Recently in Internet Category

A Google page rank of 5 isn't impressive, but in the blogging community this seems to be the rank that separates the wheat from the chaff. I obtained a Google PR5 in only about three months after the blog was started, and I believe this success is based on a few deliberate "white hat SEO" choices I had made up front. These choices were, in no particular order:

1. Networking. I've found that especially StumbleUpon, Thoof, Reddit, and Fark have drawn traffic to my blog. There's also Digg, Technorati, and Del.icio.us, of course, and while you may not get traffic from those sites unless you're lucky enough to get dugg, Google will notice the links to your site.
2. Participate on message boards and other people's blogs. (This is also networking, of course.) Make shameless self-promotion with a link to an article that you wrote, or use trackbacks if the other person's blog allows them. Have a link to your blog in your signature and your profile.
   
3. Blog bait in the form of provocative articles. Don't be overly provocative (writing a pro-Nazi article will probably draw traffic, but something tells me your site might be placed in a category that won't improve your page rank), but say something that sounds profound using effective rhetoric. My article, Survival Tips: Lessons in Misanthropy quickly became a "buzz" on StumbleUpon, for example. People will share these articles and link to them.
4. Blog bait in the form of little applications, tips, and tricks. I wrote some plugins for Joomla and some plugins and hacks for Movable Type, and made them free for everyone with the license requirement that they link to my blog. Little "how-to" posts explaining how you did something in PhotoShop or on your Linux machine can also draw traffic.
   
5. Blog bait in the form of humor and satire. Readers love to be entertained.
   
6. Valuable and well-written articles. I wrote something about this in an earlier post. I'm sure you can do with less than philosophical high-brow articles, but they should provide some insight in a nice wrapping, that is, something that other people will actually look for and use. Make sure your articles include words that you anticipate people will search for. If in doubt, see which tags similar high-ranking articles have received on Technorati and other aggregator sites and use them in your posts as appropriate.
   
7. Include graphics in your articles. Google indexes the images, and I suspect they have a positive effect in Google's page ranking algorithms. In any even't, quite a few of the blog hits are caused by Google's image search.
   
8. Submit your site to the search engines. Also configure your blog ping the various blog search engines out there. (You probably knew this already.)
   

Finally, there's actually an unused number 9 in the above list that may partly explain why "Survival Tips" became so popular. It is a blog bait where you compile a list of "top-ten" or "top-fifty" (or top-anything) of whatever you choose. For example, you may visit a variety of quotes pages and copy some quotes you like on a specific topic. Then when you have the desired number of quotes, make a blog post that says "Top 50 Republican Quotes" (or, equivalently, "Top 50 Dumbest Quotes Ever") or something, and your post is probably bound to become popular. I have written a few blog posts with enumerated suggestions, but since none of them were entitled "Top-blank," I don't know how effective these top-n lists are yet.

It seems that Google is currently lowering the page ranks of sites that have paid content. As of this writing, this blog has not yet included any paid posts, and considering my plans to include paid content in the future, I can expect the page rank to drop. However, I imagine that the page ranking algorithms consider the ratio between paid content and non-paid content so I'm not too worried about that.

As you may know, Movable Type 4 allows you to schedule entries for future posting so that when the time comes, they're automatically posted to your blog site.

This allows you to:

1. Publish your entries at a steady state even if you're not at the computer; for example by writing a number of entries in advance, and have them published automatically after you've gone on vacation, or
2. Write your entries while at work, scheduling them for publishing after you've come home. (Not that I'd recommend this, but your mileage in terms of job security may vary.)
   

I won't go into detail how to configure your MT4, because this is already documented at Moveabletype.org, save to say that it requires you to run a script named "run-periodic-tasks" periodically.

Unfortunately, not all web hosts allow you to open a shell to start the "run-periodic-tasks" script as a daemon, nor do all web hosts allow you to add cron job scripts.

Your web host may instead allow you to specify a web address to visit at specific intervals. With the following short little script, you can call MT4's "run-periodic-tasks" script whenever the script is visited as a web page:

<?
passthru( "cd MT/tools; ./run-periodic-tasks -verbose" );
?>

Yes, it's that short. Name it "MT-run-periodic-tasks.php" (or whatever suits you best), and place it in the root folder of your blog so that "MT," the directory where MT4 is installed, is a subdirectory. You can actually place "MT-run-periodic-tasks.php" anywhere you like as long as it's accessible from a web browser, but then you'll have to change the path in the above script.

If your path to MT4 is www.example.com/MT/, then you should now be able to execute the scheduling script by visiting www.example.com/MT-run-periodic-tasks.php. This is also the URL you insert in your web host's periodically visited web address, if your web host provides such a service.

You can use this trick even if your web host doesn't offer any kind of cron job service whatsoever. Just find a free cron job service online, such as WebCron, Web Service Scheduler, or remote-CRON, or pay a limited amount for a similar service at, e.g., WebBasedCron, and have this service call your script.

A few years ago a CEO asked me how I was able to beat her entire company and any other mention of her on the Google searches with a single blog entry on my other (Danish) blog that wasn't too flattering as it was a powerful (but civil) retort against an interview she had given in a local newspaper.

I didn't reply to neither her question nor her invitation to come by for a chat in case I happened to be in town, primarily because I didn't feel like debating the issue with her. It seemed to me that she would just repeat her request to have the entry removed. I also refrained from mentioning to her that I was very often in town, and that in fact I happened to work just one level downstairs in the same building as her company.

I did wonder why I'd be the top search match on Google, though. There were no links to the blog entry from other pages. I think my blog had a reasonable page rank for a somewhat obscure blog at that time, but her company name and her own name could hardly have been less known on Google than my blog.

Even today the pages on my other blog are found much higher on the Google search results than I'd imagine. None of the usual explanations about page ranking algorithms seem to apply. I never even paid attention to keywords or "tags" for my entries. What do my entries have that other entries don't have?

Okay, I presume my entries have the envy of a few bloggers and the resentment of at least one CEO out there, but that's not what I meant.

I don't have the answer to what my entries have, but I do have a few observations on what top Google search results don't have that my high scoring entries also don't have.

• Pornography. Granted, many of the search phrases seem to concentrate on just that, and several of my blog entries do contain phrases that could have sexual connotations causing the search hits. (I suppose that by writing entries that are reached by searches for sexual content, perhaps I should reconsider my mental health according to Freudian theory.) There's no explicit sexual content in the top search results, however, but hints are fine, and people appear to search for that.
  
• Illegal software. Microsoft does seem to consider any software not written by Microsoft to be of dubious nature and approaches open-source software as criminal activity, but this trend probably hasn't caught on at Google. Downright illegal software, or "warez," doesn't seem to reach the top of the searches, though. (Speaking of Freudian, what is one to think of a person's libido if he calls his company micro-soft?)
• Bad grammar and spelling. Do a Google search for something, and check the top results for language quality. There are few spelling and grammar mistakes. (You may now add "anal" to my use of Freudian theory on blog content.)
• The entry is short. (Er, let's just stop mentioning Freud now.) Most entries appearing in Google searches have a reasonable length. Terse comments don't show in the search results unless you're searching for a unique phrase that is found only in a short note.
  
• Unconventional terminology. If the article uses the same field-specific terms in the discussion of a topic as other articles, the article can draw some authority from field conventions. It would be fair to assume that an article is not relevant if it uses terms that are absent in most other articles discussing that topic. The ability to use correct terminology probably correlates with the ability to write reasonably lenghty articles, so maybe this is sheer coincidence from a Google search point of view.

The general picture is that a Google search may not yield what you were looking for, but Google searches rarely return material that would rate as complete junk to an intelligent mind.

I'm sure that Google suppresses web pages with pornographic or evidently illegal content, but in addition to that I suspect that Google applies some content analysis algorithms that benchmark the language quality and content coverage of the articles when the articles are sorted for relevance. I haven't been able to verify this suspicion, but it does appear that top search results do share some quality characteristics.

In the above is even remotely true, then the corollary is clear: to make your entries come up early in the Google searches, make sure they're well-written, of reasonable length, and that they apply proper terminology as applicable to the topic. And, make sure to add some Freudian slips to your content, making sure that when you say one thing, you mean your mother.