Developing Your Blog 2: Content

Developing Your Blog 2: Content

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Introduction

If you have been using the posting on developing links and thing about search engine optimisation (SEO) you might well have found some links that emphasise the need for the highest possible quality in your content. If you want people to take you seriously (even as a comedian) the content needs to be good. It needs to add something to what is already available for a start. This means that once you have decided what you want to write abut you need to start researching what is already out there. The is no point in just reinventing the wheel people will not bother to link to your site, place comments or help your blog by word of mouth. Low amounts of traffic mean that search engines will give you a very low ranking if they see you at all. This means you will get little or no traffic. Unless you plan and strive to create good content your blog or website will fail to attract attention and you will probably stop bothering. Here I'm assuming that you are writing the blog for others to read. Obviously if they are private entries none of this applies however here we are considering blogs and websites as part of the mediascape and being open to the public.

Content...Content...Content

The first thing you need to do is to focus carefully on what the core content of your blog is going to be. It should be on areas you know about or are very keen about and wish to research and comment upon further. This Kinoeye blog started as an educational resource area for one film course that was being delivered. That was its only focus at the start and it took a long time to learn how to do these things well. One good thing about blogging is that your work isn't set in stone. You can go back to entries and reedit them and develop them in all sorts of ways. I certainly want to do this with some of the earlier entries as I have got better at using the available tools and the tools themselves have been improved. You will be on a learning curve don't worry about just do it as the advert says.

My suggestion is that you start out by planning out what it is you want to write about and prepare to get good at it. you might be writing about, fashion, film stars, endangered newts, global warming, the Russian invasion of Georgia. whatever it is you can bet that there are a lot of web entries out there numbered in hundreds of millions however once you get to know an area you will start to dsicover gaps in the coverage. For example only yesterday I was developing a page on Channel 4 and its relationship to the British film industry. I was searching through a Google for good quality entries on the film the Madness of King George. I was surprised that there wasn't an entry worth linking to in my opinion. That means I need to find the time to do a review of it.

Content can provide a range of services which don't currently exist on the Web below I give a couple of examples from my site which seem to be providing visitors with a service which wasn't otherwise available.

I see the Web as being content driven and this is the dominant position at the moement. However not all people agree with this perspective. Andrew Odlyzko considers that communications capabilites through connectivity rather than content (seen as entertainment is actually 'king'). He has written an online article entitled "Content is Not King" (2001). Doubtless the irony of cliking on this link is apparent :-).

What this argument suggests is that the Web (and browsers in particular, which made the Web user-friendly) may have created a misleading impression. By focusing attention on centralized delivery of content, the Web may have prevented a proper appreciation of the importance of the often chaotic and generally unplannable point-to-point communications. The Web and the browsers may have played two main roles. One was to force online service providers to accept an open interoperable standard that made the entire Internet accessible for communications for everyone. The other was to introduce a user-friendly graphical interface for e-mail, chat, and netnews, which made such communications easier. However, the Web is not as important to the Internet as is commonly thought.

Now there is no question that Odlyzko is making some powerful points and those intersted need to study his peer assessed article carefully. However since 2001 things have moved on considerably. The enormous expansions of social networking sites with people generating their own on-line spaces as well as a proliferation of blogs, Wikis, Podcasts and other aspects of Web 2.0 clearly challenges the binary position which he has established becuase connectivity and content do appear to be converging between these forms.  In this sense user generated content which goes beyond the point to point or one to one of the personal letter or telephone call is significantly different. whether the business models of Google, My Space , YouTube and Second Life will succeed is yet to established  however all of these are in someway dependent upon user generated content to drive the Web. This sems to counter Odlyzko's arguments against content which in terms of what might be described as Media 1.0 with centrally delivered content and control are convincing arguments. The upshot of all this is that producing worthwhile content for your target audience will help drive the web and if it is good content will help add value to humanity in general.

Planning your initial postings

Before you start blogging on the area of your choice you would be wise to plan out several articles and preferably think about how they can complement each other so that you can then interlink them. Even when you do things right it will probably take search engines time to notice you so don't expect instant and immediate results. Once you have a small body of work written then it may be a good idea to contact the search engines and alert them to your developing site. Again this is prioritising content and it ensure that once search engines start to crawl your pages there is something there that people will want to read. In the long-term you will want people to revisit your site, bookmark it and even link to it. You need to impress that audience who may also be publishers that you are worthwhile putting into the loop.

Providing a Service

I have mentioned this page in the previous section on web development so skip it if you have already visited. As my main current research project is a history of European Cinema in the five main industrial countries since 1918 I needed to map out which countries had been producing which films when.  I realised that a simple table drawn up as a chronology / timeline would be incredibly useful. I could could make easy comparisons. I then realised that I could link each entry into the best article on that specific film that I could find on the web. I decided to do this very thoroughly and went down to page 20 of a Google for each entry. Very occasionally I turned up something excellent like a brilliant thesis on page 15 which nobody had noticed. This provided a service in several different ways. For any researchers it could be a useful first stop, for those who had published something unseen I was contributing to bringing it to light, for film programmers and films clubs across the world it provided easy access information to make decisions or to put into their local marketing. At a perwsonal level it gives me a useful research tool as well. another advantage of doing this although I hadn't realised it at the time was it was a page that would appeal strongly to search engines because of all the external links.  It was acting in accord with the principles of Web 2.0  which encourages interlinking as much as possible.  Over time this has developed into a strong page and there is still more to be done.

My second example of a good service page which has done surprisingly well is a page on the Greek Director Theo Angelopoulos. I have seen very few of his films but those I have seen I really liked especially one called The Weeping Meadow. now it maybe too slow and meditative in its style but its a way of making films I enjoyed. When I came to look for more films of his available in the UK there simply weren't any DVDs. There were still a couple available on video but I didn't want to buy at full price as it was old technology. As a result I decided to create a list of good websites and bibliography about him so that anybody who was intersted in his films could follow it up a bit more. Hopefully it will help to create a market for the films currently unavailable. This therefore helps fans and students the filmmaker himself and the company that has the rights but is uncertain about whether the is too much of a financial risk in reissuing them. Despite the fact I have no great expertise on this particualr director I could still do something useful and educational. Somebody else will hopefully develop a more informed page or write a good thesis and publish it on the web.

1. Chronology of European Cinema (Google Ranking 4/10)
   
2. Theo Angelopoulos (Google Ranking 3/10)

Remember Content +Tagging & SEO

As has been dealt with in part one just having the content isn't enough it must be combined with ways of ensuring that search engines find the pages through tagging. I have pages which still need re-editing and tagging more effectively which were the product of a lot of research and work with useful content. These pages still don't register in a Google ranking and are barely visited.

I learned a valuable lesson yesterday when checking up on one of my pages which I though should have worked its way up through the Google search results to at least the page 5-7 region. The page was on Mike Leigh the film maker and included a good range of links a biography and a filmography as well as some biographical details and I considered that the page had more to offer than the Screenonline biographical notes and links thus meeting my page performance targets.  Pages like this have worked their way up effectively in the past so I was surprised that even by page 22 it hadn't appeared. What was even stranger was that a page on his most recent film Happy-go-Lucky published only a couple of days previously was on page 22. It was then clear that I had done something wrong!

On the Mark up page I realised that I had called the page British directors: Mike Leigh. It was called this as it was part of a series, however in the header of the blog post which is read by the search engines this was the name. I Googled the term British Directors: Mike Leigh and it came out first on a global search the problem is that nobody is likely to use that as a search term. As a result I had to edit the page and it is at least getting visitors. I will google it in a couple of weeks to see if it is in the top few pages of a Google search under the term Mike Leigh. I realised that I had made a similar error with several other director pages and had to edit them as well. hopefully they will perform better.

The lessons to be learned from this experience are that content and correct titling of the page and good tagging must be combined in order to achieve success.

Researching Your Content

Researching your content effectively is fundamental to success therefore you must learn how to do it well. It helps if you are clear about what you are intending to research from the outset. This enables you to reject the mountains of spurious information that you are likely to turn up.

You need to research what is already available on your chosen subject. Now when you are researching as an individual to get information you might want something very specific, lets us say for example information about Ken Livingstone the ex-mayor of London and his enthusiasm for Newts.

For the purpose of this posting I entered the search term 'Newts Ken Livingstone'  and turned up the fascinating paper Newtsweek. I also discovered that this search term returned about 16.5K hits. The search term Ken Livingstone returned just under 2.2 Million. Therefore it is useful to narrow the terms of your research as it should make it quicker and easier to find the  information that you want.

If you are comparing somebody who has recently been promoted as a 'celebrity' such as Keira Knightley. Entering Keira Knightley as a search term returned 11.2 Million hits. Apart from anything else this tells us that for many people their priority is engaging in discourse about somebody who has gained a lot of publicity but drooped out of college and hasn't got any A levels! By comparison somebody who has been Mayor of London both in the early 1980s and again for several years until 2008 and influences policies which affect 10 million Londoners plus millions of visitors gets comparatively little attention!!

If you are trying to build a service as this blog is providing resources about cinema I will need to trawl the search returns for Keira Knightley. This is becuase this is the most likely search term that people will put in initially. They might put in terms such Keira Knightley Atonement (662 thousand hits) or Keira Knightley The Duchess(351 thousand hits). Again these terms have narrowed your search down significantly.

Once you have got your Google search running you then need to start being discriminating and learning how to use what Google returns as efficiently and effectively as possible. Assuming you want the best quality writing and best researched entries then you don't need to work your way through every item on the Google page. Many will be fansites just trying to sell visitors something, others will be DVD Companies trying to sell DVDs and so on. some will just be tacky pages gibbering on about ridiculous things which inevitably surround star personas. If you are investigating the construction of stars then these pages could be very valuable by the way. What you are accessing depends upon what your article is trying to achieve. If you are trying to evaluate and review how good a performer Keira Knightley actually is  in terms of her ability at acting then these  sites are just so much junk. The search term 'Keira Knightley Acting Abilities' returned just over 55 thousand hits. Clearly this isn't the primary concern of most sites, which are parasitical and ephemeral in nature.

Anchoring Your Research

When you find appropriate sites for the purposes of your forthcoming blog posting you should develop a weblography. One of the foremost complaints about websites is that a visitor has no idea of how relaible the person is who has developed the site, how well they research things, and how good they are at analysing what they have researched. Most thoughtful people think that most websites are unreliable sources of information. A well known informational site such as Wikipedia suffers from this problem. The articles are multi-edited. Sometimes those workingon articles in an altruistic way are highly informed whilst at other times they are not. Wikipedia has now become more demanding by asking that those working on articles leave accurate citations for example. It wikipedia need to do this so do you!

Things to do to gain your website visitor respect:

Create a webliography that is linked. Visitors can then check your sources of information. You may be proceeding with the information in good faith but it might be out of date or the fundamental research behind ideas might be weak. Some visitors will take the trouble to check and challenge the validity of your concluding comments.

If you have some books or articles or newspapers etc that you have used then create a bibliography. There are different ways of constructing a bibliography but the essence of any referencing system is that any reader should be able to check back on the accuracy of the conclusions you have drawn from the work you have used. Remember journalists and commentators who write for large commercial and non commercial media institutions have access to powerful sources of information as thay will have good libraries for example as well as excellent electronic resources. They are frequently acknowledged as being very expert in the fields thay cover. Therefore articles from the Financial Times, Guardian, BBC and similar media institutions already carry an weighting that individual bloggers with no history can emulate. Many of these organisations will employ their own researchers that a specialist journalist can call upon.

These articles will have been through the editing process and the editor will have spoken to the journalist and checked that the sources for the ideas are relaible. This is one reason why I tend to use a lot of referances to the above organisations when I create a webliography. I respect (although may not agree) the quality. This is what good journalism is all about.

What makes me very suspicious is uninformed opinion. This is clearly a problem with the Huffington Post which is trying  to be a successful 'New Media' online newspaper. It has a low level of resources and its contributors are relaitvely unknown and don't have a great deal of respect for their opinions developed over years or else because they are associated with media brands that have a repuation for good journalism. Joshua Chaffin in the Financial Times (30 / 31 August) commented in a worrying way that her site has benefitted:

...form her tart commentary and conviction that the mainstream media is handcuffed by striving for a false objectivity.

however in fairness Chaffin in an earlier article on the Huffington Post  has noted:

Like a standard newspaper, Ms Huffington insists that her contributors maintain accuracy. All errors must be corrected within 24 hours, lest bloggers have their posting privileges withdrawn. Yet she argues that one of the blog's strengths is an attitude and immediacy that distinguishes it from the mainstream media's sometimes-tortured attempts at objectivity. "None of this 'on the one hand, on the other hand', " she says. "You have to believe that there is a truth to be ferreted out."

Once one reads between the lines this seems that Huffington wants her cake and to eat it. In reality a blogging contributor isn't checked out and isn't necessarily someonewho has the reliability of a system which works to certain professional standards. The search for 'immediacy' could weaken accuracy and when it comes to serious stuff anyway accuracy is important. Who actually cares about the love life of some overpaid tawdry celebrity. I think that Huffington will have to get better standards than this if she is to succeed in the long-term.

You need to strive for professional accuracy in your blog. this means taking more time on postings however once a good posting is up then this builds your blog portfolio and will help generate a stronger presence on the web. It is likely to gain you loyal visitors over time and this is what you want.

Comments Box

Keeping the comments box open to readers is a good idea. You can delete the rubbish which turns up but keep the thoughtful and serious stuff. It all contributes to your site and underpins a core message of Web 2.0 that the sharing of ideas becomes a powerful tool for everybody, which adds a lot of value to society.

A rules of Engagement PAGE

This idea comes from the Jeff Jarvis Buzz Machine blog and might be csomething you wish to do. In any case the work which is your own writing is your own copyright including original images, sounds and video. You may wish to license it through creative commons.

Webliography 

Andrew Odlyzko "Content is Not King" (2001)

Chris Brogan blog . How Your Blog Helps You Do Business

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: 01 Sep 2008 19:18 |  Tags: Andrew Odlyzko Blog Content Blogging Blogging As A Business Content Is King Developing Your Blog 2 |  Comments (0) |  Close comments |  Report a problem

Developing Your Blog 1: Search Engines and Linking

Developing Your Blog 1: Search Engines and Linking

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Introduction

For some time OCR A Level Media has been encouraging the creation of web design and making basic websites as part of its coursework portfolio in both foundation and advanced production. Other level three media courses will be offering similar production units. I have noticed that there is little emphasis on how to develop and maintain audiences and the text books don't seem to be dealing with issues such as marketing the websites / blogs and discussing the increasingly sophisticated business tools available. In many ways this understanding is far more important than learning at an extremely basic level how to use Flash or  Dreamweaver. To learn these programmes properly takes a lot of time and effort and they are not generic skills. By comparison  learning about how web business are actually operating through the use of Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) and Web Analytics tools is very important for an A level student.  One reason for learning about media studies is to gain an underlying understanding  of how things work so that you are not fooled by things which is very easy when it comes to media related things.  You may never do these things yourself.

SEO & Web analytics combined are essential tools for reaching the target audience of the site and are absolutely fundamental to the success of any website whether or not it is trying to sell advertising/ products / services or a combination of these things. At its core media is a business which depends upon attracting audiences and is usually paid for by subscription, advertising or in the case of the BBC a licence fee which is very like a subscription in reality. Together SEO and Analytics drive company websites and even individual websites. Of course content is important but you can have the best content in the World on a site which is useless if nobody ever gets to find it. Marketing and promoting your site are essential ingredients of success. If you don't like doing it then you need to find a company / person that does.

Search & The Web

Let us assume you have got the content of your website sorted out and its great and the design looks amazing and all the links work well and it is easy to navigate, in short it is the perfect website. You have taken months to learn the programmes to create it and lots of time to write and research the content, take the photographs record the sound and the video. You put the site up via your Internet Service Provider (ISP) and because you want to be able to at least pay the service provider you decide to put adverts on your site.  Once your site is up you search for it typing in different search terms. If like most people you don't go further than page two on a Google search you will probably be disappointed. You will have to persevere and go a lot further.

This blog has what I consider to be some pretty good pages but they don't even appear in the first 20 pages of a Google search. That page is pretty much dead in the water unless I do something to try and push it up the search engine rankings. Sometimes this can take months. One page on this site has developed a successful search engine ranking after a few months. It is called A Chronology of European Cinema. According to the Firefox browser it has a Google ranking of 4 / 10.  The reason why this page is powerful is because there are an enormous number of external links and some internal links to what I consider are the best available web pages on individual films publicly available. Over time the page has attracted users. The combination of these things gradually pushes the content up in importance. The number of hours to research the page is enormous and it is still ongoing. By comparison a reasonably useful page on Keira Knightley gets nowhere on the Google page ranking indicator. The page isn't in the first ten (probably 50) on this search term which got 9.3 million hits from Google. No surprises there then! The point is that to your site / pages will have to fight their way up popular search terms. Because my entry has a tag and some links to The Duchess starring Keira Knightley and about to be released a search of the term "The Duchess Film" found my page on page 9 of a Google search - not bad but not nearly good enough! you need to think about a range of relevant tags which might attract some users to your page.

Please note during searches I have found that pages which have come out without registering in the Google rankings can come very high on the actrual search whilst other pages with higher rankings can come in a couple of pages lower. for example one search turned up a British Film Institute Screenonline entry which was justifiably in the top three of a British director search yet the page wasn't ranked by Google. There were no external links though because that it the policy of the site who want to control their content. This almost certainly reduced the search engine ranking but had no effects on the results becuase it was obviously a very popular page. Screenonline has a great institutional critical mass which no blog or small website can hope to emulate.

As you can see from the above example the first thing you need to do is to make your site and your pages attractive to search engines. Search engines like Google are the most important web tools in existence. Without search facilities the web simply couldn't function. There are tens if not hundreds of millions of websites, blogs etc. there has to be a way of accessing them. Google has been the most successful search engine to date because it managed to develop algorithms which searched the web more effectively than other search engines. Search engine technologies are continuously developing and they also try and ensure that the content of the site / page matches the search term. In the 1990s website designers used to add lots of irrelevant meta-tags to their sites. As a result you would get an Australian Scuba diving outfit as the first search hit when you were searching for a French film which happened to have diving sequences in it. Search has improved a lot since then becuase it was very frustrating for users and held back the development of the web.

SEO: Using Links to heighten the Page / Site Profile

SEO is a bit of a 'black art' with Google using around 200 different parameters as it works out its rankings, which are inherently dynamic and therefore change conitnuously. This means that a website needs to be managed. Just because it is high in the rankings month doesn't necessarily mean it will be in a few months time. One reason for this is that people might come along with better pages on the same subject which means yours might get pushed down the rankings. The web is a cpmpetitive place even though collaboration through links can be mutually beneficial!

I have just discovered this useful page which seems to accord well with the experience I've had with the 'Chronology of European Cinema' page I used as an example above when it comes to increasing the profile of a page or site. I wish I had discovered it before however I seem to have worked out quite a few of these ideas for myself. On this site I'm trying to make entries better than other websites that I have discovered whilst researching the pages. Alternatively if I have not time to write a totally individual entry I try to put in a really good set of links to other relevant sites. The next step would be to annotate these sites. In that sense this is rather like providing annotated bibliographies in the hard copy world. Keeping these up to date howver is a serious problem as sites get bigger. In the real world of business based sites and blogs where people are seeking an income keeping these link pages up to date in the dynamic world of the web requires more human resources, unless somebody has developed a programme to do it for you. Even then that is difficult because it requires personal judgement based upon knowledge. Anyway here is Blogstorm's list of things to do:

It isn’t going to be easy but if you really want to linkbait in your industry then the path is quite straightforward:

• Find all pages on Wikipedia that relate to your niche
• Write more detailed versions with better images
• Email all the people who link to the Wikipedia pages and gently point them to your new page
• Find subjects where Wikipedia doesn’t have a page
• Create a quality page on these new subjects
• Use your existing link equity to help the new pages rank
• Wait for people to find and link to these pages

In 18 months this strategy will probably give you enough links to outrank Wikipedia for every term you target. (My emphasis: Blogstorm Linkbait entry) 

There are some things to note here. Firstly  the comment about 18 months. You are not going to develop some super website / blog overnight. The whole thing needs to be considered as a process which develops. Patience and steady ongoing development work is essential! It may be rather time consuming to track down and email Wikipedia users

The idea of using Wikipedia as some sort of benchmark is a good one because Wikipedia pages frequently have a high ranking. Despite the problems of Wikipedia it is continually developing and entires are only likely to improve. The may well be pages that aren't linked to by Wikipedia and you need to search for these as well. for example in the world of British cinema the Screenonline site has many excellent entries. I frequently link to these until I get time to write a better one. As the quality of these is usually very high each page is hard work, however the point is to continue to add value to both my site and by implication the web as a whole. This is the importance of the idea of Web 2.0, sharing and developing information and ideas. This is one reason why search engines encourage sites to make links.

The question of linking out (to other sites) from mainstream media sites is subject to research  to see if this creates more links in.  There does seem to be  some correlation between the two figures indicating that providing outgoing links  can benefit even large mainstream media companies.

What is Linkbaiting

Well I hadnt' come across this term until today however the underlying meaning is pretty straightforward. Here is a useful article from the About Weblogs site on linkbaiting (Google page rank zero at time of writing).

Tagging Blogs

The way that search engines work to update their information is by using programmes called called webots or webcrawlers which search sites and even read some of the content to check it against  the  tags  which have been used by the web publisher. Another system that helps find blogs is the Technorati search engine. you can 'ping' technorati with you tag and then it will be entered into its search engine. It is obviously useful to enter as many systems as you can to help people find your blog:

Tagging is a software tweak that's already used on photo-sharing site Flickr.com, for example. Here's how it works: As the site's users post their photos for everyone on Flickr.com to see, they tag a photo taken in, say, Iraq, with a tagline, "Iraq." A blog search engine called Technorati.com uses these tags to retrieve search results. If you entered "Iraq" into its search dialog box, the engine would serve you up with news stories, blogs -- and photos tagged with "Iraq" (See this article on Salon.com for other examples of tagging).

Such tags could completely change the way we blog and communicate, believes Glenn Reid, who, while at Apple, created iPhoto. In a recent blog entry, Reid gives a great example of the possibilities: All reader comments on all blogs could, potentially, be linked up based on their tags, so that, instead of following individual blogs, people would be able to follow conversations on specific topics (such as Iraq) conducted on hundreds of blogs. (Business Week: The Future of Blogs )

Websites and Metatagging

Websites work slightly differently to blogs and the way to encourage them to be visible to the serch engine web crawlers is to create metatags in the HTML:

Meta tags are HTML codes that are inserted into the header on a web page, after the title tag. They take a variety of forms and serve a variety of purposes, but in the context of search engine optimization when people refer to meta tags, they are usually referring to the meta description tag and the meta keywords tag.

If you are making a website using a programme such as Dreamweaver you will need to plan your metags carefully.

Please now go to the entry on content

Webliography

Webstorm SEO and Webmarketing Blog. This entry on 'Linkbait'

SEO Wisdom - How Great Content Brings Top Rankings

15 tips to increase Blog Traffic

The Three C's of Blogging

Linkbuilding versus Linkbaiting

Help Search Engines Find Your Blog by Letting Them Know Where It Is

SEO is Dad: The 30 Easiest Ways to Get Links and Exposure (I think you need to take some of these with a pinch of the proverbial salt, they can be quite time consuming. I still think excellent content is key for long-term development.

Online Media Studies Centre: Improving content with Web data and analytics

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: 01 Sep 2008 08:29 |  Tags: A Level Media Production Blogging Developing A Blog Linkbait Media 2 Point 0 New Media Search Engine Optimisation Seo Target Audience |  Comments (0) |  Close comments |  Report a problem