wolfb - feeds and RSS

Wolfb is back in Blogger. After a year or so in a drupal platform, I've decided to move back to Blogger.

The reasons are simple: I made the mistake of installing 9 blogs in the same Drupal script, which worked fine for a while, but proved unmanageable at the end. And when I decided to move to another server, it was impossible to transfer the database or make any sense out of it.

So I cleaned most of the posts and moved back to Blogger. This blog is not my main one (which is the Spanish language hombrelobo), but I will keep it to post a few ideas from time to time in English and to announce news from the eyeOS project.

Funny, this must be the only blog moving to Blogger ... seems like everybody else is moving from Blogger to Wordpress .....

Stay tuned ... :)

Labels: domain, seo, web

Focus on Digg, forget the rest, that's the message after looking at this:




alexa website statistics by alexaholic








Well, OK, also focus on Slashdot if you have a friend that can you a story published .... :)

Labels: domain, seo

A few days ago I started a new project: a videoblog or vlog in Spanish, called hombreloboTV.

There is only one video so far, but after publishing it, I started investigating about the use of GeoTags, that is, marking the videos with a location marker. Why ? Because that gives you the possibility of looking for the videos in a world map, where you can look at the videos recorded in the place that you like most. I travel a lot, so I plan on having 6 or 7 countries covered this year. So back to geotagging.......

I read a few very interesting articles on the subject, among them some from Vlogsmaps and this about getagging using  Microformats. All good but not quite there yet. Different formats are proposed, with no clear benefit for any of them.

Then I found this service: Tagzania, that allows you to mark different points (in my case, URLs) with a free account. The great thing about the service is that allows you to create a Google Map (this is a link to a Google Map of my videos) with all your points and also a Google Earth map (this is a KML link to a Google Earth map of my videos). You only have to create more links to your account and the maps get updated.

The service is very good. Now if they would only allow for clickable URLs .... (I emailed Luistxo from Tagzania and he told me they are working on it). And then, let me dream .... updating my account with my own RSS, so I can add the geotags to my individual posts and my Tagzania account gets updated automatically .... :)

Labels: domain, seo, tagging

A lot of websites talk about optimising your pages for Google (to gain as many visitors for free as possible). Some others talk about optimising it for Adsense (to get those visitors to click as much as possible in your adds and make as much money as possible).

But I am going to discuss here how to optimise your site for Digg, Google / Yahoo AND Adsense. Why ? Very simple, because they are complimentary, and in the long run your site will be better off working with all of them in mind.

I am going to assume that the objective of your site is to get your voice out to as many people as possible and to get paid for it as much as possible.

Traditionally, you would optimise the site for Google Search, so you get as many visitors from the Search Engines as possible. That would mean using:

- Title and keywords in the metatags.
- In-URL keywords.
- A good title that includes all your keywords (that means, a boring title)
- All this is intented to optimise it for machines, so repeating words and making it boring.

As a second step, some people would also optimise it for Adsense (once they are here, let's make sure they click on adds that pay enough). Again, this means optimising for machines, and involves:

- Looking for high-paying keywords.
- Using those keywords in the title and the text of the pages.
- Mixing the adds with the text, and annoying visitors with very in-your-face adds.

But now we have a new tool: Digg. The difference with the others is that digg:

- Is made of human beings, not robots.
- It has a very short live.

As an example, let's see here the effect of having one story in the front page of Digg.com:




As you can see, it is a very dramatic increase, that fades immediately.

Let's compare this with a "Google effect", when a page gets better positions in Google over time:



The ideal situation would be then to benefit from the 3 of them at the same time. This can be achieved if we do as follows:

- Create great content (no surprises here ...)
- Write for humans. The title has to be catchy and a good summary of the content.
- The first paragraph has to have a lot of information already.
- Include only one or two keywords maximum in the title and first paragraph, to avoid alienating humans and still get robots to index it with those keywords. In order to find those keywords, we have to look for words that generate a lot of traffic (my favorite resource here is Wordtracker) AND also pay a lot per click (my favourite resource here is Keyword Country)
- We send the story to Digg (my experience says best time is Wednesdays at about 09:00 USA Pacific Time)
- We ask a few of our friends to vote for it ... if we don't get enough votes in the first hour, it will disappear forever.
- We pray ??  :)

Good luck, Hope you found this article interesting. If you did, please vote for all my stories at Digg.

Labels: domain, seo