superboreen / Flickr

I am by no means an SEO expert, but if you plug my name into most search engines, you’ll find a lot of what I want you to find in the first few pages of results. This has come as the result of years spent blogging, posting on social networks — in a word, publishing.

Occasionally, like yesterday morning, I speak to journalism students about how I do what I do. One of the things I’m asked most often is “How can I get myself to rank high in search results?”

This post is meant as a DIY guide to getting started, but I strongly, strongly caution you that this is by no means a definitive work of how-to. If you wish to scroll down past all my preamble, I’ve posted several links to sites that can teach you a lot more about SEO than I can. These are the people I learn from, and they’re mostly the sources for everything I have to say anyway.

Step 1/Rule 1: Good SEO comes from quality content

I cannot emphasize this point enough. Your goal in building up your own personal SEO is to draw people to your content, so you obviously want to put forth your very best.

I’m not going to pretend like every blog post I’ve ever published has been great. Some of it has been downright shitty. The stuff that’s worked, and that’s drawn people to this blog, has been the stuff I’ve invested my time and effort in.

Fuss over your writing the way you would a term paper. And seriously, if you work on something for a long time and it’s just not happening, don’t be afraid to trash it.

Decide on an identity and stick to it

I’m “paulbalcerak” on every network I join. It may or may not be as easy for you to claim your real name like that — sorry, John Smiths of the world — but from an SEO standpoint, consistency is more important. Just make sure you also use your real name. For instance, Ian Lurie’s Twitter handle is @portentint, but his name is Ian Lurie. (Follow the link.)

Do I have to say this? Don’t pick some ass-hatted screen name like “LadiesMan_2012.” Use something you can put on a résumé.

Decide what you want to blog about

If we’re talking about SEO, we’re ostensibly talking about blogging — like I said earlier, publishing. You need to consistently publish in order to build strong SEO, and preferably, you need to stick to a niche.

My niche on this blog has become, more or less, branding. I like that because it’s specific, but it’s also broad enough that it allows me to write about colors, and then pivot and do a piece about how to build up search engine rankings.

If you’re using your blog to further your career, you should use that space as the starting point for where you want to go. When I started out, I blogged a lot about where I thought the journalism industry should go and what it should look like. Now, I get paid to shape that future. Don’t be afraid to tell people what you’re about and what you want.

Read. A lot.

Once you’ve figured out what you want to write about, go find people that are a million times better at it than you are, and devour their writing. Link to it. Blog about it. Comment on their sites. You’ll be stronger in your field and better educated within a few weeks.

Now here’s the part where I send you to other people’s sites. These are the writers/SEO experts I learn the most from:

• Ian Lurie / Conversation Marketing
• Rand Fishkin (et al) / SEOmoz
• Copyblogger
• Darren Rowse / ProBlogger

I don’t think I’ve ever visited HLN’s site, but I clicked over to it today for whatever reason, and I found it really interesting.

The home page is basically a top-10 list of what I guess are what they’ve determined to be the top stories. What I don’t know is what they’re the top 10 of (day, week…?). It also doesn’t help that the story at the top of the page, which is “breaking now,” broke almost 24 hours ago as of this writing (Saturday evening).

Nevertheless, the layout is interesting, and it’s kind of a bold move, too. It’s not hard to guess which stories each news site considers important, but this is the only one I’ve seen that’s willing to assign a number to them.

Gerard Stolk / Flickr

CBC radio host Terry O’Reilly has an absolutely fascinating post/podcast up on how brands use colors to make us buy certain things:

Take the colour Red. It is one of the most passionate colours. It connotes action, adventure, fire, lust, anger, courage and rebellion, for example. Therefore, it is a colour best used for action-oriented products and brands. Red, for example, is the predominant colour in the Virgin logo – which is perfect for that brand, as founder Richard Branson is definitely adventurous and rebellious.

Blue stands for security, trust, productivity and calmness of mind. As a result, blue is the colour of choice for UN flag. It’s also the most popular logo colour in the corporate world. Think of the Allstate logo, who want you to feel you are in good hands. …

Orange is a colour that suggests value and discounts. Online bank ING has branded itself as orange, no doubt, in part, to remind you of their promise of reduced banking fees. The Home Depot has an orange logo and theme, as does Payless Shoes – both built on a premise of value.

Green represents freshness. Think the Jolly Green Giant and Subway. …

For centuries, purple symbolized nobility and wealth. … Cadbury chocolate has been associated with purple for over 100 years. It was Queen Victoria’s favourite colour. …

The colour Brown is earthy, and contains feelings of honesty and dependability. UPS began using brown in 1916 -because in the world of package delivery, the name of the game is dependability.

Yellow stands for sunny warmth, cheeriness, fun and optimism. Black is really the absence of all colour, but is a colour of authority, power and luxury.

White has a feeling of lightness, and is the reason why most planes are painted this colour. It soothes the concern we all secretly harbour that a machine that size can’t possibly become airborne.

I have to confess, I’d never given a lot of thought to what a brand’s colors say about it. Obviously some colors are bolder (red, orange, yellow) than others (blue), but it’s striking how much these associations make sense.

I’m also struck by how seemingly mismatched some brands are with their colors. Take Comedy Central, for instance, which redesigned its logo about a year and a half ago. Black and white? For a comedy network? Yellow or red would have seemed more natural choices, but as Bobby Solomon noted at the time, “when you have to represent a multitude of programs having an agnostic design like this makes a lot of sense.” (He also notes that the logo is a lot more vibrant and colorful in video format, which is Comedy Central’s chief medium.)

Expect more color-related posts from me in the coming weeks. I’m really interested to walk out into the world and view it through this filter I’ve acquired.

via Put This On, which is red.

nateog / Flickr

It’s funny that Andy Greenwald chose to write about superheroes and villains today for Grantland, because he appears to possess his own superhuman level of insight into the cultural goings-on of Mad Men. Whether his abilities are natural — he was bitten by a radioactive spider/just came upon this analysis himself — or manufactured — he built an iron suit/has some kind of inside track to the Mad Men writers’ though processes — I have no idea, but he uses them like an expert:

It can’t be a coincidence that Matthew Weiner, Mad Men creator and control freak par excellence, introduced his own Martian, copywriter Michael Ginsberg, the same year Marvel Comics unveiled the Silver Surfer. Like Holocaust baby Ginsberg, the Surfer was an unlikely survivor, the product of a desperate sacrifice, his still-beating heart a constant reminder of those left behind. Ginsberg feels like an alien, both to himself and to his new colleagues at Sterling Cooper Draper Pryce, yet he is eager to belong. As long as he keeps his voice down and his otherworldly skills focused on mundanities like cologne ads, his stranger-in-a-strange-land eccentricities (like understanding The Beatles) can be tolerated. Michael may call himself a spaceman, but inside the sturdy walls of a Manhattan office building, he’s really just another Other, not all that distinct from fellow outsider Dawn. Their differences are folded into the established culture easily enough because, when you get right down to it, they need their jobs more than their jobs need them.

Of course, the Silver Surfer didn’t come alone, and neither did Michael Ginsberg. Both served as harbingers for leggy, purple-mini-skirted giants who possessed the ability to unmake worlds. One was called Galactus. The other is married to Don Draper.

His post will undoubtedly make the most sense if you watch Mad Men and have at least some familiarity with the Silver Surfer and Galactus (even that atrocious Fantastic Four sequel), but even if you don’t, I think you should check it out anyway. It’s a great piece of writing.

ky_olsen / Flickr

Being successful in any communication field is, I would argue, about 40 percent dependent on communicating well and 60 percent dependent on effectively receiving what’s being communicated to you. You need to be a good listener.

I’ve been some form of journalist since 2005, which is long enough to know that being a good writer is important, but no one will care how well you write if you can’t listen well enough to know what the hell you’re talking about.

Listening, however, is hard; at least empathetic listening is. What’s that? I’ll let Tony Valdes, writing for The Art Of Manliness, explain:

[Empathetic listening] is the ideal.  We are able to set aside internal and external distractions so as to listen without judgment or interruption.  We are emotionally and mentally invested and provide verbal and nonverbal feedback to the speaker.

Tony, who has his BA in rhetoric and communication, is in the midst of a three-part series over on that site on how to be a better listener. Even if you consider yourself a good listener, I encourage you to check out the two parts that have already been published. It’s full of interesting tips and observations, such as:

Most of us probably received a minimum of twelve years of instruction on how to write well, yet it is a skill that is only used in approximately 9% of the average person’s daily communication.  Reading often receives between six and eight years of formal instruction, yet it only accounts for 16% of our communication.  Speaking receives a paltry one year of attention, perhaps two years if we’re lucky, and it is only 30% of our communication.  Listening, however, often receives less than a half-year of formal training, yet it makes up 45% of our daily communication.

That’s an extremely important 45 percent, too. Most of my communicative output throughout the day is predicated upon what I’ve learned — listened to — from someone else. I wager that’s probably the case for most other people, too.

Anyway, like I said, go read Tony’s posts.

Source: NBA.com

If you’re reading this post on my actual site, it probably comes as no surprise that I’m a fan of the new Brooklyn Nets’ logo: black, white, simple. That has less to do, though, with my personal preferences, and more to do with the fact that the logo is so…un-sports-like.

Minimalist branding is nothing new — consider the throwback trend that’s dominated the NBA for the last several years. But look at the Nets’ logo among all the others (scroll just past the league logos) — it’s a bold contrast to nearly every other design, even the Spurs’, which basically has the same color scheme.

To me, the Nets weren’t going for a cool, or even modern/hipster, basketball logo; they just wanted to make an iconic logo, period. That was likely necessary, given that the last pro team to call Brooklyn home had one of the most iconic logos of all time, and which is still more or less in use today. It’s also still associated with the neighborhood*, despite the fact that the Dodgers left in 1957.

The logo does have technical and logical flaws (second link: “if the identity is meant to convey Subway signage, where is the bold Helvetica?”), but for the purpose of this post, I’m more concerned with the conception than the execution. (Besides, logos get gradually perfected all the time while still remaining basically the same.)

The concept and thinking are what sports logos need more of. How do we stand apart? How do we make it so that all you need is a shape, a color or a font to know that it’s us and not the other guys, or some other thing entirely?

Arguably, that’s what any industry’s logos need more of.

*I don’t mean to suggest that Brooklyn teenagers are playing sandlot games in Dodgers caps — maybe they are — I just mean that any time Brooklyn and pro sports are brought up in the same sentence, the Dodgers are what come to mind.

Damemusic / Flickr

Happy Friday.

If you’re trying to kill time before the weekend, here are two excellent ways to do it:

1. Relive the first round of the 2012 NFL Draft in GIFs. This may be my favorite thing of the day.
2. Figure out your Klouchebag score (Klout + douchebag). Mine’s 39.

Happy Friday.

Life Archive

This instrument can teach, it can illuminate; yes, and it can even inspire. But it can do so only to the extent that humans are determined to use it to those ends. Otherwiseit’s nothing but wires and lights in a box.

Edward R. Murrow would have been 104 years old today.

Here are two ways you can celebrate:

• Read Murrow’s “wires and lights in a box” speech (h/t to another CBS News great, Mark Knoller, for that link).
• Watch Good Night, And Good Luck., which is a great movie about Murrow’s and CBS News’ battle in the 1950s with Sen. Joseph McCarthy.

toodlepip / Flickr

Or as All Facebook puts it, “Facebook Real-Time Page Insights Go Live (Sort Of).”

Whatever.

The point is, Facebook Page Insights used to lag by like three days and now they don’t. I just downloaded a couple Excel sheets from the main page I manage, KIRO 7 Eyewitness News (see what I did there?), and I can see data up through today, though not all my posts from today are displaying.

This is mostly a convenience. I don’t necessarily need to know right now, or today, how my posts from today performed, but it’s a hell of a lot better than waiting three days, which can seem like forever.

Second City Warehouse / Flickr

My blog is infamously streaky. Every year, I’ll go on a few tears where I churn out multiple blog posts per day, sometimes for several weeks, and then go virtually silent for a month or longer.

I’m trying to be better.

One of the hard parts is just getting back into the game. It’s like getting into a really good gym rhythm and then disappearing for two months. You really want to feel on that first day back like you didn’t miss a beat, but it quickly becomes apparent that you did, and then you wake up the next day to that sore-everywhere workout hangover.

What helps, though, is to get inspired.

Enter Chuck Klosterman’s post up on Grantland today about attending separate concerts by Creed and Nickelback on the same night:

The music of Creed is powerful. That’s not necessarily the same as “good,” but it’s something. They perform a simple trick on (seemingly) every track: A song will open with an uncomfortably subdued constriction that abruptly drops into a pulverizing wave of melodic distortion, instantly generating a hyper-real level of drama that can only be discounted if you consciously pre-decide to view the technique as preposterous. This is the central potency of the band’s songwriting, but also its downfall. The key to being appreciated by pop critics is the act of taking your own music less seriously than the people who adore it (Stephen Malkmus is probably the best contemporary example). Creed seems to exemplify the opposite. Creed seems to take itself more seriously than its own fan base does, which makes logical (but not practical) sense. Now, the reason I keep including the word “seems” is because I don’t know if this is actually true; the band might consider the entire trajectory of their career totally hilarious. But their posture is serious. As I watch them onstage, they don’t seem to be having fun in any context. The various musicians are dressed in a style best described as “business casual,” assuming their business is happening in Texas.

That last part also made me smirk.