Archive for April 19th, 2009

Another great fitness blog that I’ve come across is that of Colin Timberlake, a fitness freak from America or Canada. He writes about his running training weight training, giving all the information about what times he does a run in and how much weight and number of reps/sets he does for his weight training.

What is different about this blog, is the numerous inspirational people that Colin writes about, and the reasons that he finds them inspirational. For instance, one of his inspirational figures of the day was Madonna. Not (I’m guessing from what he writes about her) for her personality, but for the fact that at over 50, she is still in very good shape and can most probably out-do most women half her age!

It’s these daily inspirational figures that populate the site, and they range from sports personalities, actors, singers, musicians, fighters and of course, a few choice bodybuilders, including the great Arnold Schwarzenegger.

The site is built using WordPress, or a similar blogging solution. The theme looks to have been custom made or at least an off the shelf theme that has been tweaked to fit in with the author’s content and style.

The design is clean and easy to read, with a two colum design that favours the adverts and navigation on the left hand side and the content on the right hand side. My only issue with this is that the advertising is far more prominent that the website navigation, and there does seem to be an awful lot of advertising and affiliate links.

For instance, the left hand column has two Google Adwords text ad blocks, a Doubleclick image ad block and two Amazon widgets that contain affiliate links to various fitness related books and inspirational (or just preferred viewing) films chosen by the arthur. I’m not against monetising a blog, but I don’t believe it should be done at the expense of the navigation.

I would also argue that the Google ads may be more successful if they were integrated into the blog posts, as would the Amazon affiliate links, if they were integrated into the posts and related, so for instance, if he wrote about how Madonna inspires him, he could have an affiliate link to Amazon to a Madonna products page, which could contain books, cd’s and dvd’s of hers.

In terms of the search engine optimisation that has been done on the website, I can’t see that any major sins have been committed. There are no spammy site-wide links which is good, but there is also no tag cloud, which is bad, purely from the point of view that he could be missing out on some easy long tail traffic. I know from my own blog that I get a bunch of random search engine traffic that is directly resulted from my tag cloud.

Last thing to say on the SEO side of things is that the author hasn’t disabled the blog title from each title tag. This means each page title has “| colintimberlake.com” appended to it, which neither adds any extra meaning to the visitor nor the search engines, and in fact will reduce the relevance of the words in the title tag. A small issue that can be resolved easily, and may as well be to maximise the benefit of on-page optimisation.

What would make the biggest difference to the search engine optimisation efforts of Colin’s blog would be to get more links coming into the blog. I could only see six inbound links according to Google, and as the blog has been online since January, that’s measly 1.5 links gained per month so far.

All in all though, it’s a well written blog, the title’s of each page are well thought through to include varying keywords and each page of content contains the keywords and is good quality content which search engines just love.