One of my loves is office supplies. I’m almost as happy looking through an office supply store as I am a book store. Part of the manifests in my planner love. However since I left regular office work I’ve been looking for the perfect planner for me. Finally, after a decade or so it dawned on me my needs change so I need a planner that can adapt as I change. (more…)
Okay last Tuesday I let slip one of my dirty blogging secrets – I prewrite and schedule posts. Today I’ll explain and air out another little thing you might have picked up on if you’ve been paying attention to my posts. (more…)
I hate excuses. I love reasons. Sometimes reasons are used as excuses. I think that’s what I’ve been doing about blogging. You see there were good reasons for the disruption to my routine with all the trauma of last month. I tend to cope with such things by battening down the hatches, pulling inward and getting through. I did that. I’m through and emotionally I’ve dealt with it all.
However I’ve not returned to my 5 days a week blogging. I intend to but well reasons became excuses and I languished in the new/old habit of not blogging. Except for that nagging desire, that I want to to it. Yet we all know inertia is hard to overcome or establish. Yes just as a moving blogging truck is hard to stop, a blogger at rest is tends to stay at rest. I hope to muster the energy to overcome the rest and build my blogging inertia.
Energy, I have to admit it is something I have always struggled to get, use wisely, and not exhaust totally. Still learning what is my best pace. Seems just when I get a handle on it, circumstances shift. It doesn’t help I have the desire to do the work of 100s and the energy of half of one… LOL!
All this is to say, I’m sorry I’ve not been here regularly as I was. I long to be and am working how to do that while doing all the other things I want to do too. The latest challenge is the month of the June. At my work this is our big year making month. I know most retail industries it’s December but for us it is June. Don’t ask I won’t explain as my job is beyond the scope of this blog. However, it is where I go during Real Life and will be demanding more of time in the next month. My part time job will become full time then go back to part time again. I hope to balance that with getting back in the blogging groove.
Maybe my best bet is to start with small goals – a post a week at least. If I do more GREAT! Exceeded my goal. I just get one GREAT! Reached my goal! That way I don’t think nope can’t write five posts now so what’s the point? I believe in times of struggle or need to move to a goal, set yourself up for success. Sure I pretty much know I can do ONE post a week but you see feeling successful builds energy that I can put toward making inertia of blogging that will help me reach my big goal of 5 posts a week. So until July it’s a goal of just write one and go from there.
So today that’s what I’m doing…
The wonderful Francine In Retirement nominated me for 2012 Blog of The Year Award! I am moved and honored! Really I’ve not been blogging in earnest a full year and to receive such recognition is flattering. Thank you, thank you. Now I know how Sally Field felt receiving her Oscar.
In receiving this nomination I’d like to nominate a few blogs that I enjoy. They can go here to pick up badges and here for FAQs.
I’d like to give a nod to Diatribes and Ovations I enjoy the blog very much. It’s fun. It’s honest. It makes you think. For me that’s a lot of bang for your buck in a blog!
I’d also give a nod to Sunshine Factor. She always gives me a smile with her posts. They are heartfelt and down to earth stories or ruminations. I can relate to what Debb writes. It’s an enjoyable blog with a positive outlook.
Bo Lumpkin’s I’ve Been Thinkin’ blog takes me back home every time I read it. It’s good ole thinkin’ an’ drawin’ too. The humor is right with the Blue Collar Tour type and so true it’s even funnier. I can relate to his geezerhood comics more now as a geezer than as grandchild of one. LOL!
Also a nod to How The Cookie Crumbles and her wonderful posts. I enjoy her flash in the pan fiction. She’s excellent at setting scenes in just a few words. She completed NaNoWriMo this year! Also I love her admitted irreverent look at life!
Finally I nominate the lovely lady who blessed me with a nomination – Francine! Her photos are always moving. She’s always up beat! Be sure to check out her blog and enjoy the eye of an excellent photographer with a love of life.
My nominations can pick up their badges and share the love! Until next time!
The last post we talked about what Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and key words are. We had a link that would look at our site like a search engine does and tell us what it saw as key words. Now we know key words are how search engines direct people looking for those things to your website. We looked at places we can use keywords that readers don’t see but websites check. So now we got what they are and where to put them besides using them naturally in out posts. Now for the hard part – identifying what you want your keywords to be.
That’s where I’m stymied. That’s why I asked for you help as readers. I’m trying to define my top five keywords. The first step is defining what my site is about. I have one for multiple reasons: to sell my writing, photography, and jewelry, a form of creative outlet, to meet people with like interests, get feedback from on ideas, share my love of comic books, and get some name recognition for my published works.
Okay right there I know I want my keywords to include the following
But those aren’t going to be five key words. Okay my name is because that’s not gonna change. Now to figure out how to sum up what I do in my blog on those other four things in keywords that the search engine will like but not a lot of other websites use the same phrase. That’s where another link can come in handy. Google’s Keyword Tool lets you enter in a phrase that describes the concept. From there it generates a list of keywords but also lets you know how many searches there were for the terms and how heavy the competition is for the suggested term. Here’s a screen capture of a search I did for ‘comic book reviews.” (you can click on it to enlarge it)
So what does this mean? The first column there are keywords indexed by Google that relate to my entry. The next column tells you what the competition is like on that term. This is the number of websites vying to be on that coveted front page of search results. Next is the number of searches performed world wide for that keyword. The local area set there was the default for my IP address which is USA, English, desktop/laptop. For some reason Google won’t let you lump mobile devices in with traditional computers. So here I see the term cbr doesn’t have a lot of competition but it gets a lot of searches – the reason is it’s a well established website called Comic Book Resource . Great site! I can’t and don’t want to compete with them on their name. I see that graphic novel reviews is low but gets a good number of hits – that’s very similar to what I do reviews of complete story arcs. I might consider using that in my tags and alt text on comic book covers.
One place I learned that was heavily weighted by the search engines is the tag line here are WordPress. Here’s a screen cap of my page to show you just what I mean by the tag line – it’s not the tags you mark on you posts.
You see there where it says “sit down, have a cup of coffee, let’s chat” ? THAT’S my tag line. THAT is weighted very heavy by search engines. I need to think of a new one that reflects those five points up there, need to highlight keywords in that line right there. When I do those will be weighted more heavily and people looking for the things I write about in this blog can find me.
That’s it. That’s all I know about Search Engine Optimization and keywords. I’m not an expert by any means just a novice. I don’t want to go overboard in this but being aware and doing little tweaks here and there (like a good tagline) can help improve the number of people I’m reaching.
I’m only half way through my class. Took the midterm recently and made a 96% WOOT! I am sure I’ll learn more as I go. I’ll be sure to pass on that knowledge. As I said in my earlier post – explaining a concept to another helps me grasp it. Trust me this aging brain of mine needs all the help it can get grasping things.
The wonderful Tess Kahn (check out her blog How the Cookie Crumbles) suggested I share more about Search Engine Optimization or SEO as the cool internet cats call it. I’m a total greenhand at this so I’m learning as I go in my WordPress class. From my personal experience I know the best way to master something is to have to teach it. Thus her idea is an excellent one.
You know when you want to find something on the web you go to a search engine to look for it? Most of the world turns to Google but other power players are Yahoo, Bing, Ask, etc. When searching you enter key words about the thing you want to read about. Say you were wanting to know how to groom your pet rock – you might try “groom pet rock” or maybe “pet rock grooming” instead of asking a full question as if you are on Jeopardy. Those are the key words of the search.
Now let’s imagine you are keeping a blog on the adoption, training, and care of pet rocks. You’d want to be there on the top of the first page of that search wouldn’t you? I mean here’s a fellow pet rock lover that wants to groom their rock appropriately! Being aware that one important set of key words for your blog is pet rock – you’d want to be sure to use those words in your tag line, text of some posts, titles, permalinks, image descriptions, image alternate text, tags and categories. Not that you need to make sure every one of those has it every single time but use it naturally. Maybe when your are tempted to say domesticated stones you might consider using the term pet rocks instead.
So now we sit here with our Pet Rock blog how do the search engines find us so that person looking for grooming tips knows about. This is where very powerful programs with lots of magic (okay it’s not magic it’s code) goes out and looks for sites that use that word, have links to that word, use that word on the backside of stuff (areas programs see but not people so much), that is linked to from other sites previously marked as good pet rock sites. That’s where this link comes in to play. That’s the one my professor shared with us as a good tool to see our website as search engines see it.
Search engines don’t go out and index just when queried. Instead they are constantly spidering out over websites and indexing them. That way when someone asks about pet rock grooming it goes to the index and pulls up what it has found as well as running quick queries out to previously good sources and their links.
Let’s think about that for the Pet Rock Blogging Bloke – he’d want pet rock there in his top five results. That would mean whenever anyone searched for something with the phrase pet rock his site would quickly appear in the search. Now what else he’d want there might be pet rock adoption, pet rock care, Blogging Bloke, and maybe his Pet Rock Shop’s name. So if anyone searched on any combo of those words he’d be at the top of the indexed results.
Blogging Bloke doesn’t want to hammer his visitors over the head with repeated use of the same phrases. That gets annoying and honestly the search engine spiders are programmed to discount over use of a term in certain areas. So you can’t just make a post of repeating your 5 keywords over and over to pump up your indexing on those issues. However using them well in the back areas can do that for you.
Remember I did a post explaining what title, alternate text, caption, and description do in the uploaded image menu? Well here’s another use for Description and Alt Text – putting in your key words. Search Engine spiders read these fields but most readers don’t see/hear them. Do keep in mind the Alternate Text is used by screen reading programs used by the visually impaired. You can use your phrases here that apply to the image and it’s an extra boost to your indexing.
Okay if you are WordPress user you recognize this as the dashboard side of WordPress.com. Here we are in the update post screen. Look at the yellow there below the title, that’s the permalink. (you can click on the image to enlarge if you are like me with reading small print). That is what shows up in the address bar of a browser. By default WordPress sets this to reflect what you name your post. You can change this to better reflect keywords of the post. There just past the yellow is the edit button click on it and delete the title from open text box. Then you want to put in keywords that you think would be used to search for a post like this. Here in this case I put the museum’s name and location. Remember urls can’t have spaces put an underscore (_) where you’d normally put a space. Then save the change you made and there it’s got the keywords and now your title catches readers while your url or Permalink catches search engines.
This is getting long so in another post sometime in the next week we’ll talk about how to determine what keywords are best for you. That’s really what I’ve been puzzling over for myself. I’ll use me as a guinea pig for that post as I work through just how I want to better define my blog and website.
Again I’m learning things about WordPress as I work through my course. I’m the geezer of the group by age and with the oldest blog. So assignments that are related to doing things on our personal blog are much time intensive for me than others. That’s okay I’m there to learn to do it right and correcting all my posts is part of the upgrade process.
I’d say we’re all familiar with the pop-up image menu that happens when you place an image in your post. Here I’ll just grab a random image in my WordPress Media Library:
I don’t know about you but I’ve always wondered just what Alternate Text and Description do. I know Title is what pops up when a mouse hovers over the image in a post. I know caption shows beneath it when posted. I didn’t know what the other two fields did. Now I do.
Description is for the back-end of the blog administrator’s information. It tells them more about the image. You can use it to note title of posts that use the image, more about the image than contained in the other fields, or whatever you want.
However Alternate Text is another beast all together. I’ve almost always left it empty until I learned its function. There are three reasons it should be filled in:
Our assignment was to go through all our images contained in our post and ensure the Alternate Text field was completed. For me that was over 108 posts with many images in each post. I did it. It took three days but I did get some description contained in the field that added to the title. Not as much as I would like given the first reason up there. But there are limits on my time and I figured something was better than nothing. I vowed to pay more attention to the field going forward. I’ll try to give a description for the visually impaired of what the image contains. I don’t know if it applies to any of my readers but if anyone needs it I want it to be complete. Sure the search engine indexing is nice but to me the real reason to do a good job there is to provide a good experience for all my readers not just those with good eye sight.
With that assignment completed I’m starting my three-day weekend. We are going car shopping. Then we’ll find things to do around here and I’ll make pictures to share. Have a great one folks! Until next time!
Welcome back to the new and improved marylouiseeklund.com. I’ve put my WordPress class lessons to use around here. First off I’ve updated the layout as you can see. Ohh click on my photo there on the right and you’ll go to my home page! (or you can be boring and use the home link in the menu)
Also you can hover your mouse over the new menu that has fly outs and drop downs for three whole tiers! There are great new pages established such as Contact me there in the About Me menu.
I’ve added a Links page with a few of my favorite links and my comments about them. I’m working on a Blogroll page. That one is much longer and takes a more work but it’s progress watch for it to appear there on the left.
The Archives are now on the right when you open a post. See it there —-> the calendar looking thing? That’s it.
Each post now has a feature photo that’s mine, or used by Creative Common license, or a scan of a comic used under the Fair Use allowance of Copyright material for commentary and critiques of said work. (I never use more than 3 pages total from a comic.)
I’m sure there will be more tweaks as the weeks go by and I learn more. Yet I think it’ll build on this framework I’ve established this weekend. So keep your eyes open. Shout out what you think of the changes and I’ll return to my regular posting tomorrow. That’s all go enjoy investigating what I’ve done with the place.
Today I am home alone. Unusual for a Saturday but I don’t mind. After Lesson 4 in my class I’ve got ideas buzzing about in my head for spiffing up the place around here. Today I’m trying out things. Don’t worry if you come here and things are changing drastically from one page to the next. I’m tinkering with stuff behind the scenes and then look at it up front. IF you see something you really like give a shout out – “HEY! I really liked – That slide show of posts” the same for the reverse “The slide show made me dizzy don’t like that.”
Any way things will settle down after today until next lesson. I think then the tweaks will be smaller that today’s total revamping.
Oh check out the menu bar up top there – yes it has drop down choices from the primary choices then fly outs from the secondary to tertiary choices. I worked on that yesterday and felt very proud of myself I might add. VERY PROUD. **nods satisfactorily**
So pardon the mess but know improvements are coming!
So lesson 3 is complete in my first WordPress class. I have finally learned how to make pages! I know uber simple but I didn’t get how they were organized and nested.
This class works in two ways. One is we have our class project site. We each open and create the same website for a faux animal rescue. (mine is here if you are curious). There we carry out the assignments on setting up the site. They are all just alike but it is a way for the prof to see that we are getting the assignments and mechanics of the lesson. The other part is to start applying what we’ve learned to our own site.
That’s where the changes you’ll be seeing over the next few months come into play. The first change is I’ve categorized and tagged all my posts. That was a big assignment for me because I’ve got 100 posts as of this one. The others in the class have just started their WordPress sites and have at most 10 posts. Heck I’ve even got first tier and second tier categories but doesn’t show in this style. I’ll be changing that up later I think. You can look to the right column there and see what I’ve done.
Mary Louise Eklund 