3by9

The Fun Part About Starting A New Blog

I haven’t started a new blog (where I’d be the sole writer) since 2003 and that was for my old Typepad blog that I keep up for posterity. This blog and others I’ve written on weren’t totally ran by me, so there wasn’t a whole lot of room for experimentation.

I created a new blog on a domain I’ve owned for awhile and it’s really a great experience, one that I haven’t had in awhile. The blog’s design isn’t totally finished yet so I won’t be linking to it in this post, but I wanted to talk about some of the decisions I’ve made already and why I made them.

Archives

Leading your visitors around your blog, showing them the various articles you’ve written in the past, this is all very important… if you’ve got articles to show them. With my new blog I don’t have much content up yet so creative archiving isn’t a key concern for me right now. What is a concern is setting the hierarchical and naming groundwork for moving ahead when I do have a few dozen entries under my belt. What am I talking about?

• Individual entry URL naming scheme
• Categories, tags, and choosing a URL for them
• Monthly or yearly archives? Both? Neither?

For post organization, I’ve chosen to have a small number of categories (about 5-6 or less) and to keep them fairly high-level. Tags will be used mainly for metadata, but I’ll get into that later.

My URL scheme for individual articles is http://domain.com/category/title-of-entry.php, a pretty standard convention. The /category will be the most important category on the entry. Entries will be posted into 1-3 categories, but I’m choosing 1 above others to deem the most important and this will go into the URL.

Right now I’ll be forgoing date-based archives in favor or category-based archives and pagination off the homepage.

Search Engine Optimization

To me, SEO is fun. Google’s ranking algorithms are like a black box, and different SEO techniques allow me to try things and see how they work within Google’s universe. If they don’t work, I tweak until I get a better result — trial and error. I’ve read enough blog entries and articles about SEO to know a bit about what things I need, so now that I’ve got a new blog I get to try them out from the start.

Here’s what I’m concentrating on in no particular order:

• Utilizing H1-H3 in a topic-focused manner
• Website title
• Focused meta keywords and description

I’m a junkie for semantic HTML and it works out great that Google pays so much attention to it. It’s really important for your H1, H2, and H3s on the page to be as descriptive as possible and related to your overall topic. My overall topic happens to be Mac and iPhone-centric user interface design, so I made sure that within my website title and the main H1, it’s clear to search engines what I’m focused on. By using image replacement techniques, I can easily show a logo to site visitors while at the same time displaying my semantically-rich H1 text to search engines.

My website title doesn’t have the name of my blog as the first word, it’s near the end. I’ve seen a few websites doing this lately, namely 37signals, most likely in an effort to win top placement on particular Google searches. My niche is pretty small and focused (software interface design, not web-based) so I’m using the same technique and will see how it goes.

There’s a great WordPress plugin called All In One SEO that automatically generates your META keywords and description for you, so I incorporated similar functionality into my new blog. On individual entry pages, the description is the first 30 words of my post plus an extra 5-word sequence related to my topic, and the META keywords are the tags that the entry was placed in. I don’t display the tags in the blog’s design, those are 100% for my META keywords, so I can be a bit more focused. I try to keep the maximum number of tags on an entry (aka META keywords) to 8 to keep them relevant.

The fun part about SEO is that for someone who’s not an expert in the field, it’s really a big experiment. The ideas I have implemented here will take a few weeks to bear fruit, and if they don’t, then I’ll mix some stuff up and try again!