If you want to get your web page noticed but don’t want to spend a lot of money on text ads, your best bet is search engine optimization, or SEO. As of this writing, that mostly means understanding how Google ranks search hits, and adapting your web presence accordingly.
Historically search engine results were based on the frequency and proximity of keywords in the page text. The problem is that there are a lot of web pages out there with overlapping keywords. Another problem is that this system is easy to game by loading your pages with invisible text repeating the keywords over and over. Google attempts to rank its search results in the order of their usefulness. They do this using a complex proprietary algorithm called PageRank. One of PageRank’s most heavily weighted factors is the number of links pointing to your page. If more people link to a web site, presumably it’s because it’s more useful or authoritative. PageRank also recursively factors in the number of links going into those pages that link to you.
So the key to a higher Google rank is getting inbound links. The question is, how do you get people to link to you?
Whenever somebody comes to me and wants a web site, this is what I tell them. Many of my friends who are internet professionals or general hipsters are already sneering at this and saying something like, “Blogging is so five minutes ago.” Maybe at the cutting edge of the cutting edge, that’s true. But I deal in my freelance and personal life with plenty of people who are resistant to blogs, Twitter and what have you, and it’s my job to help get these folks on board.
If you have a web presence of any kind for any reason, you need to be able to update it yourself, easily and frequently. Unless you know what HTML and FTP are, you can’t do that with a traditional site. However, you can easily learn to update your blog yourself, even if you’re a relative novice. You can do it from any computer in the world, and for the major blog platforms, you can even do it from a cell phone.
Anna watched me Twitter over my shoulder for a while, and then announced: “I get it. It’s a video game where you compete for attention from strangers on the internet.” She’s completely correct. Having a web presence is a real-world immersive internet game where the scoreboard is your stats page or follower list. Like any good iPhone game, Twitter even has a built-in global leaderboard. Blogging scratches the same itch in me as SimCity or Civilization, except instead of building a virtual terrarium I’m building social connections.
This is not to knock SimCity and Civilization at all. They’re a ton of fun, and they’re brilliant teaching tools for computer science and the concept of emergence. Blogging is a better real-time strategy game, though, because it brings me some non-hypothetical real-world benefits.
Over the weekend we stayed with Anna’s sister Joanna, her husband Chris and their adorable new baby Lucas. Chris and I spent some of the time talking about electronic music and the internet. He’s a social media professional and a music fan but not a musician, and it was cool to hear his perspective on how people could use the web for production, not just sharing completed tracks. Then I got home and discovered the iNudge in my Delicious network feed:
Click around, it’s fun. The different colored squares on the right are all different instruments. The one on the bottom is a drum machine.
The newest version of this software lets you sing with Auto-tune over anything in your iTunes library. Pretty amazing hip-hop and electronica scratchpad, except that it crashes two minutes into each recording. Still. Auto-tune the Pro Tools plug-in is five hundred bucks. The iPhone version is three bucks. So not complaining.
Lil Wayne and I have some differences of style and taste: about facial tattoos, about drinking cough syrup recreationally, about jewelry on one’s teeth. But we agree about music. He brags constantly that he’s the best rapper alive. I think he makes a pretty good case.
As part of the research for my book, I’ve been making sample maps, diagrams showing what songs include samples of what other songs. I’m a big sample geek. I like knowing where my music comes from the same way I like knowing where my food comes from. This map shows many, probably not nearly all, of the songs that sample Michael Jackson’s solo work. Click to see it bigger.
MJ is in the middle, with his songs in the first ring out. The next ring shows songs that sampled MJ. The outer ring shows the artist who did the sampling. Most of the information comes from the Rap Sample FAQ and wikipedia. I included MJ quoting “Soul Makossa” and Björk quoting “Wanna Be Startin’ Something” even they aren’t technically samples, but I figured, musically and legally it’s the same thing. (more…)
So the other night my friend Jesse played at the Shorty Awards with his Tin Pan Blues Band. Because it was an awards ceremony dedicated to the best of Twitter, they were projecting people’s tweets about the event itself onto a screen in real time. Some of those tweets were comments about the band. The musicians, in turn, were reading and responding during the performance. (more…)
I’m a jazz guy. I like improvising in front of an audience. I like publishing a post while it’s still only a third finished. It keeps the fire lit under me to get the rest written. I was looking for a blog platform congenial to this method of working. Then I read a PC Magazine article, Succeed At Blogging The Gawker Way. Like a Gawker article, it’s funny, frank and packs maximum useful information into a minimum number of words:
“Get specific. Pick something that interests you. Revel in weird topics. Don’t be afraid to get conceptual. Keep it friendly (and human).”
The article gives Gawker editor Nick Denton’s reasons for using WordPress as their platform. He’s right, WP is the bomb.
