Top 30 Social News Websites

September 15, 2008

Though many people do not see difference on the beginning, social news sites are a little bit different from bookmarking websites. As the name is saying the focus should be on news, so you can submit or vote for the particular news. Regard to that, when submitting a site to social news websites be sure that story is in news format. Read more

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Your writing voice!

July 11, 2008

How to find self writing “Voice” especially if your blog is business oriented? It’s Easy!
It’s much like writing a personal journal on topic of your interest. Here are some tips to initiate you:

Write in a manner that’s entirely natural to you (use words and phrases that you would use naturally in speech);
Let your views and passions emerge through your writing;
Use imagery and metaphors to make your writing more vivid and articles interesting;
Write for your visitors. Imagine who you’re writing for and ‘speak’ directly to them like they are sitting in the same room with you.

This is the 2nd step from web site and blog content tips, so lets see how to establish a writing voice!

Making the difference in business blogging

Blogging is important because if someone is going to do business with you, they have to like you, or at least to respect you. People are sick of cold corporations, Your writing voice in blogging | business blog and they want a real human being they can identify with. So don’t be afraid to be “normal“. Don’t be afraid to be YOU. If you are reserved, there is a risk that your message will not come to people who will like and respect you. Setting aside could dilute your online business. So once more time “don’t be afraid to write articles in manner that is common to you and don’t be afraid to be yourself”.

It’s important to be professional, but don’t be so professional that you kill your personality. Let me make additional note here. Most people who visit my blog don’t care much about me, what is logical, because they are coming here to pick information that are relevant to them, but it’s important the people understand that behind this site and documents is real human, and not some automation or robot work.

You can put your picture on the weblog, what your background is…where you’re from…what you like to do…some of your beliefs and values… etc, but note that there is a difference between giving your personal story and using personality in your writing voice.

The formula is: When you are watching a movie you are not getting character whole bio before the film has begun. You are meeting the character through scenes and situations. The same is with blogging. As a blog author imagine yourself as a movie character. Importance of good relationship and partnership | business writing You can put your personality through blogging, but if your weblog is business oriented why should you review Indiana Jones movie? (Except if your blog is about films). Who cares what you think about latest blockbuster or music concert? Your readers want content on the topic of your site. However there is a difference if you mention somewhere in the post and go further or to have one such a post in 15 to 20. Don’t forget to respect your readers time, they are your partners. By the way, do you think Harrison Ford is too old for such adventures?

Above all, concentrate on your blog topic and remember that writing is a communication, and you have to establish a connection between yourself and your readers. Even if your blog is business type, the best way to establish a connection is when your personality comes through in your writing.

Go back to more web site and blog content tips,

Create a successful blog

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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.

SE Optimization For WordPress META Tags, noindex categories and archives | SE blog optimization 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).

Create a successful blog

Posted by Sloba | Filed Under Uncategorized | 1 Comment

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: Installing WordPress blog and SEO Optimization with video tutorials | WordPress Blog

Posted by Sloba | Filed Under Uncategorized | 2 Comments

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.

silos thematically blog building | WordPress Tutorial

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!

Posted by Sloba | Filed Under Uncategorized | Leave a Comment

More than 10 Great WordPress Plugins

April 9, 2008

The following article is showing the list of WordPress plugins that will help you have a better experience with your blog. Most of these are must have plugins for WordPress.
Besides Akismet, which is automatically installed on WordPress, here are the plugins I found useful:

All-in-one-seo-pack - Plugin for Search Engine Optimization

Google xml Sitemaps -The Google Sitemap Plugin automagically pings Google, Yahoo!, and MSN Search at regular intervals, notifying them of new content and/or changes to your site.

Optimal Title – optimize your post titles for search engines

Smart ping - Protects you from over pinging. When you edit your post, it prevent pinging so you are proteced from being considered as spammer

Another Wordpress meta plugin - This plugin allows you to specify META information, that is keywords and descriptions, for your posts and pages. Additional META keywords are derived from your categories.)

“What Would Seth Godin Do?” - This plugin will definitely help you get more RSS subscribers! It’s called “What Would Seth Godin Do“

WP-Contact Form – Great contact form plugin with security question. Here is an example on my contact page.

Darren’s Related Posts plugin or Wasabi Related Entries – As your blog grows you will certainly like to have one of these plugins which will help you to detain your readers on the blog, by showing related posts at the end of your post.

ADD This- for social bookmarking
Favicon manager - manage favicon image.

For tagging:

UltimteTagWarrior – for tagging

Tag sugest Thing - Tag Suggest Thing uses the Yahoo! term extraction API to find tags to suggest.

Embedded Tag Thing - To display a word in a post as a tag, wrap it in markup (with square brackets!)

For ads:

Adsense-Deluxe - Place Google AdSense ads inside your WordPress Posts

Ad Rotator – Rotate adsense, and any other kind of ad, graphic, etc. wherever you place the code

MaxBlogPress Stripe Ad - displaying a single line of advertising message, a special note or other information right at the top of your blog

For translation:

Global Translator - translates a blog in fourteen different languages. Hmm, its not so accurate translation, but you may want to have this for your blog.

It never hurts to be well informed with the latest on WordPress plugins and you can always explore more in this area, because you want to plug in your blog to higher level!