Your Blog's True Identity

If you haven't played around with Wordle, go now.  And then come back.

The image above is a word cloud of text from my RSS feed.  There are a lot of things that you can learn from a visualization like this, so let's break mine down:

Category Analysis

It's easy to see that I write about entrepreneurship. I've done a decent job of staying on topic but I can also see the other themes that I talk about: blogging, careers; education; and writing.  If you have categories on your blog this can help you better determine what they should be.  In my case, the categories don't match the content too often and I'll probably update them as a result.

What I didn't realize about my content was that I write about blogging more than I thought.  I'm fine with that but I don't market my blog that way.  Maybe I'll cut down some of these types of posts, I don't know.

SEO Optimization

From an SEO perspective the word cloud helps me understand how my posts are affecting my blog's search engine ranking.  I can see that "entrepreneur" doesn't show up as much as a lot of other words, yet it's in the description of my blog.  I was surprised by this.  It isn't awful but I will probably work on using it more in my titles or headers.  If the terms are coming up in places that I didn't expect I might want to work on this as well.  It's good to concentrate your core keywords in titles, headers, and links as search engines mark those types of fields as more important than normal body text.

Becoming a Better Writer

In many ways the word cloud above is also embarrassing.  I'm not a trained writer but I don't think that I'm a bad one.  The fact that the the word "really" shows up prominently is disheartening.  I think that my biggest issue as a writer is using adverbs throughout my material.  It makes the content fluffy (!) and there are betters ways of getting your point across.  There are other words that I'm not fond of seeing either: "though," "lot," "like," and "just."  I can do better than that.  Unfortunately I now have to make up for the content that I've added as a result of this post.

The Blogger Beware

The word cloud is based solely on frequency and lacks context whatsoever (and it's case-sensitive).  While "blogging" shows up more than I thought I would would have to look over my posts to see how exactly I'm using it and whether or not I should fix it.  These tips are sweeping generalizations so think about it before you rip your blog apart.

A Challenge to the Reader

My original title for this post was "What your blog is really about."  I would love to hear other suggestions for good titles for this post.  Please leave yours in the comments.

Comments

[Tilney]

Love it! I just generated a Wordle cloud for my personal blog and can see that I mention one of my sisters by name more frequently than the other. At first I felt terribly guilty but then I remembered it was by design. One of them has a much more unusual name than the other, and I don't want to force her into the Internet limelight against her will. (The sister whom I mention by name has plausible deniability, at least!) :-)

[Dale Beermann]

Thanks Tilney! I swear I could play with Wordle all day. If you read a bunch of friends' blogs, it's fun to put their feeds through it and see what comes out too.