How Does the Google Ranking System Work?
I would really like to know. I take an interest in “optimising” my website so that my posts rank highly for particular search terms. I use WordPress to manage my blog so I thought that might help my ranking. I use a URL structure that I read helps the search engines find relevant posts (I cannot remember where.) The URL structure is http://tjwoodlock/blog/[Post Title]. I use the All in One SEO Plugin and the Google XML Sitemaps Plugin.
Related Posts and Highlighted Comments
I’ve added two more improvements to my site. I followed Nick Bohle‘s tutorials for adding related posts to The Morning After theme and adding highlighted comments to The Morning After theme. I prefer a ‘bullet points’ style for my related posts list but unfortunately I do not know how to code it.
Tags Implementation
I have managed to implement tags support in the Morning After theme (including a tag cloud) using Nick Bohle‘s tutorial. Just remember to delete the space between “<” and “?php” in the code!
Comments Threads
Given that I have no ‘regulars’, and thus can offend none of them, I thought it might be useful to speculation on the nature of Internet comments threads. First off, definitions.
The above capture1 is taken from a previous post of mine2.
The top blue section is the ‘post’ and the bottom red section (titled ‘discussion’) is the comments area.
The ideal scenario would be a blog with an audience that is broadly representative of society as a whole and with all of the audience equally likely to comment on a particular post. This is rarely if ever observed. As blog’s move from the ‘centre’ their audience composition changes to reflect the blog authors particular ideology.
The worst scenario is one where the blog author and their audience become a mechanism for mutually reinforcing each others beliefs. I’ve seen this occur a number of times before. Both groups, the audience and the blog author(s), fail to encourage each other to critically assess their own beliefs and eventually the blog becomes a back-slapping exercise. As it takes begins to take on these features, regular contributors that are not of the ‘right’ ideology comment less frequently and eventually stop commenting at all, because their contributions are ignored, mocked or lost among a mountain of opposing comments.
A good blog should encourage a diversity of contributions from readers and use the composition of the comments sections as a benchmark for how well they are doing that.
- Taken with the excellent ‘thumbalizr‘ tool [↩]
- And the only one so far to generate comments
[↩]
A New Section – Glossary
I’ve created a glossary. I will add to it as I go.
Technorati Post
Current status
I have switched from Blogger to a WordPress based blog hosted on Jumba. So far so good.
Maybe it’s all the Latin?
