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Webitz - Checking out the Web from an amateur's point of view
The quote from Justin Daniel about page optimisation I included in a recent post has links with the HitTail approach, insofar as it’s keywords that don’t bring up a huge number of Google responses that are likely to more useful than ones that do.
Someone out there has a thing about Gareth Farr and the word, ‘naked,’ and it’s brought my
Random Notes blog up in sixth place out of a large number of Google responses. Now I don’t know why someone is concerned to link together poor old Gareth Farr, the NZ composer, and the word, ‘naked,’ but because I keep mentioning it in my blog, they keep finding it.
I don’t know anything much about Gabriel Zaid, except that he’s quoted in a book by Nick Hornby that I wrote about recently – and I used a quote from Zaid in my post. In a search on Blogger, my post was listed second. I’m going to mention Zaid again!
Justin Daniel says that the words you want people to find (whether it be your trade name, or the fact that you sell a particular kind of pizza and deliver it quickly, or that you write about a somewhat beleaguered NZ composer called Gareth Farr) should appear in your meta tags. Being on Blogger, this isn’t so easy – and I haven’t yet figured out meta tags on Orble, either. But for someone with their own site, this is a breeze.
Of course, says Daniel, the keywords should appear in your title tag. Obviously far more useful if your website is very focused on a particular thing. I can’t see a website called Gareth Farr Naked bringing much excitement to the Internet – except to that person who keeps searching for it.
Interestingly enough, another point Daniel makes is to use bolds or italics when you write the keyword in your site. He warns not to do it too often, because Google gets a bit uppity about such repetition (it’s vain repetition in the truest sense), but it can be done a few times without Google having a fit.
I tried out the site that was mentioned under the Writer’s Forum: Check the popularity of your blog, tonight. It’s called Popuri.usWeird results. I’ve already made this comment on the Writer’s Forum page itself, but I want to elaborate a bit.
I’ve got two blogs on Orble, Webitz.net, and Mike Crowl’s Roving Report. The latter is the lesser of the two, partly because it doesn’t have a domain name (according to the whiz-kids at Orble, that makes a difference). Yet RR got an Alexa Report, while Webitz got none. (This little piggy had roast beef, this little piggy had none.)
RR got 62 Yahoo backlinks, Webitz got none. Is this crazy or not?
Technorati lists Webitz with having plenty of links while RR has none – yet this doesn’t show up in the Popuri report.
But leaving aside these random results – and they are very random to me – I have to make mention of the results that came off the Google Backlinks for Webitz, where it suddenly came into its own. But did it want to be there?
Here are some of the first few: Britney Spears see-through shirt,
Write Santa a Letter, Man Kept 114 dead cats and 1 dead dog in freezers. Then there’s On Mandatory HPV vaccinations, How the MSM could have saved itself (I don’t even know what the MSM is), and Coffin Conversations.
It seems most of these link to Orble sites. I guess this is a good thing, that I’m appearing so randomly with Britney, Santa, and a man who isn’t good at getting rid of pets. Such company I should keep already!
The two major ways of increasing traffic to a website seem to be keywords and links. I’ve talked about keywords in relation to HitTails in another post, and have been pleasantly surprised by the practical use of their theory of focusing not just on the words everyone is supposed to be searching for, but the words that are ‘on the tail’.
Links are another issue altogether, and I’ll look at it again some time.
In the meantime, one of the ways to focus on keywords is what’s called ‘on page optimisation,’ a phrase I picked up from Justin Daniel of NFX Design.
He mentions a site where you can where there’s a keyword selector tool. By putting a word related to the basic focus of your website in the search box, you can pick up a large number of related words and phrases.
For example I put in the word opinion, and got a long list of all the searches done in February which had that word in them. (Interestingly, ‘la opinion’ tops the list!).
Daniel, says, ‘It is important to choose your keywords wisely, especially keeping in mind how often those specific keywords are searched for, as it will be much easier and beneficial to get your site as a number one search result for a phrase that is searched for 5,000 times a week, and almost impossible to get your page in the first few search result pages for a term that is searched for 500,000 times a week. It is important to note that approximately 90% of web users do not navigate past the first page of Google's search results.’
I’ll come back to Daniel’s other points in the next few posts. He has a lot of good things to say.
My son – the geek – told me about the site, slashdot.com, a couple of days ago. I hadn’t heard of it, and he offhandedly claimed I probably wouldn’t enjoy it as much as he does because it’s more technical. A geek site, in other words.
In fact, it’s not a geek site at all, and caters to all sorts of tastes.
The first piece that caught my attention related to bloggers not being journalists, and therefore not worthy of respect. The second related to the PayPerPost controversy. It seems that a law firm advertising through PayPerPost has been asking bloggers to write posts stating that a certain birth control patch is killing and injuring young women
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John Kricfalusi makes cartoons and plays in a band. Not just any cartoons: he created the Ren and Stimpy adult cartoons, and a host of other well-known – and lesser-known - cartoons.
Hugely talented, and with an aim to raise the standard of cartooning to greater heights, he’s a man dedicated to making cartoons that are worth making.
I came across his blog which is a fascinating monologue on the subject of cartoons, how to make them, what to do and what not to do. It’s also loaded with cartoon drawings, colour pictures from new and old cartoons, and, under the 1994 archives, there’s an in-your-face piece from George Liquor
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I found on a site called ZoomInfo.com that one Cheryl A Michaels is the apparent owner of Webitz.com However the last update of her page is back in May, 2004, and every link on the cached page goes back to a page which tells me Webitz.com is actually for sale as a domain name. I’m tempted to make an offer on it, so that both Webitz.com and Webitz.net would be under the same umbrella.
It’s plain that Cheryl isn’t interested in doing anything with it, even though she apparently owns a business called Webitz, about which I couldn’t immediately find anything else. (Read: too lazy to find anything else.)
It’s a frustrating thing that people hold onto domain names; is it because they intend at some point to take them up, or is it because they just want to hog them to themselves so no one else can have ‘em? Rather like the dog in the manger
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The other day it occurred to me to take a note of the list of current keywords on Triond, one of the sites I write for.
Now if these are top keywords for this site, which is basically a kind of news-cum-articles site written by a wide range of authors, then it’s worth either including some of these words in each of your articles or using them as key labels on your articles – where relevant.
They fall into rough categories. In the humanities list we have
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I don't think I've mentioned HitTail on this site.
At first I wasn't much impressed with this means of checking out words that showed up as seach key words, because for the first few days nothing seemed to be happening. And then gradually there were some real results.
HitTail works on the 20/80 theory where that everyone is chasing the 20 percent of top keywords. It's the old marketing approach that has a lot of uses
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I’ve just been checking out the Google Analytics in regard to my other website, and only just realised I could actually pin-point the city or town where the most recent hits came from. This is possibly a totally useless piece of information – unless, of course, I was to start using the names of these towns in my blog – but it’s interesting to see how spread they are across the English-speaking world. There are also three in the non-English-speaking world, I’ve just noticed: Hyderabad, Petaling Jaya and something called Central Districts – it looks like it’s in China, but it’s a very small map.
There are some in New Zealand: Titirangi, (which may be a cousin of mine checking me out), Wellington (another cousin?) and two places I’m not familiar with (both in the North Island): Weymouth and Homai.
In Australia we have: Moorabbin and Long Point. (No family members there
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Delving through Google – as one does – I came across ‘What is Crowl Art?’ in one of the results. (No prizes for guessing what word I’d put into Google.)
And what is Crowl Art, you ask? Well, according to the person on the CrowlArt site, the name Crowl is coined from combining two ancient archetypal birds. The Crow from the East, and the Owl from the West. Well, there you go. That’s news to me, who’d always gone along with the idea that the name Crowl has been around for several centuries, as an old English word for curl – as in the curl or bend in a river.
He carries on to say
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In the endless search for increasing one’s popularity on the Net – I don’t mean personally, but in the way of having people link to you, (which apparently is the way to go these days), I came across a site, and a newsletter, which are both worth mentioning.
The site is called LinkPopularity.com, and it does a good job of providing a free service in terms of allowing you to check which other sites are linking to yours. I found that there were far more Orble links to my two Orble sites than I’d expected, and far fewer links altogether to my main site. I wasn’t entirely surprised by the latter, since it’s not a site with a particular focus, and isn’t connected into any other group of sites beyond being one of the millions of blogs on blogger.com.
There were also some rather odd links showing up: four pages on my blogger.com site came up as linking to the main page of the site, and an Orble one. That’s a bit weird, because on checking these rather random pages, I couldn’t see anything that indicated they were linked to anything else. Odd. Still, at least it means there are links
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Recently, sci-fi novelist Scott Siglar recorded his first book, "EarthCore" in 22 episodes, each 45 minutes long. He posted it online via podcasts for free downloads. The book was downloaded 30,000 times, which was enough to attract a small publisher to put out the book.
Podiobooks.com is one of the pioneering sites for sending out podcasts (it was founded by Evo Terra, the author of "Podcasting for Dummies"). If, like Siglar, you’re interested in recording a book, you’ll find guidelines on the Podiobooks site, as well as other useful information.
You can listen to a sample of each book to hear whether the style of the book appeals to you and how you like the author's voice--after all, for a full-length book you'll be spending a lot of time with that voice in your ears. Some audiobook sites use computer voices on their readings; I don’t find these very appealing at all, even though they may be an economic approach
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Random Notes blog up in sixth place out of a large number of Google responses. Now I don’t know why someone is concerned to link together poor old Gareth Farr, the NZ composer, and the word, ‘naked,’ but because I keep mentioning it in my blog, they keep finding it. 
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