Month: October 2012

SEO Basics (Search Engine Optimization) and Why Webcomickers Should Care

Posted on by Timothy Dempsey

SEO Basics: Not My Problem

If you are a fellow webcomics creator and believe that SEO is not your problem, think again. Here are a few myths, guidelines and  SEO Basics. You’ll see how easy it is to get started optimizing your content for search engines in the WordPress world.

Why Should I Care?

A recent switch to the great WordPress SEO Plug-In by Yoast, has roughly doubled the traffic to this site on weekends. If that doesn’t grab you, nothing will.

Not only is there a great tutorial, but the plug-in is fundamentally simple – and even fun – to use.

It’s Too Late

Conventional wisdom dictates that in an ideal world, SEO is part of our planning process prior to launch. Last time I looked, we don’t live in an ideal world. If you do, please send me an invite!

If you feel that your site is not getting you the traffic from Google it should get organically, the difference is compelling enough. It is far better to retroactively tweak some of your text content than to ignore SEO optimization.

What Should I Do Differently?

Write more. Write more text. The images we use in our comics are not indexable to search engines. While we can try the Excerpts features, that doesn’t work well at describing the content since the dialogue we write is not the likely keywords searchers are choosing, We have to write more descriptively in our blog posts. Some of my favorite comics (and I’m guilty of this) put nothing in the accomanying posts since we likely feel the comic says it all – that’s the fundamental problem.

Spend the time to blog along with your comics, and be disciplined about it. I am a little too immersed in this and re-writing history by going through my Archive. I’m not suggesting that, but we can correct our SEO habits going forward.

The Round-up: In Review II Spotlight on Lynda.com

Posted on by Timothy Dempsey

Is it wrong to fall in love with a dot com? I suppose that depends on the dot com.

I mentioned casually in the last Round-up how I was looking at a course on Lynda.com. This week I decided to prove my devotion by splurging on a paid membership.

There is an old quote that I’m paraphrasing here that goes something to the effect of:

“The more you learn, the more you find there is – to learn” – Unknown

I’ll go off and do a proper search for the attribution later.

I have always had an insatiable appetite to learn as much as I can, particularly about my job. When you come to be known at a smaller firm as something of a technical expert at something, an unfortunate by-product is that you are expected to be an expert – at everything.

Coupled with a noisy environment that makes it impossible to think – let alone learn new skills – I have to ratchet up my knowledge on my own time. This is a fundamental concept I read about recently in a book (that I’ll link to, also later) on the programmer’s life. The theory is that one should not be learning anything at a job site; one should be producing and carving out a schedule for learning on your own time.

Yesterday I made a major breakthrough in a dynamically generated list for a form driven by a database – (a back-end task, not my strength) while getting clarity about CSS page layout (the front-end, where I “live”). Both thanks to my membership. My Life will be simpler.

I can’t recommend Lynda.com more highly. I wish I had pulled the trigger sooner.

Best,
Tim
P.S. I know this sounds sponsored. Trust me, it is not. Is there a course on that?