Journey to the Blog

Journey to the Blog

Day 1 May 17 / 2021

Today I’ve decided to start a blogging in earnest.  I have no idea what to do with it and not a single clue what to write about. I wondered if I should write an essay about my experience in Japan, while good, but I don’t think it will be as interesting. Mainly because I have no idea where to start. I'm leaning towards the temples in my city because the information about them in English is sorely lacking. For personal reasons I have decided to start chronicling my journey. Prior to this I have downloaded several books and applied for several jobs all while knowing almost nothing about SEO and HTML. Today I’ve started learning about them.

SEO: Search Engine Optimization. This is an important term I’m still trying to understand. From what I can tell it’s related to keywords and drives the traffic to your webpage. When I typed the expression “Teaching English” one of the first results was for the BBC. However when I flipped the script and typed in “English teaching” the first time the paid link to a dubious English school in Japan came up. I clicked on it then left quickly. The second time a different English school popped up and the first school appeared down on the list. This is how I learned about “Bounce”

Bounce: When you go back from the webpage quickly after entering it. This has the effect of lowering the page in Google’s rankings.

HTML: This is the script around creating a webpage content. At the moment it looks like Klingon to me so I will have to be more vigilant and learn this one step at a time.

White Hat / Black Hat / Grey Hat: These are terms that describe how content is connected on the page. White Hat follows Google’s search algorithms. Black Hat tried to sneak around them and probably creates click-bait. Grey Hat combines the two and describes a grey area that isn’t completely wrong but not entirely right. Like any company Google says do this to be safe on page 1 but then says don’t do that on page 9 which contradicts  page 1. So what do you do? Your best.

The above are some of the things I’ve learned today. The most important thing is to actually create things that people are interested in reading and doesn’t duplicate content. The very existence of this would probably fail the second one. However I have to start somewhere.