WTF Blog Clutter: Pictures of Our Bloggy Friends

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If you are a member of a social networking service, it’s natural that you want to put the HTML code in your sidebar that shows off the faces or avatars of your buddies. After all, that’s what these social networking sites are all about. Your face on their blog and their face on your blog.

Is it? What good it is? How does it help your blog?

As part of this going series on WTF Blog Design Clutter, let’s look at the visual social clutter that clogs our blogs.

If your blog is a social blog, and the pictures of the folks participating on your blog might be helpful. People like seeing their faces or avatars on other blogs. Besides, it should be good link juice, right?

Maybe. [Read more…]

Blog Design: WTF Is That Doing There?

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Remember the old adage that you never get a second chance to make a first impression? You personally may get a second chance to sway that first impress, but your blog doesn’t. If you don’t grab them within the first micro-seconds of a visit, they won’t subscribe and they won’t be back.

Digging through a lot of blogs recently to research an upcoming article, I found myself thinking “WTF” as I looked at the designs. I was constantly distracted from the content I was eager to read through and quote towards things that blinked, flashed, or listed irrelevant stuff. My eyes had to work overtime to stay focused on the information I was there to glean.
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Are Blog Comments a Source of Referral Traffic?

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Here’s a question. If blog comments are mini-resumes, which comments are bringing the most traffic to your blog?

When you leave a comment on a blog, there are three things at work.

  1. Your desire to participate in the blog conversation and topic.
  2. Your desire to increase your link credits through blog comments.
  3. Your desire to encourage traffic from your comment to your blog.

A lot of pro bloggers cover the first two, but I want to explore the last one. If you really want to drive traffic to your blog through comments on other blogs, is it working for you?

Have you been paying attention to your blog referrals and incoming traffic to see where your traffic is coming from in relationship to your blog comments? It’s a very good question because we blog and comment on the premise that blog interaction helps drive traffic.
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Adobe Makes Flash Sites Visible To Google, Yahoo, But Not Microsoft?

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It looks as if Adobe has given sight to blind search engines. Previously if web designers of blogs, web sites, etc. coded their site in flash, they would have to give up the ability to have their site indexed by the Google giant, and their whipping boy Yahoo!

Now bloggers, web developers and social networks will be able to remake their sites into “one big eye candy,” without fear on missing out from search engine traffic (aka “Google juice”).
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Why Does a Blog Post Fail?

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In Blog Challenge: What Are Your Most Favorite Blog Post Failures, one of the regular blog challenges I issue to “kick your blogging butt,” Atul Sabnis of Gaizabonts accepted the challenge to describe one of your favorite blog posts to write, one you were sure would get a lot of attention, but didn’t.

The challenge was to figure out why the blog post didn’t work. Sabnis wrote in Failed in Abstraction that the blog post titled A Discrete Process of Abstraction didn’t work for some very good reason, reasons we could all learn from:

This post deserved more attention than it got because it summarised well, my thought process of all that goes into most of my blogs; especially this blog…Why do I think this post failed? It was very dogmatic, to begin with. Its statement left no crack even, to pry open a possibility for a conversation. Then, it used artistic metaphors for something that isn’t often considered artistic. Finally it got tangled in its own wordsmithery. It still makes meaning to me, even if I shed the context I have, but I can imagine why, somewhere towards the end of the third paragraph, the reader may get lost. Anthropomorphism abounds.

Why do our blog posts fail? Not every blog can be at the top of the charts, but learning why they fail may help you understand what works and doesn’t work, on your blog with your readers.

Here are some of the reasons some blog posts fail:
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Has Your Blog Been Banned or Blocked?

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I recently published How to Access Banned WordPress.com Blogs, and a friend asked me how would she know if her blog is banned by a country, government, Internet Provider, company, school, or otherwise. Good question.

On Monday, I’ll be publishing a feature article on how to find out if your blog is banned and offer some options to get your blog off a ban or blocked list, but what about you?

Has your blog been blocked or banned by a government, educational institute, corporation, or web filtering service or program? How did you find out? Did you find out why your blog was blocked? Were you unable to get your blog unblocked?

Share your story with us.

Have You Helped Someone Today?

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I’m not bragging. It’s a fact. My blogs get a lot of attention. They win awards. I have a lot of incoming links, and a lot of steady traffic. The PageRank of my blog – well, actually, I don’t know. I have no idea and haven’t paid attention for several years. It doesn’t matter.

Most of the stuff that other bloggers worry and fuss over doesn’t matter to me. I don’t look at my blog stats unless I have a good reason. I don’t write to beg for traffic nor attention. Honestly, I just do what I do and people like it. Any search engine page ranking success I’ve had is due to experience and common sense. No games. I hate the games.

I tried to explain this to someone just entering the blog market recently, and they just couldn’t get it. “But you’re THE Lorelle! You’re famous!”

Nope. I’m just me. I’m just you. I’m just like everyone else, I’ve just been doing this longer. So pardon my arrogance for just a moment, but I’ve been there, done that, and now I think I’m paying attention to what’s more important than some numbers and scores.

What matters most to me is helping people.
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Never Write For Search Engines

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I recently spoke at a writer’s conference and heard a fellow speaker recommend the following advice: Never write for search engines. Write for your readers.

While he’s right, he’s right to a point.

If you put all your energy into writing for Google, then obviously, you are ignoring your readers, but what does that mean?

Writing for SEO only is a simplified way of saying, “Let’s game Google.” Clearly, playing the Google Game won’t work if you put all your focus on interpreting what Google wants and then serving only that. It’s like asking for carrot cake and getting serviced a bowl of carrots and each ingredient in the carrot cake separately. Google wants carrots, give them carrots. Google wants sugar, so get the sugar out. Google wants flour, so where’s did I put it…ah, here it is. Two cups, right? Water? Spices? What else does Google need to make the cake?
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Do You Tag Yourself?

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Do you tag yourself? Honestly? No, this is not a game.

With everyone back on the tag versus categories versus tags bandwagon, have you checked to make sure you are tagging yourself?

Inside of is the tag attribute that turns “Lorelle on WordPress” into a tag.

<a href="http://lorelle.wordpress.com/" title="Lorelle on WordPress" rel="tag">Lorelle on WordPress</a>

When I write my name in a link, I also include a tag:

<a href="http://lorelle.wordpress.com/" title="Lorelle" rel="tag">Lorelle</a>

This makes “Lorelle” a tag.

When I write about the , I also put that in a tag, so the words “Blog Herald” get into the tag clouds on the site as well as the tag search engines and directories.

I use the same tag technique for , , and every taggable link I write to help associate what I write with those tags.

Are you tagging yourself and your blog? The rel="tag" is all a link needs to turn it from a link into a linking tag. It’s what defines a tag.

If you aren’t tagging yourself and your blog, it’s a great branding technique you may be missing out on.

Localized Domain Names to Increase Local Traffic, the Next Big Thing?

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Darren Rowse spins off a question asked on Twitter, regarding if it’s worth it to get a local domain name to better drive traffic in your region. While he says he’s no expert, here’s the conclusion:

Search engines are focusing more and more on localized search and indexing and promoting local search results to users. While less people use these local search tools than the global ones there is still a market and the traffic they generate can be significant. So yes – I definitely think targeting local markets with local domains can be very worthwhile.

This post is, by the way, in Darrens really cool reader question segment, where he uses 3 minutes to answer a question, and then flips it to the commenters. Great usage of a blog community, in my opinion!

Anyway, I’d reckon that there’s a lot of people that know more of this than I do, but I do find it easier to get higher ranks in local search results if you have A] the local top level domain (like .se for Sweden or .co.uk for the UK), and B] the local language of the region. Think about it, if you go to a local version of Google, you’ll be able to pick if it should only search in the country’s language, or pages from the country in question. Here’s where the TLD and language comes in, but I suspect that it also affects rankings since a google.com search while render different results than google.se, even if I haven’t opted to search locally.

Maybe someone else knows more of this?