Will Marlow

One huge myth is that if you use Twitter or Facebook to link to your website from your status updates, you'll increase your Google PageRank (in other words, your website will get pushed to the top of search results), because Google famously "counts the number of links" to your website to determine how "relevant" your website is.  Lots of links = great search engine optimization, right?  But you can think of the major Internet companies as co-conspirators in a plot to determine "relevancy," because back in 2005 they all decided that whenever someone links to a website in the "user generated content" area of another website, they would start inserting an invisible "nofollow" tag.  This means that ALL links in a Twitter feed have a hidden "nofollow" tag embedded in them (same with Facebook), and this makes them invisible to search engines.  To be clear, this means that the target of the link doesn't look any more attractive in the eyes of Google, Yahoo or Bing. 

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If you want to take your blogging to a high level, you should make sure you have a blog that is customized to help you advance your specific goals.  My top priorities for this blog are: (1) delivering useful, clear content to my readers, and (2) making it easy for readers to subscribe to my blog.  These may be simple goals, but pursuing them ruthlessly means you need to remove all distracting elements from the blog, and making sure that all elements that remain serve a purpose.  When you have a minimalist style, any dumb parts will stand out like a sore thumb.  

As you know, I started with the default Posterous settings, which are excellent, and made the following customizations:

1. Rather than keeping the "login" navigation at the top right of the page (above the fold), I moved it to the bottom right, below the fold (which is the same thing that @guykawasaki does with his Alltop page. 
2. I increased the size of the header by 2x.
3. I posted a hidden "About me" page, and posted a link to that page to serve as a replacement for the default Posterous "profile" page, which I hid from view.  Posterous's default profile page is great for the social networking aspects of the platform, but it is a huge distraction and source of confusion to most of my readers, who don't care that I happen to use Posterous's platform.
4. I removed the faint text that said, "Contributors," along the right side of the page, because I'm the sole writer of this blog.
5. In addition to letting readers subscribe via Posterous's default subscription path, I added a Twitter button AND a Feedburner email field.  For some reason it was tricky to get all these options to display consistently whether you were reading from a specific post OR just reading from the blog homepage, but I eventually figured out how to get it right, which is important because for my blog this is part of the "anchor" section, which readers rely on to navigate the site. 
6. I posted a hidden "Most popular posts" page and put the link beneath the "About me" page.  These are the two "informational anchors" on the site.  Beneath these two links, you have the three "engagement anchors," which include a Twitter button for people to subscribe via Twitter, a Feedburner email subscription field, and the default Posterous subscription button, for fellow users of Posterous.  (Note: I wanted to keep a link that said "Follow me on Posterous" because that is one of the few nods to Posterous on the blog, and I want to give the platform credit for powering this site.)
7. I purchased a custom domain name (www.willmarlow.com)
8. When you view a blog post, rather than seeing the view count and the number of times the post has been "Favorited" in the top part of the page, I moved that information down lower, because I needed that prime real estate for the anchor section (and because the importance of that information is debatable).
9. I removed the Posterous tag from the top of the page.

I will continue to optimize the blog by making minor changes designed to make the blog more readable and user friendly, and I'm appreciative of any feedback you may have for things I'm doing right and things I'm doing wrong.  Please don't hesitate to let me know what you think.  And if you share my goals, I'm happy to send you what you need to use my optimized blog template as your Posterous "theme." 

Will Marlow co-founded AlumniFidelity to help his clients reposition their fundraising to benefit from Web 2.0 technology and marketing techniques. He’s working with clients such as UVA, the College of William & Mary, the University of Oklahoma, Bowling Green State University, Randolph Macon College, and he loves nothing better than a thorny marketing challenge.  Read more about Will Marlow here, or email him at will@alumnifidelity.com.

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I wanted to share the thought process behind the way I customized this blog.  As with any web project that I'm involved with, I began by setting the goals of the blog (what do I want to accomplish?), then choosing the tactics I would focus on (of all the things I could do in order to advance my goals, which few things can I do really well?), and then articulating a theme that will help me make any tough tie-breaking decisions. 

By starting with this outline, it was easy to optimize the blog without wasting time on enhancements that I was likely to change my mind about later.  I created an "anchor" section that stays the same, whether you're viewing the homepage of the blog or any of the blog posts.  This anchor section includes two informational sections - an "About me" page and "My most popular posts," both of which are important for new visitors to the blog.

The "anchor" section also includes three ways for readers to easily subscribe to the blog.  You can subscribe to the blog by email, or through Posterous, or you can follow me on Twitter.  These options are available to readers from the home page or from each individual blog post.

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Every so often, I do some quick keyword searches for my company, my clients, and my own name, to see how everyone is doing regarding search engine optimization. 

Two things are notable.

Number one, it looks like the black art of search engine optimization (SEO) is rapidly losing relevance, and it's being replaced by the much simpler art of social media optimization.  Which means, essentially, that search engines will now be able to find you largely by your own social media conversations on Twitter, Facebook, and on your blog.  You still need to make your content "search engine friendly" so that you don't make it hard for Google to find you, but the complicated voodoo is being replaced by activities that you do.

Number two, much to my surprise, when I entered the same search criteria in both Google and Bing, Bing told me something useful that Google did not.  Bing told me that someone had linked to my blog from Twitter without letting me know.  I was happy to find out so that I could thank the person, but the point is, Google didn't tell me about this and Bing did.  Now, it'll take A LOT more than this to win even 1% of my search loyalty, but I was surprised that given the same search criteria, Bing scored a point on Google on my scorecard.

PS - If you ever find yourself in a conversation with someone who tells you that Twitter or Facebook is a fad that could disappear because they don't do anything useful, and you don't know what to say to them, remember that people still pay big money for "search engine optimization."  Twitter and Facebook displace this costly marketing activity with a non-cash alternative.  In other words, rather than paying for SEO, smart businesses are using social media.  That's the opposite of useless.

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