A Few Notable Blogs and One Site

If you can't get enough marketing info, check out these two award-winning blogs, http://www.sethgodin.com/sg/blog.html and http://www.adrants.com/.

And, if you'd like to see what's cutting edge on Bainbridge Island's art scene, check out Collocation an art installation at Pritchard Park.

Blog Software to Create a Website

I don't know why more people aren't using blog software to build their sites. Actually, I do. You still need to know a little programming to build custom templates, wrapping text around images usually needs to be done by building HTML tables and navigation is a bit of a trick too, but the benefits of an inexpensive content management system might be worth it. It really depends what type of site you'd like to create.

For one of my clients, Shaboom Inc., building their site with blog made sense. Their site is content-rich and has grown organically with lots of internal text links, it's almost a blog, but without the benefit of the blog software. To see how this might work, I dummied up some blog templates in Blogger: http://dev.superwebgirl.com/blog/shaboom.html - doesn't look much like a blog, does it?

As it turned out Blogger didn't have the ability to create internal navigation the way MovableType did, so we recreated the templates in MovableType and our client is populating the site now.

Keywords for Search Engines

Recently a client asked me some great questions regarding key words. Our exchange highlights what you should keep in mind when writing up a list of keywords for each page of your web site:

"Search engines don't act intelligently. By that I mean, if your keyword is "hat" and someone types in "hats" it won't think it's the plural of hat it'll think it's a completely different keyword.

That's why I mix it up and make sure if plurals might be used that I include them as well. As for capitals - I don't believe most people bother with initial or all caps when searching - they're more likely to type words in quickly in lowercase. But if you think something will always be capped then it should be included in that form in your keywords."

1) I am a little confused about how to strategies around composite terms. For example, if you have biodiversity and conservation, do you also need biodiversity conservation?

Yes.

2) Are words like about (magazine about conservation), to (subscribe to conservation in practice), what is (what is conservation biology) useful for some search engines and not others?

No. I leave out all prepositions and articles. They just eat up your keyword allotment and create odd search engine results - search engines rate relevancy by looking for the highest density of a term in the title tag, meta tags (although less weight is given to keywords now), image alt tags and text in your web site.

3) Do we need all caps versions of the acronyms?

Only if you feel that people will capitalize them when they search for them.

Hope that helps. And, remember, Google is currently looking at title tags more closely than key word lists or descriptions.