My Geek Notes

If you run a blog and haven’t yet incorporated easy ways for your readers to integrate Web 2.0 and social media type behavior . . . shame on you!

Blogs are probably the easiest types of sites to market and can usually rank well in search engines. There are two primary reasons for this:

1. Lots of tools exist for building blogs that are pre-optimized for search engines. This Web site, for example, is currently powered by WordPress. The system is written in PHP, validates as XHTML 1.0 Transitional out of the box, and includes cool features like permalinks that allow you to put relevant content in the page filenames. There seems to be nothing about WordPress that the major search engines don’t like.
2. Blogs are naturally centered around content. A good blog will focus on a theme of sorts - this Web site centers on geeky-type things from the perspective of server administration, programming, design, and marketing. We anticipate adding other geekcentricities in the near future. Search engines love original content that’s updated regularly that revolves around a consistent theme.

In fact, the two features listed above are a significant portion of what search engines look for when analyzing and ranking sites.

There’s one more important element, however, that search engines evaluate when deciding how to rank Web pages. And that, my friends, is the number of other Web pages that link to yours.

Enter Web 2.0 and social media.

The Internet has become a giant community of inter-connectivity. Even more important than the endless networks of computers that make all this possible, is the endless network of people that publish across those computers.

If you want to run a successful blog, you have to include Web 2.0 and social media elements. Having an optimized site with original content doesn’t matter any more. Millions of people have those.

Right now, the single most important thing you can add to an optimized site with original content, is active participation in the social network created by the Internet.

I’ll be working with the administrators of this site (the geeks I know and love) to incorporate Web 2.0 and social elements into what we do here. As we progress, I’ll keep notes and publish them to this site.

If you have questions, please list them below in the comments section.