300th Post!

This is my 300th post. The second 200 came much quicker than the first and the third even quicker. I have gotten into a blogging routine that I am comfortable with. I post on average 5 times a week, usually taking off on the weekends. I have stuck with Entrecard but I don't obsess over it anymore. I drop on those blogs that I like and don't stress about reaching any magical number. My blogging routine is definitely going to be interrupted in the next few weeks and turned on its head (I know I'm reaching, I just thought the shot of Kate went with the post for some reason). It's going to be hard to do much dropping while I'm off work so I apologize now.

I comment when I can and intend on spending more time on the blogs I enjoy whether they are entrecard or not in the coming year. I'm through dropping on blogs completely out of my realm or ones that haven't updated in over a month. It's affected my visitor numbers somewhat but I'd rather have 100 quality visitors a day than 250 when more than half are spending mere seconds with me.

I'm troubled by something I discovered on my Webmaster Tools from Google recently. It said that I'm in the 97% of download time and it takes an average of 20 seconds for my site to load. This is terrible. I removed a bunch of unnecessary widgets and links that it said were slowing things down but it still is dragging. I tried to run a site check last night with the new Page Speed Checker but it wouldn't install for me for some reason at home. I'll try it again later and hopefully find some more things that I can fix to speed things up. I really like my blog template that I spent money on from my graphic designer but if it is slowing my blog down that dramatically I will have to find a solution in the new year.

I've been debating about whether I should keep this blog solely for business and knitting and using Lenox Pics for personal and photography. I've been thinking about doing a form of the 365 shots in a year and reserved the blogspot name for myself. I think keeping two blogs going would be too much time and energy but I don't want this blog to get too broad. I've never been a true knitting blog and consider my cohorts to be other crafters rather knitting or otherwise. I've gotten more personal here in the past 6 months than I had originally intended but that is how things evolved for me. For those of you with two blogs do you think it is worth it or should I just focus my energy here?

Thanks for sticking with me. Hopefully I can keep coming up with something worth saying for the next 300 posts.

Birthday Ham?

You all made me feel better about my first bad experience with a craft show customer. I definitely learned from it and will be prepared next time. I don't think it would have bothered me so much if she hadn't chosen 3 really nice scarves including the one above which I had actually contemplated keeping. I may have enough yarn to recreate in if I make it more narrow. It's all a learning experience that's for sure. I had so many good interactions with customers that I really can't let one bad apple spoil anything for me. I particularly loved the women who bought one scarf on Saturday and loved it so much she came back on Sunday to get 3 more for herself and gifts.

So, moving on. I have obviously been a bit focused on Strange Folk the past few weeks. I'm sure you're ready to hear about something else. Unfortunately I've got nothing. So I decided to look at my webmaster tools to see what people were actually reading on my blog and saw some interesting things. First off did you know that you can use it to find out which searches you are ranked in? Here are some of the top google searches that I come up in and the ranking:

strange folk festival

5

craft show ideas 9

fall scarves

7

good advice for life 7
birthday ham 1

sales dance

1

color quizes 9

booth display

3

lenox anniversary gifts 9

someone who knits

10

I'm happy that I'm the first blog to come up in search under just about any combination of the words Strange Folk Festival. I have also had a lot of people find me by searching for craft show ideas and other combinations including the words craft show recently and I hope they found some things that were helpful to them. But who knew that I was a source for "good advice for life." I think the Birthday Ham is hilarious. I did a happy birthday post for my brother, whose name is Hamilton or Ham for short. I don't think whoever was searching for birthday ham ideas got what they were looking for here.

That's all I've got today. We're going to Archon this weekend in Illinois. It's my husband's favorite weekend of the year when he can be as nerdy as he wants to be and nobody judges. I should have some interesting pictures to share on Monday of the festivities.

SEO For Dummies

When I started my blog over 6 months ago I had no idea everything I would need to learn to be even remotely successful at this new hobby of mine. I saw the term SEO batted around and had no idea what it even stood for or how it related to me. Eventually I picked up that it meant Search Engine Optimization, which really didn't explain much to me. I started to gather that it had something to do with how we come up in the Google search and involves backlinks and code, which are terms that made my head hurt so I just went back to looking at pretty pictures of yarn. The past few weeks for some reason I've suddenly gotten inspired to understand more about how my blog gets seen. I am in no way even close to an expert about this stuff so if you are looking for answers I'm not the one to come to but I figured that there are probably some others who are as clueless as I am that might appreciate a few places to start.

To let you know how clueless I really was I didn't even know that Google WebMaster Tools even existed. I had installed Google Analytics early on but was only using it for the bare necessities like seeing what searches people used to find me and how many unique visitors I had. A few weeks ago I stumbled across a very user friendly blog with some great tips that even I was able to put to use right away. Gary Conn puts things in easy terms and goes step by step showing screen shots so that I was able to start using the Webmaster Tools to find out how many links I had and any errors that Google had discovered in my site. It also helped show me what searches I was most visible in. Surprisingly I found that a post that I did as a throw away a few months ago about the Facebook MeME, defining your life by song titles, was the top of the searches for some reason. I still don't know how to recreate this phenomena but it helps to know how people are finding you anyways.

So from Gary I learned how to add a sitemap to my blog for Google here. I also learned how to add meta tags and site descriptions to my template code on blogger here. I promise it sounds scarier than it is. For some of you this is probably like baby stuff that you conquered the first week of blogging but I am so not a techie.

I'll share my observations of blog directories and trying to get links later in the week. I really had no idea how important those links really were until recently. I now understand why my Google ranking is so bad, since I had made no effort to get or trade links in the past. If you have any beginner tips on SEO please share!

I am sharing a few bad pics of my niece Jess with her obsession. She has now made close to 60 finger knitting creations. It was so inspiring to see her find pure joy in the act of making something with her hands. She has now started a club in her class where she teaches kids how to finger knit and they work together after school. They are planning on setting up a booth at their church fish fry the next few Fridays to sell them and donate the money to charity. How sweet is that?