Writeyness :: Info to snack on

Search Engine Land is the new venture of Search Engine guru Danny Sullivan.

There are a couple of excellent posts on the blog just now looking at two issues relevant to any website looking to improve their search engine rankings:

Google’s Tips On Duplicate Content Worries looks at how Google views duplicate content.

Stop The Freak Out Over Linking looks at the dos and don’ts of using links to give your ranking a boost.

Anyone involved in working on their business’s website should keep up to date with search engine developments, and Search Engine Land is another great resource to add to your list.

A couple of nice blogging related articles….

Seth Godin wrote a succinct summary of what makes a good blog post:

How to write a blog post, he says, involves:

- An appropriate illustration
- A useful topic, easily broadened to be useful to a large number of readers
- Simple language with no useless jargon
- Not too long
- Focusing on something that people have previously taken for granted
- That initially creates emotional resistance
- Then causes a light bulb to go off
- Causes the reader to look at the world differently all day long.

All good stuff, although the last point is maybe a little ambitious for all posts!

And Darren Rowse at ProBlogger provides a good blogging SEO summary with How to Optimize Your Blog for Search Engines.

A month on, I’m still experiencing World Cup withdrawal symptons… sometimes involuntarily waking up at 7am on weekends (when the games were televised here in Vancouver) and going downstairs anyhow to click through the TV channels in the desperate hope of a glimpse of a bouncing football… other times listening out for the blast of an airhorn or muffled cheers from the pubs and cafes around town that would signal a goal.

All in vain.

I also miss all the World Cup blogs, so, to help me through this difficult time, I return to their cached pages now and then. My favourite piece of World Cup writeyness is this excerpt from the New York Times World Cup blog after a Germany win:

“Last night, in Cologne’s Heumarkt, i sat tensely watching the home side go goalless until the 91st minute when, miracle of miracles, late sub oliver neuman netted one, putting the Germans through to round two, the first team to advance. Depending on the feed, certain bars had a few seconds of delay, which seemed to work roughly south to north heading up the plaza.

“When Neuman scored, the roar traveled up the plaza like an aural wave, germans unleashing 90 minutes of drunken, sausagey tension upon the city, Koln transformed into a spontaneous orgy of singing, dancing, flag waving, beer spilling and pole climbing. You have not lived until you’ve seen the host country win on an injury time goal the night before a bank holiday. I think they’re still celebrating.”

“… sausagey tension…” — great.