[Discuss] BLU's SEO

[Eric Chadbourne]

This may sound odd but why does blu care about seo?  If somebody in the 
area is interested in the topic they will find us.  So we only have to 
be "findable".  About 10 years ago I wanted to learn about gnu/linux.  I 
googled for local groups.  Found blu and have learned a ton.  I have 
suggested blu to many other technologists and probably zero have stayed 
on the discuss list long.  The complaint somebody told me just last week 
was that the list was way over their head.  So I think this is a very 
specialized group of folks.  My $0.02.

I just opened a private window and googled "boston linux group" and blu 
was #1.

--
Eric Chadbourne
617.249.3377
http://theMnemeProject.org/



------ Original Message ------
From: "Tom Metro" <tmetro+blu at gmail.com>
To: "L-blu" <discuss at blu.org>
Cc: "Joseph Guarino" <jguarino at evolutionaryit.com>
Sent: 10/17/2013 3:08:55 PM
Subject: [Discuss] BLU's SEO
>At last night's talk someone raised the question of what could be done
>to improve BLU's SEO. Here are some thoughts I had:
>
>-consolidate BLU's online properties from 3 sites (main, wiki, desktop
>blog) into one site. The down-side is that the replacement would need 
>to
>be a CMS, and would take more work to setup and maintain than the
>current simple site supplemented with outsourced hosted services. The
>"cost" to do this may exceed the SEO benefit. Although a "one-click"
>install of a good CMS at a shared hosting provider may prove adequate,
>and low maintenance.
>
>-make more use of embedding to show content on blu.org from the various
>outsourced services, like Flickr, Picasa, Google Calendar, Wikispaces,
>etc. YouTube was specifically mentioned at the meeting, and John Abreau
>has already started doing this (http://blu.org/video/). The only change
>I'd recommend is embedding the videos along with the meeting summaries,
>so a search turning up the meeting summary also shows the video. For
>example, this talk:
>http://blu.org/cgi-bin/calendar/2012-dec
>should embed the video.
>
>-the speaker, Joseph, suggested the idea of having rotating guest
>bloggers as a way to build up content on blu.org, which is great, but
>BLU actually has two good sources of fresh content: the meetings and 
>the
>mailing list.
>
>Some steps could be taken to package up the post-meeting information to
>present it better, make it easier for a human to navigate, and easier
>for a search engine to index. (Here's where a CMS could help.)
>
>For the mailing list, the archives are already published in multiple
>places and indexed by search engines, but not in an ideal way for bring
>traffic back to blu.org. Someone seeing a BLU Discuss posting in their
>Google search results is more apt to get taken to mail-archive.com or
>gmane.org than blu.org. If you want the canonical location for a 
>message
>that people link to to be on blu.org, you need to run a higher-quality
>list archive UI than pipermail. And the message archives need to be
>framed with the usual site navigation elements so you can explore what
>BLU is about. Take a look at a message from the official archives:
>http://lists.blu.org/pipermail/discuss/2013-October/045629.html
>There are no links back to learn what BLU is. No logo. No branding.
>
>The other way to repurpose the mailing list content would be to create
>an automated system that lets subscribers rate messages for
>quality/usefulness, and then automatically surface the highest rated
>messages on a blog on blu.org. (As an added bonus, blog postings seem 
>to
>get a higher page rank than archived list messages.) (Ideally the
>blogging UI would be tweaked to direct users who want to comment to the
>mailing list.)
>
>-something easier to implement than any of the above and potentially
>more impactful would be to list BLU in various user group directory
>sites, like Meetup.com (already used by the Desktop SIG). With the 
>other
>techniques above, someone looking for an answer to a specific 
>Linux/UNIX
>problem might uncover a BLU posting or video, but they may not be "in
>the market" for joining a user group. In contrast, people searching the
>group directory at places like Meetup.com are "ready to buy." The only
>reason BLU doesn't already have a Meetup.com presence is that 
>Meetup.com
>  charges a monthly fee.
>
>-lastly, BLU is pretty well connected with all the social networks, but
>it doesn't seem to make much use of them. (For example, I haven't been
>posting the meeting announcements to the LinkedIn group.) Ideally, we
>should build a small web app that automates publishing of meeting
>notices to the announce list, Google Calendar, adding to blu.org,
>posting to LinkedIn and Facebook (and Meetup.com?) as events, and
>posting a summarized version and a link to the other networks.
>
>If the idea to surface notable list postings on a blog is implemented,
>references to those postings would be another good stream of content to
>distribute via the social networks.
>
>(Note to BLU organizers and volunteers: I don't say any of the above as
>a criticism. In a volunteer organization, getting information published
>for the least cost/effort is often more important than things like 
>SEO.)
>
>Anyone have other ideas?
>Anyone want to volunteer to work on any of them?
>
>  -Tom
>
>--
>Tom Metro
>Venture Logic, Newton, MA, USA
>"Enterprise solutions through open source."
>Professional Profile: http://tmetro.venturelogic.com/
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