When you’re writing a blog, you should check your stats from time to time (I’m not as obsessive about it as some are) to see what people are reading, where they came from (referrers), what they click in your posts. Search terms are especially interesting to me. They don’t exactly correlate with the most-viewed posts [...]
How many people look at an animated infographic on a news Web site? “I would say 10,000 is a good number for us,” said Keith Claxton, an infographics journalist at the Chicago Tribune. That would be a great number of pageviews for, say, a post on my little blog. But for a news site on [...]
When I hear about someone who’s supposedly an expert in some area, I type that person’s name into Google. (Don’t you?) If I don’t see a likely link on the first page of search results, I add a keyword to the search and re-run it. Here’s a simple example. The newly appointed dean of our [...]
Somehow I missed this excellent post about SEO for online headlines, by Patrick Beeson, online for two weeks already! Read it and learn how to write headlines that will bring a bigger audience to your stories. Lucky for me, one of my forward-thinking colleagues here at the university asked if I knew any good resources [...]
On Saturday (the day of the week when traffic to this blog is usually at its lowest), I saw a surprising surge in visits. Turned out a particular post had been linked on Techmeme, and it being a slow day, the link sat on the Techmeme front all day. When I went into my FeedBurner [...]
So The Charleston Gazette, a small newspaper in West Virginia, won an IRE award for its investigative series about mine safety. After years of covering the coal industry, [reporter Ken Ward, Jr.] offers readers an unparalleled portrait of the dangers inside mines and the breakdowns of regulation that made 2006 a deadly year. Using documents [...]
Danny Sanchez explains it all to us, based on various sources and Google’s own patent application for “ranking blog documents.” (My mind reels when I think about applying for a patent on algorithms!) Danny’s post is perfect because it neatly summarizes the how and why, then just points us to the compete original sources. And [...]