Twitter has been much maligned and is said to be full of garbage. ‘I am eating a sandwich now’, ‘I love Mariah Carey’, ‘iPods are cool’ etc are just too common on the micro-blogging site. But one way you can utilise it to your advantage is to expand your network on a topic.

If you have a blog and want to get more traffic, go onto twitter, start following like-minded individuals and upload your blog feed to twitter. These people may in turn follow you and read your feed. If they are interested, they might move on to your blog. Simple as that.

While it is true that most people who follow other people rarely read the ‘ followee’s ’ tweets, if you are evolving within a tightly-focussed topic, other people will be sufficiently interested in what you are tweeting about. If your topic is self-catered villas in the Isle of Wight or bi-refrigerent optics, other twitterers might well be interested to know what you have to say on this subject. But please don’t post about the dinner you just fed to your dog. It pays to stay on-topic.

Every time you come across a blog you like in your area and that blogger has a twitter account, you can follow that person and expand your network.

This is part 3 of the topic on blog-type sites.

Read Part 1 about Sites powered by Wordpress and Part 2: how easy it is to create blog-type sites.

As an illustration of how you could use a blog as a site, consider a gym business.

Many gyms have websites but they can provide little service over the web, except to provide information about what is happening in the gym, where all the interesting activities occur. So the website would exist to provide information to members and potential members and a traditional site could do that very well with a page for contact details, and services separated into different categories, etc. The site could even allow existing members to renew their membership online.

Interactive site

How about using a blog-style site to run it instead? Create permanent pages for information such as contact details, prices and services. Write posts as updates when for example a new aerobic class is launched, new weight machines introduced, promotions launched. These will appear on the first page at the top and will invite people to visit the site more regularly as they see fresh news often. The blog-style site will also allow members to interact by posting comments. Potential customers could also post their questions in the form of comments. To take the idea of blog even further, guest posts could be written by different training experts which could be interesting to members and non-members alike.

New interactive informative sites are much more interesting. As it is so easy to get such a site up and running, hopefully we should see more and more such sites.

Shame Blogspot is nowhere that flexible. There are templates there that would alter the look of the blog but there are no plugins and you cannot download and install the software on your own server, you have less control over it.

I recently stumbled across an old blog post detailing how SEO experts were handing out wrong advice regarding Wordpress permalinks.

Usual SEO-friendly URL

The conventional practice is to write an SEO-friendly URL that features your keywords and the structure of the URL would be your category structure. More often than not, the keyword part is simply the post title. We all know about this and most bloggers do it. In blogs, the URL for each blog post is called a permalink, because, well, it is a permanent link!

Arguments against keyword permalinks

In criticising this permalink structure made up of keywords, the main arguments against that was speed and reliability. A convoluted explanation was given, revolving around Wordpress, its database structure and plenty of other technicalities that would result in the server spending a long time to look for a particular post because that post can exist in a number of locations and on very big blog sites, the Wordpress server might even crash. The end result being underimpressed readers who would leave the site because it takes too long to load or crashes down.

Naming and shaming SEO experts

Next in that post was a dedicated part on naming and shaming ‘SEO experts’, including Matt Cutts from Google, who recommended the conventional approach and on how they were all wrong. Followed concrete examples and citations on when they made their so-called wrong recommendations.

But where is SEO in the explanation?

While I am not going to argue whether the argument is correct or not as I am no expert in these technical matters, I will certainly argue against the author’s spin on it. His arguments on speed and reliability have nothing to do with SEO! That’s all there is to it.

He criticises SEO experts about an explanation having nothing to do with search engines. HE was just looking for an excuse to attract attention by naming and criticising big names. SEO is all about bringing traffic in via the search engines. It is not about improving the customer experience, however important and crucial that is. If you want to colour your font yellow on a white background, is this an SEO sin?

As a final note, Wordpress has announced that it has solved the technical issue that caused SEO-friendly permalinks to slow down a site.