Blogs

I have read all the blogs across all three years and left comments - sometimes very brief - as part of the assessment process. The second marker is now also doing this. As I was doing this I measured the page rank and traffic for all the pages. I used Alexa - some free software which you can download - to measure the traffic. Alexa gives the rank in teems of 'most popular in the world' so Google search engine has a rank of '1' - meaning it has the most traffic in the world. Winchester University has a rank of about 120,000th. WINOL had a rank of 200,000 when it was in production, which was brilliant (it has now slumped to 1,000,000th). Your blogs range from 10 millionth to about 2 millionth - to be in the top 1 million (in the world) would be brilliant, probably put you in the top 5 percent of student blogs in the UK. To get it above 500,000 would be something you could go to town with on your CV. And this is possible. I already had a session with 2nd/3rd years on this - so this is a reminder to them - but this is new stuff for year one. You have a bit of time at the moment (relatively speaking) so this is an excellent time to do a bit of SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMISATION (SEO). It a very useful thing to do for one and all since an increase in traffic and page rank on one blog leads to an increase for all.

Please follow this step by step guide:

1. Check your existing traffic ranking at ALEXA - http://www.alexa.com. You can download and install a toolbar which will tell you the ranking of any site you are looking at, including your own.

2. Check the page rank of your blog by going to http://www.mypagerank.net/service_seostats_index. For a student blog your page rank should be zero or 1 (or maybe two) in a few cases. The aim is to build that up to four or five. Page Rank is important and I will explain more about that below.

If you are normal you should find you have an Alexa rank of between 1 million and 10 million. All the other 'visitor counter' gimmicks are no good - very inaccurate and a waste of time. You should have a page rank of zero or one or two (maximum is 10). Some first year blogs already have a page rank of One (no second or third years are all zero or unranked. The reason for this (as I shall explain below) is that the first year blogs have more people subscribing to them and linking to them.

The game is to get your blog's Alexa rank up to above 500,000 and your page rank to four. This is a simple process, not to laborious - but it does require attention. You need to make it a hobby, and use your competitive streak to see that Alexa rank and page rank crawling up. This is the process of Search Engine Optimization (SEO). £50 cash prize for the first student to get their blog up into these categories.

There are four processes involved:

(1) 'On page' Search Engine optimization (especially)
(3) Creating 'linkable' content (or 'linkbait')
(3) Site submission to search engines (especially Google, Yahoo and MSN/Bing)
(4) Getting links (the most important part, but dependent on (1) - (3) above.

(1) 'On Page SEO' (matching google's system for analysising blogs)

You need to understand how google works if you want your site to turn up when people search for a particular term - eg 'journalism courses'. Being listed by Google is the key to getting high traffic and new readers. You need good SERPS - search engine return positions - for your target terms or key words.

You need to submit your blog to google (this means tell google that it exists, what it is about and ask to be included in their index for that term. If you are not in the google index it is impossible for google to offer your site to people searching for your keywords. The term 'search engine' is misleading (marketing). It is actually a gigantic filing system and the first job for you is to ensure you are in the filing cabinet and in the right part of it (see also - below - submission to search engines).

BUT google will automatically scan your blog to see it is really what you say it is about. This is done with software google has called 'robots' or 'spiders'. You really want the spiders to come to your site and index everything on it. That way google will trust your site and give it a higher SERP. What you MUST NOT DO - is say that your blog is all about a popular thing like football; when really it is about something else. Google's spiders have been developed to spot that and they will take you out of the index if you do that, and then you will get no traffic at all - so your site must be 'pure' (more on this in the section about content, below).

When you 'submit' your site to google, you are asking google to spend its spiders to look at your site and to index it.

How the spiders work (exactly) is a trade secret and if you go on the web you will see a vast industry discussing SEO and how to get the spiders to come to your site and then to rank it highly. But we do know the spiders look for the following:

(1) The title. This should be straightforward and concrete and should match your METATAGS (see below) and your KEYWORD DENSITY (see below). IF possible it should also match your URL.

METATAGS - are words that describe your blog which you can write at the top of the page, but which are invisible to ordinary readers. You can see the metatags on any web page by clicking on VIEW and VIEW PAGE SOURCE on your browser. For example the official Manchester United FC website

Url is www.manutd.com

You can read the VIEW SOURCE - you will see a list of words the designers think their potential readers will be using to search the web. The role of the page description and metatags is to 'capture' those searches.

The metatags are invisible to the ordinary viewer, and are there only for the spiders. The spiders will read this and check them against the URL (they match); the title of the page (also matches). The spider will then also look at the articles and pictures (there's a way in which the spiders can see the pictures - see below - this is important) and see that all the content is about Manchester United (and nothing else really - the spiders have dictionaries of terms that would logically also appear on a site about Manchester United - such as Eric Cantona or even Pele or something). The spiders are very sophisticated.

In this case the spiders will be completely confident that this is a site about Manchester United. It will file these pages in the google index so that the next time somebody does a google search with the word Manchetser United (or any of the metatags) it will appear in that search. But how high it will return is a different matter - that will be mainly about how GOOD the spiders think the site is, and that is all about Page Rank (see below). But you need to sort out your metatags and title (and content) before you can think about increasing page rank which (as I will describe) is mainly about which other sites (and how many site like to you).

In this Manchester United example the tagging has been done well - there are lots of metatags (including ones designed to catch foreign language searches). This site can afford to do this because it has very high page rank. You will need to start with far fewer metatags (the optimum for a lower ranked page is reckoned to be only eight). So your site will have to be very focused.

DO YOUR ON PAGE SEO NOW (this is if you are using Blogger, wordpress I don't know but it should also be simple)

You can fix your title and page description very easily. Just go to 'settings' on your control panel and write them in there. Also click all the buttons which are about your site being searchable by search engines.

Your page title here should be very simple, but specific and concrete - A blog a journalism and journalism courses (something like that is good) - or INSTEAD a blog about football and beer (but NOT both - that will get you very low ranking. You can have two (or two dozen) blogs if you like - but each one must be 'pure' if it is to get any traffic. There is nothing worse for viewers than going to blog to read about journalism or HCJ and finding stuff there about football - it is fantastically annoying. Google does not want to annoy its users, so anything like that and you are sunk. So keep it pure. You can link from one blog to another (that's actually useful and will build page rank).


Using Blogger the metatags are a bit more tricky because you have to re-write the HTML code - which is good news because it will give you a competitive advantage over most users, who would be scared of doing this.

You can do this using the edit HTML tag in blogger. I will do a seperate post about how to do this, because it is slightly tricky.



You can see there how I have added the code for the 'metacontent' straight after the tag for head. When you open up your own 'edit HTML' tag on your own blog that code and those key words will not be present. You need to simply type them in - very carefully making sure all the punctuation is correct and all the '<' and '>' are there. I would add some code for you to strip in, but blogger won't let me do that, so you need to do it by hand. It is worth it.


When you do this you should have all these things consistent with each other.

(1) URL - (eg SOMETHING_Journalism.blogspot.com)
(2) Page Title (fix this in blogger control panel to eg SOMETHING Journalism)
(3) Page description (also in blogger control panel) to something like "This page is all about SOMETHING Journalism with articles, views, links and videos about SOMETHING.
(4) MetaTags - that's the slightly tricky bit - where you have to re-write the HTML code. (by the way it is easer to add metatags in CMS systems like Joomla - we just haven't got round to doing it for WINOL).

(5) That your content is clean and relates only to your title and metatags. So you need to remove any articles about unrelated things (ie NOT about journalism and/or SOMETHING or - at least - very closely related. Every time you put a post about football or something up there on your journalism blog it actually does more harm than good. There is nothing to stop you however creating a second or third blog for your other interests and general comments on the world. I think you are just about OK with HCJ entries and journalism entries on the same blog, but it would probably be optimum to have separate blogs one for journalism. one for HCJ, one for general comments and fun, one for football, etc. You can link all these.

So if 1-4 are all present and if the blog's content is 'pure' then this will mean the spiders (when they come) will really like your page and put it in the right filing cabinet so the next time somebody uses the the search term "Something Journalism" or a searchterm with these words in it, you stand a chance of appearing (assuming you have got some page rank - see below). But without this you have no chance.


The SOMETHING is a word that people will search for, so not normally your own name. Maybe not change the UR now because you have built up a little bit bit of page rank and it is worth keeping that (how long the page has been on the web is a positive page rank factor unfortunately - so older sites will be higher ranked than new ones, so long as they have links in to them and are being updated).

You can check whether your basic on-page SEO is correct by using this online tool :

http://www.seoworkers.com/tools/analyzer.html

There's a bit of work in sorting all the above out, so I will do a second post later on the next steps namely..

(2) Creating 'linkable' content (or 'linkbait')
(3) Site submission to search engines (especially Google, Yahoo and MSN/Bing)
(4) Getting links (the most important part, but dependent on (1) - (3) above).