I have developed a system for fitting our blog writing into our daily routine, and it involves the use of technology by gaining efficiency from productive software and streamlining the thought processes.  This helps get around the press of servicing clients in our software development and web business at Paladin Consultants, LLC .

Inertia and the lack of a clear idea of what to write about has been the number one blogging stumbling block for me, along with a cumbersome production process of the blog article itself.  I have solved this in several ways.

1. I found I had a lot of ideas, but didn’t have a way of recalling them when I needed them.  So I started using Evernote, which recently added a Blackberry extension.  Since I am never far away from my ‘berry, I can text, dictate, or send a picture to Evernote, and harvest those thoughts at the proper time.  I also am a heavy user of OneNote, so, on an as needed basis, I copy thoughts from Evernote to OneNote for a more permanent and well-organized record.  There is a good blog for OneNote, which talks about the many uses it has. 
2. I try to have a small camera near me all of the time.  At very least, I have my Blackberry camera. So, armed as such, it is easier to get illustrations of some of my topics and ideas.
3. Recently I have found that once I have decided on a thought or idea, it is productive to actively think about that idea while falling asleep.  During the night, somehow, the idea seems to be processed and examined from all sides, and, oddly enough, seems to be well developed my morning.

The next bottleneck is usually the development of the idea.  This is partially resolved by the sleep technique discussed above.  The problem with the sleep technique is that if you don’t capture it quickly, its persistence appears to be limited.  Use it or lose it.  So among the first tasks of the morning needs to be the capture of the previous night’s thought process.

I’ve had success with mind mapping techniques, especially for short blog articles.  For a longer treatise, a hierarchical outline, such as one might produce in Word would be more appropriate. Usually, I draw the mind map on a yellow college ruled pad, but I’ve gussied up the one for this article to make it visually appealing. See if it makes sense to you.

Once I have the ‘plan’, then it’s time to bring in the power tools to take care of the details.  I use BlogJet, a very convenient and inexpensive online blogging software, which lets me compose, spell check, insert artwork, links, tags, and virtually everything I need to do to produce the blog itself.  I felt that this piece of software reduced the amount to time I spend visually composing each article by at least 1/2 hour.  They also have a very nice feature which fits into Firefox, which allows me to copy and paste pieces of web pages into the text of my blog very easily.

Firefox is an extremely important piece of software for me.  It seems that no matter how hard Microsoft and Google try, they can’t quite come up to the standards of the Firefox Mozilla browser:  Mozilla always seems to be one step ahead of them.  There are two Firefox  plugins that are particularly effective for me: Taboo, and SEOQuake.

Taboo is a software tool which allows you to take many tabs open in Firefox, and store them in one tab as thumbnails.  So, instead of having 20 tabs opened, you might only have two: the one you’re immediately working on, and the other containing the Taboo ‘reservoir’ collection.  Taboo allows you to temporarily store dozens of pages in this thumbnail format, each image growing as you mouse over it.  It saves looking through the tab array, and saves scarce memory.  A very useful tool!  I have a Bookmark category called ‘Blogging Tools’, which I open in tabs  (about 10 sites), then annex them to the Taboo page.  Makes for very efficient research and fact checking.

SEO Quake, is another Firefox app that analyzes the keyword/ key phrase content of your article.  At the end of writing the article in BlogJet, you can save it to a temporary HTML file, and use SEO Quake to appraise it for links, key phrase effectiveness before you publish.  And it always helps to have a list of your Wordtracker phrases to rework your article against.

In the Pantheon of Tools I rank Delicious near the top.  It’s a very powerful tool which lets you save sites, software techniques and articles, like your Browser Bookmark feature.  Except that your Delicious sites are available to you whether you happen to be at your computer or not.  Available on client machines, Available on your Blackberry or iPhone. Available on your laptop.  Available in subgroups as RSS feeds of your tags, of as subscriptions to the tags of the rest of the universe.  An extremely powerful element in anyones toolkit, and a great contribution to social knowledge.

In addition to photographs, I try to include portions of scanned documents like software code where appropriate, to illustrate my point, as well as screen clips, video clips, and charts.  I find that Google charts allows one to create some very nice looking graphics with ones own data.  Those graphics, though not ornate in any sense,  are far more professional looking than those produced by Excel.

Finally, if you are not a strong typist, or are composing at the keyboard, while doing your research at the same time, Nuance’s Dragon Naturally Speaking is a good candidate for you.  I confess to using it sometimes to squeeze out a quick article when I am short on time.

Please leave a comment – comments help us do a better job!

Far and away the most important of these meta tags is the <Title> tag.  Left click on your web page and select ‘View Page Source’  from the popup menu.  This will open a copy of the source code for that page in your browser window.  Near the top of the page will (or should) be the Title tag.  Google and other search engines attach a large degree of importance to the contents of this tag, and assume that it summarized the purpose of the page.  It is considered good form for the context of the Title to be consistent with the context of the text elsewhere on the page.  If those two contexts do NOT agree, you have a problem, because Google will deduct points from its appraisal of your page, and demote your page to the lower regions of their rankings for those subjects you are trying to promote.  An even more egregious error occurs when a page has no title.  This is the mark of an unprofessional developer.

Titles should be limited to 10 words at maximum.  And one should bear in mind that the search engines attach more importance to words at the beginning of a Title tag, as well as at the top of the page of text.

The Title tag should contain the name of the firm, and the keywords describing the items you are trying to promote on that page.  In addition, if your business is local in nature it would be wise to include the locale as part of the Title tag.  Don’t waste words like ‘the’ or ‘and’ or generic adverbs or prepositions in Title tags, because robots are trained to ignore them, and because they take up room that can be better employed.

Next in importance is the meta Description tag.  The text in this tag is the description that appears in the Google search results just below the clickable title of the page, which appears in the search results.  Obviously, the text in the meta description tag should be consistent with the text in the main body of the page.  If it is NOT consistent, see above: another deduction in Google’s appraisal of your offering.  Think of this tag as your opportunity to make a small tasteful commercial about your product.  It’s OK to be a little provocative, and give the reader a reason to buy/investigate further.  Meta description text should be limited to 160 characters (the limit Google will read).

Meta Keywords, are now of just marginal importance.  In the past, this tag was a catch-all summary of the keywords in the article/page.  As a result, developers would stuff this tag with repetitions of keywords and phrases that they thought users would search for.  But in recent years, search engines have gotten more sophisticated, and actually the text on the page itself is indexed.  So meta keywords has been relegated to a redundant opportunity for ambiguity.

The meta Robots tag tells the spiders whether or not to follow and index that page.  The default condition is to index and follow.

In our last SEO article, Effective Web Marketing: Common Sense SEO Choose Your Battles and Your Terrain, we made the point that a micro-targeting strategy, using the long tail principle would reward you with more visitors, and more qualified visitors to your site.  In essence, the strategy is to choose very specific key words to describe the product you are offering on any given page, and concentrate on marketing only that item on that page.  We used the example of ‘electric swizzle sticks’ instead of ‘appliances’ to capture a surer position in the search engine for those who were searching for ‘household bar appliances’.

An obvious objection might be, ‘But swizzle sticks are only a small portion of what I sell, and their profit margin is very small!’  While that’s true, there is no real limit on the number of pages you can have.  If you’re in the appliance business, you can have a separate page for blenders, another for ice machines, another for bar fridges, etc.  And each of these pages will be dedicated to the specific appliance you want to target.

You don’t need to sell everything on your home page – in fact nobody really tries to do this anymore.  In fact – every one of your pages on your site is an opportunity to sell a different product or service.  And to neglect this strategy is to condemn your site to be far down the list in search engine offerings for any product!  Now that you have adopted the long tail strategy of positioning your web pages, it’s time to get down to the fine tuning of each page that is important in getting you the results you want.
Returning to our ‘electric swizzle stick’ example, it’s obvious that not everyone who is looking for such an item will refer to it by the same name.  Some are looking for an ‘electric bar stirrer’, some a ‘drink mixer’, still others a ‘hand drink mixed’, and perhaps a dozen other terms, taking into account regional language and terminology differences.

So your job is to brainstorm with other members of your organization, and come up with a list of a dozen or so synonymous terms which you feel that the searching public might enter in the Google search box and expect to see your product.   Sit around, and try to imagine that many ways the public might end up looking for your product.  Often, this is NOT the way you refer to your product.  For instance, if your marketing folks come up with a process which uses ultrasound to hostile the molecules in a drink to make a more thoroughly mixed drink experience, it is not necessarily true that the public will be searching for that ‘ultrasound drink experience’, even though that might be the phrase that the marketers hope to make famous.

Once you have compiled your list (actually, there may be multiple lists because you may have multiple products to be found by different searches), now you have to validate and quantify your brainstorming choices.  The will require you to employ the use of one or several tools and techniques to assist you.  For organic searches (those that are NOT paid), you want to choose terms that are relatively infrequently found in web pages, and relatively frequently searched for.  So if you quantified the number of pages containing each phrase, and divided THAT number into the number of times that term had been searched for over a period of time, al other things being equal, you would select the terms having the higher quotients as your ‘favorite’ key words to optimize for.

Here are a few of those tools available on the web:

Google AdWords Keyword Tool: Enter a search term or terms, to display other keywords related to that term.

Google Trends:Insights into broad search patterns.

Google Insights for Search: Compares search volume patterns.

Wordtracker Free Keyword Suggestion Tool: Returns related terms rated by popularity. Data is collected from the Dogpile and Metacrawler meta search engines.

Trellian Free Search Term Suggestion Tool: Ranking similar to WordTracker

SEO Book Keyword Suggestion Tool: a wrapper for the Yahoo! keywords tool

Now, understand that there are literally billions of web pages out there, and choosing the right ones to deliver is not a trivial task.  Let’s say you have a business that sells household appliances.   Well, there are thousands of other business that are in the same line of work.  How do you get your page to the top of the list?  Don’t forget that if your page is 240th on Google’s list, it will appear on page 10 of the results.  It’s not too likely that many people will have the patience to wade through 10 pages of results and find your offerings.

One poor strategy might involve optimizing your page for another popular trending topic of the moment – say Britny Spears, or Jonas Brothers, or Barack Omaba.  That might bring a lot of traffic to your page over the near term, but not traffic that would result in folks buying an appliance from you.  Mostly, those people would visit your site expecting to get information on one of the trending topics listed above – and would be disappointed!  The search engines would also quickly find out about your rouse, and would ban you for your deception.  Don’t forget – it makes them look bad, too.

So now you can see that if you optimize your page for ‘appliances’, you will lose because Amazon,, Sears, Walmart, and hundreds of other more well-known and better capitalized businesses are ahead of you in the line.  If you optimize for one of the popular trending topics of the day, you will disappoint the user, and the search engines, and, most likely, be banished into the black hole of unindexed sites. What’s a body to do?

Well one strategy is to employ the ‘long tail strategy‘.  A hypothetical user is searching for an electric bar swizzle stick.  Consider the number of people in a month who search for ‘appliances’ – could be in the hundreds of thousands – huge competition for you; household appliances in the tens of thousands – less competition, but still unworkable; ‘household bar appliances’, perhaps in the hundreds – much better!  Similarly, if you were a dentist who wished to maintain a viable presence on the internet, simply optimizing your page for ‘dentist’ would put you in competition with  tens of thousands of other dentists.  However, if you were a endodontist in Rye, NY, or Westchester County, you would have a much better chance at being clicked on by a guy with a root canal issue in Rye, NY.

So the right strategy is to give up the very small opportunity to be seen by a rare one of the hundreds of thousands of folks who are looking anywhere for any kind of appliance or dentist for the much larger chance of being selected by a user looking for a specific product or service in an certain area – even though that population will be much smaller than the generic search.  Now there are a number of variations on this particular technique.  They vary with the size and budget of your organization, the number of goods and services you offer, and the type of business you’re in.  But this long tail technique, generically speaking, is one of the most effective search engine optimization tools available.  Please visit our website, or watch this blog for further articles on SEO (search engine optimization) and web development.

It is the main job of anyone who is engaged in search engine optimization to make that website friendly and hospitable to search engines.  Help them do their job, and do not adopt the attitude that you can co-opt them.  Ig you push that envelope too far, the engines will penalize you by deducting points from your page, or, in extreme cases, by refusing to index your pages at all.

It’s important to understand that a search engine sees ONLY text.  It can’t understand pictures, or movies, or Flash files or any graphics.  Only words and text are indexed by the search engine.  It can see code, but disregards it.  And the text which it sees, the search engine will try to put that text into some intelligent context to help assign some meaning when it matches the text to a search.  Different search engines accomplish this task in slightly different ways, but the basics are the same.

The better search engines accept site maps.  These are XML files that show all of the indexable pages (or files) on a site, along with information about the files, such as creation date, most recent update date, and its position in the site hierarchy.  These files are very helpful to the search engine in evaluating the site, and, in fact, submission of one will frequently bring about a new reindexing of the site when it is submitted.

Search engines attach more weight to text at the beginning of a page.  Text which matches phrases found in the Title of the page is assigned an especially important ranking, and text which is further down the page is assigned a diminished importance.  Some engines lose patience as they get further and further down a page, and quit indexing after a certain point.  So a page with lots and lots of javascript code near the top of the page may be thumbing its nose at the search engine, and will possibly be rewarded with a low ranking because of that.  If you must use javascript in your pages, annex that code to a separate file, and reference that file in the HTML.

Strictly speaking, not all search sites are search engines.  Yahoo!, for instance, is a directory where sites are indexed by hand by a staff of people who categorize sites.

But in the search engine category, Google is the 800 pound gorilla.  It has nearly an 80% share of the global market today, though this has shrunk nearly 3% in the past year, as Yahoo!’s share has brown from 9% to 12%.  So, obviously, it makes a lot of sense to pay attention to what Google is doing.

Google has two forms of placements in their pages.  One is AdSense, a Pay-per-Click (PPC) program where subscribers pay for each phrase they wish to advertise under.  Those paid ads appear either on the top of the google page, or on the right of the page, depending on your chosen Google page format, when a user searches for a phrase that matches the one paid for.  Each time the advertiser’s ad appears, Google charges his account an amount varying on the placement premium the PPC client has agreed to pay.

The rest of the Google pages are printed the ‘free’ or organic search results.  The objective is to construct your web page such that your page ranks high in the organic search listing.  Now the actual formula Google (and the other search engines) use to determine which sites get a high ranking, and which do not is a highly guarded secret.  And it is ever changing, and varies from search engine to search engine.  If it were publicized, everyone would adjust their web pages to accommodate the formula, thus defeating the purpose of the formula.  Not only does the ranking formulae change constantly, but the demand for those key phrases is ever changing, as is the re-working of sites all jockeying for position in the competition for high visibility.

Most users tend to favor the organic search results.

So the takeaway from this article is that prime placement in the organic rankings is a very valuable asset, but it is fleeting and ever buffeted by changes in competition, formulaic changes in the search engines, and even with rank of other pages in the website.  Second, because of all of the diverse forces at play, the placement of a website in any given search listing will fluctuate according to ALL of those factors.  So it is not possible to control your site’s placement in a search result – you can only hope to influence it.  Having said that, it is clear that search engines bestow honors on sites that produce fresh, new content that is helpful to the consumer, and that is well organized with good links.