While it would be great to have a perfect blogsite, few actually achieve
perfection because blogsite content is undergoing frequent change. Furthermore, the presence of an
imperfection—called out as a quality assurance issue—does not mean a page is invisible, ineffective, or was rejected by
a search engine. It simply means, that in terms of MyST Blogsite quality assurance metrics,
an item is not perfect. Perfection is not necessary for your site to be effective.
However, knowing where imperfections lie helps you and you team create higher quality content,
something that your visitors—and search engines—appreciate.
For this reason,
we recommend that you verify and address the issues called out in your QA
reports, whenever practical. Weblog Posting Activity Each week,
your MyST Blogsite tracks your weblog posting activity and provides a simple
report that summarizes the activity. This report helps you gauge how you (and your other authors) are doing in terms of
maintaining a consistent writing pace. Regular weblog posting is an important success factor in obtaining good visibility for your blogsite. The report highlights channels with recent posting rates below one item per week, making it easy to spot underperforming weblog authors. Just click the name of the weblog to jump directly to that channel. The report helps you see where you may be able to improve the posting consistency. Tip -
Set a recurring calendar item to remind you to write something at least once a week. Tip -
Use your private intelligence and public briefing channels as sources of blogging ideas.
Try subscribing to these channels in your favorite RSS reader.
Item Titles (or Names) Every
item should have a Title. This is sometimes referred to as Name. By default a new post is named "New
Item". A blank title field or a title called "New
Item" is called out as a QA issue. Search engines rely heavily on the title of each
item, so you should definitely fix any title issues. Item Summaries Ideally, all items should have a summary. The summary field allows up to 255 characters and should accurately reflect what the
item is about. An empty summary is called out as a QA issue.
Summaries are important for visitors, search engines, and RSS feeds, so you
should try to write meaningful summaries for every item. Keyword Property Usage All
items should contain one or more (but not more than ten) keywords (or key-phrases) that accurately describe the primary ideas
of the item. Keywords are used by some search engines and tagging systems. For
example, MyST Topic Cloud uses keyword properties to create topic tags. The absence of any keywords,
or the presence of more than ten keywords, is called out as a QA issue. Tip - Start new
items by adding keywords and key-phrases first; they will act as guideposts while writing your content.
After saving an item, review the topic tags to verify that they accurately
classify the item.
Link Property Usage Link properties contain three elements of data; the Title (or Name), the
Synopsis, and the URL. Missing titles and
synopses create problems for search engines and users. Missing synopses also limit an understanding of where the link leads; this can affect your visitor's experience and
impair classification of the targeted content by search engines. As such, these fields are important;
missing values trigger issues in your QA reports. The URL field requires the same treatment expected of hyperlinks (discussed below). Tip - When you complete your
item, save it and then re-edit it to add link properties. Make it a habit to expose your primary embedded text links as link properties. As you do this, check the embedded links to make sure they have title attributes and use the same attribute text in the link property descriptions.
Broken Hyperlinks Link properties must contain a valid HTML 4.0 URL. The most common mistake is
including leading and training spaces, since we tend to copy and paste URL's into the link property fields. URL's
with leading or trailing spaces may appear to work fine in your web browser, but
such URLs may fail with search engine crawlers or other web spiders. For
this reason, such URLs are called out as QA issues. Other link issues include a URL that is bad, or perhaps a URL that is good, but at the time
MyST Blogsite tested it, the address was unreachable. If the URL address fails
to respond with a page within 30 seconds, the QA system notes it as a broken
link. Tip
- If a flagged link appears to work when you test it, re-edit the link and
make sure that it does not contain leading or trailing spaces.
Broken Images No one likes to see broken images, so
the quality assurance system looks closely at the images you use in your blogsite. Missing ALT tags, image size, and of course, bad URL's to the images, trigger issues in your QA report. You can avoid these by using the image tool bar button
 to create images in your content. If you completely fill in the fields for this tool bar option, you will generally avoid image issues. Tip - Make sure you review your blogsite (from time-to-time) as a visitor sees it; use the public URL to do this and preferably from a computer besides the one you use to create your content. Doing this will expose potentially broken images that work fine from your desktop system, but fail on other computers.
Correcting Issues The QA reports attempt to describe in detail each issue it has found. It also provides a link to each
item in question. This makes it possible to navigate to the offending posts. Once you have the post displayed, correct the issues by simply using the edit link at the bottom of the post content. Ranking Reports
Note: Ranking reports are included with Standard (i.e., level 2) blogsite
configurations and higher.
Rankings for a sampling of the words and phrases used in your blogsite
measured weekly against a search engine. MyST Blogsite ranking services use Google to measure your domain rankings. All ranking data should be consider a snapshot or thumbnail perspective since each post may be found in a variety of ways and across many search engines.
Once your blogsite domain is detected in the top search results, based on keywords or
item titles, the ranking report data will begin to accumulate. This may take as little as a few weeks or as much as
several months from the launch of your blogsite. The timing depends on many
factors. One important thing you can do to accelerate this process is to
ensure that you have a prominent link from your primary website(s) to your
blogsite. MyST Blogsite offers three ranking reports:
- Name Rankings—This report lets you track the visibility of the name of
each weblog and each individual weblog item.
- Keyword Rankings—This report lets you track the visibility of specifically
targeted words and phrases.
- Link Rankings—This report lets you track the visibility of the title of
each link property specified in a channel item.
It is important to stress that each of these reports provides only a
thumbnail sketch of your blogsite visibility. In most cases, your blogsite
will be indexed under many other words and phrases not reflected in these
reports. | 
