Mashable.com presents 6 Tips For Building a High Quality Blog Following.

The 6 Tips (with my thoughts on / experiences with putting them into action) are:

1. Turn Existing Customers Into Readers 
   When I first read this tip, my immediate reaction was "I don't have 'existing customers.'" But actually I do, and so do you, if people in your social or business networks have interests in common with your blog subject. If you're writing for part of your network, however, don't lose your focus while trying to reach network members who aren't as interested in your subject. Build on the part of your network that really wants to hear what you have to say, and add others with the same interest. Don't spam your friends who aren't that into your blog subject.
    
2. Skip the Misleading Traffic-Boosting Techniques
   Mashable refers specifically to slideshows (which bulk up pageviews-per-visit stats to increase ad revenue) and misleading headlines to draw traffic. I confess I've been guilty of the occasional misleading headline myself - but since getting on Twitter and linking to my blog posts on Facebook, I've become convinced that honesty is the best policy when it comes to blog post headlines.
    
3. Speak to a Very Specific Audience
   This is another lesson that it's taken me a while to learn. But learn it I have. In 2007, I had one blog (edwardspurlock.net) and posted anything and everything that interested me. Since then, I've started blogs on several different subjects - exercise and fitness (Geek My Fitness), mental exercise (Kung Fu Mind), and learning Web design and development (Evolving Code Monkey). I've repurposed EdwardSpurlock.net as a blog on social and business networking, and built this blog (edward.spurlock.cc) for subjects related to my current career  (my "day job") and career change (blogging and Web content creation).
    
4. Guest Post and Use Guest Bloggers
   I haven't done tried to do any guest blogging yet - being new to professional blogging, I've been hesitant to put myself out there.
    
5. Encourage Loyalty Through Consistency
   By "consistency", Mashable means being consistent in one's stands, as well as posting regularly and often. I've never had much trouble with philosophical consistency. 
   
   As for posting consistency - I've read this advice several times since I started blogging. In fact, "blog on a regular schedule" is one of the commonest pieces of advice for new bloggers. What a pity that it's so much easier to read this advice than to practice it!
   
   I've gotten serious about my blogging two or three times before, and posted several times per week for two or three months running - then something would come up, and I'd abandon the effort. This year, I'm off to a good start with a post every day on my Evolving Code Monkey blog - but it's very early in the year. 
    
6. Be Timely and Relevant
   This is another aspect of blogging that I haven't mastered. In fact, I hadn't really thought of it as an issue. It seemed to me that chasing the latest trending topic on Twitter or trying to be the first to comment on a new article on a popular industry blog were activities driven by a selfish desire to build up one's own online presence, and not in any way a service to the audience.
   
   However, this Smashing Magazine article has opened my eyes. Timeliness is more than chasing trends - it really is serving the readers. Rather than "interrupting" your readers by revisiting some subject they read about three weeks ago on some other blog or news site, a timely post on a trending industry topic gives them your unique viewpoint when they're already thinking about it. It's more convenient for your readers.

From Slate magazine comes this essay on How to be a faster writer. I may have "blogged" ("curated"?) about this story before, but if so, I think it's something I want to remind myself of.

At F8, the Facebook developer conference, Facebook announced some major changes to the service - this on top of the new Top Stories arrangement from a couple of days ago, which most people found took some getting used to.

So what's coming soon?

• Timeline - The Profile page will soon be replaced by a Timeline, which will provide easier access to past activity (including Status Posts). You can also add pictures, notes etc and place them on your Timeline after the fact - even before you started to use Facebook (all the way back to baby pictures, if you like). The Timeline will become like an online scrapbook of one's life. If you want to get a head start on this change, you can enable your Timeline now and get busy uploading those baby pictures. Also, Mashable's Ben Parr went in depth with the new Facebook Timeline.
• Gestures - developers can create buttons similar to the Like button, but for any action directed to any particular entity. For example, you might visit a book publisher's site, and the product page for a particular book might have a button you can click to tell Facebook (and the world) that you're Reading that book.
• apps only need to ask once to share stories on your behalf - as part of Facebook's new Open Graph, Web sites that get your permission to share a story on your Ticker don't need to ask permission when you visit the site again - they can just share automatically.
• "lightweight" information will be shared on the Ticker, not the News Feed - the News Feed will contain important updates, like Friends' status updates, changes in relationship status, and the like. Less-important information like shared stories, Farmville, etc will be relegated to the Ticker, has already been added as part of the recent changes.
• Watch TV shows, listen to music, etc with friends thanks to new FB partners - Facebook has partnered with Hulu, Spotify, and others to allow users to watch TV shows, listen to music without leaving Facebook. These activities will appear in the Ticker too. You might notice that your friends are watching a show you've been meaning to catch, and start watching it "with them" directly from Facebook.

Big changes! For the 800 million of us already on Facebook, some of these are going to be a pretty big deal.

The Panda attacks the Farmer

(picture from Rick Weiss)

Earlier this year, Google began rolling out changes to the algorithms used to rank the value of the Web sites in Google's index. These changes were aimed at "content farms" - sites that steal copy content from other sites (a practice known as "scraping") or post vast amounts of low-value content, such as poorly-written blog posts written by poorly-paid freelancers.

These changes (nicknamed "Panda" after the name of one of Google's engineers) have been effective. Sites that formerly ranked highly in Goggle's index, such as articlesbase.com, associatedcontent.com, suite101.com, and eHow.com, have seen their traffic drop way off. Even "real" sites like About.com have seen noticeable drops in the numbers of Web visitors.

Bad pages can hurt your entire site

Google has confirmed that the change in their ranking algorithms doesn't just apply to the low-value pages themselves. A site that contains a mixture of low-value and high-value pages can have the ranking reduced on all their pages due to the low-value pages.

This is probably what happened to About.com. Although the site (which is owned by the New York Times) did have genuine people with real identities acting as Subject Matter Experts (SMEs) and posting lots of high-value content, there were plenty of subject areas where the Experts were, well, not so expert. If some of those SMEs were manually scraping other sites to get the content for their subject areas on About.com, Google's newly tweaked ranking algorithms may have reduced the ranking of the good information on About.com.

Implications for site owners

What does this mean for you and me?

When I started this blog earlier this year, I wanted to get in the habit of daily blogging, and establish my Web presence. I didn't know that my "bookmark" posts (where I posted links to sites that I thought would have value to Evolving Code Monkeys like myself) could do long-term damage to my site's Google ranking.

When I relaunch my Evolving Code Monkey blog (as EvolvingCodeMonkey.com) later in August, I'm going to focus on providing only high-value, original content. I won't try to blog something every day - rather, I'll go for posts two or maybe three times per week, on a schedule.

I'm going to maintain my current domain (edward.spurlock.cc), and if I feel the urge to post a "bookmark" post or some other low-value content, I'll add it to this blog, rather than diluting the quality at EvolvingCodeMonkey.com.

Google's 23 Questions to Improve Your Pages

In response to question from site owners and webmasters about the changes, Google's Webmaster Central blog provided some more guidance on building high-quality sites, including a list of 23 questions that webmasters could ask themselves about the content on their sites. These are the kinds of questions Google's testers were told to ask in formulating their judgments of page and site quality. I recommend reading the entire list and taking all the questions under consideration. However, the 23 questions can be summarized by the first question in the list:

Would you trust the information presented in this article?

While writing yesterday's post on "Reading and writing on the Web - have The Rules changed?", I ran across Jakob Nielsen's collection of articles on Writing for the Web.

It's a treasury of information that comes directly from Nielsen's research and experience. I'm not going to try to review the collection and draw conclusions - at least, not tonight. Consider this a quick bookmark, no more.

If you write for the Web, or want to, you have to read Nielsen. You don't have to agree with him - but you do need to read him.

A few days ago, Betsy Thaggard put a question to the STC Austin mailing list:

What's your take on writing for and reading on the web? The conventional wisdom was to keep things short, that people didn't want to look at a screen for long. But now that so much of what many of us read is on a monitor, does that change the desired length of text on a page?

And what about for mobile sites: Are we still aiming for basically a sentence or two of synopsis, or do people want, and are they willing to read, entire articles or at least pieces with at least a little substance to them?

And where do tablets figure into this inexact equation?

Have The Rules changed for reading on the Web?

Well, what are The Rules, anyway?

Steve Krug pretty much laid down the law on Web writing in his classic book, Don't Make Me Think: A Common Sense Approach to Web Usability, 2nd Edition. In fact, on page 45, he literally lays down the law:

Get rid of half the words on each page,
then get rid of half of what's left.
-- KRUG'S THIRD LAW OF USABILITY

That's pretty clear - or is it?

Actually, if you look at the rest of Don't Make Me Think, it's pretty obvious that Krug's Third Law only applies to a subset of Web content:

I'm not suggesting that the articles at Salon.com should be shorter than they are. I'm really talking about two specific kinds of writing: happy talk and instructions.
...
We all know happy talk when we see it: It's the introductory text that's supposed to welcome us to the site and tell us how great it is, or to tell us what we're about to see in the section we've just entered.
...
Your objective should always be to eliminate instructions entirely by making everything self-explanatory, or as close to it as possible. When instructions are absolutely necessary, cut them back to the bare minimum.
(Krug 2006, pages 45..47)

FACT OF LIFE #1:
We don't read pages. We scan them.
One of the very few well-documented facts about Web use is that people tend to spend very little time reading most Web pages. Instead, we scan (or skim) them, looking for words or phrases that catch our eye.
The exception, of course, is pages that contain documents like news stories, reports, or product descriptions. But even then, if the document is longer than a few paragraphs, we're likely to print it out because it's easier and faster to read on paper than on a screen.
(Krug 2006, page 22)

In my opinion, The Rules haven't changed, for the most part.

"Keep it short" applies to happy talk and instructions. Years of experience reading online text haven't made us more tolerant of fluff.

In fact, I suspect our greater sophistication about Web content has made us more aware of Krug's "sure-fire test" for happy talk:

If you listen very closely while you're reading it, you can actually hear a tine voice in the back of your head saying, "Blah blah blah blah blah blah..."

And at this point, most of us know how to fill out a Web form. Those who don't aren't going to read instructions, unless they're instructions for an offline task, like setting the VCR clock. OK, that's a joke - no one reads those instructions either.

The Rules haven't changed for other Web content, either. The inverted pyramid still applies to news stories, and long sales letters still have their place on the Web. Bullet points still work in product descriptions and blog posts.

Krug's Fact of Life #1 may need an update, though. Years of online reading experience, plus nicer monitors, plus better phone displays, plus pad form-factors, may equal a greater willingness to read long documents online, rather than printing them out (but Jakob Nielsen still thinks PDFs are Unfit for Human Consumption).

But what about mobile sites? Betsy aked:

Are we still aiming for basically a sentence or two of synopsis, or do people want, and are they willing to read, entire articles or at least pieces with at least a little substance to them?

I think the smaller screen real estate on mobile devices is going to continue to enforce the "keep it short" rule there. If I'm going to read a substantive article on my phone, I'm going to want to have some confidence that the article has the information I want. One way to do that would be to get to the article via a link from "a sentence or two of synopsis." So once again, I don't think the rules have changed much.

Looking professional on the Web - is it the domain name, or the design?

A couple of weeks ago, Carol Tice at makealivingwriting.com wrote a great post about leveraging one's blog into a paying writing gig. One piece of advice caught my eye:

Clean design also means not having .blogger or .wordpress or something in your URL. Pay the tiny fee and get hosting — it really makes you look a lot more pro.

I wondered if this applied to Typepad blogs as well - Carol seems to feel that a blog whose domain ends in typepad.com is not much better than one ending in blogspot.com (Blogger) or wordpress.com.

I'm still not convinced.

I think that "the difference that makes a difference" is the design, rather than the domain name. Carol Tice is right that blogspot.com and wordpress.com look unprofessional - but I think it's because the stock blog themes available on these free blogging hosts are recognizable as stock themes. Typepad's Unlimited and Premium blog hosting levels allow full customization.

Mind you, if you're going to pay $15 per month to host a single blog, you might as well pay for "real" Web hosting, with your own domain and fully-customized installation of Wordpress. If you followed my recent Design Inspiration Countdown series, you know that a site that uses Wordpress doesn't have to look like just another Wordpress site. But if you use the default Wordpress theme, I don't think your own domain will make you look much more professional.

Of course, looking at this blog's theme, you would probably say that I need to take my own advice!

Can your audience reach your blog? Check your domain name!

Last month (June 2011), I reached a personal Internet milestone. It was ten years ago when I first registered my personal domain name, spurlock.cc.

Sadly, however, not everyone is supportive of my achievement. In particular, the Web filtering at my day job has started blocking my domain, including both my blog and my webmail.

Websense offers a tool that you can use to scan your blog's URL (or any other site's Web address) for security threats. When I scan spurlock.cc, Websense's tool advises me that my domain may contain "Potentially Damanging Content...based on the URL of web page."

I suspect that the problem is the .cc Top-Level Domain (TLD) suffix. It's the TLD of the Cocos Islands, a South Seas territory of Australia. But Websense thinks it's "Potentially Damaging" - perhaps because other .cc domains have hosted actual malicious content

I'm not going to fight the filtering at work. I can't pretend I have a compelling business reason to read my own blog from my desk. But the takeaway here is - check your domain name! If Websense doesn't like it, your audience may not be able to reach it - and Websense is used by many businesses and government organizations, including public libraries.

Four years ago, BlogEngine developer Al Nyveldt put together a Webcast showing how to create a BlogEngine 1.1 theme, step-by-step. I watched the first part of the Webcast, but was disappointed to find the originally posted version froze about halfway through.

Yesterday, I noticed that Nyveldt posted an update a few days later, with a link to a Windows Media (WMV) version of the BlogEngine Theme video. I don't know how I missed it when I first became interested in BlogEngine, but there it is.

The download is 158 MB, or 194 MB unzipped. The video is almost 25 minutes long, and gives a good idea of Nyveldt's workflow.

A number of things have changed since BlogEngine 1.1. However, I plan to watch the video for inspiration on creating themes for the current (2.5) version of BlogEngine.