume site to the black format.
Take at look at Google, who gets about 200 million queries a day. Let’s assume each query is displayed for about 10 seconds; that means Google is running for about 550,000 hours every day on some desktop. Assuming that users run Google in full screen mode, the shift to a black background will save a total of 15 (74-59) watts. That turns into a global savings of 8.3 Megawatt-hours per day, or about 3000 Megawatt-hours a year. Now take into account that about 25 percent of the monitors in the world are CRTs, and at 10 cents a kilowatt-hour, that’s $75,000, a goodly amount of energy and dollars for changing a few color codes” - via EcoIron

2. Power Windows More Efficiently

“CO2 Saver is a lightweight application that runs in Windows. It adjusts your Windows power settings so that your computer, monitor and hard drive consume less electricity when you’re not actively using them. It calculates how much power is saved, and converts it into pounds of CO2 emissions prevented by having the toolbar installed. You see the amount of CO2 saved by yourself and all toolbar users together.” 

Granted most of these options can be adjusted manually via Windows power settings, so this is really geared towards newbies who don’t want to mess with power settings, but still want to make a difference.  Also, the social aspect of this toolbar helps bring across the fact that put together, the impact we make from simple power saving is truly huge.

3. Calculate Your Carbon Footprint and Take Action

Like it or not, each of us has an impact on the carbon levels of the world.  The amount carbon your lifestyle creates is called your “carbon footprint”.  Yahoo Green has released a calculator for you to measure yourself.  This is a useful barometer on how badly we are affecting the environment with our simple actions.   It also goes one step further, they also give tips and help you make plans to inspire actions to bring those levels down.

4. Make Your Driving More Carbon Friendly

Before getting a new ride, check out which cars are the most environmentally friendly options (At the time of writing the #1 car is a Honda Civic hybrid).  Already own a car you’re happy with?  Daily Fuel Economy Tip also provides you with updated news on the lowest fuel prices.

5. Build a Greener PC

Did you know a SATA hard drive uses slightly less energy than IDE? or that the Intel Core 2 Duo E6700 processor runs 42 percent faster than the Intel Pentium D 960 yet consumes 40 percent less energy?  Plenty of PC building tips slanted towards green living can be found at PlayGreen.org

Bonus tip #1 : Check out part 1 & part 2 of the ‘Save the World Using Your Desktop’ series

Bonus tip #2 : Check out 10 first steps you can take towards lighter living.

[tags] environment, carbon, carbon footprint, green [/tags]

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TestFreaks is a new service which aggregates product reviews across the web.  Still in it’s Alpha stage, I managed to get the lowdown on what I thought was pretty exciting technology (or at least promises of it).

Here’s the Deal

What they’re trying to do is to make a product review aggregator just like Wize, but add in a social aspect like Amazon, where it gathers information about your preferences, and matches them with other readers who are most like you, thereby pushing the most relevant reviews to you.

Focused on User Reviews

Their take on it is that professional reviews are usually objective and done with a great deal of attention, however they only spend a short amount of time with the product. User reviews on the other hand tend to be to complete opposite. TestFreaks is to truly get the best of the user reviews rather than just to aggregate them as a single entity.

My 2 Cents - User Reviews vs Professional Reviews

I’m not sure I really agree with the fact that user reviews are the best way to go.  While it’s true that users spend more time with the review product, it’s usually the case that they spend less time with competing products.  More often than not, this leads to the user learning to love the product they spent good money on, and biased positive reviews. 

User reviews tend to give better insights on reliability and customer support, but as for product itself, I usually go to the pros first.  I like a bit of a balance, with clearly separated professional and user reviews, rather than mixing them together like what TestFreaks is currently doing.

My 2 Cents - Simplify the Summary

I also prefer a definitive conclusion when it comes to the summary of the product reviews.  Right now on TestFreaks I have to scan through multiple review excerpts before I arrive at any form of conclusion as to how good the product is.

I like the way Wize summarizes it’s products into a single score.  While this may not be entirely accurate, it is by large correct and gives me an extra quick way to scan through hundreds of products just by looking at a single score.

Conclusion

Very much in an alpha stage, this product is still very rough and I personally won’t be using it till a few months down the road, when more features are released…but I will definitely keep my eye on them.

Disclaimer: Testfreaks.com has paid me to review their service, and to give an honest opinion.  Please note that all opinions expressed in this post are completely my own, and have not been influenced by the Testfreaks.com in any way.

What features do you like to see on a product review site?  Let us know in the comments!

[tags] product review, gadgets, review aggregator, deals [/tags]

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