SYNTHESiST refines White Hat Search Engine Optimization 170.0

Surprisingly, Kathleen Eisenhardt and inductive case research wins
To help improve blog content, the very first principle of white hat SEO, I installed a keyword cloud plug-in at the Sidebar on the right to compare results with my tag cloud.

At the footer below, the tag cloud is my own view about what is important in this blog; the keyword cloud tells me what visitors searched and found on the blog – one is author-defined and the other is market-driven information.

And SYNTHESiST’s readers tell me differently since the keyword cloud was installed two weeks ago! And the keyword cloud leader, Kathleen Eisenhardt …

This is important as it tells me I am hitting my target audience of professors and researching students.

What is mortifying to me is that I did not anticipate that Kathleen Eisenhardt and grounded theory research with case studies would excite the most search in my blog.

I even removed one reader reaction thinking their was some embedded comment spam that was driving traffic. Still the search and found feedback consistently continued. So there, that leads to a market insight.

Maybe, I should also write about Yin (1989) or Corbin and Strauss (1990) that I have studied and are in my library. What say you?

Definitions. Search engine optimization or SEO is the set of techniques to make a website or blog visible to search engines like Google or Bing with the ultimate objective of getting the site to the first page of each search for keywords. The first and most important keyword, of course, is the blog title.

For SYNTHESiST, a Google search will show it has achieved the second or third mention on the first page.

There are two classes of SEOs: white hat or black hat. White hat techniques or above board and include good content or frequent updates among others. Black hat are frowned upon by search engines as they increase traffic by tricking the robot.

A discredited technique that can lead to blacklisting by Google is to write the keyword repeatedly but invisibly on a page to increase its mention and page rank. Blacks hats, often with negligible content, drive traffic to their sights to make money on clicks at online ads. For me, black hats are not necessarily bad; some such sites are designed as trading or buy-and-sell markets.

Tag Cloud. For SYNTHESiST, the tag cloud is located at the bottom of the home page, at the footer.

Its top six terms on my tag cloud – that as the phrase indicates I tagged as I post the blog – are: innovation, change management, emerging markets, intensive learning, and Bengt Ake Lundvall and national innovation systems. They are the subject matter I write about most and the object of writing the blog.

Keyword Cloud. At the Sidebar at right, the cloud of keywords (modified and grouped) come from the terms used by search engine visitors and that are found in SYNTHESiST.

The top six keywords are about: Eisenhardt and case study research, mobile phone banking, blue ocean and s-curve of innovation, technology innovation in emerging markets, Peter Senge and systems thinking, and William Baumol and innovative entrepreneurship.

Lessons to Learn. It is interesting to note that the apparent sweet spot on these top keywords are similar to the topic of conference invitations I have been receiving after publishing this blog: learning about innovation and entrepreneurship in Asia (emerging markets).

I am still engaged. I am sure there are more insights to be gleaned from studying the keywords themselves, the trend of new keywords for example impact of the Apple iPad and trending topics pertaining to innovation on social media like Facebook and Twitter, and the gap between what I think is important and what my market think is important.

White hat SEO. The Alexa ranking continuous to improve from December 25 with listing in more search directories other than Google. I will report the numbers and improvement as of February 25 in the anniversary post.

New blog features learned first and then installed include poll surveys and new page. These will be continuously updated and added on to.

I did conduct a more basic SEO review and was disappointed with myself for finding out I have 2062 miscues in place. I can only blame myself as, five months ago, I did decide and reported here to write as one would in a regular essay and print as in a regular magazine.

Three Examples. It seems I do have to accept that big brother, the search engine crawler robot, is a constant consideration as an important reader. I did make the adjustments based on the SEO rules as below:

Firstly, if you noticed, all ampersands have disappeared in the printed titles. It seems they, and other special characters, stop the crawlers from reading the rest of the title so a lot of keywords are lost from the index.

Secondly, it seems the crawlers like shorter titles and many of mine have been tagged as sub-optimal. It strange though that extra-long titles are the norm in such blog magazines like Huffington Post.

My journalist-editor recommends titles of not more than eight in the active sense as in above.

A friend and former national news editor-in-chief would cringe at the title of this post above but, as you guessed, white hat and search engine optimization are keywords, actually two-word and three-word keywords in the portmanteau-laden dialect of the net writers. I do have to cater to my weighty reader, the Google bot and her ilk, and make her e-life easier as she works to index this blog.

Finally, articles like the and an have disappeared from my titles as they are not counted in titles and subheads in permalinks.

The Compromise. I have to extend the effort at creativity to make sure that human and robot readers are able to read, store and index the pages in the brains and storage servers. In doing so, as with most writers, I create content that is both meaningful and memorable.