O’Boyle Training Redesigned

I’m proud to announce that the new website for Hugh J O’Boyle Training has been officially launched. I was initially contacted by O’Boyle Training last year to look after their old ASP content management system, which had been designed for them several years previously.

After spending some time trying to tweak the website, it became clear that it wasn’t serving the company’s needs. They commissioned Scribble Designs to completely overhaul the website to give them a modern site with full flexibility.

The new site is built using ASP.NET 2.0 and provides a more flexible content management system which allows the administrators to easily add new pages and sections. The site’s back-end sports new file and image management facilities and a whole host of new features.

I’ll have more information on the web design portfolio page shortly.

My Blogging Swiss Army Knife: Top 5 Essential Sites For Bloggers

I started blogging back in 2004, and during that time have come across a number of sites that helped me learn more about the process of blogging and how to build a successful blog. This post contains the top 5 websites that I consider indispensible resources for bloggers.

Hopefully this post reflects my goals from blogging - which are writing quality content, generating traffic and making money from my blogs.

This post is also a part of the ProBlogger group writing project.

1. ProBlogger - Darren is the original problogger. He has covered all aspects of blogging over the last couple of years - from monetization of blogs through to search engine optimization and copywriting, he’s placed himself at the centre of the blogging industry. ProBlogger is an essential destination for anyone serious about blogging.
2. Performancing - The first of two communities on my list, Performancing has been completely reinvigorated in recent months by the efforts of Ryan Caldwell and Raj Dash. Both write from direct experience and participate to a fantastic extend in the Performancing community. Because it’s geared toward bloggers (the motto is “Helping Bloggers Succeed”), it’s easy to get involved in discussions in the forum or share your expertise through a personal blog entry.
3. John Chow - John will love this double-linkbaiting idea for evilness! Get a link from Darren’s writing project and a link from Chow! Seriously though, John Chow has some great ideas for how to make money online. From clever tricks with AdWords to affiliate marketing, there are loads of alternative methods of monetization for bloggers to explore. Also, if you do a review of his blog, he’ll link to it and send you a ton of traffic. Apparently.
4. Copyblogger - I initially underestimated Brian Clarke’s blog, Copyblogger, because at one point all he seemed to write about was the importance of writing titles. While Brian has a unique talent for taking a topic and beating it to death, he also writes one of the most focused blogs on the importance of writing quality content. Brian’s posting frequency is easy to keep up with, and provides plenty of food for thought.
5. SEOmoz - SEOmoz is a blog, an SEO company and an SEO community hub, all in one. Serious bloggers realise that to get traffic to your website organic SEO is crucial. SEOmoz is a fun place to participate in search engine discussions, and the bloggers (Rand and Rebecca mainly) make the topic fun and interesting with their comics and GoogleBot illustrations.

Those are my Top 5 blogging sites. If you can think of other resources, drop a link to them in the comments.

Recommended Reading for 30th April through 8th May

Interesting posts I’ve read between 30th April and 8th May:

• Dr. Dobb’s | What Is Drupal? | April 30, 2007 - A very comprehensive introduction to Drupal. Almost a bit too simplistic in scope and content, but a worthwhile overview. (Note to self: play with Drupal more)
• The Definitive Guide to Semantic Web Markup for Blogs - There’s nothing definitive about this guide at all - it’s all commonsense advice. And also - why does this just apply to blogs? Any website should be applying semantic structure - for accessibility and search engine reasons. SEO is not just for bloggers.
• How to: Build an Affiliate Site You Can Sell for $1M - My second visit to Andy Hagan’s site looks at building a website of value over a period of a few years and then either selling or keeping. Interesting insight into the process.
• Top 17 Niche Social Media Sites (That Actually Send Traffic) - Interesting list of alternative social media sites that reputedly bring traffic. Since the rise of Digg and the Pligg platform that allows you to easily create a niche social media site, undoubtedly there will be more of these sites to come.
• 3 Reasons to Add Articles to your Web Site - If you’re a small business owner, publishing articles about your topic area on your website will help attract visitors to your website. This is an oft-overlooked strategy and something savvy small businesses should be looking into.

I use Ma.gnolia to bookmark interesting things on the web. Here are my latest bookmarks.

Front Page On Digg Feels Good!

I came back to my computer this evening to discover two stories that I submitted to Digg have made the front page! Guess what? They weren’t even mine!

Nope, I’ve been practising what I preached the other day about social bookmarking and ethics. I was browsing through Google Reader and came across a couple of outstanding articles. One was a short tutorial on how to jazz up your screenshots by master designer Dave Shea. The other was Elliott Back’s in-depth post about the poor service provided by hosting company Dreamhost. I actually wrote about this on another blog some time ago, and my experiences were somewhat the same as Elliott’s. I felt instant sympathy and submitted the post to Digg.

What I Did Differently

I’ve been seeding other people’s pages to Digg for a few weeks now, as well as the odd page of my own that I feel is relevant.

My approach was to not use the original title of each post. Dave Shea’s for instance was ‘Simulacrum’. Simula-what? Nope, I changed the title to “Getting Skewed Perspective Screenshots With Photoshop“, which better described the content and gave an implied benefit to the reader. It’s had almost 1,000 Diggs at the time of writing.

For the Dreamhost post, I posed the question “Just Exactly How Bad Does Dreamhost Suck? Read this to find out!” The original title was “Dreamhost Sucks at Hosting”. It was to the point, yes, but I wanted to draw people in a bit more. I rephrased the title as a question and finished with a call to action, “Read this to find out!”. Dreamhost always sparks passionate debate anyway. They have a core base of loyal users, but an equally impassioned base of former customers who have been let down by the company in recent years. This post has had almost 1,400 Diggs, and 170 comments on the Digg page.

The best bit, for me, is that neither post was written as linkbait. Perhaps that’s the biggest difference?

Why Digging Feels Good

Getting two submissions to the Digg front page felt great, especially as I didn’t have particularly high hopes of success. And because neither was a site of mine, I wasn’t constantly checking stats to see the progress. Here’s why it felt so good:

1. I’m glad to have given two good posts a hit of traffic they might not otherwise have received. I’ve read Dave Shea’s writing for a couple of years now. He introduced me to Standards-based web design, so I feel in a way like I’ve finally given something back (hi Dave!). Elliott’s post about Dreamhost is an issue that needs serious attention - I’m glad to have helped spread the word.
2. I’ve helped other people to find resources of benefit. Perhaps someone considering web hosting for a new site, or maybe a designer looking to achieve that skewed screenshot effect.
3. I’ve boosted my credibility on Digg (yay!) and proven myself as an information broker. I regularly come across fantastic resources, so Digging them helps spread the word. The more people get benefit from those resources, the better a source I become. In fact, my Digg account now seems to have twice the ‘friends’ it did before. Hopefully people will like my submissions and perhaps they’ll be a bit more popular in future.

And it’s nice to know that when a link I’ve seeded gets popular I’ve passed on the benefits of social bookmarking -increased RSS subscribers, backlinks, PageRank, etc.Plus, it’s great to be able to practice linkbaiting on someone else’s content! If you’ve been playing with linkbaiting on social bookmarking sites, I’d love to hear your experiences in the comments.

Using Social Bookmarking Sites The Ethical Way

Social Bookmarking services allow people to store their bookmarks online and share them with other people. There’s a popularity element to the process too - most bookmarking sites publish lists of the currently most popular items based on a number of criteria.

Smart webmasters know that by getting their sites listed on the ‘popular’ lists means a major influx of traffic, which can result in:

• Increases in RSS subscribers. A number of sites have documented a rise in subscribers after a post becomes popular on a social media site.
• Increased links back to your site. Many bloggers find things to write about on social media sites. If you’re popular, expect lots of nice links back from other blogs.
• Google Juice. The increased backlinks will ultimately result in better PageRank with Google and therefore higher placement in search engine listings.
• Reputation. As all these factors come into play, your site has the potential to become a trusted resource and this can all reinforce your reputation as an expert in your niche.
• Better advertising revenue. Maybe not immediately - social media users are an ad-blind crowd. But increased traffic and better SERP placement is likely to see better advertising opportunities over time.

As you can see, there is a lot to gain from leveraging social media sites. Note that I didn’t say ‘exploiting’ social media sites.

Seeding

Seeding is the practice of submitting links to social media and bookmarking services like Digg, del.icio.us, StumbleUpon and Reddit. There are countless others, although the impact of seeding is less if the service is less popular. Which explains why attaining the Digg front page is the goal for many bloggers!

Seeding becomes controversial when you’re only promoting your own site, or you’re seen to be submitting stuff purely to gain traffic. This is frowned upon by the users and moderators of social bookmarking services for a very good reason - it’s considered to be spamming. And everybody hates spammers.

The only exception to this rule is if you’re creating quality content and otherwise participating in the community. If you’ve created a unique article or post that will offer real value to visitors, then there’s nothing wrong with seeding your own pages. Nicer if someone else submits it for you though.

My Suggestions For Ethical Bookmarking

• Limit your activity. Not all social networking services will yield a result, and some are barely used at all. Why waste time with multiple submissions - you could be creating great content!
• Participate in the community. There’s a reason they call it Social Bookmarking - it’s all about people and connections. Find people with similar interests, comment where you can and build a solid friend list. You might actually enjoy it…
• Don’t just seed your own stuff. Share the resources you find interesting, particularly in your niche. It’ll vary your submission list and it’s a great way to reward other bloggers whose writing you admire. If you only seed your own stuff, you’ll look like a spammer.
• Be inspired by the community. Lots of bloggers get their inspiration from their social bookmarking tool of choice. They can also discover great writing in their area that they might never have found before. All this can generate ideas for you to write about and experiments to try on your own website.
• Above all, don’t spam. Not every post is worth submitting to a social bookmarking service. Shorter posts, or link posts that point out a resource but don’t offer any real insight are examples of this.
• Hope that people start to seed your pages. The Holy Grail of Ethical Bookmarking - in my opinion - is when people start watching your blog or website and seed your links for you. Word of mouth is better than self-promotion any day of the week!
• Seed other people’s pages. Reward websites and writers that you enjoy by bookmarking their work. It’ll give them all the benefits listed above, and your Digg account won’t look quite so spammy!

Start Your Ethics Engines

Creating an account on every social bookmarking service available is counter productive, spammy and a waste of time. I believe that you’ll really only see benefits from social bookmarking if you’re participating in the community. That means seeding other people’s pages, commenting on posts and building up a network of friends.

Also, by focussing on one or two particular sites, you stand a greater chance of success with your bookmarking. And it’s long accepted knowledge that when you become popular at one site, it won’t be long before your content gets seeded to other bookmarking services. For instance, if you hit the front page of Digg, you stand a shot at getting popular on del.icio.us or reddit.

Self-promotion fuels hostility in social bookmarking users. Do it too much and you can expect a backlash. Let’s push to drop mercenary linkbaiting in favour of participation and fair use of social bookmarking services.

Why Is Google SERP So Important?

What is SERP?

SERP stands for Search Engine Results Page.

When you do a search in Google (for example), a page of (usually 10) results is displayed to you. These results are what the search engine thinks are most relevant to your query. Results on subsequent pages may have relevance, but that becomes increasingly unlikely the further back you go.

The results displayed by any search engine are based on a number of factors. The most important is whether the content of the web page matches the words in the search query.

Other factors may include how authoritative the website is, the age of the website and how many links point to the site. Inbound links are considered a ‘vote’ for your site, which is why so many people place emphasis on link building for SEO.

Why Do I Want To Be On The First Results Page?

You want people to visit your website.

It’s a fact that the majority of searchers will find what they’re looking for on the first page of results. Obviously, the prime position is at the top of the page, among the first three results.

Search engines are a vital source of traffic for your website. If you show up in first position on page one of the results, people are much more likely to click through to your site than someone whose site appears on the tenth page of results.

So, your position in the Search Engine Results Pages is critical to the exposure and eventual success of your website.

How Do You Search?

I want you to think about how you search for information on the Internet.

How many pages of results will you wade through to find the right information? How often do the first results you find meet your needs? Do you refine your query to get better results?

If you own or run a website, you’ll see the importance of getting on that first page of results for whatever keywords drive visitors to your site. In a future guide, I’ll be looking at how you can track what search phrases people are using to find your site and how to extend content on your site.

Wikimedia’s Unethical Use Of nofollow For Commercial Gain

I was disturbed to read recently that Wikipedia is planning to lift its nofollow rule for links that point to their new for-profit site, Wikia.

What nofollow Does

nofollow is an attribute that can be added to links on a web page. While not directly beneficial to users, it tells search engines that the link is untrusted. As a result, search engines avoid the link.

nofollow was originally intended to prevent link spamming on community websites such as blogs and forums. Wikipedia adopted nofollow a while back because it was so easy to drop spammy links into their pages.

Google uses the number of links back to a website and the authority of the linking site as a means for calculating the importance of a web page. By using nofollow, you tell the search engine to exclude the link from that calculation - so the site gets no benefit from the link.

Now, they have decided to remove the nofollow code from any links that point to Wikia and a few other approved blogs.

Why Should You Care?

You might not think that this is a problem on the face of it, but Wikipedia has grown into a massive authority site based on the number of links back to it from other sites. Therefore, any sites that Wikipedia links to (without using nofollow) will have an immediate advantage in the search engines.

They describe this as editorial approval of links to trusted sites, but there are any number of legitimate articles from legitimate sites that could be added to a Wikipedia page. Why should they be unfairly hobbled? Because Wikimedia don’t have the resources to police every link added to Wikimedia.

I suggest that Wikipedia should adopt either a blanket application of nofollow or remove it altogether. I agree with Loren Baker at Search Engine Journal, who said:

I do not think that selective power linking to projects which make your company money is the answer and do not see much of a difference between Wikipedia’s Wikia linking practice and sites selling editorial links (links placed within editorial content) to the highest bidder.

Put simply, Wikipedia are using their PageRank strength to boost another for-profit company. They are giving their for-profit website special treatment at the expense of other quality resources.

Check out Michael Gray’s post about the dominance of Wikipedia in the search engine listings to see why this should be of concern to webmasters. As a webmaster and SEO, I’m worried that Wikipedia’s dominance even for simple common or garden keywords may make it harder for clients (or myself) to get search engine exposure with new websites. I think you should too.

Managing RSS Feeds

If there’s one problem with RSS, it’s that you can subscribe to feeds too easily. I subscribe to more feeds than I have the time to read. I’ve tried most of the major RSS aggregators and homepage solutions like Netvibes.

Of course, too much RSS is a bad thing. I found myself getting more and more frustrated with all the feeds in my reader (Google Reader) and watching unread items stack up. How would I ever read it all?

Read the rest of this entry »

Recommended Reading for 24th April through 25th April

Interesting posts I’ve read between 24th April and 25th April:

• Master Stylesheet: The Most Useful CSS Technique - Another take on globally resetting styles using a master CSS file. To elaborate, different browsers have different default settings for web documents. By using a global reset, you can control this and make the display settings much more consistent.
• Eric’s Archived Thoughts: Reset Styles - Eric Meyer looks at how we can use a global reset CSS file to iron out the inconsistencies between web browsers. Check out the original article and the follow-up which refines the process.
• Link Building Structures: Hunters and Collectors - An interesting look at link building structures. Can’t say it all makes sense, but it just might be an interesting series….
• 10 Steps to get Traffic from Yahoo Answers - Yahoo! Answers is a very popular service where people can ask a question about virtually anything and receive answers from the community. This post looks at ways to leverage the service to create traffic for your website.
• How To Turn Google?s Paid Link Reporting Into Profit | Scoreboard Media Group - Google is taking on the paid link industry by introducing a "paid link reporting" facility. This post eloquently exposes the scope that exists for abuse of the system. While any link-building I’ve done had been organic, I think the strategy of reporting these types of links is a bit of a liability.

I use Ma.gnolia to bookmark interesting things on the web. Here are my latest bookmarks.

Husband and Wife Blog Battle

Regular readers of the Scribble Designs blog know that my wife Lisa and I run an entertainment blog called Unreality TV.

Well, a few weeks ago we formally launched two new blogs under the Unreality banner - Unreality Music (my baby) and Unreality Primetime (Lisa’s baby). Comparing our strategies last night, we realised we were taking extremely different approaches.

The Challenge

Over the course of the next twelve months, we will be battling each other to see who can build the most successful blog. We’ll measure success on a number of criteria, which I’ll reveal in a forthcoming post.

The Strategy

Lisa’s approach is primarily about content-building. She’ll watch the latest TV news and blog about it rapid-fire. I’ve never seen someone compile content so efficiently. Better still, she’s now got contacts in TV publicity, so she gets a lot of the inside scoop on shows. I joked with her at the weekend that there’s no point reading the TV guide anymore, because she’s usually two days ahead.

My approach to writing is much more methodical. I’ll be writing about music, so I research the band in advance. I’m a slower writer by nature anyway. On the music blog, I’ll be working on a link building strategy and possibly trying to use social media to gain backlinks to the blog, which Lisa isn’t too worried about - she built Unreality TV up mostly on organic SEO!

The Outcome

The Blog Battle will end on 1 May 2008. Along the way, we’ll compare readership, traffic stats and how our strategies are working. Hopefully we’ll have two fairly successful blogs by the end of the year. Posts in this series will be tagged Blog Battle.

More importantly, we’ll be able to tell you which approach works best for a blog - pure content building and organic SEO, or less content but more focused on link building and social media promotion.

The goal here is to establish two top quality blogs using different methods and see how they perform over time. Although monetisation will be involved, the main motivation is to have fun building two great sites.

Anyway, we hope that other bloggers out there will follow our experiment and chip in with their thoughts and advice along the way. May the best (music) blog win!