The Web. Monday's lecture.

Blogs! Blogs! Blogs! I think we've all finally seen the light and the importance of our blogs. It's taken a year to sink in and after mondays lecture with Chris there is now no excuse why our blogs can't be optimized to the max. We will defeat google.
What now?...
- Keep track of traffic to my blog.
- Link Bait - what can i add to my blog in order to pull in the punters? Youtube.com is excellent link bait.
- Form Follows Function.
- Alexa.com - excellent way of tracking websites and their popularity. Added the toolbar function.
- SEO - 'Search Engine Optimization'
- SERP - 'Search Engine Return Position'

We also learnt a bit about Google. We now know that it doesn't 'search' the entire web because it doesn't actually have 'all' the answers, as much as we'd like to believe in the power of Google and is in fact just a massive filling system. The Google index can only return information that is within the google search engine.
'Spiders' also featured largely in the lecture; the metaphorical term for the computer programme used to analyse web pages to see what it's all about before adding it to the Google Index.
Spider's also spot the URL, so if it's an 'ac.uk' its a winner because it proves it's a legitimate site. Google likes this. (e.g 'Journalism' in the title may help.)

- On-page SEO (tags, video, pictures...etc.)
- Off-page SEO (other sites, links...etc.)

Keyword density - our blogs should constantly be appealing to the 'Spiders' by using relavant keywords and using them repeatedly throughout. (But not too much!) Approximately 5% should be about the topic that you wish to be returned in a 'search'.

-Meta tags - do not make irrelevant to content.
-Pictures! Alt tags, attribute text.
- Domain names - 'MaxineErasmus.com'...hmm..
- SEOworkers.com
- HTML - coding.

We have to get high ranking sites to link to our page. (e.g wikipedia; if i write an article that relates to a topic on wiki. i can add my url to the page, can be risky as anyone can remove me but will give it a go.)
Also, other students can link to us, other universities (e.g City University), if we contact other bloggers who's blogs appeal to us we can 'Comment Spam' and add our URL, its one sided but it's still a link!
- Submit site to other directories; Yahoo, Bing.

- Add a Glossery? - a list of terms specific to a topic of interest or hobby; this is another way that will enable links and SEO.

Book - 'Designing Web Usability: The Practice of Simplicity' by Jakob Nielson.

Photojournalism!
Always be aware of lighting.Outside is best.

Two types of picture.
1. Point picture, i.e mugshot, helps with positive identification. (e.g 'David Smith has been charged with murder' - more than one David Smith, a picture can help clarification of identity.)
2. Action picture. (Does what it says on the tin.)
- Explicit consent - agrees but can later deny.
- Implicit - posed, happy about it.

Now I just have to put it all into practice.