An occasional writer's journal

Visitors to this site might be suspicious if I do not appear to be selling anything… but in getting you here and reading my latest entry I’ve achieved what thousands of website managers and so-called “pro bloggers” consistently fail to do.

Having encouraged you past the first sentence I’m already feeling a sense of achievement, especially if 140-character microblogging is more your thing. Imagine this article as a thread of 20 tweets all joined together but from a twitterer who can’t really express himself via Twitter alone.

WordPress co-founder Matt Mullenweg

As you continue into yet another paragraph of preamble you might be thinking, “This guy is sooo long-winded. Why doesn’t he get to the point?” Or, “What can he tell me that I don’t already know?”

You might also think, “I know there’s nothing wrong with my own writing, but why can’t I get visitors to my site to stick around?”

You’ll have noticed on arriving that I chose neither to slap you in the face with a 720-pixel-wide popup banner just to make you feel “welcome”, nor challenge you to the dance of a dozen animated buttons. So the answer to your previous question involves more than the quality of your writing.

If you arrived via a site exchange link or a blog referral listing, this might be the first time in a while that you’ve checked out the written content of another website. You were probably encouraged to visit as many comparable sites as possible to register a daily total of clicks that you hoped would increase your own site’s directory ranking.

I wish you the best of luck if your aim is simply to generate the highest possible number of split-second return visits by referral associates, but allow me to return to the subject of why you might agree that my own site — whose theme, I guess, is writing — might be worth more than a fleeting glimpse and a click on the back button of your browser.

Content is king

There follows a video interview by USA Today with Matt Mullenweg, the 25-year-old Texan founder of WordPress, the world’s most rapidly growing platform for bloggers, and it’s there to inspire you. Matt’s message to all bloggers in the age of social networking is that they shouldn’t forget to blog. . . and that means adding content.

Matt, who set out on his career as a jazz saxophonist, explains that he became interested in blogging “for the comments” in being able to generate feedback from across the world within minutes of his music and other content appearing on the web.

His approach is the opposite of that of the early web entrepreneur. Imagine a car salesman in Detroit who, after meticulously fashioning a corporate website featuring display fonts that match the colour of the necktie in his photo, is wondering why his order forms are still blank and the only comments he receives are from spammers.

Let’s look at it simply. If I visit your site and you have something to say, which I believe comes from your creative imagination, I am more likely to agree with you or be outraged enough to leave a comment of my own. That record of my visit becomes a permanent link on the web to direct people back to my own site, depending on the quality of my contribution. A patronising remark such as, “Nice site, good effort”, will hardly bring visitors rushing back to my blog, especially if they don’t even speak English and have to feed my jottings through a machine translator.

The thing about writing for the web is that you must appear to be human, especially to search engines. Sure, you can limit your website blurb or the intros to your blog posts to 140 characters in order for them to be picked up and shared by twitterers and other microbloggers, but you still have to follow a few basic rules about writing that usually involve a subject, verb and object.

Marketing gurus who are obsessive about search engine optimisation (SEO) in sculpting every post and page of their sites to support key words and categories are, in my view, doomed to failure. It is suggested that your blog entries and titles, for example, should contain at least one keyword, represented across ten per cent of the site’s content. However, your top-10 category position on Google is compromised if an excerpt or retweet of your entry is not readable, or appears robotic or arbitrary. If you can’t control it, it can have the opposite effect to that intended.

Write about what you enjoy

To echo the words of Mullenweg, whose creation WordPress doesn’t boast 20 million users for nothing, you should write about what you know, and preferably what you enjoy. I made the mistake when I started blogging of focusing too much on SEO — because I was going through a learning process — and found that publishing a blog post became almost as boring as talking to myself.

Perhaps you remember my opening remark about not selling you anything. Well, perhaps I’m offering a kind of service but inviting loyalty in return. I guess I have to build an audience or following before deciding in the future if I’ve anything worth buying.

The SEO geeks among you might like to count how many times in this post I’ve used the verb “to write” or other references to writing, without swamping you with offers from Amazon books! Incidentally, you might find an Amazon shop on another of my pages if you return one day. For now, please feel free to leave a comment!