I’ve used CoverItLive twice to liveblogged 2 events back in February. One was a Saresehan (it’s like a small seminar with small audiences) and a live music.

I will highlight the Saresehan event, as it was a success in terms of the Live Blogging introduction to the local music community. Knowing that less Indonesian music community was accustomed with this sort of online live event coverage (back then, people mostly responded like, live blogging? WTF? Is it like a LIVE chat? What’s the different between those two? etc etc).

However soon after the Live Blogging ends, the widget became dull. It’s like a dead widget in the middle of a blog post. Worst thing is to me, covering a live event especially seminar-like events, is like producing an unsearchable keyword rich content. So with that dead widget, there’s no way people could find the event coveragae through search engine search.

Today, CoverItLive through mailing list, announced their new features which include this Search Engine friendly help:

A potential drawback that concerns users of hosted software is that search engines will not credit their site for content in a hosted application (like CoveritLive).

Yes. It’s a drawback and it concerns me as i found most of my music community site (60%-70%) traffic come from Search Engines.

But CoverItLive has done a good job regarding this issue, they introduce an embedable Live Blogging result and which is surely readable by search engine.

To use the feature, simply login to your account, go to Completed Live Blogs then click the Save Content Locally. Then the site will produce an embedable content. Simply embed the codes to your web page.

I checked out the result using SEO Browser, and now the page is FULL of TEXT. I love it. Thank you CoverItLive.

PS: By the way, CoverItLive is free.

This guest post was initiated when Aaron Wall asked his readers whether he can write a guest post on his reader’s blog. So i immediately asked him if he wouldn’t mind to write SEO for non tech as at topics like Football, Music or even Pranks. Below is what he wrote for me. Hope this is useful for you too.

Every topic worth writing about has passionate people talking about it – after all, what attracted you to the topic? If you are in the tech field you can write a great post and get hundreds or thousands of links out of it. In some niche fields that might be near impossible. But it is worth remembering that you are only competing against other people writing about the same topics. So if you write a blog about a niche topic the measurement for success might not be 100 links, but 5 links, or maybe even only 1 good reference.

As far as SEO for blogs goes, I think the Blogger’s Guide to SEO (http://www.seobook.com/bloggers) is probably one of the better documents available on the topic. But lets say that your niche is so small that it seems like many of the ideas about communication and link building in that guide are irrelevant. The truth is, that no matter how small your topic is there are going to be other people who care about the topic too.

The key is figuring out where your passions align with their passions. Are you going to write a site about the NFL and break onto the market as the quick leader? Not likely. But if you created a site about the Chicago Bears, and wrote it religiously (like you were Mike Ditka’s son) then eventually people would notice it. The key there is that a team is something people are already passionate about… it is an established brand with fans. There are lots of right wing political blogs and lots of left wing political blogs…those party affiliates are brands. With music band names are brands, and so sites like GreenPlastic.com follow the latest Radiohead news, syndicate videos, and share lyrics and guitar tabs online, etc.

If you want to create your own brand the two options are to follow on someone else’s brand (which is easier), or to create something that people are passionate about and want to share. That passion can be creating great topical content built up over months and years, content that strokes the ego and identity of targets (award programs and interviews work great), or content ideas where your topic overlaps with other topics.

For example I created free SEO tools http://tools.seobook.com/ and made many of them open source. Not only does that content tie in with SEO, but it also ties in to people who like free and open source software. Don’t just think about your topic… think about how it
relates to other topics and other people. Taking that one step further, if you are going to run a prank why not do one about viagra or credit cards http://www.zug.com/pranks/credit/?

I’m a rookie domainer. I started domaining & making websites/blogs at 2006. I started out by having 5 domains. RobinMalau.com was my first domain (surely!). Since then, I was going off off the internet for about 8 months and back to blogging in June 2007. Now, I have like 30 domains and manage half the number of blogs/websites for myself and my friends.

For the last 7 days, I help a friend to build his band’s website/blog. He has a huge number of inventory (read: materials, pics, songs, concert archives etc) but never has a website. His ex girlfriend bought him a domain years ago but since they broke up, the domain was left unprotected.

Well, for this project, the hardest part was to regain its .com domain back. I am surprised with the lack level of awareness of my friends about their band/business domains. I saw cool bands lose their .com names because lack of understanding that they lease a domain by paying a super small amount of money annually. Most of these domains were thrown back to the domain market (mostly bought by domain brokers) because it was left expired by its initial registrar.

Oh well. Since the presence of the internet become more and more important for your brand (read: business), the first lesson you should learn is: never lose your domain name.

One thing i find out if you want to move your blog to WordPress, the first thing you should do is finding the right domain hosting. I use Dreamhost because from my point of view, it’s just better than anyone in the market. Then, before you decide to move the blog, choose a template. It’s a hard part.Unlike Blogger, WordPress theme market is super huge (you can check the theme market at the official site here or make a Google search for it). So, after experiencing weeks of confusion of choosing themes for my first self-hosted WordPress blog, i started this blog and my Manchester United blog by first find the right theme.

In general, WordPress themes can be divided into 3 categories. First, free themes which i use for my earlier blogs. Second, premium theme, that is a theme that you should pay to use while other people can also use. Third, custom template theme. For this blog, i use the second option.

The second option usually cost from $15-$100 for a single license theme while the custom template could cost $250 – up. Because of my lack of html/css coding knowledge, i waste most of my time configuring codes and browse into user forums instead of writing posts. So, i decided to buy a theme that in the end i can ask the designer for assistance configuring. I started searching for the most fit theme for me, design and price wise. Until i found this template from Armen Thomassian.

Armen is a young passionate designer from the UK who create this theme for charity. My family have monthly donation plan, so i figure that i can use this cool well designed theme by donating a very small amount of money and being a part of the charity. Well, what a good deal!

So i pay for the charity, contacted the nice guy Armen, then he send me the template file. If you see his blog, i copy almost all element from his blog to customize this theme. I am sorry, because i don’t know other way to do it. But i will try to figure out my own style later.

Anyhow, if you plan to buy a cheap WordPress theme with a good cause, you can check out Armen’s theme here, see the template (also available in 1 & 2 sidebar options), and read the cause. It’s great deal. You can donate for a good cause and get a cool well designed WordPress theme.

Happy WordPressing!

Update (Jan 6): I also say goodbye to Blogrush because apparently it’s useless.

[youtube width="425" height="355"]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NN2I1pWXjXI&rel=1&border=1[/youtube]

Well, i am now an experience wordpress user. Lol. No, i’ve passed my first day as a WordPress user & i am excited. Apparently, compare to WordPress, Blogger is super easy to use.

Before i got into blogging in Blogger, i used to design and developed my band’s website. So i now some Frontpage and FTB publishing basics. But since i know Blogger, i left those ‘old’ stuff. Now i am back using it and how this new blog system work is apparently quite simple.

All you need is Microsoft Frontpage and an FTP software. Go back and forth from WordPress dashboard to FTP software, to Window explorer finding those editable PHP files, publish it through ftp and refreshing the blog (I don’t know how to describe this best, at least i keep my promise to update the process ).

WHATEVER. Here comes the update. When i tried to migrate my blogger blog to wordpress, i think Google block the access to my Blogger account from WordPress. So i decided to use a super shortcut. I created a new WordPress.com account, imported all posts and comments from my Blogger blog, and export it into an XML file. Then i sign in to my new WordPress (people might call it WordPress.org or something, i am not sure, i am a rookie) and imported the xml files, then it’s done. I’m done migrating my Blogger blog to WordPress. I am not sure whether this is the perfect way to move your blog to a new platform, but that’s what i did and it works until i realize that my YouTube embed posts are all gone LOL. Whatever, i can embed it back one by one eventough it suck!

But, i still have some fun browsing through new templates and have fun perplexing some programming details. Dude, i’m a WordPress.org user and i am stoked! More updates later.

[youtube width="425" height="355"]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0klgLsSxGsU&rel=1&border=0[/youtube]

Via Digital Inspiration.

Did you get this? This is cool. If you want to know what blogrush is, please go to their site here.

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- 10,000+ Blogs Removed From BlogRush
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- Busy Week Ahead!

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