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Mar 25
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I guess you could say that I’ve been blogging on and off for around 8 years, maybe not today’s classic reverse-chronological blogging but through various methods over the years I’ve shared my thoughts with the Internet at large. In that time I’ve kept an eye on my page rankings and have figured out enough to help ensure that my content gets seen as often as possible by the right sorts of audience. I should say up-front that I don’t always follow my own advice since I tend to flit between projects and often don’t have as much spare time as I wish I had but I keep trying different things until I learn a thing or two.
So, since the web is all about giving and sharing (with a sprinkling of lolcats) I felt that now would be a good time to post a few tips to help other bloggers make sure their voice gets heard. I should stress that these tips are not designed for commercial ventures nor to produce stupid volumes of traffic, I love the Internet and I’d never condone the so called black-hat SEO usually employed to peddle crap and generate more ad clicks. Anyway, on to the tippage…
Tip #1: Produce Good Content
This may sound stupid but the one of the most important factors used by search engines to choose which pages appear above others is how popular the page is based on links from other sites. People aren’t going to link to your content if it isn’t any good and besides, if you’re not producing decent content you’re probably not doing what you set out to in the first place (unless you were aiming to be rubbish). It might sound daunting at first but all you have to do is produce content that might be useful to people, either because they’re well researched opinion pieces, reviews, tutorials, etc. Just share your knowledge and experience and someone out there will find it useful and if you don’t feel that you know enough – do some research and share what you learn.
Tip #2: Produce Plenty of Content
It’s worth bearing in mind that search engines chiefly index the text on web pages which is all well and good if you’re a writer but if you’re mainly posting photos and videos it’s worth making sure you include a certain amount of test along with the post, ideally a synopsis of the video or a description of what you feel the photograph shows, how you went about taking it, etc. If you want to start your blog off with a big bang you should write a good 5-10 posts before you ‘launch’ as well as having populated your profile or about pages, having a reasonable amount of text on day one will really help you get on the major indexes (Google, Yahoo, Bing) as early as possible.
Tip #3: Promote Yourself and Get Involved With the Community
You don’t need to go off at the deep end and remember that what you’re trying to do is make your content known to the target audience, the aim is not to mass-market yourself but to make sure you get found. If you’re blogging in a particular niche then get yourself involved in the community, join forums, comment on blogs, etc. and you’ll get your name (and your blog) known, as well as finding out a little more about your audience and what they might want to see. I don’t mean that you should join a forum and spam it with all of your posts – remember you’re goal shouldn’t be to self promote but just to get involved. It’s also well worth using social networking sites wherever it makes sense, make sure you’ve got a presence on Facebook and Twitter as a bare minimum and consider other sites such as Myspace and Bebo if they cover your target demographic.
Another method of promoting yourself is to use paid advertising, it’s a good way to get an initial influx of readers to your site – this might seem a bit daft if you’re building a personal blog but you can quite often get free trials with various online ad agencies such as Google, Facebook, Microsoft, Stumbleupon (also see my Stumbleupon Ads review).
Tip #4: Tune Your Links
I said earlier that the most important factor search engines use to rank pages is the number of inbound links, this is mostly true but I’d add the proviso that they need to be good quality links. In this case ‘quality’ is affected by a couple of major factors, the PageRank of the source (links from more popular sites help more than links from less well known ones) and the relevance of the link text (the text of the link should relate closely to the content on your site). This is particularly useful whenever you’re crafting links back to your site in forum posts or comments on other blogs, for example – if you are writing about exploring abandoned mental hospitals it is much better to link using relevant text (e.g. Abandoned Asylums) than it is to just post the URL (e.g. http://www.sickbritain.co.uk/2009/08/top-10-abandoned-asylums-in-the-uk/) since the text gives the search engines a way to understand what it is you’re trying to say.
It’s also easy to forget but search engines also evaluate your outbound links, the Internet is a network and you should always make sure that you’re linking out to other great sites (for example, see Brent Ozar’s WordPress SEO post). You might think that posting lots of outbound links would cause your readers to jump ship and look elsewhere but actually the opposite is true, the Internet is full of both good and bad content and people need help to filter that so if they find a site they like and trust that helps them find other good content they’ll keep coming back to see what else you’ve found.
Tip #5: Find Your Niche
If you’re just starting up your blog you may not have settled on a particular area of speciality, it’s absolutely fine to have a general “this is what I’m up to now”, or “here’s something I found interesting” type blogs (in fact you’re reading one now) but if you want to build traffic and obtain regular readers it’s probably better to stick to one topic. This makes most sense if you’ve got one clear hobby (e.g. running, or urban exploration) but if you’re anything like me your hobbies might be a bit random (photography, travel, video games, Apple products). If you struggle to find a personal niche you could always take a more professional angle and blog about your area of work, whether that be as a blacksmith, a nurse, a teacher or a more techie discipline such as IT Security, Business Intelligence or programming. I’ve already mentioned that it’s links that are important, picking a niche will not only help build your readership it will also help make sure that your inbound links are relevant since all of your content is clustered around one subject area.
Tip #6: Monitor Your Progress
It’s all well and good to follow all of these tips, but how will you know what’s working? If you’re using a hosting company there’s a high likelihood that they will provide some sort of stats package to go with the hosting, you can get great information from sites like these but they’re often a bit fiddly and sometimes too detailed and you can’t see the wood for the trees. The best solution I’ve found (not least because it’s free) is Google Analytics, I’ll write about this separately at some point but there are plugins for most common blogging engines and CMSs that collect information on which pages are being visited and allow you to see not only the number of hits you’re getting but also where traffic comes from (referrals, keyword searches, direct visits, RSS feeds, etc.). If you use Analytics and have an iPhone you have to check out one of my favourite applications Google Analytics app for the iPhone, it’s been on my front-page for over a year and I use it almost daily.
Tip #7: Be a Good Citizen (a.k.a. don’t be a jerk)
Simply put – you just won’t become successful as a blogger if you act like a jerk. Don’t get me wrong, if you are a jerk and that’s your thing and that’s part of your blogging style then I guess you might as well go for it but what I really mean is that you should be respectful of your readers and your peers. One of the worst possible things to do as a blogger is to rip-off other people’s content, it’s fine to reference and quote other people’s posts but don’t copy & paste wholesale and especially don’t try and pass the idea off as your own: plagiarism is not cool – give credit where credit is due. My other major piece of advice is not to take self promotion too seriously just focus on good quality content – don’t spam forum and comment threads with links to your site, don’t write posts just because you think you’ll generate more traffic, don’t write crappy little posts just to get your post count up, etc.
Whilst I’m mildly reluctant to admit it, I was one of those sad people so excited by Apple’s scheduled July 27th announcement that I stayed behind at work so as not to miss the Engadget live-blogging coverage and despite the fact that every man and his dog will be blogging about the iPad over the coming weeks (and yes, 
In terms of actually using the device, the demo shots of browsing the web, watching films and thumbing through Google maps all look absolutely superb, very slick, very iPhone, very Apple. I was especially impressed by the look of the calendar since the iPhone has been a godsend in terms of managing my personal life and anything that can help me remember where I’m supposed to be and when is a real boost for me! Despite being a gamer I really wasn’t that interested in that part of the presentation, there seems to be an obsession with trying to present the iPhone and now the tablet as hard-core 3D gaming platforms when I’m quite sure that they’re both rubbish for racing sims and first-person shooters. I’m not saying that games don’t have their place in a mobile lineup but the physics-based genres are far better enjoyed on the XBox 360 or PS3, the real strength of a touch-screen mobile platform is for genius-like casual games such as 
The biggest leap forward provided by the iPad is by far and away it’s use as an e-book reader and for reading newspapers, whilst the rest of the features are stunning by themselves the real revolutionary change that this device (and devices of it’s ilk) will bring is in how we consume ‘print’ media. Steve’s presentation really made me feel sorry for Amazon’s Kindle, seeing a photo of the chunky white keyboarded 1980s-style device followed by as shot of a Jonathan Ives masterpiece must have ripped the heart out of the Kindle team at Amazon. That’s not to say that Amazon as a whole lose out here, their app will most likely work on and compete with Apple’s own iBooks offering and that sort of competition can only be good for end users – my only big worry with the e-book future is that so far all of the major stores are using DRM, meaning that if you bought a book on one store you won’t be able to transfer it to another.
So, what’s the point of the iPad then? I’ve heard a few people saying that they really don’t see the point and that’s it’s nothing more than a big iPod and to an extent they’re absolutely right, it’s not portable like a phone and it’s not as functional as a laptop. I don’t even think Steve’s cheap shots at the netbook market were quite warranted since I’ve no doubt that the iPad would be useless if I were trying to work remotely from a Starbucks typing emails and using a VPN client to remote control my work desktop. This is something I have done on little Dell Mini 9 many times and it really does work, the tablet market isn’t meant for people who want a laptop and it isn’t for people that want a netbook.
In comparison to its younger brother the SNES had a wonderful design, where as the NES looked like a cheap lunchbox with the coloured buttons and curvy design the SNES tells you immediately: “this is going to be fun” – and fun it was. I didn’t own a SNES myself but I borrowed one for a time and had plenty of play-time on what most people regard as the classics, and two out of my three games here are all time classics irrespective of platform.
Probably the most obvious choice and a defining moment for the genre, the console and perhaps the era is 2D fighting legend Street Fighter 2: Turbo Edition. There were a few versions of Street Fighter released on the SNES and whilst I feel justified in combining them into one for the sake of simplicity it’s the Turbo Edition that stood out for me, never before had we seen such a fast-paced twitchy fighting game packed with special moves and combos – it was a joy to behold but a real labour of love to master.
Another clear stand-out game is Super Mario Kart, oddly I stand out as being one of the small minority of gamers who has never particularly liked the Mario Kart games but I still recognise it for the landmark it is and I am well aware of how popular the game remains up to this day (with DS and Wii versions selling like hot-cakes). The game made good use of the common SNES graphical trick of rotating a 2D plane to give a 3D look and feel (known as 
Lastly is another 
Alongside the SNES, Sega’s Megadrive (or Genesis in the US) was one of the significant era-defining consoles in video gaming history, between the two consoles they’re responsible for turning a generation of kids into gamers and despite the potential fanboy-vs-fanboy flamewar fallout I’d put them both on a par for their impact on and input to the video gaming world. Always much more drab than the SNES, the Megadrive and Megadrive II were compact little black units that didn’t really ooze fun but provided me with some of my most fun gaming experiences.
It’s inevitable that I’m going to mention the Megadrive’s flagship game: Sonic the Hedgehog, a game I must of completed more than twenty times and I honestly don’t think that there is a more perfect example of a platform game out there. Whilst also available on the Master System it’s the 16-bit graphics and sound that really allowed Sega to pull off one of the platform’s first truly cartoon-like games, bettered in graphical style only by the Disney games: Castle of Illusion, World of Illusion and Fantasia.
It’s difficult to stop myself from rambling on and on about Megadrive games but I’ll try to limit myself to a few more titles that I believe either defined a genre or brought about a new change in direction for gaming. My stand-out game here is Desert Strike, a top-down isometric combat helicopter sim. that required the user not only to get to grips with a bizarre control method but also added a degree of mission planning and forethought by forcing the player to think about fuel, ammo and hostage rescue whilst trying to complete the missions handed out.
One genre that really seemed to take off in the 4th generation of consoles and I think particularly on the Megadrive was sports titles, one clearly landmark title was EA’s FIFA International Soccer – the game that started one of gaming’s most successful series. Whilst also available on the Master System again it was really took 16-bit graphics and speed to get the genre going with the followup game FIFA Soccer 95 being a Megadrive exclusive and other franchises throwing their hats into the ring such as NBA Jam, Madden NFL, NHL Hockey, NHLPA Hockey, PGA Tour Golf and so on.
The Mega-CD was unit that fit either underneath the original Megadrive or alongside the Megadrive II holding the main console in a sort of cradle, it provided a CD-ROM drive which would naturally allow much higher volumes of data to be stored alongside real CD-quality sounds, Full Motion Video (which was mainly grainy and pointless) and some additional graphics horsepower. The problem was that most games of the era didn’t really need that and consequently most titles released seemed to be much more like technology showcases than decent playable games (Night Trap I’m looking at you). This time I’m not going to pick a ‘best game’ out of the pile I’ve got because I honestly don’t believe that any of them rate higher than the standard Megadrive titles.
The 32X was a strange beast indeed, meant to up the power of the Megadrive to a 32-bit level it was a mushroom-like lump that was attached directly to the cartridge bay of the main console and in turn took specially designed cartridges itself, there were never really many games available for the 32X and I imagine the whole project lost a lot of money for Sega. Still, some titles really showed off a level of power beyond that of any other equivalent on the standard 4th gen. consoles, found Virtua Racing Deluxe and Doom to be two of the best available.
Like many an Apple user I’d been looking forward to getting my hands on Snow Leopard for a while, perhaps since Bertrand Serlet’s presentation at WWDC 2008 announcing “zero new features”. That might sound silly but the vibe given was clearly that Apple weren’t planning to mess with the user interface too much but instead focus on improving performance and tweaking existing functionality and that sounded great to me given that Leopard already catered for almost all of my OS requirements. So coupled with the “evolution not revolution” approach and the price announced at only $29 I was practically on the edge of my seat with anticipation.
