You can do search marketing for the good of mankind, so why not blogging for the good of mankind? There are issues-focused blogs like the environmental blog TreeHugger. Now there’s a network of blogs for good, founded by Paul Chaney of Radiant Marketing Group. Way to go, Paul! It’s a brilliant idea; I hope it really turns into something big. Doug Kaye (founder of IT Conversations) is another blogger/podcaster with a social conscience… he’s started the podcast channel Social Innovation Conversations.

I too am inspired to blog for the benefit of mankind and the planet. The way I have decided to make a difference is by starting a blog to give visibility to ideas that I and other bloggers have that will make the world a better place in some way. It could be an idea to improve the environment, to help out a charity, to advance human rights, etc. I’ve just launched this blog, which I am calling Changes for Good. I would love to get some of you bloggers as contributors. Please contact me if you are interested. And of course, any and all links would be greatly appreciated. 🙂

You may recall several weeks back my post about the blogger hand signal. I’ve since discovered that this “gang sign” has been made into a T-shirt and is available for purchase from Threadless.

If you’re not familiar with Threadless, it’s developed a sort of cult following. The T-shirt designs are submitted by their site visitors. They have some pretty wacky designs, like this one and this one.

An interesting video from the Museum of Media History forecasting a potential fate for the Fourth Estate, culminating in the New York Times going offline in the year 2014. I’m all for citizen journalism, Google, Amazon, affiliate revenue sharing, social networking and Moore’s Law; but mix them all together and it could turn out rather icky.

I think they got it wrong about Googlezon though. I think the merged company will be named Amazoogle. 😉

My two-part article for Marketing Profs titled Ten Tips to Help Your Blog Soar in the Search Engines, was published a couple weeks ago. If you are a premium subscriber, you may have already read it; if not, here’s a brief overview of the secrets to SEO success contained within…

1. Customize your title tags with keywords
2. Rewrite your URLs for link gain
3. Tag clouds and tag pages are your twin secret weapons
4. Link to related posts
5. Create a Top 10 Posts list, regardless of posting age, and offer links to these
6. Lose “permalink” and “click here” from your linking vocabulary and instead link with keyword-rich anchor text
7. Create sticky posts to gain keyword prominence on category or tag pages
8. Use heading tags to reinforce your keyword theme
9. Guide the search engines to your key points with bold, strong or emphasis tags within the body of the post
10. Multiple author blogs need author pages and the links to their sites need to be cleverly done to maximize SEO benefit to them

The complete article is around 3000 words and goes into much more detail, including suggested WordPress plugins and specific PHP code to insert into your blog. Sign up to MarketingProfs to read the full article, or access most of the information on my blog optimization tag page.

Yes, it’s true, you can actually spell the word “blog” with your hands. Here’s the photo to prove it.

Careful, using this ‘gang symbol’ in the wrong neighborhood could get you shot! 😀

The article Defending yourself against the blogs from Multichannel Merchant (May issue) offers some good advice to merchants on how to more effectively manage their brand in the blogosphere.

The article opens with a story of how Greenpeace successfully pressured Gorton’s parent company Nissui to pull out of the whaling business by inciting a blogstorm against Gorton’s. I feel so ‘out of it’ — reading the article was the first I’d heard of this and Gorton’s, & Gorton’s Fresh Seafood are clients of mine! (well, not mine personally, but of my web dev / SEO agency Netconcepts)

Also included in the article are some comments (from yours truly!) on how to enter the blogosphere effectively:

1. Create a “safe haven” for employees to experiment with blogging. Set up a private blog on your intranet or extranet, or start a blog that’s password-protected. Then offer access to that test to a selected audience. Your inexperienced bloggers will feel more comfortable knowing that all your customers and competitors are not watching their every move.
2. Decide on a permanent home for your blog. The Web address you choose should be one that you will be happy with for years to come. Remember that it will become difficult to switch blog services if you allow the service’s name to be part of your URL. Ehobbies.blogs.com, backcountryblog.blogspot.com, and sethgodin.typepad.com are all examples of blogs that are forever wedded to their blog platform, for better or for worse. If they switch platforms, all the links they’ve earned will be unavailable to their new blog. Links are the lifeblood of your search engine visibility, so the significance of this cannot be overstated.
3. Select a scalable, flexible, and user-friendly blog platform. There are so many solutions to choose from! Some are hosted services, such as TypePad, Blogger, and WordPress.com. Some are software packages that you install on your Web server, such as WordPress, Drupal, or Movable Type. You can pore over comparison charts (such as the one at www.ojr.org/ojr/images/blog_software_comparison.cfm), though I suggest you simply go with WordPress (the software package, not to be confused with the hosted service at WordPress.com). WordPress is free, so the price is right. It’s highly configurable, since it’s open source, and it has a plethora of free, useful plug-ins written for it.
4. Decide on a posting schedule. Try to post at least three times a week. Allow several hours per week for this. I typically spend two to three hours a week blogging. Don’t hire a ghostwriter for your blog, or you’ll get slammed by bloggers for lack of transparency (an unwritten rule in the blogosphere). As far as retaining readers, recency is more important than frequency. A couple weeks of inactivity makes the reader feel like nobody’s home. Conversely, having the latest post be only a day old makes the blog appear “fresh.”
5. Build relationships with respected bloggers. Not only will they be more likely to link to you, but they will also offer advice and bolster your street cred. Posting thoughtful comments on their blogs is only the first step. Attend blogger conferences such as BlogOn and Blog Business Summit and meet bloggers in person. Keep the dialogue going through e-mail and through phone or Skype conversations. Become an evangelist, and you will really get them on your side.

You may also want to check out on my own blog the unabridged version of my ecommerce blog tips that I had sent to the Multichannel Merchant journalist. It further expounds on the five tips.

It is easier to build a relationship with your reader and engage with them if your blog is sticky. A sticky web site compels visitors to come back again and again, and to stay longer too. My blog is reasonably sticky because the author is so good and has such insightful things to say. 😉

But in all seriousness though, there are things you can do to engage your readers more effectively. For instance, you can form a community where they all talk to each other. Most blogs, unfortunately, are abysmal at that. Even my blog really doesn’t do a very good job of bringing readers together and involving them in a group discussion. It’s entirely too easy to be up on one’s soapbox, to start a conversation and also finish it.

Here are some practical suggestions for making your blog sticky, courtesy of Performancing:

1. Design for repeat visits
2. Keep advertising minimal for repeats
3. Provide a recent posts list
4. Answer your comments
5. Use the right language
6. Post frequently
7. Have a private message system
8. Allow member posts
9. Include members in decisions
10. Don’t neglect the distributed community

Since my list of WordPress plugins was so well-received, I’ve got another list to share. This time it’s my favorite Firefox extensions…

• Tab Mix Plus – saves your tabs and windows and will restore them if you quit out of your browser or it crashes, allows you to undo the closing of a tab, and lots more
• Performancing for Firefox – a blog editor for your WordPress, Movable Type, or Blogger blog that features integration with del.icio.us and Technorati, spellchecking, etc.
• All-in-One Gestures – execute commands by making certain movements with your mouse without having to use the keyboard, menus or toolbars — like going back a page, closing a tab, etc.
• User Agent Switcher – masquerade as Googlebot, Yahoo Slurp, or msnbot etc. to see if a site is doing bot detection
• Web Developer – tool for doing CSS coding, building web forms, etc.
• Google Toolbar for Firefox – Get query suggestions as you type into the search box, view PageRank scores, etc. Check out my screencast on installing, configuring and using the Google Toolbar.
• SEO-Links – hover over a link and it displays link popularity and rankings for the anchor text from Google, Yahoo and MSN Search. I’ve got a screencast on using SEO-Links too.
• Copy Plain Text – copy-and-paste from a web page into Microsoft Word so that the formatting isn’t carried over
• ChatZilla – IRC (Internet Relay Chat) client
• Sage – RSS feed reader
• ViewSourceWith – view the page’s HTML source using an external editor (WordPad, BBEdit, etc.)
• ShowIP – displays the IP address of the web server in the bottom right corner
• StumbleUpon – get recommendations of related pages to check out from friends and like–minded individuals
• Search engines for the Search Bar – add your own favorite search engines to the search box in the top right, such as: MSN Search, Wikipedia, LinkedIn, Technorati, Creative Commons, etc.

Here’s a tip that isn’t quite an extension, but over time it’s a huge time-saver. And it works in IE too.

• When you want to type in a URL into the address bar, you can leave off the the www. in front and the .com at the end, because, by hitting Ctrl Enter, the browser will automatically add the www. and the .com to the address for you!

This isn’t meant to be a comprehensive list of useful Firefox extensions. Check out the new FirefoxFacts ebook for a bigger list of recommended extensions and tips for Firefox. And if there’s an extension you feel should be added to the above list of favorites, please leave me a comment!

I was asked via email by a reader whether a company’s blog should live at blog.mycompany.com or mycompanyblog.com.

If the blog will get more links by being at an arm’s length from the corporate site, then I’d have it on a totally separate domain.

For example, if a life insurance company had a blog about health and wellness at www.stayinghealthy.com, I would expect that to garner many more links from the blogosphere than one at blog.lifeinsuranceco.com.

This may seem like an oversimplification, since I haven’t discussed the branding implications, but I believe the “link-ability” of the blog is the key ingredient for long-term success with a corporate blog. Everything else to me is peripheral.

What follows below are some of my favorite WordPress plugins and why. Many of them I have in common with Cavemonkey’s excellent Top Ten WordPress Plugins list. Here’s my list, in no particular order:

• PodPress – makes it super-simple to post podcasts; includes an inline media player
• Popularity Contest – offer a leaderboard of your Most Popular posts based on views and ratings
• Google Sitemaps Generator – creates a Google Sitemaps XML file. What’s killer about this is that it uses Popularity Contest’s ratings for the priority scoring that Google uses to determine how frequently to spider your pages
• Akismet – you’d be a fool to run a blog with comments turned on and not use this plugin to stop the flood of comment spam. ’nuff said!
• Adhesive – gives you the ability to flag certain posts as “Sticky” so they float to the top of the category page regardless of whether it’s the most recent
• Ultimate Tag Warrior – creates tag pages and a tag cloud. Great for SEO as I’ve said before.
• EmailShroud – an email address obfuscator to thwart those evil email harvesters. Scans for email addresses in posts, but won’t work on email addresses hard-coded into your theme.
• Transpose Email – another email address obfuscator. Doesn’t automatically scan for email addresses, but can be used from within your theme files.
• WP-EMail – “Email this post to a friend” functionality
• WP-Print – Printer-friendly version of posts
• Subscribe2 – let your readers subscribe to your blog updates via email
• In-Series – link posts together into a series, regardless of dates posted or categories selected
• Permalink Redirect – fixes the canonicalization problem where the same page loads whether the slash is there or not. Important for SEO.
• Gravatars – puts the commenter’s “Gravatar” image next to their comment
• Subscribe to Comments – a commenter can check a box on the comment form so that they get notified of further comments to that post
• WP-Notable – places a row of buttons alongside your posts so the reader can easily add your post to their favorite social bookmarks service (del.icio.us, digg, etc.)
• A Different Monthly Archive – a pretty way to display links to archives by month
• Related Posts – link to related posts automatically based on the content of the post
• Related Posts for your 404 – your File Not Found error page can now suggest related posts to the misguided user. Cool!

What are your favorites? Did I miss any important ones?

Hello from the Search Engine Strategies conference in NYC. Tomorrow I’ll be speaking on search engine optimizing blogs and RSS feeds. If you recall a post of mine from last month, I went into some detail on some tweaks I had made to this blog to make it more search engine optimal. I thought I’d continue where I had left off, with some more handy-dandy blog SEO tips:

• Use Heading tags
  Heading tags (H1 through to H6) are given more weight by search engines than regular body copy. So use them to reinforce the page’s overall keyword theme. Don’t make the date an H1 tag, instead make the current category name or tag name on your category page/tag page an H1 tag. Make the titles of your blog posts H2 tags. More on this here.
• Add emphasis within your posts
  Use bold tags, strong tags, etc. within the copy to help identify to search engines which words/phrases should be given more weight.
• Make use of “sticky” posts
  A “sticky” post is one that always appears at the top regardless of the date/time posted. The “sticky” feature is available in some blog systems by default (e.g. Blogger.com) and in others through the use of a plugin (e.g. the Adhesive plugin for WordPress). Sticky posts make it easy to make your targeted keywords more prominent on a category page or tag page, because it will ensure the keyword-rich copy you write in a sticky post stays at the top of the page. More on how to do this here, and an example of it in use here.
• Link to and profile your contributors (for group blogs)
  If your contributing bloggers have their own independent websites, they’ll appreciate you passing them some link popularity. To do so most effectively, don’t link to them site-wide but instead from your home page and from within each post that they author. Also create an author profile page for each of them, with a link to that author’s site, a biographical statement (taken from the “About Yourself” field in their profile), and the posts that they’ve authored. This is my profile page for example. Let them define the anchor text of the link to their site, The way I did it for this blog, which runs on WordPress, was to get each author to specify the anchor text they wanted in the Nickname field on their User information and I used that instead of their name at the top of each post.
• Do keyword research
  Whenever you craft a title, a tag, a post’s body copy, a post slug, or a category, you should be considering whether the words you are using are what your target audience are searching for. Here are some free tools: Overture’s, Google’s; and paid tools: Wordtracker’s, Trellian’s.

If you want proof this stuff really works, and that it’s not hard to do, my 14-year-old daughter in 2 days created her first site, a blog, using WordPress, about Neopets. She wisely named it the The Ultimate Neopet Cheats Site, after doing the research (okay, I helped her) to find that “neopet cheats” was a pretty popular term (albeit not as popular as “neopets cheats”) and not very competitive. Lo and behold, just 2 weeks after launching the site, it’s already on page 2 in Google and Yahoo for “neopet cheats” and climbing! And that was just with one link from my blog.

UPDATE: You can now download my Powerpoint slides from Search Engine Strategies on optimizing your blog and RSS feeds. Also, by the way, my daughter’s blog is now on page 1 in Google for her targeted term. 🙂

UPDATE 2: My daughter has now moved her Neopets Cheats site off of WordPress.com because of their policy of not allowing the posting of AdSense ads.

UPDATE 3: My daughter now has a Swicki on her blog which brings in additional AdSense revenue.

A report conducted by the recruitment firm OfficeTeam, the Office of the Future: 2020, looks ahead to the future of office work and the kinds of jobs that will be invented in the coming years, which they purport will include such things as Virtual Meetings Organizer, Human Resource Coordinator, and Information Integrator/Abstractor.

It was the Information Integrator/Abstractor role that intrigued me the most. According to the report, the job will include the collecting, compiling, and indexing of text, data and images in order that this content can be searched in a variety of ways.

It occurred to me that the business blogger of today is the predecessor to the information integrator/abstractor of the future. After all, what does a business blogger do but the following:

• identify a wide variety of trusted sources of novel and important news and commentary
• take in an overwhelming amount of information from these sources
• ruminate on this information, analyzing and making a judgment call on its value and relevance to his/her constituents
• cull, aggregate, categorize, prioritize, and comment on the information collected, in an effort to make it more relevant, timely, useful, and actionable
• republish it in a format that can be easily disseminated and further analyzed / commented on by others of his/her kind in disparate parts of the world

This could be the job description for a Corporate Blogger in 2006 as much as it could be one for an Information Integrator/Abstractor in 2020!

If your blog isn’t linkworthy, it’s not going to get very far in the blogosphere. Indeed, links are the currency of the Web, at least as far as search engines are concerned. No links = no rankings, and lousy links = lousy rankings.

One might even go so far as to valuate a business blog on its links (at least in part). For fun you might try out the free tool at the Business Opportunities Weblog and see how much your blog is worth. The computation is based on the link-to-dollar ratio of the AOL-Weblogs Inc deal. According to the tool, this blog is worth $200,000. Anyone want to buy it from Rick? 😉

So how do you make linkworthy posts? In The Art of Linkbaiting, Nick Wilson and commenters offer some great suggestions:

• Offer a niche-specific blogroll, tool, How-To, or compilation of news stories.
• Post a scoop.
• Expose a story as flawed or a fraud
• Be a contrarian about a story, product, or prominent blogger’s opinion.
• Be humorous. Good topics include a bizzare pic of your subject, “10 things I hate about…”, and “You know you’re a when…”
• Publish or commission some original research
• Creative-Commons-license photos you made of an event you’re blogging about
• Make available for free a theme, plugin or piece of software
• Start a meme that others can replicate and that links back to you (e.g. buttons/stickers/tools for bloggers/webmasters to post on their sites, contests, quizzes, surveys, etc.)

Building links is both art and science. It requires a great toolkit as well as loads of creative ideas.

MarketingProfs is holding a webinar on Feb. 16 on the topic: “Inside Secrets to Building Links for Online Publicity, Buzz and Search Engine Optimization”. The undisputed link guru Eric Ward and I (Stephan Spencer) are both presenting. Sign up here.

As Rick mentioned, I’ve lent a hand with the recent blog revamp. One of those things is to help search engine optimize (SEO) this blog a bit more. I’m just in Phase 1… there’s plenty more left to do. Here’s a recap on what’s been done:

1. URLs. It’s imperative when switching blog platforms that the old permalink URLs still work. There are plenty of deep inbound links from the blogosphere to specific posts that provide that all-important “link gain” (such as Google’s PageRank) to this blog. We don’t want to lose that! So I ensured that the permalink URLs of all the old posts within our new WordPress 2.0 blog are exactly the same as they were under Typepad. I couldn’t do that with the category URLs (WordPress requires that category URLs include a directory), so for those I did a permanent (301) redirect to the new URL. (In case you’re curious, I did this through a rewrite rule in .htaccess). That way the link gain passes on to the new URL. I also set up a rewrite rule for all pages under http://businessblogconsulting.com to 301 redirect to the corresponding page on http://www.businessblogconsulting.com. This will eliminate duplicate pages in the search engine indices and consolidate link gain. Otherwise when people link to http://businessblogconsulting.com without the www it creates another site for the search engines to visit and explore. For new posts, the permalink URLs will contain full words and hyphens not underscores, since underscores are not considered to be word separators by Google.
2. Title tags. From an SEO perspective, the title tag is the most important thing on the page. Most blogs don’t have optimal title tags. The best title tag is one that LEADS with the targeted keywords. Most blogs, including this one, led with the name of the blog. Instead that should go at the end. I’m happy to say that’s now the case here. And I customized the home page title tag to have some good keywords in them like “corporate blogs” and “business blogging”. Note that now the home page title (which is “Business Blog Consulting: Everything about Corporate Blogs and Business Blogging”) has both singular and plural forms “blog” and “blogs”, as well as the verb tense “blogging”. Creating a custom title tag for your blog’s home page is well worth doing. Consider this: I decided to target the search phrase “web marketing blog” with my personal blog, Stephan Spencer’s Scatterings. By simply changing the home page title tag from “Stephan Spencer’s Scatterings” to “Stephan Spencer’s Scatterings: Web Marketing Blog” and adding a mention of “web marketing blog” once in the body copy, I went from nowhere in Google to currently #8 out of 55,200,000 for “web marketing blog”! That’s an important point, btw… Make sure the keywords you are targeting are not just in the title tag but in the body copy as well. On this blog, you’ll notice that “corporate blogs” is now in the home page title AND in the body copy. Hopefully I’ll be able to report back soon that we’re highly ranked for “corporate blogs”!
3. Tagging. A tag cloud and tag pages are a blogger’s secret weapon. I can’t believe how few bloggers do this. I’m not talking about Technorati tags. I’m talking about using a plugin like Ultimate Tag Warrior, which is exactly the plugin I installed to create tag pages like this one. So now, if we want to target a new keyword in the search engines, we just start tagging some posts with that keyword and, presto!, we’ve got text links everywhere pointing to this new tag page (notice I’ve put a tag cloud on the global site nav so such links are ubiquitous throughout the blog). And of course I made sure the tag name is mentioned at the beginning of the title tag and in the body copy! I’m going to further optimize the tag pages by adding some keyword-rich intro copy to each tag page, but I haven’t gotten to that yet.
4. Related Posts. I installed the Contextual Related Posts plugin so now we’ve got more interconnections between blog posts, which is a good thing. Each permalink page lists related posts at the bottom of the page. Most blogs are overreliant on the chronological archives, which tells the search engines to weight your recent posts more heavily. But an old post may be really well optimized and targeting a really important keyword. So that post needs more link gain, and that means more links pointing to that page and links from pages higher up in the site hierarchy. Related Posts is a good start. I made each blog author’s name a link to their posts, and that will help too. I’m also going to install a Top 10 Posts plugin to provide further linkages, and that will be even better! But I haven’t gotten a chance to do so yet. Ah, not enough hours in the day…
5. Link text. I’ve made the title of each blog post link to that post’s permalink page. The word “permalink” is not good link text, for the same reason that “click here” is not good link text either. (Unless of course you want to be #1 in Google or Yahoo for “click here”!) By having the words in the post title as link text, this tells the search engines what the permalinked page is about much more effectively.

This isn’t a comprehensive list, and I’m sure I’ve forgotten some things. If I have, I’ll post an update here.

BTW… Here are a couple other good blog posts to check out if you want more search engine visibility for your blog: Ultimate WordPress SEO Tips, Google Teaches Bloggers How To Rank

I heard at the Search Engine Strategies conference earlier this month in Chicago that the Ask Jeeves spider doesn’t cope well with websites that don’t have robots.txt. So if you don’t have a robots.txt file hosted on your blog’s document root, create a blank one.

Another detail often missed by bloggers is to create your own custom favicon.ico file. The favicon is a little 16 pixel by 16 pixel image that appears in the location bar on people’s web browsers; many of the RSS readers use it as well. Peter Brady at Performancing has some interesting things to say about whether or not bloggers need to have a favicon. My take on it is this: with a custom favicon, you look cooler and more with it, plus it differentiates you from the rest of the pack in your subscribers’ RSS subscription lists. If you don’t have time to mess around creating one in Photoshop, you can do a quick and dirty one pretty easily using the free web-based tool Favicon Generator. It took me all of two minutes to create my favicon for my blog using this tool.

With the blogosphere abuzz with the announcement that Yahoo has acquired
del.icio.us, I predict tagging is going to get a lot more coverage in
the press now. Along with that will come a validation to their readers
of the importance and benefits of tagging with business people. In
anticipation of that, all us business bloggers need to get serious about
incorporating tagging into our blogs.

One thing I haven’t seen enough of on blogs — but I predict will be
up-and-coming — is the appearance of tag clouds, where certain keywords
are larger in font size than others, all of them clickable, leading to
various category pages, tag pages, or search results pages.

One of my favorite implementations of a tag cloud on a blog is on O’Reilly Radar

My second most favorite is a new approach to “auto-tagging” on Eurekster’s blog.

The latter is actually what Eurekster calls a “BuzzCloud” and any
blogger or webmaster can get one for free by signing up for a Swicki. A
swicki is a personalized search engine of the web that is targeted and
relevant to you and your blog audience. The buzzcloud contains a set of
search terms that you have suggested along with ones that Eurekster
auto-tags by noting which searches are popular with your audience. When
one of your readers clicks on the links, they are taken to a search
results page in Eurekster for that search term, and the results popular
with you and your audience are promoted to the top of results and marked
with an icon — in essence, tagging the results as well as the search
term.

I believe tagging that requires manual intervention such as del.icio.us
and technorati are primarily for web-intensive users; the combination of
manual control and auto-tagging offered by Eurekster with swickis can
potentially lead to mass-use.

You can sign up for a swicki for your blog or website here.

I love Google as much as the next person, but their official blog just doesn’t do it for me. The "voice" just does not seem real, or anything I can relate to. It feels scrubbed by the PR department; I might even go so far as to say it comes off as a mouthpiece of the PR department. I don’t get that feeling from Google engineer Matt Cutts’ blog. The official blog, however, has its face to the company, and consequently its butt to the reader. That’s just a gut feeling I get reading their blog, but the specifics of what bother me I found harder to put my finger on… until now.

I’m not telling you anything new when I say that business bloggers who are overly self congratulatory or self promotional are anathema to the blogosphere. But where do you draw the line? When is it too much? In trying to quantify what bothers me about the Google blog, I came up with what I believe is a quantifiable "sniff test" to ascertain if a blog is too narcissistic or inward-facing: it involves "keyword density." Keyword density is simply the ratio of a particular word to the the total number of words in a page (or in this case, in a post). Read on, to learn how you can apply this test to your or others’ blogs.

As an SEO (search engine optimizer), I scoff when I hear the words
"keyword density". Calculating and fine-tuning a page’s keyword density
in order to appear higher in the search results is a fool’s errand.
Yet, I think I’ve finally found a valid application for a keyword
density calculator, and it has nothing to do with SEO. Here’s what you do…

Add up the number of occurrences of "we", "us", "our", and your company name in the blog post. Do the same with "you" and "your". Calculate the
ratio of these two numbers. And calculate the keyword density for both.

What about “I” and “me”, and “my”? I’ve intentionally not counted them, because I recognize that the blogger needs to claim their thoughts and opinions as their own. It’s the faceless self-important corporate voice that really bugs me the most. And that’s what this sniff test ferrets out.

Let’s work through an example. Take for instance this post from the Official Google Blog:

• 17 occurrences of "we", "us", "our", "Google" or "Googlers"
• 3 occurrences of "you" or "your"
• 6:1 ratio of us-speak to you-speak
• 422 total words in the post
• 4% "it’s all about us" density
• 0.7% "it’s all about you, the reader" density

Compare that with this randomly-selected post from the Yahoo! Search Blog:

• 7 occurrences of "we", "us", "our" or "Yahoo" (in the context of the company not part of a product name)
• 8 occurrences of "you" or "your"
• 1:1 ratio of us-speak to you-speak
• 214 total words in the post
• 3% "it’s all about us" density
• 4% "it’s all about you, the reader" density

In this very small sample set, Yahoo’s blog seems to talk to the reader
much more effectively. Not to mention their blog supports reader
comments, unlike the Google blog.

Now to make this more scientifically valid, we just need an automated
tool that analyzes all of the posts from both Y!’s and Goog’s blogs to
compare. That’d be a nifty little tool if it existed. Perhaps I’ll get
someone here at Netconcepts to code it…

— Stephan

You may already be familiar with the concept of character blogging, where the blog is actually a fictitious charcter, such as a cartoon character from a cereal box, or a doll perhaps.

I think an interesting twist to this concept would be to have an historical character blogging from the past, as if it were the present day. I think American Girl, with their dolls from various historical periods would make for excellent character bloggers.

As a step in that direction, American Girl has recently launched a Felicity Blog. Felicity is a doll set in the time of the American Revolution. I think it would be a great idea for Felicity and the other dolls to be speaking to girls from the past.

American Girl is done a little bit differently though than a character blog. One of their editors poses questions Felicity faces, and also deals with themes/issues that are relevant to girls today, and asks girls to say what they think Felicity should do.

This Felicity blog doesn’t really give the impression of a character blog, but it is certainly very successful in soliciting comments from readers, with over 250 comments for their first blog post. That is really impressive!

Maybe there are some lessons here to be learned for business bloggers in how to engage with their community of consumers as successfully as American Girl seems to do.

If attendance at the "Blogs, Podcasts and RSS" breakout session at last week’s Shop.org annual summit in Las Vegas is any indication of retailers’ receptiveness to blogging, the room was full and the retailers were a captive audience. Yes it helped that one of the panelists, my client CEO blogger Steve Spangler, made his wallet catch on fire, made snow erupt from a beaker, and showed how to cause an fizzy eruption of carbon dioxide with Mentos and Diet Coke. (Did I mention he’s a trained magician, professional speaker, and Emmy-award winning television personality? …in addition to being an inventor, cataloger, entrepreneur, CEO,…)  Anyways, electrifying performances aside, the retailers on my panel — eHobbies, Ice.com, and SteveSpanglerScience.com — all gave compelling evidence for the value of blogging to retailers, and for Steve, even taking it further and bringing podcasting and vodcasting into the mix.

You’ll want to check out the panel’s Powerpoint deck for charts of blog-related revenue growth and other goodies. Steve shared that 13% of online revenue is attributable to his blog. Not bad!

I’ve also blogged a recap of the session here.

A few weeks back I blogged some advice here for business bloggers who might want to consider text link advertising as part of their blog marketing mix.

Well, there’s been a lot of controversy as of late about buying text links. Blogger Phil Ringnalder published a scathing post accusing publishing house O’Reilly of being a search engine spammer. O’Reilly’s founder, Tim O’Reilly, responded to the accusations on his own blog. Google engineer Matt Cutts posted a comment to Tim’s post admitting that Google has decreased the voting power of sites like perl.com and xml.com and downgraded the reputation of some of their outbound links. Ouch!

Matt’s (and presumably Google’s) position was loud and clear:

If you don’t want your own site to suffer the same fate as O’Reilly, you better tag your link ads with a rel=nofollow attribute so that you don’t pass any PageRank score to your advertisers.

In my mind, that doesn’t seem quite fair. Website owners and bloggers work hard to build a content-rich site with good PageRank score. Google’s black-or-white stance on this equates to a diminished earning ability for these websites by insisting webmasters cut off the flow of PageRank to their advertisers. This of course decreases the value of the link ads to those advertisers, and consequently the revenue likely to be realized from them. Granted, no savvy advertiser is going to buy a text link ad solely based on PageRank score, but PageRank does factor into the equation.

This makes me wonder what Google’s position is on BlogAds.com is, which is part banner ad, part text link ad. A good blog ad contains useful content. Why shouldn’t the blogger be allowed to “vouch for” (by not tagging the link with nofollow) the links contained within that ad if they so choose?

Most “white hat” SEOs such as Christine Churchill believe text link advertising is a legitimate practice. I agree with her.

I wonder what Google would do if all the websites across the Internet decided to take all their banner ad inventory they have and bypass the click-tracker redirect that counts all the clickthroughs. Suddenly all these new votes would start counting all over the Internet for commercial advertisers and sponsors. Wouldn’t that throw Google for a loop!

So what is the bottom line here for bloggers who are looking to advertise? It’s basically this: be discriminating in your link buying. Text link advertisements are not inherently evil. Just don’t buy ads on sites where any of the other advertisers on the site are misleading, deceptive or misrepresentative. By that, I mean things like the following:

1. Setting the ad’s link text to some keyword-rich phrase that doesn’t accurately reflect the page that is linked to.
   e.g. An ad on SeacoastOnline.com proclaims “The North Face” but that isn’t The North Face!
2. Linking the ad text to a landing page that is built for search engines and not for people.
   e.g. the “Discount Vacations” ad on DailyItem.com points to one of Orbitz’s many “doorway pages”.
3. Hiding or obscuring the link so human visitors can’t see it, only search engines.
   e.g. Doing a “View Source” on the home page of PRNewswire.com reveals these hidden links:
   
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<a href="http://www.icrossing.com">Search Engine Marketing</a>
<a href="http://sev.prnewswire.com">Search Engine News Release Optimization</a>
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And it goes without saying that you should refrain from such practices yourself when you advertise.

This post is based on material taken from on my own blog across three separate posts: Link buying – ethical or unethical?, Buying links – Google’s perspective, and Buying link ads – the ethical debate rages.