OVBlogger: Blogging and SEO

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If you haven’t been online all that long, you probably forget the days when all web pages had to be written by hand in a text editor, like Notepad, TextPad, WordPad, and all those other pads. Everyone had to learn HTML because that was the only way to get your stuff onto the Web.

Enter WYSIWYG, which means, “What You See Is What You Get.” WYSIWYG HTML editors abound from the free versions, such as Nvu to the expensive alternatives like DreamWeaver. And you know what most of them have in common? Overblown code that can make you nuts if you half know what you’re doing!

Well, I know at least that much and the WYSIWYG editors I’ve tried from MSWord to that freebie, Nvu work, but how well? Often the code they create isn’t compatible with all browsers. For example, some center a table with <table align=”center”>. Firefox doesn’t mind, but Internet Explorer says, “So what?” You have to physically go in and add the <center> and </center> tags fore and aft. Annoying!

Here’s a link to the Boing Boing short for an interview with the NY Times Design Director, who says they hand-code everything:

http://www.boingboing.net/2008/04/30/nytimescom-handcodes.html

Probably a very good idea, if you’re uber picky about how your code looks.

But… also important for another reason.

Our Tech genius at Overcome Everything, Johnny Meehan, just discovered something very unhappy, at least for me, who uses Nvu a lot—it doesn’t work with Google Analytics. For some reason the code it manufactures makes the Analytics stats come out all wrong. Please don’t ask me why or what they are… I don’t have a clue. Johnny’s the genius. I’m just lucky to work with him.

I recently did a page for one of the OE sites that was totally screwy when I tried to edit it and enter new content into the page. Pfffttt!!! It got me so crazy that I just hand-coded the whole page from scratch. It was much, much simpler.

Anyway, WYSIWYG is great for pages that don’t have to be reworked or for pages that you’re throwing up in a hurry or whatever. I use it, too. But… if you want reliability, learn some HTML.

It’s not rocket science.

Popularity: 66% [?]

Have you ever used “nofollow” tags on your website? If you aren’t using them, you definitely should be.

For example, if you have a PR4 page and you have links to 10 sites on that page, each of the pages is getting the benefit of 1/10 of the strength of that PR4 page. You’re bleeding page rank, if you’re using follow-through links to pages like support, about us, or any other page that you don’t want to rank in the search engine results.

The solution is the “nofollow” tag. When you use that tag, the search engine spiders stop when they see it, and the page the link is on won’t be affected.

Here’s how a “nofollow” link looks: <a href=”http://ovweb.net/about.html” rel=”nofollow”>About Us</a>

So, it’s smart to use the “nofollow” tag on any page that you don’t want to appear in the search engine results pages. You’ll find that this strategy works as well on websites as it does with blogs.

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As an aside, this week is heating up. Ben Mack will be joining me on Wednesday at 9 p.m. for a little Guerilla Balance Sheet conversation. Go over to http://Blogging4Boomers.com and sign up for the calls, wether you’re a Boomer or not. It’s going to be chock full of great information!

Popularity: 50% [?]

Are you into using video yet? If not, and you’re well on your way with blogging, it’s time!

There are several reasons. First, you don’t have to make your own videos. Finding a video in your niche and adding it to your blog is a great way to add content and not have to think too much about it. Here’s how to embed video in your blog, if you grab it from YouTube, for example.

1. You go to the video page, and on the right hand side, as the video is playing, you’ll see a line of code in a box, and above it says, “Embed.” So, copy that code and put it into a plain text editor like Notepad (Don’t use Word. It does creepy stuff when you try to translate to HTML.)
2. Go to your WordPress blog dashboard.
3. Click on the Write tab
4. Give your entry a headline and write whatever introduction you want for the video into the blank.
5. Above the writing pane, you’ll see a tab that says “Code.” Click on it.
6. Under the introduction you just wrote, type in <center><embed>
7. Paste in the code you copied at YouTube.
8. Directly after it, type in </embed></center>
9. Go back to the writing pane and click “Save and continue editing.”
10. When the page refreshes, you won’t see the video in the writing pane, so DON’T FREAK OUT!
11. Click on Preview
12. You’ll see that the video is indeed working and you can give just a little shout of victory!

Adding video is very cool and easy to do, and there are plenty of sites to get it from–Google Video, Blip TV, Daily Motion, and so on. Just look for the embed code for the video and do what I mentioned above.

If you make your own videos, it’s not that different to get it into your blog, you just have to store the video on your own server, create your own code, and embed a player. It’s much easier to upload to a video directory site and let them do all the work, plus save space on your hosting account.

But if doing all that is beyond your realm of expertise, you can actually buy a product called “Video Web Wizard,” which I have used in the past, and it will do all the dirty work of embedding the video in a web page for you. It’s really inexpensive and works very well. It comes from Keith Gilbert, who’s like 18 years old. Wow! Wish I’d have started that young. But then, Tim Linden of StartXchange (the best traffic exchange on the planet) started when he was 15. All these Wunderkind. I think it’s awesome. Anyway…

If you use Camtasia, you can produce the video as a web page. The current Camtasia version is Camtasia 5, but you can get Camtasia 3 free at this blog:

http://www.downloadsquad.com/2007/11/22/techsmith-offers-free-camtasia-studio-download/

Lemme tell ya, Camtasia is the Bomb! If you’re going to buy it, however, it’s about $300 for the current version. I bit the bullet because video is where the Web is heading.

Then, when you’re done creating and editing your video, you can spend hours and hours uploading it to a gazillion different video sites. If you want a great way to do it and only upload the video once, you need to check out Traffic Geyser. It will upload the video for you to many different sites.

A new place, Tube Mogul, will allow you to upload to several sites free, but it has nowhere near the power of Traffic Geyser. Then, you can supplement by adding to sites that Tube Mogul doesn’t have by going to Jack Humphrey’s Friday Traffic Report and checking out his list of 50 video sites. Great post. Great blog. If you’re not a subscriber, well… You aren’t thinking straight.

But here’s the deal… People want to turn their computers into televisions, and with the speed of broadband and the fact that the majority of people have high speed connections now, it’s possible. And guess what? I bought Camtasia about 6 months ago and already made the money back and then some. So…

Get into video. Seriously. If you don’t, you’ll be left behind.

Popularity: 76% [?]