I wrote earlier about a search engine optimisation (SEO) service I had started using (and which I am still using) called Scribe.  Well the people behind Scribe have now produced >> a rather good report on SEO which you can get here.

The report, as you would expect from the bloke who set up the Copyblogger site, is very well and clearly written.  It explains how SEO works, what the search engines are looking for, and why it is important.

The last part discusses (of course) the SEO optimisation software Scribe.  The software has moved on since I bought it when it was first launched.  They are now re-launching it and there is a new special offer.  You can read about it in the report, and it is worth thinking about if you write a lot on blogs and web-sites.  I use Scribe all the time now, and have found that my visitor numbers have risen as a result.

However it is entirely up to you.  But do read the report as it is free and you will find it very helpful.  You can >> get it by clicking here (affiliate links).

If a picture paints a thousand words, you will want to keep them in your excerpts!

An excerpt, in case you did not know, is a reduced version of a post which goes below the initial post on the home page. So you get one post in full and then a lot of excepts. Shortened versions with a link to take you to the posts own ‘page’.

Excepts are good for several reasons:

• They help your SEO. Apparently Google does not like repeated content, so if your posts are in full both on the home page and on their own page, you will be penalised
• It makes it easier for people to scroll down and find what they are looking for.  This is particuarly useful if you tend to write long posts
• It encourages people to visit the post ‘page’.  As this is where the comments box is they are then more likley to post a comment

Headway, the theme I use, creates excerpts automatically, which is nice.  If you don’t use a theme such as Headway though, you may need to find a plugin which will make the excerpts for you.  I had this problem with my Green Blogging blog, and I found and now use Excerpt Editor there.

By defualt, WordPress strips out all the code in excerpts and just presents the text.  However, this is a bit boring, and also annoying if you have gone to some trouble to find the right pictures.

Excerpt Editor kept my images in my Green Blogging blog, but the Headway service did not.  I was particularly keen to keep the pictures in my Lodger Landlord blog.  The pictures in many cases define the post, and would be useful for people scanning the list of excerpts looking for a particular post.  But how to do it?  Time to look for another plugin.

I found one eventually.  There are several that I suspect would do the job, but the one I used (and am using here at the time of writing) is Thumbnail for Excerpts.  I chose this one as I liked the fact that it said it would make my life easier!

And it works.  As you can see.  Bingo!  The only problem that if you do not have an image on the post, it show a rather ugly holding white image.  This is not a problem with the Lodger Landlord site where I have always had one image per post, but it means I cannot use it on my Landlord Law Blog.  This was set up about 4 years ago and for at least a year and a half at the start there are no images at all.  But that is not a problem really as I have a lot of other images scattered around to make the site look nice.

I have had to put in quite a few images on this blog though.

What do you think?  Do you use excepts on your blog? Do you think keeping the pictures is a good idea?  What plugins do you use?

Update: during this past week (October 2010) I have upgraded this blog to Headway version 166.  For some reason that I don’t understand the Thumbnail for Excerpts plugin stopped working.  The Headway forum told me that thumbnails are now part of WP version 3, and indeed a closer look at the edit post page found a thumbnails section at the bottom right.

This works differently from the plugin and I have to allocate a picture to each post to be its thumbnail.  After which I have to delete the picture from the post text box or it appears twice.  So I am currently going back through the blog allocating a thumbnail for each post.  Its a bit time consuming but its nice to see some of the old posts again.

SEO stands for Search Engine Optimisation (in case you didn’t know).  Bloggers, as well as having to write readable copy, are also supposed to optimise it for the search engines.  Personally I have never really bothered that much with SEO, trying instead to write interesting articles of the sort which hopefully the search engines would want to promote.  But  not any more!

One of the advantages of following various ‘big bloggers’ (see my post here) is that you get information about new services that are being launched.  Recently I received an email telling me about a new service from copyblogger Brian Clarke.  Its called Scribe.

Scribe is a wordpress plugin (affiliate link), which analyses your blog post, via a content optimization service which you are able to access via an ‘API key’ you get when you sign up. As a user it is like magic.

You type your post.  Then you fill in the SEO information boxes you have at the bottom of your post if you are using the Thesis or Headway themes, or if you have the free All in One SEO plugin (you have to have one of these or you can’t use Scribe). Then you click the analyse button, which appears in the Scribe box at the top right of your screen once you have done this.

The Scribe system then digests your content, and thinks about it (presumably connecting with the Scribe service) while a little spinning circle spins. Then up pops a box telling you what percentage SEO success you will have and what you need to do to improve it.

As you will realise from this post, I have invested in Scribe. I have a number of blogs, and as my business depends to a large degree on the internet, it is important that I am visible. Also, there is an ‘early bird’ offer from Scribe if you sign up before 19 February.

Hopefully my posts will now become a lot more visible on the internet. We shall see.

Note – I have just analysed this post and it has scored 99%!

Lawyers are often disdainful about social media, and don’t want to bother with it. “Whats the point” they say, “I’m not interested in knowing what people had for breakfast (twitter) or having connections with people or ‘friends’ I have never met (facebook, Linkedin, Ecademy etc).

Question answered! But see also Part 2 (to be continued …)