You can set Live Writer to automatically tweet your posts when you publish with this handy Twitter plug in by shoutmeloud. Download the plug in Twitter Notify.

In this post, we will explore some tips and tricks to improve the search relevancy and page ranking for your custom blog content, such as posts and articles in your series.  This is one article in an ever-growing series : Blogging 101 : Behind the Scenes at SlingAlibi.com. The goal of this series is to provide a step by step guide that you can use as a checklist to host your own website with a customized blog engine.

1. For Microsoft employees, if you have opted to create an indie blog, beyond MSDN, then it’s a good idea to post teasers on MSDN that link to your primary blog engine. That way you can take advantage of the traffice that MSDN attracts, while still maintaining the autonomy of a custom blog engine.
2. Set up an account on FriendFeed. Link your blog, twitter, Facebook together. The Facebook Add-In will automatically pull in any friends you have on Facebook. Keep in mind, FriendFeed will notify your friends that you added them.  I only realized they were notified when I got some thank you mails.
3. If you are a female blogger, you’ll want to sign up on Blogher.
4. Probably I am on my chicklet honeymoon phase, yet I like the idea of tending garden. So I have opted to be completely transparent on my subscriber base both on Twitter and RSS and plugged in these two chickies into my HTML Header.  This was screesnhot at 8/29/09 which means it’s exactly been a week since I bought the domain, and exactly 2 days since I got it working on 8/27/09. I am curious to see how readership grows and will be happy to share best practices as I learn them. Here is the code to create the chickies:

      1: <script type="text/javascript" language="JavaScript" 

      2: src="http://twittercounter.com/embed/?username=slingalibi&style=bird">

      3: </script>

      4: <p><a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/SlingAlibi">

      5: <img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~fc/SlingAlibi?bg=99CCFF&amp;fg=444444&amp;anim=0" 

      6: height="26" width="88" style="border:0" alt="" /></a></p>

      7:       

5. Using memes. I have heard mixed reactions on this one. I’m not sure if’s a good idea or not, but I am going to try a ReTweet button (or a ReTweet chicklet) on a trial basis.  Here is the code I used for the ReTweet button at the top of the page. Replace <URL> with your own blog post URL.

      1: <a href="http://api.tweetmeme.com/share?url=<url>">

      2: <img src="http://api.tweetmeme.com/imagebutton.gif?url=<url>"

      3:  height="61" width="51" /></a>

6. One chicklet that I enjoy is the TweetMeme buttonwhich you see in green at the top of this post. You can use it in web pages, RSS feeds, and even emails. It allows people to quickly spread word of your content through Twitter by direct linking to their Twitter account directly from the content itself.

Have you ever wondered how people have configured their Instant Messenger settings in Windows Live Messenger to show their tweets and blog posts?   If you ever examined the lower bottom panel of your Messenger, you may have seen the “What’s New” component which constantly refreshes with notifications about social networking activities  your friends and colleagues have taken lately. In this post, we will walk through how you can configure your Messenger to display your online activities, as well.

You can automate the delivery of your tweets and blog updates to all your Windows Live contacts through the What’s New feature in Windows Live Messenger. Setting it up may not that intuitive to everyone, so in this post, we’ll walk through the steps you need to take to make it happen!

At the bottom of your Messenger window you will see the Configure Updates icon which looks like two connected people.

If you click on that icon, you will see more information about how you can also be intertwined with your friends and family using Social Networking platforms such as Facebook and Twitter. Click on the Add Web Activities icon if you are ready to connect Messenger with your social networking activities within Facebook, Twitter, Flickr, PhotoBucket, WordPress, iLike, LiveJournal, Pandora, yelp and many many more (including one in Russian that I cannot translate accurately).

Once you click on the Add Web Activities href, you will be redirected to a web page which will enable you to configure your social networking accounts so that the activities are displayed directly in Messenger.

The instructions for each are obviously unique; however, let’s take a look at how we can configure one popular social networking platform you may have heard of: Twitter.

Type in your user name and your preferences for how and to whom you wish to display your activities:

You can even configure Messenger to show your custom blog posts!  Let’s walk through that, select the Add Web Activity link. From there, the set up is very similar to configuring Twitter, except instead of a user name, you will need to enter your RSS feed URL:

Last Modified: 10/16/2009

In this post, we will explore some tips and tricks to improve the search relevancy and page ranking for your custom blog content.  This is one article in an ever-growing series : Blogging 101 : Behind the Scenes at SlingAlibi.com. The goal of this series is to provide a step by step guide that you can use as a checklist to host your own website with a customized blog engine.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

There are several techniques you can use to optimize your site for better search relevancy.  Please feel free to use this as an a la carte checklist of options to configure your website.

1. Get an account at Digg. Add a Plugin for Digg into Livewriter – This puts a link to Digg in each of your posts.This will allow people to stack rank your content as valuable or relevant for the Digg aggregator.

2. For .NET Application Development related content, get an account at DotNetShoutout and DZone. Both allow you to submit links to your most important posts and people can vote on them, bumping them up on top 10 lists.  Optionally, you can tag your posts with little links that allow your readers to cast their vote directly from  your posts. This could be tacky, so verdict is still out on whether this is a best practice. I am experimenting with a DotNetKicks link on some of my posts.
3. Likewise, get an account at DotNetKicks. Add the LiveWriter plug in for DotNetKicks, assuming you are writing about software development with .NET.
4. Submit your blog to Technorati. Just join, membership is free. Then you can claim your blog by creating a “fake” post with a key that Technorati provides. Once they reach out and touch your post, they’ll authorize the claim. You can track the status of your claim directly on their website. Once your claim has been approved, you will be able edit your settings and see your ranking amongst the -rati. Check out my ranking. I am sure it is 3M out of 3M: Once you are set up you can use the Ping button to have Technorati search your site for new content. You can automate this by entering this into the settings for your blogging engine, in my case, I can go into control panel in BlogEngine.NET and set up the automatic ping service. This establishes a handshake between my blog server and Technorati.
5. Submit your site to crawlers and blog indexers, such as Blogged.
6. Connect to delicious – sign in – drop in tags into your blog. Tags are basically the equivalent of keywords from way back in the 90s. Keywords provide descriptive terms in the META of a page. Search engine crawlers examine the meta of a page to determine the best place to index the page. More keywords is not necessarily better. Be very selective with which keywords you choose. Read the section on SEO for more information.
7. Submit your blog to search engines. There are tons of techniques on how to this. This posting is a good reference guide on submitting to search engines. It’s a good idea to wait until you get a fair amount of entries in each of your categories so the crawlers don’t miss indexing a particular category due to its sparse population. A good rule of thumb is 15-20 items per category..
8. Run a free search simulator test on your site to see how a search engine views your site. This will help tweak your content to be more search friendly.  So when I ran one, I quickly realized the Spider wasn’t able to crawl my links. I realized that I hadn’t properly set the sitemap property in the robots.txt file to point to the sitemap file. Also, I realized that by web hoster has a security guard that is turned on by default. You can turn down from STRONG to MEDIUM inside the Control Panel. Once I did that, I definitely got a slew of results from the spider.
9. Separate your UI markup code from your content. Look at your source. Are you using the FONT tag? Switch those out & use Cascading Style Sheets for setting your UI attributes.
10. Don’t use too many H1 tags (this page is incredibly guilty of it) it confuses the search engines with TMI. That’s probably why I am going to have to break this page up into at least a dozen posts. But don’t get annoying with how granular you are with your site. Personally, I don’t enjoy skipping around between pages for tiny crumbs of information. It’s a balance, not too dense (like this page is in its current form) where ADD people can’t deal and not too sparse, where fast readers are bored and flit away.
11. Always use ALT text with your images. Crawlers can’t “read” images.
12. Get listed in DMOZ – a human maintained yellow pages of the web. This will link you up with other partner sites, such as AOL, AltaVista, Google, etc.
13. (optional) Likewise register with the paid service directories, such as Yahoo and business.com directories, but this is not free. ($299/ and $199 / year respectively).
14. Run a free web site grader against your main page for more tips like this. IT’s great to have a role model in mind when you run this search. Basically do a little investigating and find a blog that’s something similar to what you’d like in reach. I opted to go with the the people who helped me tremendously getting set up here, as a means to understand what a successful site looks like. As you can see I have a long, long way to go:
     
    
    
    
15. Don’t create hyperlinks that are called “here” or “this”.  Apparently poor anchor texts do not allow search engine crawlers to properly categorize your site.
16. Don’t have any broken links. This is an obvious one, but good to remember for regular monthly maintenance.  You can use a validation spider to clean your site up. I plan to get rid of my 2nd subdomain blogs.slingalibi.com to avoid confusion and keep my site focused on one domain, so I’ll definitely be running this tool in the next day or so.  But I did a quick run through, not expecting to find much after less than a week of being up, and (er) I am guilty. The crawler crawled for several minutes: And then it told me I had 11 bad links (and I haven’t even killed my subdomain yet!) So most likely 1/month is not frequent enough:

     

17. How you do redirection is also very critical for SEO. (ASP.NET 4.0 has new features to support 301 redirection – which signifies a permanent redirection – much better for search crawlers.). Why do you want redirects? To make things nice and neat with setting subdomains. For example, I have a redirect from about.slingalibi.com to an ASPX file sitting deep inside a folder.  When it comes to your own personal ASP.NET code, you should consider the new routing features of ASP.NET 4.0. 
18. Leverage the Text Template Add In if you are using Live Writer. This will make it easy for you to automatically insert links to chicklets so you don’t have to manually add the line of code for each of your chicklets, like the tweet me script:

   1: <p><script type="text/javascript" src="http://tweetmeme.com/i/scripts/button.js"></script>&#160; </p>

This is one article in a series giving you the behind the scenes story of setting up a .NET and SQL Server hosted application platform that runs on Windows 2008, IIS7.  The series will cover how to set up a blog engine, RSS feeds, optimize them and give you best practices on writing Search Engine Optimized content. The series will also cover tips on how to publicize the content with a Social Networking Optimization strategy.  This is a living series, happening in real time.  Each post will be updated as the story develops, so be sure to check the last modified date listed at the top of each post.  Please post any questions in the comments, as they will be answered directly through the updated content.  The goal of the series is to help both novice and intermediate developer go independent with their own customized blogging and development platform.

For information on the entire series, please refer to the original stub post which links to all the sub-posts in the entire series. Or, better yet, subscribe to the actual feed: Blogging 101 - Behind the Scenes at SlingAlibi (1)

Last modified : 8/31/09

Going Indie!  Buying a domain 

1. So only a week after launching on MSDN, I have decided to republish the content on another domain. For several reasons (1) to get the content off a MSDN owned side (2) for ease of management purposes (3) for new features, such as Facebook connect, that the current (old) version of Community Server on MDSN doesn’t provide (4) to maintain my readership should I ever leave the company (which i am definitely not planning to do) or if something happens to MSDN blogs. (5) maintain my own branding. So I am now going to walk through the process of moving from MSDN onto my own indie site.  It’s early enough in the life of my blog as my subscribers are only at 15, with 6 reach (number of actions taken on my site – clickthroughs off my blog), so hopefully it will be relatively painless to migrate : 
2. Although GoDaddy isn’t necessarily family friendly and it is littered with upselling ads, apparently it is the domain provider of value and choice amongst my colleagues. I did a search on an anagram of my name on WHOIS and found it available.  Also, apparently GoDaddy supports DNS redirection so you can move your hoster around. Using a promotion code given to me by my colleague (thanks Tim!), I was able to get 10 years down from $106 to $76:  
3. One warning, be careful on what you put down for the Administrative Contact, Technical contact & Registrant address fields!  A simple Who.Is will pull up your information for all the world to see so don’t put down an address and phone number that you don’t want to share with the world:
4. Now I had to set up the hoster.  From what I heard from my fellow DPE colleague Brian, webhost4life was the best provider if I wanted to own an entire, site and database.  I opted for the middle package because it gives you SQL Server & ASP.NET in case I want to add custom pages and projects to my site one day.  It takes a few hours for them to set up your account. Once it is complete, you will receive an email. It took me 3 days, or 1 full business day to receive the mail.
5. Next, the DNS routing needs to be setup. Your hoster will send you the DNS servers to use. These need to be plugged into GoDaddy settings. Choose the Manage option from the site, Advanced Details. Then edit the nameservers to match the ones given to you by your provider.