With any blog successful blog it is all about finding your audience and keeping them on board, however one problem a lot of blogs have is that the audience simply doesn't find them.

This is a problem i have had previously with this blog and it is what forced me into taking serious action to increase the readability of my posts, the feedback and lastly increase traffic to the blog.

The Problems

I faced my problems with my blog and i blame the majority of the problem simply on my lack of attention to trends, the popular content and then my lack of SEO knowledge.

I found that i simply was not applying any attention to the things i was posting about so my blog posts seemed unrelated to anything else, unstructured and random, i was aware of this i attempted to pull off this style, with little success.

Search Engine Optimisation was another huge problem for me, i had spent months trying to perfect the blogs link system so that the URL's contain a description of the content they pointed to and i believe the method i used was just not very SEO friendly.

The links were not my only problem either, i was unable to format the content currently simply because of the content management system i created, this meant i could post the news, and that was about it, there was simply no after-care.

The Solutions

I looked into many solutions to solve this problem and considered moving to a blogging platform like WordPress or Blogger but as a designer and developer i want something more flexible so i decided i would research solutions to my problem and create my own.

Research: Uniform Resource Identifier (URI)

I felt that this was my major downfall, the links appeared to be SEO friendly but after much research i found that they were the complete opposite to SEO friendly.

 http://www.slaterjohn.com/blog/Micro@11_V_Festival_2009_@16_Clashfinder  

This is the linking system i used, the link is structured to appear like all content is categorised in a folder (blog) and this is then followed by the title of the post, the title is the unique identifier for the post.

The problem with this style of URI is that i use underscores and symbols, something which isn't very good for Google or other search engines and although i understand where the post is going people seeing this URL may not be as understanding and it would look just as random as a series of numbers.

I looked into WordPress who have a very good way of producing SEO friendly links in their software and they even have a very good way of customising how your links are displayed, this is something that interested me very much.

 http://www.slaterjohn.com/blog-post-title-here.html 

This method is ideal as it keeps everything uniform, strips out any symbols in the URL and makes the link more understandable, the problem is there is no way to determine whether this is a blog post or content, this is something my blog has both of and a way to differentiate between the two is important.

 http://www.slaterjohn.com/blog-post-title-here-b-12.html 

This method is exactly the same as the first method but instead of it displaying the title it also displays the type of content, whether it be blog post, content or category, as well as the unique identifier for the content being called.

 http://www.slaterjohn.com/2009/03/13/blog-title-here/ 

This is a URI method that is very popular with WordPress blogs and is something i seriously considered. The problem i saw with this however is that Google never seemed to rank a lot of my pages if they appeared to be in a new directory, let alone 3 directories and this is exactly what put me off.

Solution: Uniform Resource Identifier (URI)

After my research i decided on the URI format i would use on the blog, this method need to be straight forward and understandable for the readers of the content along with Google, after all keywords in the URL is going to help with my Google ranking.

 http://www.slaterjohn.com/blog-post-title-here-b-12.html 

This was my chosen solution because it contained the keywords relevant to the blog it linked too as well as the unique identifier for the content being requested. This solution is perfect for the reader because the title of the post is visible in the URL so the user knows what to expect without even clicking through.

This solution is also perfect because it allows me to use the same URL format for all of the content on my site because by using a content identifier the content management system understands exactly what content has been requested and where to take the content from (which database table). In my solution this is defined by the letter before the unique identifier, each letter relates to a type of content.

• b - This si blog post content
• w - Web page content, such as the about us page and contact us page
• c - Blog categories
• l - Lifefeed content

Research: Content

Obviously the structure of the URI is going to affect the way my content is accessed although it is not going to have an effect on the way my content is read. So i decided it would be wise to research how other blog posts are structured and how the written content is support.

WWTDD

The structure of this website is very straight forward and in the 3 years i have been reading it nothing major has changed. The reason i read the content is because all of the blog posts are very media rich, straight to the point, short and very witty. Personally the unprofessionalism and rich media is what makes me go back to this blog every day, the posts seem very straight to the point and a strong opinion of the writer, regardless of how inappropriate his opinions are, is presented to the reader.

• Media Rich Content
• Witty, Non-formal posts.
• Short and Sweet

See The Article

Smashing Magazine

The main reason i visit Smashing Magazine is for inspiration, something that could not be achieved with the masses of media that is featured in every post. Every post is long with a large amount of written content but i find myself often skipping this content and simply browsing the images.

• Content Depth
• Media Rich
• Targeted at a specific audience

I decided to look outside of the blogs i have in my favourites and focus on some of the blogs i have read in the past and enjoyed.

See The Article

John O'Nolan

I came across this blog when John O'Nolan was running a content experiment that i found very interesting. I liked the way all of his posts were laid out, although they were very text heavy (because they need to be) he broke up the content with striking headers, headers that explained the section in one line. I compare this method to a newspaper because a newspaper contains hundreds of articles but when you are browsing you rarely read every single article and tend to scan for a headline that strikes you.

• Content Depth
• Broken apart by headers

See The Article

FHM Music

Again FHM use a similar method to break up content, they have small chunks of text broken up by images and headers, these allow me to scroll to exactly what i want to read without much brain power (ideal for me). Something that FHM have done on this articular article is broken the text content up with video and images, the key image is what draws you in because seeing a image of Pixie Lott wearing little clothing is always going to draw in the target audience.

• Content Depth
• Media Rich
• Images used to draw in audience
• Pixie Lott

See The Article

Solution: Content

After my research i decided to set out some plans for how all content on the site will be formatted, this plan would mean all content is uniform and is structured in a similar to prevent the reader from getting confused.

I took my favourite points from each of the type of blog and decided to throw these elements into the mix, obviously media rich content would not be an option for some content, but where possible this would be featured.

Media Rich

This was the key point i made about the blogs i read, they all have content with a lot of media including images and videos and this is something i felt was important for my content also. Each blog post would contain one image which would represent the post along with images to go inline with written content.

Where possible i opted to use video content as videos speak louder than words and if i could grab the readers attention with video then i could potentially keep this reader on the website looking at different content.

Section Headers

This made massive impact on John's blog and i felt it was important to use a similar method to split my blog posts, especially if the posts have lots of written content. I decided it was wise to use headers that describe the content (like headlines) in the hope that users scrolling down the page would see a header they like and read the content.

Conclusion

So far the search engine optimisation i have done on the website has had positive affects and more traffic is being driven to the website than it was before however it is very difficult to determine whether or not the search engine optimisation has had an impact on my Google ranking as it can sometimes take weeks for content to be indexed.

I have seen some negative effects from the changes i have made as the removal of old content has meant a 150% increase in the amount of traffic to my error page however i believe this is mainly due to hot-linking to images that no longer exist.

Further Development

It takes a lot of hard work to get search engine optimisation perfect on any website and although i have seen some positive results from the SEO i have done recently it is important that i continue to work on driving more relevant traffic to my website and hopefully getting continuous readers who naturally come back to the website without the help of search engines.

Keywords: seo, search engine, google, search engine optimisation, content, media, music, articles, fhm, website, web design, design, mod rewrite