What’s Up? I’ve Been Blogging

Some of you have told me that you’d like to know more about me. So this post is about some recent news in my life… that have to do with blogging! I know this isn’t exactly what you guys meant, so I hope I don’t bore you!

It became quite a long post, so here’s a quick summary: this post includes a doppelganger, spammers, and some basic tips for improving your blog’s performance!

From a trip to the Dominican Rep., 2008

Things that have been going on with my blog lately

Most of you don’t know this, but I’m actually fascinated by the mysterious world of internet marketing and search engine optimization!

I already have a marketing background and last year, inspired by blogging, I decided to do some additional studies in the field of internet marketing (while working my day job, of course).

I’ll admit, I’ve been stubborn about social media. I don’t like mass hype in general and I left Facebook years ago when it started becoming something like the old yellow pages, its existence being taken for granted by companies too lazy to set up a real website.

So you can imagine my shock when I realized, naively too late, that studying internet marketing would require me to create accounts for at least Periscope and Twitter, in order to complete the assignments!

What, social media assignments? What has the world come to? Oh yes. Our Periscope assignments involved filming and broadcasting on the streets, which invariably meant capturing innocent bystanders in live videos, so very much against my ethics. I felt like I couldn’t make my viewpoint understood no matter how much I tried: all the other students and teachers thought it was okay to catch strangers on film, even if you accidentally captured snippets of personal conversations and then broadcasted them all over the world… I had to think hard to come up with locations to shoot that would fulfill the assignments but have minimal effect on bystanders. (A privacy nightmare!)

To sum it up, I endured multiple Periscope experiments for the sake of research, but the moment my studies were done, my account was deleted like swiping away a fly.

As for Twitter, I actually liked it and I started an account for my blog.

Also from the Dominican Republic

Surviving social media

I’m surprised at how I adapted to Twitter, considering all of the above. The fact that it’s not too personal is what attracts me. It’s a great place to share other bloggers’ posts – besides, social media links reinforce your search engine rankings.

Since I have mainly travel-themed followers on Twitter (other travel bloggers, travel related websites, etc.), I’ve noticed there’s also lots of commercial junk there. Many Twitter accounts appear to be automated, as in there’s no real person behind the account or the real person doesn’t actually ever visit the account but curates it through automation, and there are robots and spammers, too. Even non-spammers send automated direct messages to new followers, which is basically spamming, and some people quite obviously buy followers, because who really has the time to follow hundreds of thousands of accounts personally?

If you ignore all that and focus on interesting content, Twitter can be fun.

My Twitter experience hasn’t gone entirely without hick-ups, though. I recently had to change my Twitter username, since I noticed there was someone else using my old nickname elsewhere on the internet. Though this person wasn’t on Twitter, some other users were mixing me up with her (they were too lazy to actually visit my account to check whether it was the same person, before tagging me to posts that had nothing to do with me).

To avoid being mistaken for someone else, I renamed myself, while muttering under my breath, how original a name do you have to come up with to not have an online doppelganger?! 

Luckily, modifying my Twitter identity didn’t affect my followers in any way. I’m now @SnowMeltsSW. Due to Twitter’s character limitations I haven’t been using my blog’s title as my username – it’s too long – I’ve been trying different variations of it. Around the same time, I also updated my WordPress Gravatar to feature my blog’s entire title instead of the nickname I used to have.

As for other social media, I’m still experimenting with Instagram. Though I’m not posting there regularly, if you want to check out my Instagram, it’s thesnowmeltssomewhere.

From Paris, circa 2005

Are you real? – Existential dilemma of the day

A while ago, I realized that I was getting more and more spam followers on WordPress, too. Yes, spam blog followers! Followers who don’t really exist. Blogs that aren’t really blogs, with all of their content featuring the same date. Some of them follow, unfollow, and follow again, seeking clicks to their site.

I did some searches on this and to summarize what I found out, you cannot block a follower. All you can do is report a spam follower to WordPress which will then… do what? Investigate, maybe? But I have better things to do than sit down and report spammers, so never mind. Apparently, most spammers only want to get clicks to their site and are quite harmless. But there is always the “don’t talk to strangers” aspect: a link could potentially contain malware.

This seems sad to me, since I used to always be happy to gain new followers and I always clicked over to their sites to visit them back. And now I can’t be sure if they’re real followers anymore, or just spammers. (Of course, it could be just a glitch in WordPress that makes legitimate followers look like spammers by not providing a link to their site and notifying me instead that “this site does not exist”. Let’s hope it’s just a glitch!)

So, the joy of gaining a new follower has subtly been thrown out the window and replaced by suspicion. If you’re a new follower of mine and I never visited your site, you can drop me a comment to let me know you’re a real, live human being – I’m always happy to check out new blogs!

Well… I would!

Small adjustments for SEO

Studying internet marketing, I learned about SEO (search engine optimization), SEM (search engine marketing), conversion, evaluating an online store, and many other things that can be quite interesting from a blogger’s perspective.

So, have I been applying all that I learned to my blog and growing it rapidly?

Umm, no! First of all, I don’t have that much spare time and when I do, I’d rather be posting or commenting, than improving my SEO (as fascinating as it is).

I did do some small adjustments. I mean, if I’m blogging, why wouldn’t I want new visitors, right? Titles and taglines are important for SEO so I worked on that a bit. My blog’s title (The Snow Melts Somewhere) has always been the same, but its original tagline was Postcards from my trips.

Since my title isn’t very descriptive of the content (I don’t blog about snow, quite the contrary!), I figured my tagline should at least be descriptive. Tagline number two (you can see it right under my title) isn’t as poetic as the first one was, but now I do get more Google hits. Some even with the search term travel, which I think is pretty amazing, considering the mind-boggling amount of travel-related websites out there! I’m guessing these visitors’ previous search history has something to do with it. Either that, or WordPress stats are just unreliable.

I also noticed that WordPress has now made it possible to create your own meta description, at least in the theme I’m using, which I’m pretty sure wasn’t available when I first started blogging. A meta description is the short summary of your contents that is visible in search results. It may affect whether people decide to click over to your site or not, so it’s an important part to customize, if you can.

Do you have any great tips for growing your blog? My weekly visit stats are still quite low, so any practical suggestions on how to improve them would be appreciated – besides signing up for Facebook or commercializing my content! (I’ll pass on those, for now!)

This could be a postcard, right? From my trip to Patagonia, 2014

Basic tips

While I don’t pretend to be an expert on any of this, here are a few random, very basic tips I learned through my internet marketing studies that can be applied to free WordPress blogs:

1. For titles and taglines, a small amount of keyword repetition may help your SEO, as well as the simple act of placing important keywords at the beginning of the title or tagline. They shouldn’t be too long, however, keep them under 50-60 characters.

2. Repeat key words in your blog posts, i.e. words you want to target, words you think people will search for. The more specific, the better. But don’t overdo it, keep your writing natural: you still need to write for humans, not for search engines.

Also, keep them relevant. If the bounce rate* for your blog is high, that will hurt your SEO (*in other words, if people click onto your blog, and then quickly leave, this will tell Google your site isn’t relevant to the key words and your site’s ranking will get lower.) Great content is important to search engines, too, believe it or not.

Have I been taking my own advice and doing this? No, I never think of key words when I write a post.

3. When you post an image, click open its properties in the post editor and add a description in the title attribute area. Why? This will help the image show up in related Google images searches, and the image will be linked back to your blog. You might gain new visitors. Also, screen readers for the visually impaired use alt attributes so you’ll be improving their online experience.

Have I been doing this? Not regularly, because I don’t like the visual aspects of the grey text box this creates in my theme when you hover over the image with your mouse. But maybe your theme will react differently.

Chill out! (And pick up your trash) – Maybe not postcard material…

4. Links to popular sites as well as links inside your own blog help your blog’s SEO. Try to include both internal and external links in your blog posts. If you want to know more about this, just do a Google search, there’s an endless amount of articles on SEO and internet marketing in general. Hubspot and this article by Moz.com are as good a place to start as any.

Have I been doing this? Not as much as I could be doing. Why? Because I’ve noticed that most people don’t click on internal links anyway, so I’d only be doing it for SEO.

Participating in blogging challenges and link-ups creates links, though, and I do participate in quite a lot of those. Not because of the links – because I like doing the challenges!

5. When you comment on someone else’s post, people reading the comments might want to click over to your site to check you out. Normally, you would want to encourage this (unless you specifically do not want anyone to visit your site for some reason).

Make sure that your WordPress Gravatar profile contains a link to your site. And remember to update the link if you create a new blog (for example when the old blog has reached its space limit).

6. Remember to visit your own blog every now and then and look at it as a reader would: does it look okay? Is there an empty About-page hanging around, saying “This is an example of a page”? Is there still an example widget displaying the text “Lorem ipsum…”?

Is the blog easy to navigate? If you direct Gravatar visitors to a front page or an About-page instead of your blog posts, have you added links to your blog posts so that your visitors can explore more than just the page they landed on? Is there a follow-button?

You’ll only get followers if you make following easy – make sure your blog has a visible follow button on every page. User friendliness is important for SEO, since sites that are hard to navigate will lead to higher bounce rates as people will leave in frustration. (Obviously, you also want to give your readers a great experience.)

7. If you want to check out your search engine ranking, remember to delete your search history and cookies first. A good method is to use Chrome’s incognito search. Otherwise, your ranking will appear to be higher than it is, since search results are personalized.

And…

I do still have lots of questions of my own regarding SEO for blogs. For example, do the same recommendations apply to both my front page and individual post pages?

I’m also under the impression that re-blogging your own content is bad for your SEO, since duplicate content reduces your Google ranking. But I know that many people do recycle their content, so I’d like to ask an expert about this. – Any experts out there?

Why do I care about all of this? Simply because I think it’s interesting! It’s like its own little micro world with its own rules to follow. You can check out your performance and try to improve. I always love having projects.

Actual postcards from my trips – and a magnet

What about you?

What are your experiences with social media, blogging, and spammers? Have you had any problems like finding a doppelganger and having to change your username?

Do you try to develop your blog or do you just like the blogging part?