NewsWire

Just came across a very interesting blog, Started by Cameron Olthuis on his blog, Pronet advertising:

1. Company name
2. Company URL
3. Public facing figures
4. Product names
5. Product URLs
6. The industry “hang outs”
7. Employee activity/blogs
8. Conversations
9. Brand image
10. Competitors
11. Images/video like YouTube, Flickr, TVEyes, Google Video and Yahoo Video
12. Tags and Social search tools like del.icio.us
13. Social Voting tools like digg.com
14. Memetrackers like Techmeme.com
15. “Advanced Listening”
16. Feedback URL and link threads
17. “Voice of the Customer” log to track sentiment, instance, and/or voice.
18. Develop new roles to such “Brand Monitor” or “Blogosphere Watcher”
19. Self-clipping services like Google or Yahoo alerts for keyword mentions, but also audio and video hits as well…services like PODZINGER for example to ascertain conversational audio levels
20. Media mentions by news features in search engines such as Google or Yahoo
21. Relevant media news wires, such as Reuters (Intl.), AP News (U.S.), U.S. Newswire, CCN Matthews (U.K., Canada, Intl.), CNW Group (Canada), Mercopress (South Africa), allAfrica (Africa, general) and HR Net (Eastern Europe).
22. Utilize RSS and aggregators like Bloglines in order to aggregate, integrate and assimilate all relevant incoming and outgoing moments of truth.
23. Use wikis like PmWiki to discuss and debate pretty much everything from 1-19 and most importantly attempt to turn all the talk/conversation into walk/action.
24. Repeat steps 1-20 to look outside of your own circle. Evolve the perspective from yourself, through your direct competitive set to your indirect competitive set and ultimately to your aspirational/non-endemic/non-competitive set. This is where you want to follow the leaders so to speak - Apples, Nikes, Googles or whichever company you admire.
25. Create a PROACTIVE capability/budget in order to QUICKLY execute against everything you’re monitoring.
    Conversely, have a REACTIVE process in place to comprehensively and compellingly respond, especially when you’re on the bumpy receiving end of the stick.
26. Search Term Volume
27. Search Term Rank
28. Relevant Wikipedia Entries
29. Third Party Influencers
30. Key Stakeholders
31. Press release pickups
32. Blog pickups using services like Technorati
    

What are your thoughts on this list? Would you add/take away anything?

NB - This is the first time I’m writing a post with the new WordPress WYSIWIG editor, I must say - I’m indifferent towards it.

I have recently been reading up on how to make the ENO site more Search Engine Optimised (SEO) - so that I can try and push the site higher up in a Google search.

The ‘Top Joomla SEO tips’ I found, were:

1. Using keywords in the Title tag:
   
   The number one factor in ranking a page on any search engine is the title tag.
   These are the words in the source of a page in <title> and appear in the blue bar of the browser.

   “Choose the title of an article very carefully. Joomla will use the title of the article in the title tag (what appears in the blue bar). It will also be the text used in any insite links (see also 5 and 6).”
   

2. The Anchor Text of the Inbound Link
   
   Anchor text is the text that appears underlined and in blue (unless it’s been styled) for a link from one webpage to another.
3. Global Link Popularity of the Site (PageRank)
   
   How many pages are linking to ENO is called link popularity, or in Google, PageRank.

   “The more sites link to you, the better. Joomla is a CMS that helps you add content quickly. Create one quality content page per day. Quality content is the most important factor to getting bound links. For a site that will perform well, you eventually need 200 odd pages of content. This is the important point. QUICK SEO IS DEAD. The only way to perform well in SEO now is to have a rich content site.”

4. The Age of the Site This one is self explanatory - ENO hasn’t been live for very long, so it would be foolish to expect it to be on the first page of a Google search. Sites that have been live for longer will naturally have more content, which means more links, which means they will be higher up in Google searches.
5. Link Popularity WITHIN the Site This refers to how many pages link to the main website from inside the domain. The more links there are to a particular article will improve its relevance in Google search results. If an author of one article links to another related article on the same website (pretty much as you would with a blog) - then ENO will appear higher in a Google search.
6. The ‘Topical Relevance’ of Inbound Links, and the Popularity of the Linking site

   To improve the ranking of ENO, it is imperative that the incoming links to the site (i.e. sites that link to ENO) have a high PageRank in Google. This means the links have to be from a site that is topically related to ENO, and one that has a high rank too.

7. Using Keywords in the Body Text

   This refers to the keyword density of the phrase that you are optimizing for, in the content of the page.
   A German study into this, identified some interesting results:

   Targeted keywords in the first and last paragraphs. There is a simple trick here, write your quality content, and then use the tool of your choice to find the keyword density. THEN, take the top three words and add them to the meta keywords in the parameters part of the page (in Joomla admin). This is somewhat backwards for some maybe, it optimizes a page for what you actually wrote, rather than trying to write a page optimized for certain words (which I always find difficult).

   Keywords in H2-H6 headline tags seem to have an influence on the rankings while keywords in H1 headline tags seem to be getting less valuable. Modify the output of the core content component through a template override file.

   Using keywords in bold or strong tags - slight effect, same with img alt tags and filenames.

Hopefully, using these methods that I’ve found, and asking the Journalists to do the same, I can drive more traffic to the website. I think that I should be more closely monitoring the traffic to the website so that I can possibly tailor particular pages to suit specific users.

My project has come on leaps and bounds since my last blog post.

Review

To recap, my final year university project is to create and maintain a fully working Content Management System, or CMS, so that the second year Online Journalism students are able to upload stories to the site, and have experience of writing for the web.

I took Paul Bradshaw’s advice - and went live with the site, in a bid to solve the numerous problems I was having with hosting the site locally.

The ‘L’ Plates are off

Today, the site has gone live for the first time - you can see it for yourselves here. It’s called ‘Environmental News Online’, or ENO for short.

It didn’t go without it’s teething problems however..There were a few issues that needed resolving:

• The contents and categories for inputting news onto the site were a little confusing to understand, and have subsequently been changed by myself and Paul Bradshaw.
• Users who try to register to the website with an AOL or Tiscali account will have issues when receiving the email with an activation link.
• The links to the reporters blogs are currently static, and hopefully in the future will become dynamic and self updating.
• Some of the students will need to know basic HTML in order to attach and post images to their stories - a point touched on by Martin Stabe, who believes that it is wise to teach Journalism students basic HTML:
  

  “It would be more useful to teach some basic principles including HTML, let the serious geeks (or failing that, the tutor) set up a CMS-driven site in WordPress, MT, Joomla! or another basic CMS, and then make sure everyone else can keep it running — by concentrating on the non-technical journalism skills, like how to present stories online.”

Defeating the doubters

However, I am enjoying learning about and using Joomla! at the moment. When I started this project I didn’t even know what a CMS was.

I chose Joomla! because while I was researching about Content Management Systems, Joomla! popped up in several places.

This nicely leads to the point of the subheading above. Last week, I had the chance to have a quick chat with Pete Ashton - author of “Created in Birmingham” amongst other things.

Pete popped in to the Online Journalism class to talk about finding sources for news amongst other things, and noticed that I was using Joomla! - cue a sigh.

Last year, Pete attemped to use Joomla! for a project - and didn’t enjoy it at all:

“Now, having had to use it on a daily-ish basis for a while I can honest say, hand on heart, that it’s a piece of shit and a hinderance to my work. At least the interface is. It’s the most unintuitive, frustrating thing I’ve had to click my mouse on since I can’t remember when.”

Suffice to say, he wasn’t alone in his way of thinking. At the time of writing my blog, only three of the thirty people who commented on his post, creatively titled ‘Joomla sucks donkey cock’, actually thought Joomla! was worthwhile.

Pete found that searching for Joomla! sucks on Google brings up 219,000 results - that was in May last year. The same search today brings up 138,000 - maybe people are beginning to change their minds about it?

Time to ‘Pimp My Ride’

Steve Hill has found some excellent additions to Joomla! such as easier WYSIWIG editors (which would help some of the less technically sound students), and even add-ons that allow readers to comment on stories. Anyone for a bit of Web 2.0?

I’m currently looking into extensions for Joomla! that make things easier for the students to use and maintain the site, and also for myself too - (may I politely remind everyone that I’m new to this?)

I’m constantly learning more and more about it, and dare I say it - I am enjoying it, just a little.

Hopefully by May, I’ll be able to say that ‘I came, saw, and conquered’, by creating and maintaining a fully working CMS.

For now however, the project is underway, the site is live, and things are most definitely in motion - make sure you keep checking ENO for the latest Environmental News! The site is always changing.