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A Good Way To Get Content For Your Blog

October 1, 2007 - Filed under: web design — Tags:

One of the ways I get ideas for things to write about is to talk to people I meet online to find out what they are interested in. When they ask me questions I usually save their questions along with my answers to use here. Sometimes I rewrite them and sometimes I use them as is. I don’t give out their names or email addresses, but occasionally are nice enough to add their comments here in my blog.

This is an example of one of these recent email exchanges that I had.

1. How do you exactly generate the RSS feed? At the seminar I attended they said it just automatically generates but how do you offer it to people to sign up? There is a link on the left to sign up but you have to download some file. For instance, some websites have the RSS feed icon, you click on it and then it asks you to subscribe using a variety of RSS Readers. How do you connect this?

The RSS is usually generated by the blog software. It’s basically just an XML file. The visitor clicks on the link to your feed and puts the website address into their RSS reader (like a bookmark) then whenever you make a new post it shows up in their reader almost like a new email.

2. How do you get other blogs to link back to yours? From what I have read that seems to be a big deal.

Not a big deal. You can submit comments on popular blogs. Look for ones that relate to your site. Usually they will allow you to have a link back to your site as well. It’s important that when you are commenting on someone else’s site that you say something valuable, relevant to the post and relevant to your site. Comments that are self serving or off the topic stand out as just that and usually are deleted or ignored.

3. Does a site designed with pure CSS get higher rankings? What about a site that is W3C Compliant?

I don’t believe that matters much for rankings. I see sites done in FrontPage that are ranked high and that code is horribly ugly. Although getting your CSS off the page an onto an external style sheet will let the spiders see your content more easily and that may help a bit, but having good code on your site is it’s own reward.

4. Does putting Google ads on your site help?

No, they are separate things.

5. I have also read that using <h1> tags help. Is this true?

Yes, especially if they are at the top of the page. All of the <h> tags should used to show the content’s order of importance. Include keywords.

6. Does using gateway pages help? Such as my friend who owns a business has several keyword domains and then when you get to that page, it is more of a landing page/gateway page. It then provides some information about her business and a link back to her main website.

No, in fact it may get you banned.
http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=66355

These are some great questions and I have the option of using them all at once or expanding my answers and posting about them one at a time.

Sometimes when you immersed in this information on a day to day basis you take things for granted that other people may not have a clue about. It’s always useful to look at anything from a new point of view. One of the best ways to do that is to visit other people’s point of view.

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