BookTalk News - What I'm doing behind the scenes

Chris OConnor

In an effort to keep everyone aware of what I'm doing I'll make periodic posts here in this thread. And I'll try to be brief because what I'm doing is extremely time consuming, but from what I am learning about "search engine optimization," it is essential to our growth. I really feel we will slowly see our community start to grow through the inflow of more traffic.

Right now I am creating a seperate page for all of our past book selections. This is important for many reasons...I'll explain this later.

But here are two of the pages already completed...

Future Shock by Alvin Toffler

Pale Blue Dot by Carl Sagan

Once all 30 of our past (and current) books have their own page I will make the existing BOOKS page a text index of the whole group. The next step will be to create dozens of pages for books that BookTalk (you) recommend to visitors.

Each of these pages has quality title tags, metatags, keywords, file size, etc.. they are optimized as best as I can understand. They are far superior to anything we've had to date.

Over time we will have hundreds of pages of content so visitors will have much to read and learn on our site. The books are the first step, but essays and book reviews are in the works.

Chris OConnor

Another few book pages have been created. Also, check out www.booktalk.org/baloney-detection.php

MadArchitect

Chris, it may be possible to communicate a group of search engine codes and DOCTYPE tags to every page on BookTalk using style sheets. You may want to look into this, as it could save you some tedious editing.

Chris OConnor

Do you have any idea what the negatives are for not having that code on our pages?

leelee2525

I must be crazy to do this. I just started reading some of what your group is doing and was not going to comment, but I wanted to say I like page titled [b]Baloney Detection Kit[/b]. I had to share it with friends.
Lorie

Chris OConnor

The BOOKS page has been changed.

Chris

Chris OConnor

I'm learning of the importance of having text links at the bottom of the home page to make it easier for spiders to find all of the sites pages. As of right now I have added the basic links to our home page. I'm going to try to figure out how to make this text navigation area an include file so I can add it to the footer of each and every page in the site.

You can scroll down on our Home page and see what I'm talking about.

www.booktalk.org/index.php

Some additional changes that are coming...

1. No sidebar on our forums page. It complicates things, costs too much money, and makes my life difficult. All of the same material we were going to have in the sidebar will be added as content to the web site accessible through the top orange navigation bar.

2. We'll be adding an "AUTHORS" link to the top orange nav bar as soon as I have the time to start creating Bio pages for all of our authors. Other links to be placed on the AUTHORS page include:

Are you an author seeking a book review?
This will go to a page explaining what books we'll review and how authors can contact us to set up a review.

If you guys have any other suggestions for this author page let me know. The main idea is that the authors page will have an index of our past and present authors with links going to individual bio pages. These bio pages will also contain links off-site to other reviews, interviews, author homes pages, etc.. Our site is destined to become a real resource with hundreds of pages added.

This is how the BOOKS page looks right now. I will spice if up, but it is much more search engine friendly now. It used to be about 3x as large as any page should be. Now it is perfect, but it needs to be a little more attractive. All of the authors you see in the index will be the ones on the AUTHORS page index. But we'll also add TONS of authors and books to both the AUTHORS and BOOKS pages for "Suggested Reading" etc...

Chris OConnor

I've deleted the link in the top orange navigation bar to the "JOIN" page. That word/link misleads visitors into believing this is a pay-site, when in actuality there are no costs associated with membership. All you have to do is create a free ezboard (and soon Yuku) account and start posting. Si the JOIN page is off the link bar. I haven't decided if it will still even exist, but if it does it won't be visible on the home page or the orange nav bar.

Chris OConnor

There are now two new links in the top orange navigation bar, as you can plainly see. Neither are active links right now, but they will be soon.

I am looking for some help in finding quality articles to post on our articles page. The ARTICLES page will eventually contain an index of potentially thousands of articles, each on their own individual page optimized for the relevant keywords. This will take years and years and will really be an ongoing process of accumulating quality content relative to our mission statement.

So this is where I need YOUR help. There is a TON of free content on the web. I will provide some links below to web sites that are designed for webmasters like me to search for and snag quality articles for our site. We are not looking for just any article, but ones that make sense for our site.

If you have the time and interest in helping search for appropriate articles and SKIM them to make sure they don't suck I'd sure appreciate it.

Eventually, the ARTCILES page will have an index broken down into categories. Each category, such as "Biological Evolution" will have a number after the category name indicating how many articles we have in that category. So it might look like this...

Biological Evolution (36)
Geology & Earth Science (17)
Astronomy (51)

and so on...

Obviously, this index will make sense for our site and will be alphabetized and orderly.

Because this project will take time we must start with a search for a particular kind of article. So I am arbitrarily picking...

atheism
faith vs reason
evolution vs creationism

etc...

You get the point.

So if you can help me find a few dozen articles on the below sites I would sure appreciate it. Just give me the URL of the article and tell you me you have skimmed it and believe it looks good for our site. No review of the article is necessary or desired. Please don't waste your time. Skim and give me a thumbs up. We want quality, but right now we also want quantity. We need CONTENT for the site. Content = traffic and stuff for visitors to read. The longer they stay on the site the higher the probability that will join our reading group. Actually, there are a dozen other reasons for wanting content, but I have to get to a New Year's party and cannot type any longer!

So these are the articles sites! All of these articles are FREE and are there for the taking. We will create a page for any article we want on our site with the condition that we post a link back and give the authors name. Very simple. I am amazed that I didn't know about this resource, but I am only now studying SEO, or search engine optimization.

Idea Marketers

Article City

FreeSticky

EZINE Articles

Go Artciles

Articles Factory

Article Geek

There are many more such sites, but we should be able to find a few dozen great articles. don't feel restricted to the atheism category, but do try to find some about that topic. Good luck!

Chris

Chris OConnor

Surely some of you have some articles you'd like to see on our site.

Rich206

Quote:
Surely some of you have some articles you'd like to see on our site.

I scanned a few articles at one of the sites, but it was slim pickings. So far I've been encouraged to pray for the wicked, prepare for the second coming and convert more people to chrisitianity in 2007. I thought I had a promising title, "Eccentric Behavior, Even Dangerous Cranks, Managing Our Lives," but it turned out to be written by an astrologer warning me to be careful about Jupiter and Uranus arguing. I found the irony amusing, but the article was horrible.

Maybe it was just beginner's bad luck. I'll keep looking.


	FORUMS	ABOUT	BOOKS	VIDEOS	ADVERTISE	LINKS	BLOGS	DONATE	CHAT	CONTACT