Sitening unveiled a fun side project they started earlier this week. It all started with this inspirational tweet and then went horribly wrong when we decided to actually build it!
In about four days as a side project from our regular day-to-day client work, we created TweetStalk. Now you can stalk people on Twitter without having to follow and notify them.
Every SEO Specialist has their own formula for keyword density. Personally, I prefer to simply have articles written naturally and I try to make sure I’m appropriately mentioning and writing about my targeted keywords. However, many SEO copywriters rely on external applications or online tools to report keyword density — sticking to their tried-and-true formula. If you’re one of those people and you use WordPress to publish your content, you’re in luck. A new plugin for WordPress called Keyword Snatcher provides a quicktag to the “Write” page to easily display the current keyword density.
The plugin is not only easy to use, it’s also easy to install and doesn’t require any modifications. One of my favorite features is that it excludes common search engine stop words — taken from Aaron Wall’s stop words list.
Keyword Snatcher is available for free from impNERD.
Hot off the heals of the MyBlogLog API debut, MyBlogLog just released a shiny new widget for displaying recent visitors. In addition to its shininess, you can hover your cursor over a MyBlogLog member to learn more about them. Hovering over Web 2.0 Guru — a recent visitor to the Raven blog — revealed some identifying details and also listed all of the blogs that he authors. There are also options to add a member to My Contacts and to view their profile.
The widget is available from your Blog/Community page on MyBlogLog. Look for the message and link at the top of the page that says, “Check out our shiny new Recent Reader widget.”
I’ve always found Google’s Blog Search to be less then stellar. It’s excellent at indexing, sorting and presenting current blog entries. What it’s not excellent at is returning quality results. However, today it hit an all time low. I was doing some research for a client — searching for “chicago annuity” — and the first page results were basically all spam.
One of the first things I noticed was the keyword stuffing in the blog entry description. As this screenshot shows, having the word annuity in every sentence three times is most definitely keyword stuffing!
If you look closely, you’ll see that all of the websites are Blogspot (Blogger) websites. Although I didn’t click on all of the links, the ones I did click on had already been designated as spam by the Blogger team.
It seems like the Google Spam Team isn’t working with the group that runs the Blog Search. These are the type of search results that are long gone from Google’s main search engine, which is why it’s shocking to see it so “spammed” up. With results like this, Google’s blog search is basically useless. Instead of finding the expected mixed bag of results, I now just find spam. I hope they’ll give this some attention soon.
We were lucky enough to get access to the MyBlogLog API (Web Service), which is currently part of an invite only beta. The API allows you to pull public information associated with your blog visitors and members and then integrate that data into a custom feature or service. We thought of several ways we could use this service, but settled on the creation of a “Blog Members” directory for our first project.
The Blog Members directory was designed to showcase and promote all of the active MyBlogLog users that are members of the Raven Blog (via MyBlogLog). We also wanted to use the traditional sidebar widget to reward our most active members. So here’s what we created!
The Active Member widget can display as many members as you want. We chose four, because we didn’t want to use up too much vertical space, but you could show ten or more members if you wanted. We included a large badge to encourage visitors to join our blog on MyBlogLog. We also included a link at the top of the widget that takes the user to the Members list page.
We built a Blog Member Directory that lists all of the MyBlogLog users that are members of the The Raven SEO Blog on MyBlogLog. Similar to the widget, it lists the members in order of blog activity. We added a “Recently visited the blog” message that appears beneath the member’s name and you can click on any member username to view their Member Profile Page.
Our favorite part of the MyBlogLog Web Services implementation was the Member Profile page. We were able to list and link to all of the social networking services that were identified in the member’s MyBlogLog profile. In addition to listing and linking to their social networking profile pages, we also used the Twitter, Digg and del.icio.us APIs to pull in recent messages, links and bookmarks. Ian Kennedy’s profile page show off the profile features very well.
Since we’re (Sitening) an open source Web development shop, we mainly use PHP for our programming language. We needed a PHP wrapper for the MyBlogLog API, so we made our own. We also made it open source so everyone else can use it too. It’s available on Google Code at http://code.google.com/p/php-mybloglog/.
Dosh Dosh, a quickly rising personality in the world of search marketing, recently posted a blog entry announcing over 10,000 subscribers. Dosh Dosh’s simple advice was to “Minimize noise. Maximize signal.” The blog entry listed eight (accidental?) strategies that were used to achieve this. They included:
One thing that I felt was missing from the list was “branding.” Dosh Dosh has excellent branding. From the name “Dosh Dosh” to the Japanese influenced anime girls, Dosh Dosh has built a strong and interesting brand.
However, there are things in the list I would change, or at the very least qualify…
We’re planning on doing some interesting projects. I’m not going to go into detail about it right now, but it will be something that’s new and fresh — which leads me to believe it will positively affect our subscriber base, not deter it. As for contests, meh.
There’s been a lot of things written lately about the effectiveness of traffic from social networks. Many people see it as a great source of instant traffic, but not a source of long term readership. We’ve experienced the opposite, especially when the content that is made “popular” is a tool or something the user can use over and over. However, Digg in particular is not our favorite source of traffic.
If your blog entries aren’t going to have any interesting information in them, then you should definitely lay off frequent posting. However, if you really do have something to say, and you think it will be of interest to your core audience, you shouldn’t hesitate to write about it. Not only that, it’s also beneficial to organic search engine performance.
Scott Karp over at Publishing 2.0 wrote an entry this week about the scourge of blog comment spam and how it can become an annoyance for unintended victims. Such is the case for Howard Owens. Whenever Howard leaves a comment on a blog that uses Akismet, his comments almost always get flagged as spam, but the problem is that they aren’t spam. Scott believes the culprit is hacking (or cracking as it should appropriately be called).
It’s likely because Howard’s blog was hacked by spammers. Not once, but twice. So when Howard enters his blog URL in the comment form, it triggers the spam filter.
Without Akismet, it would be almost impossible to manage comments on a WordPress blog. On the Sitening Blog (which runs WordPress), the percentage of comments submitted that aren’t spam is less than 4%. So, as much as I feel for Howard’s commenting pain, I’m willing to allow him to slip into my Akismet spam list and click the Delete all button without reviewing the list, and without remorse.
Ultimately though, the point of Scott’s entry was to highlight and increasing trend on the Web — “how spam threatens to squeeze out real content.” Unlike email spam, which has its own agenda, comment spam seeks to artificially build up traffic and search engine performance through automated — albeit somewhat archaic — means of publishing keywords and links. Also, blogs in particular, are like a vast gold-mine for spammers. For every high quality blog that is carefully attended to, my assumption is that there’s a hundred more that are unprotected ones that are being filled up with spam comments. If email spam is any indication of the future of blog spam, then we’re in for long, bumpy ride.
Blogging has proven itself to be more than just a way to speak your mind online. As companies like Weblogs, Inc and 9rules can attest to, it can also be a lucrative business. Even better, you don’t have to be a large company with several blogs to make money — Darren Rowse of ProBlogger is living proof of that.
Although blogging is easy to do, it’s not easy to make it into a successful, revenue generating machine. Being successful at blogging takes time and determination. Mani Karthik put together a helpful list of the twelve habits of successful bloggers that might help you in your blogging endeavors.
Five Reasons Why You Should Run a “Do Follow” Blog
Monday, January 21st, 2008Running a “Do Follow” blog does take more effort. You have to be more vigilant about the quality of comments left on your blog and you have to give greater scrutiny to external links. However, there’s excellent “Do Follow” and anti-spam tools that are available to bloggers. Andy Beard has a comprehensive list of “do follow” plugins. The list includes plugins and guides for WordPress, Blogger/Blogspot, Typepad and Moveable Type blogging platforms.
Five Reasons for Running a “Do Follow” Blog
Although I’ve already touched on some of the reasons why it’s best to run a “Do Follow” blog, here’s my full list (feel free to expand the list in the comments).
“Do Follow” Comment Rules / Policies
Running a “Do Follow” blog does take extra effort, which is why you should have a few comment policies. These are the policies that we use on Raven.
After you change your blog to a “Do Follow” blog, make sure you submit it to the “Do Follow” Blog Directory. That will make it easier for other “Do Follow” bloggers to find your website and is also an excellent resource for yourself. As long as you use spam blocking services, like Akismet, you should be able to effectively manage the amount of spam that will pass through your blog.
Thanks to Randa Clay for the “U Comment / I Follow” badge.
Posted in Blogging, Commentary | 7 Comments »