Say good bye to the plain old search box on a white background. If you want to say good bye that is. Google added custom themes to your personal home page today. You’re still welcome to keep the old standard, but I’ve already got a new theme.
From the Associated Press
Sprucing up its famously plain Web site, Google Inc. is offering a new option that plants its Internet search box in panoramic settings that change with the time of day and the outside weather.
Bill Slawski found a new patent on ranking blog documents that should be of interest to anyone with a blog. As you would expect Bill has given his usual overview of the patent, explaining things and making simple for the rest of us.
Today I came across an interesting post by Joshua Porter of bokardo.com. The post, 9 Lessons for Would-be Bloggers, as you might expect from the title are some lessons Joshua has learned in his years of blogging. Darren Rowse has a follow up piece, Lessons from the Heart for Would-be Bloggers, at ProBlogger. While I’m not planning on talking in depth about each point there’s a theme running through a few of the points I would like to discuss.
First the 9 points
Have you been using the link data Google now provides through Webmaster Tools? Do you wish Google provided even more information? I know I do. Well Google hasn’t made any changes to the tool, but thanks to Joost de Valk you can now pull a little more data from all those links Google is reporting.
If you were trying to fly in or out of the North East U.S. a few weeks ago you’ll no doubt remember the problem JetBlue was having in keeping flights in the air and on schedule.
The problems started with an ice storm that naturally led to flights being grounded, but once air travel resumed JetBlue found itself lagging in getting their operation running again. We all know things happen and in this case JetBlue dropped the ball. However their response to the situation is more telling about the company than the temporary problems they faced.
Yep, free seo advice.
Last Wednesday Loren Baker announced that Search Engine Journal would be launching a new project called SEO Clinic. Every week SEO Clinic will offer advice to one selected site among those that request a review.
Graywolf raised an interesting question in regards to the length of blog posts. Is there an optimal post length? Will shorter posts help to retain readers and even lead to more links?
From Blogging in a Sound Bite World:
I come across a lot of good articles each week that I never get to mention, so I thought I’d join some of the other bloggers in the seo community and offer a few links. I’ve hesitated to do this in the past, because I imagine you’ll already have seen some of these, but I decided to give it a shot and see how it goes.
Since the day I began posting on my blog I’ve always published partial feeds of my content. I’ll be honest in that I don’t remember why I made the decision originally, though I suspect it had something to do with not wanting all my content scraped and republished. Until an hour ago I had always thought the partial feed decision was the best way to go. Then I read a single post and did a little research and I now think I may have been wrong all this time.
Yuri thinks so and wrote a post last week entitled Create a small business website on a small budget to tell you what you need to think about if you want to get it done.
Here's the basic checklist of what you should be doing:
* research your customers
* research your keywords
* plan your website
* get a content management system
* get a website template
* improve template usability
* make the template accessible
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