This weekend I attended the virtual con (uncon) known as Dragon*Cant and that was a blast. I attended a panel by SVAllie of allisondduncan.com on “tips on Blogging with SEO“. [SEO=Search Engine Optimization]
It was very interesting and opened my eyes to a few things I’ve been ignoring for a while. She showed me how to take a more of an active role in how my site is viewed by search engines and most importantly google. While many people prefer to use other search engines google matters when it comes to how fast people with find you. I have installed a few new plugins (they work with more then just google but all the various search engines) and registered my site with a few places to help my rankings. I’m not sure how long it will take to notice a difference but I’m hopeful.
What I learn with this site will only help me apply these lessons to my professional web presence, which, there isn’t much of. Professionally I have been too busy working to maintain a web presence, also I have a middle man for some clients who handles all of that and the other clients and the big clients have found me through real life networking. I’m amazed at what a small world it is and how much professional relationships can make or break you.
I learned a few other things, like linking say your Live Journal account that is set to private entries shows up as a broken link, so the search engines rank you lower as a non relevant site. It makes sense, but I never expected that. So now my Live Journal site isn’t linked from this site. Since it’s private only I guess there isn’t much harm in that, people can always find me there by searching for my name. That lead to a broken link checker that was interesting because it showed me what links have changed in the years so I could make sure that every link works. Now I get emails if a link changes.
I got a bunch of meta stuff figured out, site map done right and I now know how to keep track of my ranking. In addition to all this boring stuff SVAllie has finally pushed me out of the 1990’s. Yes, I started on the internet in the 90’s and I like dark webpages with dark backgrounds. I know it’s old and outdated and my professional site even has a white background, but nimlas.org was always personal for me so I designed it to look how I wanted to view it. Yes, that is the wrong way to think, you don’t design for yourself, you design for the viewer. I knew the dark was “wrong” but I was stubborn. Well I took the plunge and dove into some light colors. Now you are treated to a minty looking nimlas.org. It’s still green, so it represents me, and my branding is there with my pop art avatar and I even put a little star burst in the background, but it’s light. It’s new, it’s stylin’? I also have one of those Follow Me widgets, that’s all the rage isn’t it?
I hope everyone enjoys the site and if you can think of improvements or see something HUGE that needs to change let me know, and I will work on it. I like to improve.
Facebook has that new timeline nonsense, so of course I had to try it out. I have to try everything out, didn’t you know that? Right, so when making my timeline I needed a cover image, like a big banner that you have almost no control over (Big shock, facebook is limiting our control over something and then claiming it’s a feature, big fun) and at first I had my beloved cougar Jaspurr as the cover, but then I decided to change it to a wordle I made of this site’s RSS feed. Don’t know what a wordle is? Well click the image and it will take you there (While you’re at it, click the stop censorship bar and make your voice heard about how you think SOPA is just plain wrong), you can make it from anything with a RSS or ATOM feed, I learned all about this years ago from @smoran8m and I use it all the time when I want something interesting but nonspecific (I also use tagxedo for more options and importing a document)