First off, let me apologize for not posting the last few days. I have been rather busy, which is unusual for me. But there has been a post I have wanted to make entering 2012 and haven’t gotten the chance. What do you want from this site in 2012? I know what we are trying to do. Hit the jump and see if you like it.
Swingin’ Report Show
[Image for the first ever Swingin’ Report Show]
We have done over two dozen podcast, each one having the same type of structure with lots of different people interchanging per episode. For awhile I have been thinking about changing the way we do the show. First I thought I wanted to find a couple of local people. Lets be honest, if I could, that would be awesome. Even though it was practical, it wouldn’t be better than having writers from the site on the podcast.
So the second idea would be to have a regular cast. I have talked to a couple of the writers that I thought my humor clicked with better (Sharky & Barry). We had a good podcast last time around, I would love to keep this going but the biggest issue we face is time. Barry is a hard working intelligent man and Sharky is British. I would love to continue the Swingin’ Report Show with Barry and Sharky as regulars, but time will tell. I also hope to keep the guest thing going.
As for the people telling me I should make the RSS/iTunes store update with new episodes. Trust me, if I could fix this issue, I would have day one. Sadly this little issue has us stumped. Its no like I don’t like RSS or iTune podcast feeds, I do. They are easy ways to deliver the show to people. If we could bust into everyone’s living room and do a live show so you could see all the times we have to stop and edit, we would. But we can’t. But I will definitely stop delaying and find a fix for the RSS/iTunes feed for good.
We also want to hear what you want to be added to the show or complaints. Always open on improvement.
Tl;dr: Basically I want to have the podcast now have regular cast of me, Barry the Nomad and Sharky. As for the RSS/iTunes feed, it will be fixed soon. Tell us what you think below.
Video Content
Video content is now easy to upload thanks to the popularity of Youtube, blip.tv and vimeo. But we have been living in the stone ages for a couple of years, doing a few low quality videos every now and never. I want to step up the quality of our video content and frequency of it.
This is the thing, I have not really dabbled much in video content at all. I don’t know what kind of things people want videos of. Basically there are a bunch of sites doing videos. Some do “Let’s Play: x title” where they play a game and make comments over the gameplay. There are daily/weekly videos where people recap important news that day/weekly. What kind of content would you like to see? The more ideas we gather, the better it is for the readers.
Tl;dr: We want to do way more video content on the site. What kind of things do you want us to do on video? (no homo)
Search Engine woes
One thing that always pisses me off is that our search engine results are shit. See the above picture. Really? Come on. We have a ton of lower traffic sites always being indexed higher than us. I talked to a few other blog owners who have pretty tangy results and they said that they just run wordpress without anything special. Really? Why does Google hate us?
I have no idea and really don’t know how to go about fixing this. We already have a help wanted sign and haven’t really heard back from legit people. If you know anyone or anything about search engine optimization, contact us or comment. If you ran into this problem and fixed it, tell us so we can fix it.
This is my short term goals for the site. What else should I be adding? Thanks for reading!
Ad:
I just want to see the show back on some basis. I don’t care if it’s just Sanus talking to himself. That’s half-80% of the reason I visit the site so often. “Sega? They’re still around? Binary Domain? The fuck?”.
If time is an issue why not try this; record a part of a segment, then send the audio/transcript to the next person and have them give their input, and when it’s done just edit them together.
Video content? Uh.. unboxings? It’s a dumb trend, but you guys might be able to pull it off. How about reviewing it? It might actually be faster than writing an actual review, and may even bring a few people from YouTube over to check out the site that would help you trafficking search issue kind of. Two birds with one pebble.
Video reviewes are awesome IMO, I’d like to see that.
And more round-table articles!
Round-tables are totally doable and I’m looking to bring those back on a bi-weekly basis. 🙂
Video reviews are awesome, and it’s up to George if we do them, but from my experience they take a lot of time. You have to play the game, record bits that you want to talk about, write a script and edit it all together cohesively. It’s doable, but takes a good deal of time to do a quality job.
I’m actually a professional Video Editor, so if you guys need help/feedback on doing video reviews, let me know. I’m likely to start doing my own video reviews for fun, I just have to sort out the right equipment (most of which is professional-grade at work).
Hey SEGAbits!
DISCLAIMER: Before continuing, I just want to make it clear that I’m absolutely NOT a professional, or even that knowledgeable, on the subject of search engine optimisation. But I have been working on SEO for my own crappy site, and come across a couple of ideas that helped. You guys probably know all of ’em, but there’s no harm in sharing, right? 🙂
First off, linking to things helps a lot! Linking to older articles/static pages/forum posts whenever you get the chance gives bots more things to look at, giving you more results on Google. It also is beneficial to have a text-based “site map” with key links on the bottom of every page for the very same reason. When it comes to links, you know what they say, the more the merrier!
What’s helped me the most is getting links back to my site from other places on the web. Particularly, link backs that used the title of my website, as well those that came from sites with related content, did wonders for me.
I’ve heard that not using the name of your site in the title of blog pages boosts results. It apparently has to do with broadening the search terms and attracting people to a more-“focused” looking article, leading to more clicks and a higher ranking. Obviously, your mileage will vary on whether it’s a good idea or not. 😛
I also came across this related plug-in for WordPress: http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/all-in-one-seo-pack/
It may or may not be of any use to you, though. XD
Anyway, I hope something I said wasn’t a total waste of your time. Best of luck!
Hey BlazingTales, thanks for the input. Sadly we have already have SEO All in One installed, and it hasn’t done anything. I’ve also submitted a SEGAbits sitemap to Google, the big G just hates us.
well, i liked a lot the last 3 podcasts…listened a lot of times. I would like to see George, Barry the nomad, Sharky and also Aki At in all podcasts.
Yeah I like george in the podcast. Ever since Barry the podcast has significantly became more enjoyable to listen to as well. Aki-T brings the knowledge and is always interesting to listen to. Sharky isn’t on too often lately, hopefully we’ll see more of him :P. Oh yeah and Uranus. Please make him join sometime again
I like listening to the podcasts alot but hate to say it, and don’t set yourself a time limit because I think this, just sharing my thoughts:
I find myself thinking an hour and a half is a bit too long for me to listen to sometimes. I would find myself thinking that I should be doing something else when passing the hour. Hope you apreciate my feedback. On the other hand I enjoy every second.
Don’t forget Shigs, and nSEGA in the podcasts! I don’t know about the Itunes, but the RSS feed works for me. Anyway looking forward to another great year from you guys!
iTunes is a pain, but I use a crazy workaround that’s really easy, if you have a Mac and a MobileMe account (you might be able to do it by publishing to a folder instead of MobileMe). created a special dummy podcast web site with iWeb, then hit “submit podcast to iTunes”
…Thought I would help you out since I complain about it all the time. 🙂