Updated. Originally posted January 4, 2004.

If you are interested in driving more traffic to your blog, the first thing you should do is create useful, compelling content. The next thing you should do is make sure that content is easily found in search results from search engines like Google, Yahoo, and MSN.

Movable Type does a few things automatically that are very helpful to getting ranked higher in search engines. For example, Google likes pages that are well structured, with header and title tags, and with lots of text. The default templates in MT ensure that the pages of your blog are well structured with H1, H2, and H3 header tags, and even title tags that include the name of...

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It's hard to work in the web business nowadays without hearing about Perl. (It's hard to work in the web business nowadays, period, but that's another story.) Perl is one of the most popular languages in use today, is completely free, open sourced, and supported by an extremely enthusiastic community.

In addition to the core features of the language, numerous modules and scripts are available on the Comprehensive Perl Archive Network ( CPAN).

These ready–made scripts include everything from streaming MP3 servers to hooks into news clients, while the modules offer powerful generic functionality for almost any task imaginable. Everything on CPAN is completely...

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Danny Sullivan, one of the biggest names in the search engine industry, has just announced the launch of the Search Engine Watch Blog, and takes the time to explain why he chose Movable Type 3.11 to power the blog. Danny got help setting up his blog from Rob Matthews of Tiger Technologies.

In passing, Danny points out some criticisms I'd made of the Search Engine Optimization industry, but to be clear, those are critiques of those who were or are abusing the medium. Here's hoping that Danny's example of how to use a blog well will be one that the unprofessional exceptions in the SEO business learn from and emulate.

Search Engine Watch has always had some of the best coverage of its...

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The team over at SearchEngineWatch has a useful look at how blogs can improve search engine positioning, becoming a strong part of a search optimization strategy. A succinct quote shows the core message of the article:

The inherent search engine friendly nature of blogs is what gets the attention of search engine marketers. Since blogs are so easy to publish, they tend to contain lots of fresh, keyword rich text. Since many blogs are rendered as static HTML pages in very standards compliant designs, all of this information is readily available to the search engine spiders.

Trackbacks:

Previous Entry: Stardock's Blog Navigator launches

Next Entry: Advice to the bloglorn...

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The introduction to this piece has been lost thanks to a Safari caching error. The rest of it should make sense with a little guesswork. Sorry for the inconvenience.

When we start to look at more generic terms like ‘ css', there are obviously far more sites that qualify for high placement. The full first page of results for ‘ css' on Google are relevant and deserve to be there, except for possibly the current result #10 - Doctor Dobb's Journal is running Eric Meyer's CSS Reference Guide as a feature right now, but it's the only item on their home page pertaining to CSS.

At the time of writing, the Zen Garden sits in spot #9 on...

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When starting the Movable Type Weblog, I disabled the search function. There just weren't that many entries and a search dialog was not necessary.

Today, searching the Movable Type Weblog would be a good improvement. So I tried with the default Movable Type Search Engine. However, each search resulted in a CPU-intensive action. I tried to read the Perl code and saw that each search was done by selecting all entries from the database, then looping over all entries and finding the matching entries with string operations.

This is not the best way to do a fulltext search. Especially with large weblogs, this will probably lead to bad performance. The architecture does not scale very...

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Vauhini Vara of the Wall Street Journal has published a look at all the new blog search engines that have popped up in recent years, including Technorati, Feedster, IceRocket, DayPop, BlogPulse, Bloglines, and stalwarts such as Google, MSN, and Yahoo.

The challenge facing a lot of these search engines is outlined in the article:

The new services, some of which are less than a year old, aren't without their glitches. The technology is still evolving and companies are still looking for the best way to track and sort blogs. Some services miss large numbers of blogs, while others pull up irrelevant sites.

Trackbacks:

Previous Entry: Technorati launches Blog Finder

Next Entry:...

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Configuring Search for One or More Weblogs

Problem

You want to enable your system to provide users with search capabilities across one or more weblogs.

Solution

Add configuration directives to mt-config.cgi that are related to the search engine.

Discussion

The MT search engine features a number of configurable options which are maintained in the mt-config.cgi file rather than in a web interface. The search functionality is not tied to a specific weblog, and its configuration is applied system wide.

Because these functions are not tied to a specific weblog and due to...

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Google's caching system offers several cool features; one of most useful is that the words you searched for are highlighted in the page. Most web users don't read pages carefully - they scan text for what they're looking for. This is why Google's cached-page highlighting is so useful. When the page is rendered, users don't need to read the entire page to find what they came for, the page shows them where it is. As a quick example, the words highlighted above most likely caught your eye before you actually got to reading them.

Usability heuristics state that users should not have to remember information from one...

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Over time a lot of content will be generated by a site, especially a weblog or news-oriented site. Finding that content in a reverse chronological archive can be difficult and frustrating. Local search can make a site more accessible by providing readers with the means to dynamically zero in on the content they are looking for.

Built-In Search

Movable Type's public search interface originally began as an add-on to MT developed by Jay Allen before formal plug-ins existed. The code was later integrated into MT version 2.5.

The search engine provides a rudimentary means of querying an MT system for...

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Movable Type comes with a default search capability that your site visitors can use to search for keywords in your weblog entries. You can add functionality to the search form that people see on your site, and make adjustments to the templates that govern how the results are displayed.

Keyword Search Templates

Suppose you want to change the way the search results look when someone uses the default MT search function to do a search on your website.

Movable Type's templates that govern the MT keyword search results pages operate differently than the other weblog templates. (You may have noticed this if you have changed the name of your default weblog stylesheet away from...

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Any internet marketing professional will tell you, just as we will, that an effective Search Engine Optimization campaign can generate more traffic than an expensive banner-ad program, or costly and time-consuming pay-per-click methods. Some of the best methods of optimizing a website are ensuring that a page is not overly heavy in file size, maintaining a good content to code ratio, using lots of relevant content, and filling the page with as much text and links as you can without "spamming" the search engine spiders.

We're not going to cover all of the basics of XHTML and CSS. We assume that you have a basic, working knowledge of the two languages and have...

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As will undoubtedly make the rounds everywhere in the blogosphere today, Google has just launched Google Blog Search. Google's perhaps the single company most identitied with search, so their entrance into the blog search space is a big milestone even though the idea of blog search has been around for years.

For the basics of what the Blog Search team has done, you can take a look at the Frequently-Asked Questions list which does a good job of covering the basics. But at a time when everyone will be talking about (and hopefully thinking about) blog search again, it makes sense to review where we've been so far, and what problems need to be solved in the realm of blog search.

First, the new Blog Search...

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This isn't really MT specific. Many people in the past few days have asked me how I managed to increase readership on my blog. Actually I'm surprised many of them stay and read but I'm happy none-the-less.

There are a few key points if you wish to increase or maintain a readership: • Content This is the most important. Regular, on-topic content will attract many readers of the same interest. If you're writing a journal/diary don't ever think that "No One cares about me." I'll come to journals soon.

Also if you blog about a variety of things you will appeal to a larger group of people. For example, on my blog I talk about everything from technology and the internet to my everyday...

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Some days ago I described a way for being able to offer a fast fulltext search with the help of the MySQL database. Today I will go one step further: leave my own Movable Type Weblog behind, and include several Movable Type resource weblogs into the result lists.

I created a new website. It allows you to find technical information about Movable Type originating from different sources, within one easy to use fulltext search interface.

Currently, articles from Movable Type Weblog and Learning Movable Type, and Movalog can be searched.

Do not talk, show me right now

You can try MTLookup immediately. There is no need to be bored by the following information.

The Problem

If you are working with...

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Looking around the web, you've run across plenty of URLs that look like: /content.cgi?date=2000-02-21/article.cgi?» id=46&page=1

Server side scripts generate the content of those pages. The content of a particular page is uniquely determined by the URL, just as if you requested a page with the URL /content/2000-02-01.html or /article/46.1.html. These pages are different than server-generated pages created in response to a form like a shopping cart, or enrollment. However, search engines will not index these content pages, because search engines ignore pages generated by CGI scripts as potential blind alleys.

A search engine would follow a URL like

/content/2000/02/2...

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I had forgotten to share these little goodies that I frequently use. The little search bar in Firefox is indespensible for me and I have all sorts of search engines there including many Movable Type resources. Here are three that I use most frequent. To install just click the link and click ok on the dialog box that appears, restart Firefox and you should have a nice new search engine added to the drop down list of the search box. • MT Plugins Directory • Learning Movable Type • Movalog

Any others? Post them in the comments!

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Creating a Search Template

Problem

You want to customize the look of your search engine results.

Solution

Edit the default.tmpl file in the search_templates directory.

Discussion

MT provides a handful of search tags which are only recognized in these special templates. Let's take a look at those tags and their usage: • MTSearchResults

Similar to MTGoogleSearch, MTSearchResults is a container tag that creates the search results context and loops through each of the returned items. This tag creates an entry context so that any of the MTEntry tags will be valid. The search also...

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With Jim Heid

In the absence of finalized rich media standards for the web, plug-ins were developed that enabled websites to offer streaming video, animated vector graphics, annoying music tracks, and the like. Over the past couple of years, W3C recommendations have emerged to suggest standardized ways of doing what proprietary plug-ins already do so well.

One of these is SMIL™, the W3C recommendation for multimedia; the other is SVG, intended to deliver vector graphics such as those already used in Flash (but with some essential differences from Flash).

When faced with SMIL, many web designers shrug; when shown what SVG can do today, most Flash designers laugh....

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Adding Alternate Search Templates

Problem

You want to create an alternate layout for your system's search engine.

Solution

Create the template and use the AltTemplate configuration directive to define its use.

Discussion

Typically, when a search is performed, the default template, search_templates/default.tmpl, is rendered in order to display the results. The built-in search can perform a comment search in which the template search_templates/comments.tmpl is used.

If you have multiple weblogs that use the search tool, you will want the search results from one weblog to look...

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