There’s always something to howl about.

A potentially canonical list of weblog naming ideas

I updated the potentially canonical list of real estate weblogs yesterday for the first time since June. One of the benefits of delay is that I get to see who didn’t make it in the long run, saving me some work. Hope is easy. Weblogging is hard.

In any case, I added a form to the page to make it simpler (and, one may hope, quicker) to add, change or remove entries from the list.

Here are two ideas that occurred to me while I was sifting through 3,000 un-dealt-with emails (of all sorts, not just real estate weblogs):

  1. Naming your weblog with an image instead of CSS-styled text is probably a bad idea. We’re guilty of this at DistinctivePhoenix.com, but it’s something I’ll fix the next time I go after that weblog in a big way.
  2. Naming your weblog with your most potentially-valuable keyword is probably a very good idea. Here we’re entirely off the reservation. With the exception of RealEstateWeblogging101.com, nothing I’ve ever done is right. But the value of having your most valuable keyword as your URL is so rich that it might be worth your while, if you don’t already have a lot of traction, to consider starting over with a new domain name.

RealEstateWeblogging101.com is a complete category-killer, and Dave Smith is studying it extensively. It’s interesting to Dave because it’s built entirely in WordPress “Pages,” with almost no ordinary weblog message content.

The name of that weblog is an image, also, not styled text, but, of course, the title of each post and the name of the weblog are encoded in the title tag of each page. There’s something else we’re doing on all of those pages: The title of each weblog post or WordPress “Page” is shown twice, once as the heading of the content and once on the “blackboard” at the top of the page. I don’t know if that is making a huge difference with Google, but it doesn’t seem to be hurting anything.

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