Content & Writing Techniques
July 11, 2008
“Content is king”. Though even better is if we emphasize that “QUALITY content is king”. The website’s and blog’s owner must provide helpful and valuable content, write interesting articles that will make repeat visitors and buzz about the website. This is the 4th step from How to create a successful blog.
A writing schedule brings professionalism
Before we jump into “4 web content steps”, I want to make it clear, if you are blogging as a hobby, it will stay hobby! This is vital. What professional publishers do that amateurs do not? Fact is, they have a publishing schedule. I will share my way. You can follow that guide, adjust it to yourself, or simply ignore it. However you should know the secret that actually distinguishes serious bloggers from those who are just playing around is established writing schedule.
Every Monday I am creating my 3 articles for coming week. And that day, I don’t do any other work until I finish that. Later that week I will publish them one by one. I can make additional daily posts to my weblog, but my 3 articles are always ready. I can write article from scratch or rewrite PLR document, it doesn’t matter. The point is, this is giving me space and freedom throughout the week. Does this make sense to you?
And this is leading us to question “How often to post?” It’s something that can be arguable. Actually, it depends of your weblog purpose, structure and topic. For example, if you are a blogger making income from Google Adsence, and similar types of advertisement, then you will prefer to write on a daily basis. On the other hand, if your weblog is additional to your site or other income type, then probably you do not need that writing pace. Remember, your goal is to provide a value on the first place. If you are just starting the blog, whatever the purpose is, you should try to post every day for first 3 to 4 months, or even twice a day. Because more likely is that person visiting your blog, will bookmark it only if there is enough content. And you can provide it only if you publish documents often. After 3, 4 months, I think, 3-4 posts a week is quite enough, but as I said, it depends on weblog purpose. In any case, bear in mind that every new post is bringing new visitors.
And by the way, most people do not read much these days. So, keep it simple, in most cases about 500 words (better 300-400) per weblog article with related image or video is adequate for blogging. Producing longer articles is always a risk the people will run away from it.
Despite what you may have heard, you do not have to be Ernest Hemingway to have a good blog. The point with blogging is that no one is asking from the author to write stories for the Nobel Prize. Blogging is casual way to stay connected with your readers, customers or friends. And it’s much easier if you use some tools to provide web site content. Let’s see how to get quality documents and which tools and techniques can be useful:
Step 1: Who else want catchy headlines and linkbait tips?
Step 2: How to establish a self writing voice?
Step 3: Perfect articles writing trick!
Step 4: Grab the tools! (coming soon)
If you want to be notified the next time I write something, sign up for RSS feed. Thanks for reading.
Tag plugin
July 11, 2008
For every post you can determine keywords related to your article. At the bottom of each post those keywords will be displayed, and when visitor clicks on particular tag, blog will open a new page with all posts you have made with that keyword (tag). Visitor will be able to browse through posts and see related articles for that tag. It will also help in proper disposal of your articles on blog directories.
UTW WordPress plugin
This is the 7th video of WordPress SEO Video Tutorial.
This video will show you how to install and configure Ultimate Tag Warrior plugin for WordPress weblog. This plugin will create tag pages for your weblog. That way you will get more in-depth pages and it will help Google spiders to index your blog better.
Note: Ultimate Tag Warrior is not supported in WordPress 2.3+. Only install it if you’re using version prior 2.3.
Google Sitemap plugin
July 11, 2008
This is the 5th video of WordPress SEO Video Tutorial.
Google xml sitemaps will automatically notify search engines after every blog post. Not only Google, the plugin will notify Yahoo! MSN and Ask engines. Download Sitemaps plugin, and watch configuration.
This video will show you how properly to optimize this plugin for your WordPress blog.
After plugin set up, I suggest you sign up for Google webmaster tool and add your Sitemap.xml to Google.
WordPres Blog META Tags Optimization
July 11, 2008
Welcome to 4th WordPress SEO Video Tutorial. This video is showing you how to configure “All in one SEO” WordPress plugin, which installation you have seen in previous video. If you are using WordPress version latter than 2.5 you will find options for this plugin in your WordPress admin/ settings/ All in one SEO.
Keyword in Title tag
Its most important part of tag optimization. Your page title is the link that will appear in search results. Since it is what people click on in the search results and is the first thing people see about your site. Keyword in Title tag should be close to beginning. Title tag with 10 - 60 characters, and without special characters.
Keyword in Description META tag
This plugin enables you to put Meta description for every post so you can put keywords there. Description Meta tag is average important for search engines. However certainly it should be complement to the page title and bear in mind that your description will show up on Search Engine Results Page when someone is searching. Basically, you want to describe and optimize your posts for humans rather than spamming with too much keywords (overuse of keywords can lead to Google penalization). So do not do this:
blog | blogging | |SEO| WordPress plugin | Meta Optimization
You should write natural descriptive sentences for Meta. You want to be teasing enough to somebody click on it. Imagine yourself like you are writing an ad for your post.
Keyword in Keyword META tag
- Every word in this tag must appear somewhere in the body text. If not, it can be penalized for irrelevant specification.
- No single word should appear more than twice. Other way it may be considered spam. (I found this really hard to do).
Keyword meta tag optimization is not so important, Google purportedly no longer uses this tag, but other engines do.
Here is the source where you can find more SEO optimization guidance of this kind.
Update: In the video you can see that both categories and archives are not set for noindex search engines, but due to duplicate content possibilities, I recommend you set it like on this screenshoot from my blog. This way Google will index categories, but will bypass archives and you will bypass penalties from Google for duplicate content. You can comfortably display your archive on your WordPress weblog, they will just be avoided by search engines (your categories pages will be ranked).
Install WordPress Blog Search Engines Optimized
July 11, 2008
There are a number of reasons why someone can decide to start a blog. On the first glance setup can look confusing, but truth is far from it. On the other hand you don’t want to stop just with WordPress installation, because making just few neat tweaks can bring SEO friendly weblog. Best of all, you will have video help. This is basic set of WordPress video tutorials.
Installing right plugins for WordPress helps search engine optimization for the blog. It makes the difference in front of other publishing softwares, putting you ahead of other bloggers. Step by step video tutorials will lead you through proper search engine friendly WordPress installation, but first let’s check what you need before starting the setup:
- Web host – You need domain name and hosting for your WordPress weblog. If you haven’t already gotten your own hosting account setup, I recommend that you start off using Hostgator. They are one of the best services in the market with quality customer support (phone, forum, chat, email support). I don’t want to spoil them, but you should know:
· for affordable price Hostgator is offering high bandwidth
· WordPress installation with Fantastico which makes set up even more leisurely
· there are no hidden charges
- Ftp program - for uploading files from computer to the hosting server. You can download and use FileZilla, which is completely free. There are a lot of ftp software programs, but for most of them, you need to buy the software. Actually I only know for FileZilla as a free. Using those programs is extremely easy…just watch this short video clip which is explaining basics for FileZilla usage.
FileZilla Instructions
- Now you’re ready to download WordPress and to start with installation.
Video tutorials for WordPress
These videos will guide you and help you to install plugins that will give you higher search engine rankings, you will find which plugin to use for indexing optimization, which is the correct permalinks structure to use… and more tips. So lets begin:
- Famous 5 minute WordPress installation;
- WordPress blog administration guide;
- seo plugin installation;
- WordPress blog meta optimization;
- Google sitemap configuration;
- related posts plugin;
- tag plugin setup.
Structure A SEO Blog
July 11, 2008
Keeping blog organized is very important, making navigation smooth for you and for readers. As blog organization I think on building WordPress as silos, what in essence means thematically. Purpose of silos creating is to help Google and other search engines easier to see the site, indexing it in the right way, and eventually bringing more traffic. WordPress categories are helping so much for proper silo building. Besides that, in this article, I will guide you through plugin and pinging organization for WordPress. So, if you’re not sure how properly to build and organize your WordPress weblog, here is a clue:
Blog’s Tagline
Tagline is important, because it shows in search engine results. Besides that, it also displays in the browser’s tag when your website loads.
To set up weblog’s tagline, go to your WordPress admin / Settings / General, and enter the name and tagline for your weblog.
Make sure to include your major keyword, and even better, if you can, put it as a first word of the phrase.
Why Blog Categories Are Important?
Here we are coming to building WordPress in silo way. I have researched and watched several videos, and found this one from seomoz helpful and the easiest to understand. Watch the video and see what I mean.
In short, keep your categories organized:
- so your visitors can navigate through your WordPress weblog better and easily can find what they want
- in purpose of search engine optimization (silo organized categories help search engine to see properly your site, giving you better SEO rank and eventually send you more traffic),
- In silo-ed categories you need deep linking, to link your posts to other posts in the same silo. For example, if your silos (categories) are “SEO” and “WordPress,” then the goal is to have your SEO posts interlinking with one another and your WordPress posts interlinking with one another.
Manage Categories for your WordPress:
- Use paper and pen to design your blog;
- Go to your WordPress admin/ Manage/ Categories, and set up your categories and sub-categories. Make sure the keyword for your topic or sub-niche is included in your category name;
- Use the “description” box to enter a phrase that will show up when the visitor’s cursor hovers over the category name.
WordPress Plugins
With WordPress you can easily install add-ons called plugins which will bring more functionality to your blog. There are hundreds of them from helping you to optimize for Search Engines to translating blog in other languages, or saving it from spam comments.
Installing and Activating Plugins - Watch my WordPress weblog video tutorials. There you will find how to install and which plugins are important for search engine optimization. The installation is quite similar for all of them, and once you install the first WordPress plugin, you will be confident with configuration of others as well. Further you can browse through WordPress plugins directory.
Internal links
To connect your pages use anchor text. You can check at Wikipedia but in sum anchor text is clickable hyperlink, giving you option to put keywords, and if you are linking from the page that has good page rank, it will boost page rank of the blog post you are linking to, eventually boosting the SEO rank and getting more traffic to that blog post. At seomoz this process has been explained in details.
Additionally to that, I encourage you to check Ian Roger’s post The Google Pagerank Algorithm and How It Works. It will give you an idea how to interact your blog links.
Now, this is very important. I already said that you can watch WordPress Video Tutorials, where you can see configuration of “All in one SEO”, “Google Sitemap” and couple more SEO important plugins. Nevertheless, I want to list 3 more plugins which are for advanced bloggers. What I mean, if you’re new to blogging and website building you can encounter terminology which can be confusing. If it’s your situation, then I suggest you go step by step with video tutorials first, and after that follow instructions for these plugins:
These plugins will give you more control in your blog structure linking. You will be able to determine nofollow for external links and you will have more control for your internal link juice.
You will notice mutual overlapping of some functions, and overlapping with “All in one SEO” and “Google Sitemap”, but it’s important to install and configure all these WordPress plugins, because every of them is bringing something unique. Where convergence is present, just disable that option for one of them (for example “WordPress SEO Master” meta description is overlapping with “All in one SEO” meta description - so I have just disabled this option in “WordPress SEO Master” plugin). It’s not wise just to install these plugins, so read carefully instructions from plugins sites and follow instructions on plugins options page in your WordPress admin.
Update: There is a new version of WordPress SEO Master plugin, which is covering all options from All in one SEO. So, now I see it’s smarter to disable “All in one SEO”, and let “WordPress SEO Master” do whole job.
External links
Use external links to provide relevant resources. If you are using Blogroll to exchange links with other bloggers, then stay in your niche, because Google can „penalize“ you and you can lose SEO traffic if you are linking too much to topics outside of yours. This also count for blog posts, i.e. external link has to be relevant to post topic.
Ping blog
When you publish new post on your WordPress blog, it automatically announces that content to various directories by “pinging” them. Here is the list of services I ping every time with new post:
http://rpc.pingomatic.com/
http://www.kping.com/ping/
http://ping.myblog.jp
http://rpc.twingly.com/
http://ping.blogmura.jp/rpc
There is no need to adjust that every time, it needs to be set only once on your blog and it will be remembered for all next posts. To set up this, in your WordPress admin, just go to Settings/ Writing and scroll down to the bottom of the page and enter the links in the rectangle.
It is important to have pingomatic (or similar services) in the list. I saw many larger lists, but I do not see point if you ping Pingomatic and after separately ping many other services (technorati, weblogs…) which are already pinged with pingomatic. Similar service is kping. I use both (pingomatic and kping) because there are some directories that are not covered on pingomatic.
There’s just one more thing. You will certainly want to install plugin Smart Update Pinger. It will adjust your blog to ping directories only when you’re publishing a new post, not when editing (what will prevent blogging directories to see your pings as spam).
This is end of the 3rd step from How to create a successful blog? Happy silos building and happy blogging!
What’s A Trackback?
June 8, 2008
In a nutshell it’s a type of linkback. It’s a process for bloggers to send a notification and demand for linkback once they write something in one of their documents that directs to other blogger content. Once a weblog author publishes a post, the other blogger receives a notification, and through moderation process can permit or refuse the trackback. They moderate it just like a regular comment. If they permit it, trackback will show in comment sector of their post, with linkback to the first blogger.
Optimize Your Images Like a SEO Professional
June 3, 2008
I have decided to switch to revolution theme and will do that next week because this week I will have limited access to the internet. And this excellent WordPress theme is nice intro for my post, because its area is much smaller than xmark theme which I am using in this moment. So, my large images do not fit in the new weblog theme, and I will need to adjust them. I’ve already done that with few of them and will continue with the rest.
The point is that I need to reformat my blog images. And I want them to fit in nice, and I found that general rules (which will not cause problems in any theme) are:
- For images, only use .jpg or .gif file formats;
- Images on the site should be no larger than 400 x 400 pixels at the most. Even better size would be 200 x 200.
You Don’t Have to Be A Professional To Monitor Your Market!
May 26, 2008
Whatever your site is about and whatever market you are in, this service is bringing post material to you. Like I stated in the post google web accelerator can speed up mozilla firefox and internet explorer Google is offering so much amazing tools behind the searching the web.
Don’t Allow This Stupid Mistake To Lose Your Page Rank
May 22, 2008
Image via Wikipedia
Yesterday I discovered how your website can play “ugly” game with you, along with search engine. These all addresses search engines are seeing like a different URLs, no matter they open the same page:
http://example.com
http://example.com/
http://example.com/index.html
http://www. example.com
http://www. example.com/
http://www. example.com/index.htm
If you or other people are linking to your Internet site using a diversity from these similar URL’s, you’ll not only be thinning PR(Page-Rank) on your site, but in addition to that you’ll suffer the risk of having your content marked as duplicate. Once Google sees all the multiple versions of your domain name their spiders examines which page to rank, and all the rest directs into the supplemental index.
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Hello! I am Sloba and this is web2whizzing. Welcome and enjoy!
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