NBD News
September 29 2009
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Fall is fast approaching

Since my last dispatch, the leaves in my new neighborhood have just started to turn, and I've gotten back to work full-time building new websites and improving old ones. One of the new ones is the brainchild of my featured client this month, Lisa Rogak. In my Explainer, I delve into an acronym website owners hear quite often: SEO . The content-sharing service AddThis.com is featured in the What's Next section. Also check out some of my recent blog posts:

Featured Client: Lisa Rogak

Author Lisa Rogak, whose portfolio website I built a couple of years ago, contacted me earlier this year about building a new blog: behindtheknife.com . The site features professional chefs discussing their toolboxes, favorite tools, most unusual tools, and more. We launched it in late August, and Lisa has had a lot of positive responses, including interest from the producers of The Next Iron Chef. It's been a fun and challenging site to work on, motivating me to learn more about ways to "monetize" a website, encourage and track user participation, and decrease page load time. I look forward to continuing to add features to the site, and helping Lisa launch the Behind The Knife newsletter, "The Blowtorch".

Explainer: SEO

SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization, and it refers to techinques intended to make your content more visible to search engines such as Google, as well as improve your site's search ranking (where it falls in search results) for relevant keywords. After reading an excellent book by Aarron Walters called Building Findable Websites, I've come to think of SEO as just one part of a larger strategy to improve a site's "findability." Findability is a broader term that encompasses:

  1. Helping people find a website
  2. Helping people find what they are looking for once they arrive at the site
  3. Bringing people back to the website

Because search engines are only one of many ways a person may find your site, SEO is just one component of improving findability.

Some of the principals of SEO for findability are:

  • Having compelling, focused content
  • Putting keywords in titles, headlines, and first paragraphs
  • Offering an subscriptions via RSS and/or email
  • Including a site map and site search

What's Next: Add This!

For some time now, I have been adding "ShareThis" buttons to blogs and websites I build. The ShareThis service provides a button that makes it easy for a reader to share a blog post or page via email, Twitter, Facebook, or any one of myriad social networking and bookmarking websites out there. It is easy enough to implement, and though I was frustrated by the lack of customization, other services didn't seem much better. But a competing service, AddThis , has recently improved, now offering fine-grained control of the appearance of the sharing buttons. In addition, the code is easier to manage and less intrusive. BehindTheKnife.com is the first site on which I've used AddThis (check it out at the bottom of any post). For anyone interested, I wrote a more in-depth review of these two services on my blog.

Incidentally, encouraging readers to share your content is one of Aarron Walters' recommendations for making your blog findable. So if you have a ShareThis button, and would like to upgrade to AddThis, or if you don't have sharing on your site yet but would like to, drop me a line !