# Developing your own blog (by hand codiing)



## MattCoops (Apr 7, 2006)

Here's my new tile blog I hand coded strictly in html and css. 
No wordpress or anything like that.
People are always saying around here that if you have a website you should be using blog software, cus Google likes the fresh content.
Well, it is in my opinion the search engines do like new content updates, but I believe it to be far better using this approach than other people's software. Plus, your pages don't look too... well, "bloggy".

You can look in source code to see how I done it. It's all there for ya'll to steal with your eyes.


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## thefencepost (Aug 18, 2008)

looks ok, I just prefer to have the "bloggy" look you referred to even though I had my main site professionally built. 

in looking at your code, you have left out many SEO benefits that a WP site automatically inserts for you. (alt text, title tags, categories, tags etc...) 

Also, how would one find this blog you created, I didn't see a way back to your home page (maybe you are still working on it).

Anyway, kudos to you for creation, but I prefer to have something more turnkey as I don't have time to do all the coding needed to create the pages. :thumbsup:


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## MattCoops (Apr 7, 2006)

It took me 10 minutes to code the entire page.
And as far as your SEO concerns: I have a title tag in the document and alt in the image description. There's also headings tags. What other tags do you want from me?


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## silvertree (Jul 22, 2007)

Hand coding would take me a lot of time to learn. I can write articles in a half hour so that's better for me. I think the Wordpress blogs look really good, and you can customize them. I think all things are equal unless you are a website builder.
So the big question is. Do the people landing on your site care how the blog was made, or is it the content they want?


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## Mike Finley (Apr 28, 2004)

What's the point of trying to pretend to look like a blog?

I think there is a real confusion going on with all this stuff. 

A blog is nothing more than a website. It's a type of website that is designed to be user friendly to self publish to.

The look of it is a result of trying to do this.

The point of it is to convey information.

Whether you self publish that information on your website or on a 3rd party hosted blog, the end result is the same, the information is posted on the internet.

Making your website mimic the look of a blog makes no sense to me. It's like trying to make a newspaper look like a book????????? 

The information posted on the internet is the only important part of this. Whether you do it on a 3rd party blogging site and you info ends up formated like a typical blog or you post it on your website looking like a magazine article it's the same result. The information is on the internet, it's searchable and linkable and you are providing content.

Again - there is no reason for it to look like it was posted on a blogging website. There are a billion pages of info on the web that never resembled a blog post and have conveyed information, been linkable been search engine friendly, have made people money or made the phone ring. Some have looked like a magazine layout, some look like plain type, some (remember back) even had spinning animated gifs, but they all do the same thing.

It's the content that counts not the formatting of it.

People read text, search engines read text, nobody cares what color the text is, what font it is in, if it's arranged on a page one way or another, if it's inside colored boxes or resembles the typical blog site. 

Only the text matters.

You can self publish to your website a simple article very easily. It's just a templated page and a simple cut & paste and then hit the publish button, all done.


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## Chris G (May 17, 2006)

Part of the charm of a blog is the ability to leave comments. Whether not that feature is used, it's expected. If people aren't allowed to comment they may think you are defensive, anti-social, or hiding something.


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## silvertree (Jul 22, 2007)

> Making your website mimic the look of a blog makes no sense to me. It's like trying to make a newspaper look like a book?????????


That's a good point. For me a blog i just an easy way to change content. My new website will have a blog built in.


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## Mike Finley (Apr 28, 2004)

Chris G said:


> Part of the charm of a blog is the ability to leave comments. Whether not that feature is used, it's expected. If people aren't allowed to comment they may think you are defensive, anti-social, or hiding something.


I wouldn't personally be worried about what someone thought of our website if they got their nose out of joint over not being able to leave a comment.

To me the purpose is to drive traffic through search. 

However can somebody with a blog elaborate if there are any perks of the blogging software that help others link to your blog or anyways that the blogging software help increase your traffic.

(I'm not against the bloggins software, my earlier comments were just in regard to not seeing the point of trying to pretend your website is being run by blogging software) - either load it on your site and use it by hosting the blog on yourown site or just make static information pages like we always have.


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## orson (Nov 23, 2007)

Mike,

There are many plug-ins available to upgrade and add functionality to your blog on a platform such as Word Press as well as others.

Some of these plug-ins do have to do with optimizing your article's tags and titles for Google and other search engine's.

Having said that, Matt is a very sharp SEO guy so if he says his blog will do just as well with search engines I'll take him at his word.

For those of us who are less competent at site design and coding I think we'll probably benefit just as well with a WordPress blog embedded in our sites.


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## MattCoops (Apr 7, 2006)

I'm not making the page look like a blog, it is a blog.
Wikipedia has this to say about what is a blog: "A blog (a contraction of the term weblog) is a website, usually maintained by an individual with regular entries of commentary, descriptions of events, or other material such as graphics or video. Entries are commonly displayed in reverse-chronological order. "Blog" can also be used as a verb, meaning to maintain or add content to a blog."
So I in fact will be updating content on a regular basis with "descriptions of events" (jobs and design work).

You could quite say that other blogs mimic the look of my site.
It's a simple 2 column css styling that has been around long before blogs were even coined a name.

I'm working on the "tags" function now. And users will be able to leave comments, it's a simple form with javasript function and php.


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## Mike Finley (Apr 28, 2004)

MattCoops said:


> I'm not making the page look like a blog, it is a blog.


This morning the page you linked to in this post was mimicking a blog, you had graphics that you either made or lifted off a blog site, with the name "blog" in them looking like it was the logo of a blogging software, you also had what was supposed to look like comments people had left, all identical to what you see on a blog, same format with usernames and everything else. Obvously if you were putting up static pages nobody was submitting comments to your page.

Now your page is totally different missing these items.



orson said:


> Mike,
> 
> There are many plug-ins available to upgrade and add functionality to your blog on a platform such as Word Press as well as others.
> 
> ...


I thought while I was looking through one of those softwares that you can load on your site it said something about something where people could link to your blog and ad relevance to you blog posts or something along those lines, it seemed like it was a feature of the blogging software.


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## MattCoops (Apr 7, 2006)

I've only used 3 image all day on that particular page. And they were all tile pictures. What you are referring to might have been the mybloglog.com "widget" -which logs activity. I took it off, cus it made page relatively long.


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## msteinhoff (Feb 26, 2009)

*Blog SEO and WordPress*



MattCoops said:


> And as far as your SEO concerns: I have a title tag in the document and alt in the image description. There's also headings tags. What other tags do you want from me?


You don't have 'meta keywords' or a 'meta description'. You are lacking a sitemap.xml file. You don't have a robots.txt that would provide the location of sitemap.xml. So, that is less than optimal.

You may also keep an eye on how you use your H tags. You are missing an H1. Usually search engines rate content (in part) in order of tagged importance. For example, TITLE ranks highest, then H1, then H2 and so on. Your H2 is 'February 2009'. Your H3 tags seem to be more in line with keywords with which you might like folks to find you.

Also, a TITLE on your A HREF would be nice.

On the plus side, you made good use of filenames and alt tags.

I'm a huge fan of WordPress for blogging along with these three plugins...

* All in One SEO Pack -- SEO Effortlessly
* Google XML Sitemaps -- sitemap.xml automagically created and pings sent to the major search engines everytime you update your site
* Google Analytics for Wordpress -- inserts your Google Analytics ID on every page so you can see if the above two plugins are working

Wordpress is free and the plugins are free.

If you enjoy working directly with your web site's code, God bless you and keep it up. If you'd rather focus on content, extensibility and design, take a good look at Wordpress. You can still make it as custom as you like but all the infrastructure is already built-in.

Cheers,
Matt


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## SquirrelNmoose (Jan 12, 2008)

There is a little confusion (very common) on what a 'Blog' is. A blog is simply a term coined meaning Web-log, or also known as a journal. You can keep an online journal by hand coding your journal website or using some software to manage it. The most common talked about here are Wordpress and Blogger. While these started out targeting journal writers, Wordpress has evolved into a CMS (content management system) while Blogger is primarily still geared towards an online journal format.

All current CMS and blogging engines are database driven. This is where categories and tags come in. As you continually add content it becomes increasingly harder to manage, find and orginize all that content. When you use a database you can associate things, like a particle article with a catagory or multiple categories. When something is associated you can ask the database for all things connected to a particular association (category, tag,id etc.). An advantage of a dynamic database driven site is that the content and design are seperate. So you can change the layout at anytime without affecting the content.

One of my favorite examples is http://www.thedogfiles.com/ . Would you consider this a blog or a website. 
And there is this one (a CT member) http://pooleconstruction.net/ that looks like a very functional website, but does look more like a blog. Both of these are run on a Wordpress platform.

As far as http://www.cupantileandpaint.com/blog/feb09.html it looking good so far and well under way. I like the minimalist design.

On a technical note it needs some tweaking. It doesn't work in a standards compliant browsers (Firefox, Opera, IE8 etc.)
Which means 25%+ of your visitors are not seeing the site correctly. (one of my sites has up to 60% of traffic using other than IE borwsers) If you don't have them installed you can compare them here. 
http://browsershots.org/
You have multiple div id's. An id can only be used once per page (div id="wrapper" and css #wrapper). Change them to classes instead, classes can be used multiple times, and your good (div class="wrapper" and css .wrapper).


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## thefencepost (Aug 18, 2008)

My question to all this would be, why NOT use something like wordpress, it is free and there are millions of free themes, plugins are free etc... Just don't understand why you wouldn't take advantage of "free" with all the extra benefits of using it rather than coding it yourself. A simple install, upload a theme, a few plugins and you are off and running. 

And the new platinum SEO plug in is even better than the All in oNE SEO which I used for a long time.

It seems you are quite educated at the code, so I am sure you would not have any problem customizing a theme. I had my first one done professionally and have built several myself since then (even got paid for a couple).


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## MattCoops (Apr 7, 2006)

The keywords <meta> tag is pointless and useless. All it does is let other amateur SEO "analysts" know which keywords you are trying to rank for. It has no bearing on the "weight" of the page in Google algorithms. 
Also, stuffing keywords on your page doesn't help either. 
Keyword density tools actually hinder your site, as they make people think the more times your keyword is on the page the better you're setup for search engine placement. This is a false pretense.
In actuality, between your title, description, headings, and page content, you should only use your keyword 1-3 times, and no more than once every 300 or so words. The _key_ is to use latent semantic indexing, which refers to words that are connected _thematically_. I.E. if you're page is talking about *tile*, you should use other words like: ceramic, stone, floor, bathroom, grout, patterns, etc. on the same page.

A sitemap is good to have if not all your pages are indexed in Google's sandbox. It helps Google bots find those pages that it skipped over last time. But your sitemap does not have to be a .xml file. It can very well be an .html page.
I think the only use of a robots.txt file is to prevent indexing of pages that contain duplicate content or disallow crawling of your /images directory (to try and prevent thieves from stealing your portfolio pictures for their own glory).
The search engine spidering is smarter than your robots.txt file and does not need you to tell it where things are. If you organized your site correctly it will find all your stuff.

The hole reason my "blog" is setup this way because blogging is usually rants and raves, tons of links, and use of third party software. It is in my opinion that search engines see your content more clearly when there's not a whole lot of scripting and other code and more use of type and standard html elements. Also, I think your links hold more weight in standard html documents rather than using software like wordpress and the like.


In response to why do it the "hard" way, is for the pure joy of coding. HTML programming language is probably one of easiest to learn. There are more tutorials (like w3shcools.org) that teach you how to code internet pages than there are free page generators and plugins and widgets and the like. All that stuff you can make on your own, and then you can say - "look what I did". It's more original, more customized, and a learned skill.

Just like at work. You could subcontract your whole job, and sit back and watch the work. Or, you could do the actual work. There are tons of guys that use other people cus they don't want to learn the skillset.

It's purely a matter of wanting to learn something, or taking an easier way out.


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## silvertree (Jul 22, 2007)

Good thread:thumbsup:


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## MattCoops (Apr 7, 2006)

I'm actually in the process of writing an eBook to teach web design and SEO specifically to construction contractors. Just to make it even easier for ya'll. If you got about an hour each day you can do it all within a few weeks.


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## silvertree (Jul 22, 2007)

Just curious Matt. How did you go from tile to SEO? Whats your background?


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## MattCoops (Apr 7, 2006)

I actually went to shcool for visual communications. But never really got into design industry. It's tough to get into anyhow. You're competing with tons other. Supply is way over abundance than demand. Plus, pay isn't so great.
But ever since high school I dabbled in web design.

Optimizing my website was a learning experience. And it's something I work on a little bit everyday. All the marketing for my business is designed by me (business cards, postcards, print ads, yard signs). I'm thinking of getting a killer printer so I don't have to sub that out of house.


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## msteinhoff (Feb 26, 2009)

*The More I Learn, The Less I Know*



MattCoops said:


> The keywords <meta> tag is pointless and useless.


Not really though folks I highly respect have been saying so since at least October 2002.

Meta keywords are not useless. Google doesn't pay much attention to that directive, other search engines still do. While Google has the lion's share of search, it is not the only engine out there. 

The greatest value I see in meta keywords is that it helps to focus the mind. When creating content, I often come up with a list of key words or phrases and then write in that direction. Think of keywords as the outline to your essay. There is little downside to including keywords.

The other tangential benefit to keywords is that many advertising providers use meta keywords to help choose what ads show up on your pages. So, while they may not be able to help your search engine rank, they can be used to help shape what ads are presented. Better ads could mean more advertising income.

The key to looking at keywords is to look more organically. They aren't the entire puzzle but they are a piece.



MattCoops said:


> actuality, between your title, description, headings, and page content,


Google itself does a pretty good job of telling you how to best let them know what your site is about and how to rank accurately...

google.com/webmasters/docs/search-engine-optimization-starter-guide.pdf



MattCoops said:


> your sitemap does not have to be a .xml file. It can very well be an .html page.


Yes and no. Sure, you can have a site map that is HTML. However, Google, and most other search engines, are looking for a sitemap that conforms to Sitemap 0.9. That means an entity-escaped UTF-8 XML document...

google.com/webmasters/tools/docs/en/protocol.html



MattCoops said:


> the only use of a robots.txt file is to prevent indexing of pages that contain duplicate content


There, both I and Google would disagree. Google and other search engines look to robots.txt for, among other things, the location of your XML sitemap...

google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=64748

Most visitors don't want to see your XML sitemap file and many sites choose not to publish the file, instead just dumping it on the server unlinked thus making it uncrawable. For search engines to find the file, including its location in robots.txt is the best way to let them know it is there.



MattCoops said:


> or disallow crawling of your /images directory (to try and prevent thieves from stealing your portfolio pictures for their own glory).


I have a few sites where traffic from Google Image Search is material (more than 20% of referrals). I want Google and everyone else to crawl and index my images. That's why I make sure to give all photos meaningful filenames and helpful ALT tages. Not indexing images doesn't prevent them from being stolen; it just prevents them from generating traffic.

Lots of people are visual. If you look at search engine logs, you’ll see the phrase 'picture of' preceding many queries. For example 'picture of bull nose tile'. I want those searches to find my image and drive traffic to my sites.



MattCoops said:


> The search engine spidering is smarter than your robots.txt file and does not need you to tell it where things are.


Once again, Google disagrees. They highly recommend a sitemap in conjunction with a robots.txt to tell them where it lives.

In addition to announcing all your pages, a sitemap gives search engines hints as to how often content is updated and when it was last updated. By providing these hints, a search engine can more efficiently crawl your site. For large or underpowered sites, accurate 'changefreq' XML tags can save you a lot of money in bandwidth and processing power.

Maybe the most important part of the sitemap is the ability to suggest the relative importance of individual pages. Your front page may rank a '1.0' while and old bathroom install showing an out of date style might rank a '0.2'.

You may want to read over Google's thoughts on sitemaps before you finish writing your SEO document...

google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=40318



MattCoops said:


> search engines see your content more clearly when there's not a whole lot of scripting and other code and more use of type and standard html elements.


Search engines are experts in parsing code. Look at your web site with a text-based browser such as lynx and you’ll better understand what a search engine really sees.

While you can increase your crawl rate and lower latency by pushing a lot of code into external javascript and CSS, I have never seen any evidence that extraneous (protocol compliant) code will reduced your site's effectiveness.



MattCoops said:


> your links hold more weight in standard html documents rather than using software like WordPress and the like.


Are you familar with the SEMMY awards? They are the Oscars of Search Engine Marketing and SEO. Joose de Valk of Yoast was the 2009 WordPress SEO winner. You should check out his discussion of WordPress SEO...

yoast.com/articles/wordpress-seo/

If I were to play internet pundit, I'd say that templated blogs such as those created on the WordPress platform are easier for search engines to crawl and index than custom sites such as yours. The reason is simple: they have a well-defined semantic structure.

There are over 200 million blogs on the internet today and the vast majority are powered by one of just seven blog platforms with WordPress near the top of the list. Given the saturation of the WordPress platform, Google knows how to crawl and index WordPress blogs. For all I know, they may have made optimizations for each and every major blog platform.

On the other hand, Google is not optimizing for your site structure. That isn't to say that blogs rank higher in a vacuum but that there is reason to expect that standardized blog platforms are better supported. Even though you can theme a WordPress blog any number of ways, the structure remains the same.

WordPress, too, has some pretty effective plugins that help your site get indexed quickly, completely and efficiently. For example, the Google XML sitemap plugin rebuilds my sitemap after every update and then notifies Google, MSN, Ask.com and Yahoo that the site has been updated. By watching the Apache logs, I can see the search engines hit my blog moments after getting that notification. You can even tie WordPress into Ping-O-Matic (pingomatic.com/) to notify the less common search engines.



MattCoops said:


> why do it the "hard" way, is for the pure joy of coding.


On that point, we agree completely. I'm growing my own tomatoes and streaming them live to the internet (watchmyfoodgrow.com) not because it is easy or because my supermarket is out but because it makes me happy. If coding makes you happy, more power to you!



MattCoops said:


> There are tons of guys that use other people cus they don't want to learn the skillset.


I hire plumbers and accountants because no amount of learning and practicing will make me good enough to complete the task without leaks or audits. From time to time, I remind myself that I can't be good at everything. Hiring out some tasks is nothing of which to be ashamed.

Good luck with the eBook, Matt. A construction contractor-specific SEO document would be very helpful to a lot of people.

Cheers,
Matt


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## ChrWright (Jul 17, 2007)

Excellent info.


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