Blogging For Exposure

So you're blogging. That's really great. You can say you have these altruistic motives for doing so, but at the end of the day, you're doing it to get exposure. This is especially critical in the .NET community, as there are hundreds of thousands of us lowly code monkeys vying for attention. So how do you make yourself stand out from the crowd?

Simple Answer: Put your name in your blog title. You'd be surprised how quickly this affects your search placement with Google. Fire up your browser, and search for "Kirk Allen Evans" in Google. The 2nd result you'll see is his blog. That's important when a potential employer decides to Google your name to see what comes up. Scoble and others have noted that their blogging is what helped them get hired.

A little known fact about Google is that is assigns a higher value to information in the Title tag than it does to the information in the keywords metatag. As a developer in the .NET community, you need to take advantage of that fact in whatever site you build to show off your talent. Well, you should take advantage of it on any site you build, period, but that's not the point of this post.

Take a second, and click thru to this post on my blog. Click on the other two blog links I've posted in my "Announcements". Notice the consistency in my blog titles. As I continue linking and getting linked to, this will come into play in the search rankings, and will help build link popularity.

Corroboration: Notice how Scoble wields his GoogleJuice in his blog. You could Google "Scoble seattle pizza" and, the 4th main link down, you'll hear him rave about Buca Di Beppo.

Hope this helps :)