Blogging

Yay! Another Govblogger!

A big welcome to the blogosphere to Neil Williams, all round good government web egg, who has started a blog called Mission Creep. He says in his opening post:

It genuinely feels like exciting, important things are starting to happen in government’s use of web right now. It just got really interesting, and I’m going all in.

Neil has done a stack of cool stuff, like getting David Miliband started with his blog, for example, so I really do recommend folk subscribe to him and listen to what he has to say.

He’s on Twitter, too, by the way…

SEO for WordPress

Here’s some notes from the session at WordCampUK on SEO for WordPress, presented by Nick Garner of Betfair. Will tidy up later with more links and stuff.

  1. you can’t hold your website users’ hands the whole time. SEO can make it easier for them to find what they want
  2. What have you got that others don’t? What do you want on your site? Structure your content for search engines, use analytics and get social with links
  3. Using WordPress with the right plugins helps
  4. Content – useful and entertaining? Can the people writing your content actually write well? Need for enthusiasm. Would you read your content?
  5. Jon Bounds tweets – “ I’d love a discussion about whether or not it’s all a bit vulgar, rather than how to do it.”
  6. Who do you want to visit your site? Motivation: PR, money making or ego? Picture your reader and write for them
  7. Think like a librarian when structuring content: correct titles, categorisation, avoid duplication
  8. When building sites, get metadata in first, then the content. Don’t bury under piles of javascript & navigation stuff
  9. The cost of some sites using ‘traditional’ CMS can make you sob
  10. Security issues with WordPress? Can’t do ‘hard baked’ pages?
  11. Get Google Analytics and webmaster console
  12. If you are getting 90% traffic from search engines, that’s bad. About 60% is probably best.
  13. Gaming search engines gets harder as processor grunt increases. Don’t bother putting your black hat on.
  14. It takes time to get right, but can save a lot of marketing pennies
  15. Journalists are cheap – get them to write your content
  16. Can’t beat good writing
  17. Links: general directories are useless.
  18. Pimp yourself around: comment on related sites with link back to yours, put signposts up on relevant sites, be remarkable/stand out so people want to link to you
  19. Getting pageviews is fine, but to what end? You can generate traffic, but what do these people do when on your site except consume bandwidth
  20. Plenty of content, lots of key phrases
  21. 10% of traffic will have commercial intent
  22. Adsense is horrible (agreed!) If you are going to run ads use affiliate schemes
  23. The fundamental thing is that Google wants to find the sites that people want to see, so it really is just about the content
  24. SEOdigger.com – find out what keywords a site ranks for

A GovWeb group blog?

There has been quite a lot of interest in the Public Sector Bloggers site I set up recently (and which I really must get around to updating soon), which has been very gratifying. One of the issues with it – and indeed with any process of aggregating content from lots of blogs into one place – is that the sheer weight of content may well get people down a bit.

I wonder if there is any need for a more editorialised type of blog, with multiple authors, writing about government webby issues, maybe in an introductory style. It might not even look like a blog, using a ‘magazine’ style theme for example. It could cover the occasional snippets of news in the web world with how-tos and other guidance, and lots of links to other related content. I don’t see why some content couldn’t just be reposted from people’s individual blogs, to be honest.

To try and avoid having too many articles, though, it could maybe have the content refreshed twice a week, say, so that people only need to visit the site then, rather than feeling they have to check it several times every day to avoid missing something. Obviously RSS and email subscriptions could be available for those that know how.

What do people think? Is there a need for such a site? If there is, who’s in to contribute?

Blears blogging

In what must be the most exciting day in the Department for Communities and Local Government ever, which has seen the start of a Twitter feed and the publication of a major white paper, the latest news is that Hazel Blears is now blogging!

I want to hear everyone’s views, from local citizens to local authorities. As a citizen – I’m keen to know what would make you get more involved in your local community? What are the barriers or challenges you face? What could we, or our colleagues in local government, do to make it easier?

For local authorities or organisations hoping to increase public participation – please tell us about your successes and challenges and what we can do together to get people more involved.

All the important bloggy stuff is there – RSS feeds and comments on posts, which is great. It seems to be a fairly short lived affair – only running for a week until 18th July – and I am not sure if that will be true of the twitter feed too, it seems likely. Still, if it’s useful I guess it will be possible that it will return again in the future.

It seems to be running on Community Server, which CLG use for their forums too, which itself runs on Microsoft .NET technology rather than the open source based approach that the recent developments at Number 10 have gone for. I’ve used Community Server myself quite a bit in my work at the Information Authority, and while it isn’t quite as flexible or intuitive as WordPress on the blogging front, it more than does the job.

So, welcome to the blogosphere, Hazel. I hope you enjoy your stay.

Public Sector Bloggers

I’ve been wrestling with how to bring together and publicise the bloggers who have always been around, and those who are springing up following the publication of the guidelines.

So, I have started hacking together http://publicsectorblogs.org/ which takes a bunch of feeds, bungs them into one using Yahoo! Pipes and then republishes them on one page using SimplePie. Sophisticated it ain’t.

There is a combined feed to subscribe to via Feedburner, and an email subscription option too, but I see this more as a tool for people to quickly scan rather than anything else – there’s probably too much of it to begin with.

The bloggers I have used so far aren’t just civil servants, or local government officers, but anyone who works for or in the UK public service, and who write about it now and again. This is an inclusive kind of thing! They are (in no particular order):

If anyone has any further suggestions, do let me know in the comments.

I do need to make some improvements to the site, the most important one being to highlight where each post has come from. But this is my first time with SimplePie – and I suspect my use of Pipes complicates matters – and so any offers of help are appreciated!

Load more posts!