In recent years, weblogs have grown from a band of sharp-tongued outlaws to the darlings of online marketing. From Stonyfield Farm Yogurt to the Republican National Committee, it seems that everyone has a blog, or two, these days. Whether you are an individual out to bring in an income through running ads on your site or a large business with a blog on the site as a way to create relationships with potential clients, you are today’s Big Thing on the Internet. Naturally, the major search engines should be catering to your every need. But you make it plenty hard for them! Your site lives and dies by content that changes every day, so it’s difficult for search engines－which are also trying to index the entire rest of the Web, too－to keep up.

Blog-specific search works differently from standard search. Instead of going out and wandering through the zillions of web pages on the Internet every day, blog search engines sit back and watch for changes that come in through the “wires.” This means that you’ll need to do things a little differently to get your site included in these engines. In Part III, we’ll give you pointers for setting up, troubleshooting, and monitoring your feed.關鍵字優化

All the major search engines integrate blog postings into their search results, but the blogosphere, a common nickname for the world of blogs, is vast and wide, so you’ll still need to be very aware of blog-specific search sites. You can find links to current biggies and up-and-comers on the companion website at關鍵字優化

Advantage: A Link-Friendly Culture Showing up on the blog-specific search engines isn’t going to get you very far on its own. Blogs are part of a very special subculture on the Internet, and you need to tap into that subculture to gain visibility. Blogs need incoming and outgoing links－lots and lots of them－to succeed. But, lucky for you, no other sector of today’s Web is as link-happy as the blogosphere.網路行銷

The blogosphere is a very social place. Even if you usually cross to the other side of the street to avoid chatting with a neighbor in the “real world,” you need to force yourself to be a much more gregarious animal online. Time-consuming as it may be, reading other blogs is one of the best ways to connect yourself to a community, and ultimately build links and visibility for your own blog.關鍵字優化

Challenge: Optimizing Every Post Since your site probably doesn’t have a traditional site map, with sections, subsections, and conversion pages, you won’t have traditional landing pages to focus your SEO attentions on. Instead, you will have to put your time into making every post a better place for searchers to land. All of the SEO rules we lay out in this book for landing pages－rules like including keywords throughout text, writing great titles, and using search engine-readable HTML text－should become part of your every post.關鍵字優化

Does it go without saying that you are going to need to update your blog very, very frequently? We sure hope so. Since your whole existence as a blogger is about writing excellent content, you’re already well on your way to search-friendly site optimization.關鍵字優化

Web designers are natural partners in SEO. After all, shouldn’t the person who designs and builds a website have a strong interest in knowing how to make it search friendly? After gaining coverage in the New York Times and Newsweek, SEO has become positively mainstream. We’re betting you’ve already had a client ask for SEO, or you wish to add it to your service offerings. Want to use SEO for a bigger slice of the proposal pie or to gain a longer list of prospects? Here are some of the challenges and advantages we expect you’ll face:關鍵字優化

Advantage: The Inside Track You’re already on the job, providing web design services. Your client trusts you, and the site files are nestled safely on your hard drive. Lucky for you, it is often difficult for an outside SEO consultant to be inserted into the very early stages of web design. This is because much of the website is still theoretical early on, and “theoretical” SEO can only get you so far. Use your status to your advantage: As the designer, you can easily introduce SEO early in the conversation and be sure it is integrated into design decisions throughout the process.關鍵字優化

Challenge: Hucksters Abound No, no, we’re not talking about you. We’re talking about those other web designers. You know, the ones who feature SEO as an add-on to their regular services, and then just stick HTML titles on some pages, with no keyword research or insight to back them up? They probably charge a couple hundred bucks for the add-on, spend 10 minutes on the work, and accomplish nothing for their clients. Unfortunately, you have to compete with these guys. To protect your reputation.網路行銷

We have a feeling that once you have a solid understanding of search engine-friendly design and are integrating SEO best practices into your web development, it won’t just be an add-on, it will be a principle applied to all your projects. With this important capability in your portfolio, you’ll have a better chance of landing the projects you want, and heck, we won’t blame you if you raise your rates a bit.網路行銷

Challenge: A Short-Term Project SEO is a long-term effort. It requires months if not years of ongoing work. Most web development projects, however, are structured to last only through site launch and perhaps a short support period. Most SEO contracts have a term of 3-12 months, and if you’re really confident about your SEO skill set, you’ll want to push for an ongoing contract, too. Remember that the added value of your SEO services can’t possibly be known until the website has been up for several months.關鍵字優化

Challenge: A Change of Perspective You’re a web designer, which means you probably know a little something about graphic design, information architecture, usability, “look and feel,” and techie back-end development. This is great news because file-naming conventions, choice of site architecture, and scripting and page structure choices all play a part in the search engine friendliness of a site. However, your skill set may or may not include writing and marketing strategy, and your relationship with your client may not go there on a regular basis. If you’re not a natural wordsmith or strategist, you’ll need to update your tool belt or find a partner who can complement your skills.關鍵字優化

Let’s face it: The search engine’s job is not easy. Take a look at your filing cabinet, multiply it by about a billion, and imagine someone throwing you a couple of words and then hovering impatiently behind you, tapping a toe, expecting you to find exactly the right document in the blink of an eye. Nobody could! We humans are wonderfully intelligent creatures, but we’re just a tad on the slow side when compared to computers. Unfortunately, machines are still just that: machines. They struggle with ambiguity that even a kindergarten student could handle. Not to mention misspellings, regional dialects, and punctuation. For search engines to bring back great results, they have to combine the best of both worlds: the speed of the machines and the intelligence of the human mind.

What’s a search engine developer to do? Two things:

First, combine results from several sources, as discussed earlier. This allows the search engines to intertwine the massiveness of the machine-driven system (robot results) with the finesse of the human touch (directory and paid results).

Second, structure the ranking algorithms to integrate “VOTES” FROM HUMAN BEINGS. Putting The human touch into a ranking algorithm can be done in a variety of ways, and search engines continue to experiment with solutions. Counting inbound links from other websites, for example, is a way of measuring how many votes a site has from human－and presumably intelligent－webmasters and bloggers. Other ideas have included measuring how many search engine users click through to your site and how long they stay. Social bookmarking sites and collaborative tagging, even comparing a person’s current and past searches, are forms of artificial intelligence intended to improve the search experience.

But artificial intelligence still has as long way to go. In movies, you can say to a computer, “Computer, rotate, and enhance!” and the computer will somehow manage to turn and unblur a grainy image from a security camera just the way you need it. In the real world, we just aren’t there yet. Search engines remain very literal creatures, unable to improvise very much beyond the exact words, even the exact syntax of words, they are given.

網路行銷

Let’s face it: The search engine’s job is not easy. Take a look at your filing cabinet, multiply it by about a billion, and imagine someone throwing you a couple of words and then hovering impatiently behind you, tapping a toe, expecting you to find exactly the right document in the blink of an eye. Nobody could! We humans are wonderfully intelligent creatures, but we’re just a tad on the slow side when compared to computers. Unfortunately, machines are still just that: machines. They struggle with ambiguity that even a kindergarten student could handle. Not to mention misspellings, regional dialects, and punctuation. For search engines to bring back great results, they have to combine the best of both worlds: the speed of the machines and the intelligence of the human mind.網路行銷

What’s a search engine developer to do? Two things: 關鍵字優化

First, combine results from several sources, as discussed earlier. This allows the search engines to intertwine the massiveness of the machine-driven system (robot results) with the finesse of the human touch (directory and paid results).關鍵字優化

Second, structure the ranking algorithms to integrate “VOTES” FROM HUMAN BEINGS. Putting The human touch into a ranking algorithm can be done in a variety of ways, and search engines continue to experiment with solutions. Counting inbound links from other websites, for example, is a way of measuring how many votes a site has from human－and presumably intelligent－webmasters and bloggers. Other ideas have included measuring how many search engine users click through to your site and how long they stay. Social bookmarking sites and collaborative tagging, even comparing a person’s current and past searches, are forms of artificial intelligence intended to improve the search experience.網路行銷

But artificial intelligence still has as long way to go. In movies, you can say to a computer, “Computer, rotate, and enhance!” and the computer will somehow manage to turn and unblur a grainy image from a security camera just the way you need it. In the real world, we just aren’t there yet. Search engines remain very literal creatures, unable to improvise very much beyond the exact words, even the exact syntax of words, they are given.關鍵字優化

So many people feel intimidated when approaching SEO. They think it’s ultratechnical or it requires a huge budget. Many people think SEO requires some sort of degree or a lot of insider knowledge. But SEO doesn’t take any of that.關鍵字優化

The only thing that is really necessary for SEO is the willingness to learn. So here is our most special gift to you, an SEO mantra that you can adopt as your own:

I wonder why that’s happening.網路行銷

This is the approach that got us to where we are today; it helped us gain our SEO knowledge, and it keeps the clients coming. This is how we attacked almost every SEO question or problem before SEO was a big industry with hundreds of books, e-books, and websites devoted to it. And more often than not, this is how we still approach things. It can work for you, too.關鍵字優化

It goes something like this: You say to yourself, “I wonder why my Google listing has that weird misspelling in it.” Then you spend a few minutes searching for the misspelled word on your page. If it’s not there, you look for it in your meta tags. Still not finding it? Browse through the directory listings. “Aha,” you say, “There’s a misspelling in my Open Directory listing!” Now you’ve learned two things: one, that your Open Directory listing is feeding into your Google listing, and two, that you’d better get to work on getting that misspelling fixed.網路行銷

Or you say to yourself, “I wonder why my competitor has such good placement in that shopping directory.” Then you click around until you find the “advertise with us” link on the shopping directory, figure out if that placement is a service they offer, and determine whether you want one, too.網路行銷

Developing a healthy curiosity about how the search engines work, and an itch to solve interesting puzzles, is key to do-it-yourself SEO. It’s a poor man’s or woman’s marketing study, and it’s the best way to find your own path toward getting moer targeted traffic.關鍵字優化

Over the past several years, I have both drifted on and off of the SEO career path from time to time. Extended side projects and maternity leaves have caused me to focus my attention elsewhere temporarily, but I’ve always come back, and what’s more, I’ve always gotten my SEO chops back and been able to offer respected, useful, and well-received consultation within a relatively short time, every time. Why? Because I have internalized the Truths of SEO and use them as my basic frame of reference. Now that you understand the longer-lasting aspects of SEO, it should be a lot easier to make sense of the “right now” qualities, which will be described in my next article. So stay tuned !關鍵字優化