Santorum Google screenshot

When you Google for "Santorum," this is the top search result. (Click to enlarge - but only if you're not too squeamish.) You can help keep this brilliant effort working.

It’s time to use my power for good.

Yesterday NPR reported on how the batshit crazy social conservative former US senator Rick Santorum is pulling ahead in Republican polls for the presidential race.

Santorum has always annoyed and amused me. But with this, he’s officially scaring me.

Today, Marketplace Tech Report reminded me about Rick Santorum’s Google problem — so I decided to take action.

So here I am linking to SpreadingSantorum.com, a Google bombing page that writer Dan Savage set up in 2003.

Furthermore I encourage everyone else to do likewise.  Especially if you’ve had your own web site or blog under its own domain name for several years. But even if your only online presence is via a third-party service like Facebook, WordPress.com, or Tumblr (where you don’t have your own domain), I still encourage you to post a link to SpreadingSantorum.com.

Talk about a long-term investment in search visibility that is REALLY paying off! Here’s how it works…

When a website or page has been on the web and attracting links for several years, Google promotes it in search results so it ends up near or at the top of the first results page for relevant Google searches. This ultimately raises the destination site’s Google PageRank — especially when it’s linked to by sites with PageRank that exceed its own.

So far, SpreadingSantorum.com has a PageRank of 5 — but it’s already showing up at the top of Google searches for the term Santorum. (See screenshot at the top of this post.)

My site, Contentious.com, has been online and publishing fairly continuously since 1997. I currently have a PageRank of 6 (out of a possible 10 points). Not to be self-congratulatory, but that’s pretty good for a blog run by one person. That’s the power of a site being online under the same domain for nearly 15 years.

This also means that when I link to other sites with a lower PageRank, my inbound link helps their search visibility in Google. Right now, SpreadingSantorum.com has a PageRank of 5. So in fact, my inbound link helps this site maintain its search visibility.

Why link to SpreadingSantorum.com now? 

Now that Santorum is pulling ahead (however moderately) in Republican polls, it’s likely that Republicans and social conservatives — who have a pretty good track record for unified action — will try to undermine SpreadingSantorum.com‘s search visibility by linking like crazy to the official Santorum campaign site. (Yes, I am deliberately NOT linking to that site here.)

Also, mainstream news sites, political bloggers, and others are especially likely to link more often to the official Santorum campaign site, now that his viability as a candidate is increasing. (I’m gonna go wash my hands, now that I’ve typed that sentence, ick…)

All of this means that this brilliant social/political/search hack is currently under threat and needs your support. So link now, and keep linking! The more links on more days from more sites, the better!

What kind of power do your links wield?

Here’s how to check PageRank for your site or any site:

• Google Chrome users: I use this Chrome Pagerank addon. It displays the PageRank of any page displayed in my browser.
• Google toolbar users: If you use Internet Explorer or Firefox, here’s how to view PageRank in the toolbar. (Install Google toolbar)
• Safari users: There’s a Safari PageRank addon.
• Everyone else: You can check PageRank by pasting the URL for any site or page at CheckPageRank.net.

GO FORTH AND LINK TO SPREADINGSANTORUM.COM! And do your part to undermine an increasingly powerful politician who denies evolution (and thinks scientists are amoral), wants to eliminate birth control and opposes abortion rights (thus indicating he thinks women’s most important role is as an ambulatory incubator for male sperm), and who has compared homosexual sex to bestiality and child rape.

Yeah. Really. No kidding. Batshit crazy has no business in government — especially in the White House.

I realize this perspective flies in the face of reality, but I have a dream… of sanity…

For nearly 15 years, the internet has been popular with the general public. So it amazes me that so many online news stories still routinely lack the kind of links that online and mobile users find helpful—and that also enhance the transparency, credibility, and shareability of news.

In a blog post this week, the Google-newsroom conspiracy theory Kevin Sablan of the Orange County Register nailed exactly how bad missing obvious links make news organizations look…

Full story: How missing links hurt online news, part 1 | Knight Digital Media Center.

If you’re a semi-retired professional who wants to build a consulting business, and you’re not an internet whiz, what kind of web site will really help clients find you? And how can you easily build and maintain a useful professional network?

My dad, Jack Gahran, is a semi-retired management consultant who knows many other semi-retired professionals. Today he asked me to look over the brand-new web site of a colleague of his, to offer some advice as to how it might be improved in ways that will build this person’s business.

The site is a pretty standard brochure site — a few static pages of basic information. It had a nice but simple design, and the content seemed to use keywords appropriately — both of which help search engines like Google index the site well. However, Google generally isn’t very interested in small brochure sites that are infrequently updated and don’t attract many inbound links.

I offered my dad’s colleague four basic tips for improving his site in ways that will make it much more visible in search engines, and thus more likely to attract inbound links from other sites (another thing Google rewards).

I get asked for this kind of advice a lot, so I figured I’d make a blog post out of it, so everyone can benefit.

Here’s what I told him…
1. Ask Google to start indexing your site

Eventually Google will find your site, index it, and start listing it in search results. But Google has a lot of sites to index, so it may take a long time for them to get around to indexing your site.

It helps to tell Google you’re there and ask them to list you, rather than passively waiting for Google to find you. Submit your site to Google.

You should also submit your site to Yahoo.

2. Add fresh content to your site often, the easy way: Blog

So far, your site appears to be mainly an online brochure. That’s someone useful for people who already know to look you up online, but it won’t attract much attention from search engines — and therefore won’t get much traffic from people who don’t already know who you are and where to find your site.

Search engines mainly care about timeliness and relevance. There is an easy way to make sure your site provides that: Add a blog to your site.

I noticed that right now, your site’s “news and events” section has no real content. I’d suggest turning that part of your site into a weblog (or “blog”) so you can easily add fresh items to the site on your own, without having to rely on a web designer to upload the content for you.

…You don’t have to call it a blog if you don’t like that term, you could just call it news and views, which would give you more flexibility in what sort of information you can post there.

IMPORTANT UPDATE: After discussing the following tip in the comments below, I decided that it’s better to integrate your existing brochure space into a blog, rather than vice versa. Read full instructions on how to get this done.

Talk to your web designer about integrating a blog into your site. You should set up the account with the blogging service in your own name, so you maintain control of it. But after you have the account it’s fine to get help with setup.

Once the blog is in place you can easily (right through your web browser) add fresh items to your site, and their titles and introductions will appear on that page, with the most recent item listed first.

You could write not just about news and events, but also share your insight or tips about things that might interest the people you want to reach — including answering common questions they have related to your areas of expertise. These can be really short pieces: just 1-3 paragraphs is enough. No need to write long articles.

The point is to post a new item at least a couple of times a month (of course, more often is always better, but you can start slow). Make sure the title and the first sentence of each post include words that you think people who need your services would search for.

If you add a tool like a blog that makes it easy for you to add fresh content to your site on your own whenever you want, over time you’ll grow the kind of site that Google likes, indexes often, and rewards with traffic.

Even better, when you regularly post fresh content to your site, that gives other people a good reason to link to your site. Inbound links are very important to Google. When people link to deeper content on your site (like specific blog posts, not just your home page), Google thinks your site is more useful and is more likely to position you better in search results.

Oh, and: If your web designers say they can’t easily add a blog to your site, they’re wrong. (CORRECTION: Actually, trying to add a blog to a static site is hard, which is why I now recommend moving your site into a blog.) You can create a blog using a free service like WordPress.com and integrate that into any site. Once it’s set up, then you just keep posting to it.

3. Offer an e-mail newsletter, the easy way

It’s always easier for you to go to people than to expect them to always come to you. For this reason, many people still prefer e-mail to the web as a way to maintain business relationships.

Dad mentioned that he suggested you offer an e-mail newsletter for your past clients and other key contacts, and I agree, that’s a great way to maintain those relationships. However, you can get even more mileage out of this effort by using a blog to create your e-mail newsletter for you automatically.

If you decide to add a blog to your site (as I suggested above), you can use some features of a free service from Google called Feedburner to turn the items you post to your blog into items in an e-mail newsletter which interested people can easily subscribe to. That way, they can see your latest items even if they don’t remember to visit your site.

Set up a free account on Feedburner, and follow their instructions to connect your site’s blog (they call it “burning your feed”) to feedburner. Then, under their “publicize” section, select “e-mail subscriptions” and follow their instructions. You might want to get your Web developer to help you with this process, but I strongly suggest setting up the Feedburner account yourself, in your own name, so you maintain control of it.

4. Link to your LinkedIn public profile

Dad already suggested that you get active with LinkedIn, a popular online service for professional networking, and I agree it’s very helpful — especially for independent professionals.

One useful option that LinkedIn offers is the ability to create a public version of your LinkedIn profile that anyone can view, whether they’re on LinkedIn or not. (Here’s mine)

I’d recommend completing your LinkedIn profile as fully as possible, and then posting a link to it from your site’s contact page. Then, make sure you keep your profile updated.

…Those are my basic tips, intended for someone with little to no experience with online media. I tried to strike a balance between empowering him to make truly effective improvements in his online outreach, while recognizing that he probably won’t want to spends a whole lot of time online, or know how to use social media.

So even though I could have suggested many social media options for this person beyond LinkedIn, I don’t think that would be a good fit for his current skill levels and interests. Later on he could grow into that. But right now, I think it’s more important for him to create a more effective home base on the web.

I didn’t link to his site because I wanted to give him a chance to work on it first.

What do you think of these suggestions? Are they appropriate for the situation I outlined? Any disagreements, corrections, or suggestions to add? Please comment below.

In a recent post to the Wordtracker blog, The Bad, Good And Ugly Advice Given To Journalists On SEO (search engine optimization), U.K. journalist Rachelle Money made some excellent points about how journalists can craft stories in ways that will attract more search engine traffic.

I agree with much of what she said. However, I do disagree with her about the role of a journalist in the editorial process.

Money wrote that some SEO advice offered to journalists seems:

…overwhelmingly concerned with headlines and how to write better ones for the web. I hate to throw a couple of spanners in the works, but I have never, not once, had to write a headline for a newspaper. That’s the job of a sub-editor; they write headlines, they write the sub-headings and the picture captions and the stand-firsts. I have never had to write a title tag either; that’s the job of the online editor, and they are likely to write the links too. So in many ways the advice given to journalists isn’t really for us, it’s for the production department or the online team.

…That may have been generally true a decade or more ago.

But not today…

Today news is being published by all sorts of individuals and organizations — not just from established, well-staffed mainstream media newsrooms. Small news operations — or even individual journalists and bloggers — are publishing a considerable amount of news without a multilayered, multidepartmental structure and process.

Today, many journalist already are writing their own headlines, tags, links, and other microcontent elements. And that makes sense — because when you’re trying to establish relevance in the context of search engines, it really helps to have the person who knows the story best (the reporter) choosing and using appropriate keywords.

I agree with Money that it’s important for journalists to know more about how SEO works — because if people can’t easily find news, it might as well not exist. I just don’t think it’s reasonable to advise journos to avoid learning key SEO skills because other parts of the staff will handle those details. Even if you currently work for a news org that delegates some SEO functions to other staff, you can’t depend that those other staff will remain on the job long term — or that you will, either.

Better to learn how to write search-friendly headlines, links, and leads now than play catch-up on your own later.

(NOTE: I originally published this article in Poynter’s E-Media Tidbits.)

News is never just about what’s happening today — it’s also about context, including what led up to this moment. That’s why lately I’ve been intrigued by the Google News archive search. This feature, introduced September 2008, its worth a look — and maybe worth including in order to make more money off your historical archives, or to augment current coverage.

The Official Google Blog explains in Bringing history online, one newspaper at a time that this service presents archived news articles online — either as they were printed, preserving original format/context (including, in some cases, surrounding stories); or with a link to a news org’s paid archives. It also presents a timeline, showing how popular a search term was in news from past years or decades.

For instance, a Google News archive search for “space shuttle” yields a timeline with significant spikes in 1981 (for the first shuttle mission), 1986 (when the Challenger exploded after launch), and 2003 (when the Columbia broke up on re-entry).

An example of the early shuttle coverage I found here includes this March 24, 1982 Pittsburgh Post-Gazette story: NASA sees little problem with lost space shuttle tiles. That’s actually a jump from a page 1 story. Other stories also appearing on the page include: “Begin to stay on after Knesset vote,” “Will match missiles with subs, Soviets say,” and “Military coup ousts Guatemalan government” — an intriguing glimpse into the tenor of that time.

That archived story was available for free — but my search also pointed to several articles for sale from newspaper archives. For instance, the Christian Science Monitor is selling its July 21, 1975 story Space shuttle to involve Europe, too for $3.95.

Not every news org’s historical archives are available in the Google News archive. Apparently Google strikes partnerships with news orgs to scan and serve their archives, or to link to existing online archives.

Participating in this service could be a way to turn your history into traffic. The Official Google Blog noted: “Over time, as we scan more articles and our index grows, we’ll also start blending these archives into our main search results so that when you search Google.com, you’ll be searching the full text of these newspapers as well.” This means that participating news orgs could find their historic wealth increasingly findable, and thus potentially more compelling and/or lucrative.

(NOTE: I originally published this article on Poynter’s E-Media Tidbits. Thanks to Tech.Blorge for the tip.)

As I’ve mentioned before, hashtags are a powerful tool that allows Twitter users to track what many people (especially people whom you aren’t already following) are reporting or thinking about a particular topic or event.

Here’s the catch: Hashtags aren’t an officially supported Twitter service. They’re merely a convention that Twitter users have adopted on their own, within the 140-character text-only constraints of tweeting. So you can’t really “follow” hashtags through the main Twitter site.

Many third-party Twitter tools and services “play nice” with hashtags — but you must first know what these tools are and how to use them in order to get maximum value from hashtags.

This can lead to a bit of basic confusion, especially among people who are new to Twitter. Specifically, how exactly do you follow a hashtag?…

For example, this weekend my colleague Pete Myers, publisher of Environmental Health News, asked me:

“So I just Twitter track #bisphenol and it will search for tweets with bisphenol? Where are instructions?”

I hear many similar questions. So let me use Pete’s example to show a few options for tracking Twitter hashtags…

YOU CANNOT “FOLLOW” A HASHTAG DIRECTLY THROUGH YOUR TWITTER ACCOUNT

This is perhaps the most confusing point for people who are new to hashtags — but it’s important to understand. From your Twitter account you can only “follow” other Twitter users (accounts set up for an individual, organization, project, event, etc.). A hashtag is not a Twitter account that you can click a “follow” button for.

A hashtag is not a source of tweets. Rather, it’s a way to label (tag) tweets so they can be easily pulled together.

TWITTER SEARCH: EASIEST WAY TO TRACK HASHTAGS

Since a hashtag is nothing more than a character string inserted into a tweet, it’s something that you can search Twitter for. Therefore, the most basic way to track hashtags through your web browser is:

1. Go to Twitter Search.
2. Search for a hashtag you want to track. Include the “#” in your search query. Here’s a search for #bisphenol
3. Keep that page open in a browser tab, and refresh it periodically to see the latest results. Or subscribe to the feed for your search in your feed reader, and check there occasionally for updates.

If I plan on only following a hashtag for a short time (up to a couple of hours), I usually just track it via twitter search. But for something I want to watch from several hours to a day or more, I used a different tool…

COLUMN-BASED TRACKING TOOLS

There are many, many third-party tools for using and monitoring Twitter. Several of these allow you to set up columns to track tweets based on search terms. One that I use quite often is Tweetdeck, a very slick Adobe AIR application that runs on your computer.

Tweetdeck allows you to configure up to 10 columns where you follow tweets according to criteria you specify. These can be all the people you follow on Twitter (your “friends”), or a subset of friends, or the ongoing results of a Twitter search. So if you search for #bisphenol via Tweetdeck, a column will appear showing all the latest tweets using that hashtag — and it will automatically update for you. You can add, delete, or reconfigure columns anytime you like.

There are also configurable web-based Twitter tracking tools like Monitter that offer similar capabilities. Personally I prefer Tweetdeck, but that’s just a matter of preference.

…So those are the bare basics for how to follow a hashtag. They’re definitely not the only options, but they’re some of the simplest. And if you want to look up what specific hashtags mean (or spread the word about a hashtag you launched or like), there are some hashtag glossaries that can help.

The catch is that hashtags are often cryptic — usually because they work best when they’re as brief as possible. So you might stumble across an interesting-sounding tweet containing a hashtag like #wci, #plurk, or #tpb and wonder about its context. Although you can follow a hashtag easily with tools like Twitter Search, Hashtags.org, Tweetdeck, or Twitterfall (which Paul Bradshaw recommended yesterday in Tidbits), those tools don’t easily tell you what a given hashtag means.

Here some promising new tools that can help you quickly put a hashtag in context — or let people easily look up the meaning of the hashtags you launch or use…

• WTHashtag is a brand new wiki-based hashtag glossary from Microblink. Since it’s brand new, a lot of popular hashtags aren’t listed there yet. If one of your favorite hashtags isn’t listed there, just create a free account and then add a page for the hashtag. Anyone can edit these pages, so if you feel some sense of ownership or concern about a hashtag, you can check off “watch this page” to get alerts of updates. I just created a reference page for #JTMpoynter, the hashtag for this week’s Journalism That Matters conference at Poynter.
• Tagref is a searchable glossary of hashtags that gets built directly via Twitter. To add a hashtag to this glossary, send a tweet to @tagref Twitter account in this format: @tagref #hashtag is definition. (I just did that for #JTMpoynter.)
• Tagal.us lets you set a hashtag definition via Twitter. This process is a bit more involved than how Tagref works, but every hashtag you define via Tagref also gets cross-posted to Tagal.us. One advantage: Other Tagal.us users can vote on definitions and decide which best describes a particular hashtag.

…All of these services are pretty new, so a lot of popular or new hashtags aren’t listed there yet. If some of your pet hashtags aren’t there yet, take a minute to add them. And whenever you launch a hashtag, be sure to list them in these glossaries. It doesn’t take long, and the findability benefits could be significant if any or all of these tools gets popular.

NOTE: I originally published this article on Poynter’s E-Media Tidbits.

And in an age of information overload, the challenge for journalists is no longer just to provide more news content. Rather, our value lies in supporting relevance, insight, and (ultimately) meaning.

This is why, lately, I’ve been intrigued by Silobreaker. This Europe-based news aggregator site uses semantic web technology (Including visual interfaces) to make news more relevant — and thus, more compelling and useful.

This is pretty important because, since relevance has inherent value, it can be the basis of business models…

WHAT’S THE SEMANTIC WEB, AND WHY SHOULD JOURNOS CARE?

The semantic web is a set of technologies that help computers interpret meaning more like how humans do it. This can make various computer technologies (especially search) far more efficient and effective. It makes it easier for computers to get to the point in ways that people understand and value.

As this semantic web tutorial explains:

“The semantic web is not about links between web pages. It describes relationships between things (like A is a part of B, and Y is a member of Z) and the properties of things (like size, weight, age, and price).”

…Apply that logic to news, and you approach what most news consumers try to do, with varying degrees of success, in their own heads. News consumers constantly try to create meaning by “connecting the dots” between a dizzying array of often-conflicting stories from a multitude of venues — and then relate those patterns to their own lives and interests.

They do this in order to form opinions and make decisions — which from their perspective is the whole point of news!

WARNING: SILOBREAKER IS REALLY GEEKY

I’ll tell you up front: Silobreaker is geeky. Its user interface can be confusing and frustrating. It’s often not easy to understand what the site is saying, or why.

That said, it’s still well worth exploring — mainly because of its search tools. These visually portray the potential relevance of current news topics. This can prove valuable to journalists, as well as to analysts and regular people.

For instance, let’s say I’m a Hispanic parent who cares about my children’s future prospects — so I’m very interested in education, and what educational opportunities or pitfalls may affect my kids. I start my Silobreaker exploration of this topic by conducting a “360-degree search” for stories that connect these topics: Hispanics and education. This provides a fairly conventional news aggregator-style overview of air pollution-related news, superficially not too different from what you’d get from Google News.

But for more insight into what’s happening in this field, I glance at the right-hand sidebar. In the top chart there, “article volume,” I see that starting in early October coverage of this intersection of topics picked up sharply, but has since subsided somewhat (although not completely). This clues me in that this field heated up for a bit. That’s useful context if I haven’t been monitoring this field regularly.

Scrolling down further in the right sidebar, I see a box for “network search.” I double-click that box to display a large diagram showing how the issues I named, plus many others selected by Silobreaker as relevant, currently relate to each other in detail.

The network view allows me to literally see how issues connect. The value of this is serendipity potential. I notice that one of the related topics is “higher education” — and I have two teenagers, so that gets my attention.

I double-click the “higher education” node to make it the focus of this diagram. The resulting diagram shows me how topics, companies, people, organizations, and places currently relate to each other in this complex field. More importantly, clicking on a blue dot on any connecting line tells me why Silobreaker thinks those issues are connected (articles, blog posts, etc.)

I find the network search especially fascinating — even though, to be honest, I’m not quite clear on how it works or what it’s telling me. But I do know that it has helped me to better understand interrelationships and how they evolve — something that’s hard to get at just by reading conventional news stories. So it’s well worth spending a few minutes clicking on topics and playing with the sliders in Silobreaker’s network view. Allow the diagram to rearrange itself around your selections. See if you spot interesting relationships you hadn’t noticed before.

SO WHAT?

Silobreaker offers the most obvious potential for people who need news. But for news professionals, still greater value lies here in being able to spot possible stories and angles before they become obvious. If you know what interests your community, and can express that in keywords or topics, then Silobreaker can show you what’s happening now that might be relevant.

This kind of tool can help create and shape stories, as well as tell them.

Silobreaker offers other visually interesting tools worth exploring. Each offers some advantages and frustrations. Expect clunkiness and confusion, but also some Aha! moments. Think of this site as an early prototype for a news business based on relevance. Where could we go from here?

(NOTE: I originally published an earlier version of this article on Poynter’s E-Media Tidbits.)

I edit the Tidbits blog. As I was producing that post, I was searching for a good, direct link for Ron Rosenbaum — a journalist and author who recently wrote in Slate that media maven Jeff Jarvis has been gloating over the death of print. I discovered that Rosenbaum blogs for Pajamas Media — and I prefer to link to people’s blogs, so they can speak for themselves.

I noticed something about Rosenbaum’s blog that, in the context of the current rancorous debate he sparked over the fate of traditional journalists, strikes me as somewhat sad.

This screen grab says it all:

rosenbaum

RonRosenbaum.com: It's just a blog title, not a domain. Really.

The name of Rosenbaum’s blog appears to be a domain: RonRosenbaum.com. But it isn’t — that’s just the name of his blog. Even worse: The domain RonRosenbaum.com currently doesn’t resolve to any site.

This reflects a discouraging level of online-media cluenessness that is so common in the mainstream media mindset…

Currently, this domain is owned by The Authors Guild (not Rosenbaum himself). Apparently the Guild is doing nothing with this domain, not even forwarding it.

error

The domain RonRosenbaum.com currently doesn't point anywhere.

…That’s a shame, since people who might hear that Rosenbaum’s blog is RonRosenbaum.com would logically plug in that domain and go… nowhere…

According to the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine, in October 2006 that domain did resolve to Rosenbaum’s blog on Pajamas Media — but since then, it hasn’t gone anywhere.

I’m surprised that Pajamas Media — which is generally pretty savvy about search visibility — would allow one of their blogs to have the same title as a nonfunctioning domain. They don’t do that with their other blogs. Maybe there’s some backstory that explains this choice in this case, but it seems fundamentally confusing to net users and thus a pretty bad idea.

Deeper irony: Given Rosenbaum’s current criticism that Jarvis is “dancing on [journalists'] graves,” I’m surprised that he would choose to blog on Pajamas Media — which bears this tagline throughout their site: “Sending the MSM down the river.”

pajamas

Hey, Ron Rosenbaum: Is Pajamas Media gloating over the death of print? If so, why are YOU blogging there?

I’m just sayin’…