Archive for the ‘Blogging Tips’ Category
by Franky Branckaute on January 22nd, 2010
Among bloggers, especially those trying to make a buck with their sites there’s a myth. It helps them to improve their traffic and stats and ultimately should bring money and pay for their next cruise to Egypt, a marvellous country with an ancient history. A country we still speak about today and people travel in hordes to visit the pyramids, look at the Great Sphinx. Even Indiana Jones went to the Pyramids.
What the Egyptians never did though was this thing called SEO. Instead they created great content, a rich and bespoke culture and history. People still speak about their culture, visit the country and take pictures of the ruins.
First I’m going to tell you a secret: What the Egyptian Pharaohs did was perfect SEO. What the oil sheikhs in Dubai and Abu Dhabi do is the kind of SEO result most bloggers try to achieve. One country is still popular more than 2000 years later. The other… who will care about Dubai in 5 years? They even don’t have an Apple store there.
SEO Doesn’t Matter for Bloggers
- Setup a blog, start writing
- ???
- Profit!!!
Most of you will now want to click away and leave this page but hang in there for a second. I’m going to tell you all the SEO you’ll ever need. That’s right, after that you will not have to worry anymore about any ‘SEO’ at all.
If you think of the Egyptians you will understand that they would have been the ultimate bloggers, better than any SEO. Let’s have a look at how their great nation would have been the perfect blog. Read More
Categories: Blogging Tips
Tags: content, seo
by Scrivs on January 20th, 2010
Odds are if you are reading this site you own a blog. Odds are even better that your blog doesn’t get as much traffic as you want. Odds are even betterer(?) that if you could make a living from your blog you would do it. Guess what? It isn’t going to happen. You don’t deserve the traffic or the money. You don’t deserve the fame and recognition that can come with a big blog. Do yourself a favor and stop pretending.
If you are still around after reading that and thinking to yourself that I need to go to hell because you definitely deserve those things, then maybe you can explain to me why you do. Do you understand how much work it takes to make a site big? I don’t think you do because if you did you probably wouldn’t be wasting your time reading this entry. You would be off working on your site and wondering where you are going to take your next cruise. Read More
Categories: Blogging Tips
Tags: content
by Dee Barizo on January 17th, 2010
One of the easiest things you can do to improve your reputation on Google is exchange blogroll links with other blogs. This strategy is not the most powerful strategy in the world, but it can give you a small boost in rankings. And if you’re targeting different keywords than your competitors, you might even get big ranking improvements.
About two years ago, I started a blog on a popular TV show. I didn’t have time to do a comprehensive link building campaign, but I still wanted to get search traffic. I exchanged blogroll links with other blogs and my traffic increased by a couple thousand visitors per month.
Reciprocal links still have value despite what many SEO specialists say, but you do have to be smart about it. Here are two principles to keep in mind.
Read More
Categories: Blogging Tips
Tags: blogrolls, seo, Sunday Morning SEO
by Franky Branckaute on January 13th, 2010
Not that long ago I declared 2010, The Year of The Return of Content but it seems that I didn’t make my message clear enough and some, albeit older, diseases have continued to dominate and takeover the blogosphere.
Spread like a wildfire, an unstoppable worm on his way to burn the burg.
Of course I mean the unstoppable Buttonitis and still immensely popular over-tagging hype, AKA social media design killers.
Buttonitis
Hold thou, O earth, now, since heroes may hold not
I like to think that I coined the term Buttonitis and if Urban Dictionary is any measure to go by, I have.
The term itself is that self-explanatory that there’s no need at all to define it as ‘When buttons take over the look over your site and hide the content’. We all know plenty of examples of this widespread disease and they come in different variations.
Being “It” Playing Hide and Go Seek The Content
Because we are that nice and wanted to highlight the scale of things, we faced the unthinkable and visited what is probably the prototype of modern buttonitis: The Mashable homepage. We highlighted the content for you. Read More
Categories: Blogging Tips
Tags: content, design, tips
by Darnell Clayton on January 12th, 2010
Five years ago if someone told me that we would be editing images on our cell phones and uploading them to our blogs just as easily as a laptop (or desktop), I probably would have laughed in their face.
Flash forward towards today and here I am now amazed that I am able to edit video (yes video!) at a fraction of the price I would have paid to place upon my laptop.
While the video editing apps are still in their infancy (at least upon the iPhone), here are seven of the best video apps that every video blogger blessed with the iDevice should own (plus a video of my ugly mug to help demonstrate their power). Read More
Categories: Blogging Tips, Blogging Tools
Tags: iphone, Mobile Software, video, Video Blogging
by Dee Barizo on January 10th, 2010
Hello BloggingPro readers, my name is Dee Barizo and I’m the resident SEO geek. My SEO column for Blog Herald has moved here. I’ll be covering practical SEO tips to help you improve your rankings and get more search traffic.
Today’s topic is about web directories.
In the fast moving internet landscape, directories seems very outdated but they actually still work. For my day job, I do SEO for clients. I’ve seen their rankings improve after building links on directories.
Read More
Categories: Blogging Tips
Tags: directories, link building, seo, Sunday Morning SEO
by Regnard Raquedan on January 9th, 2010
One of the good (or bad, depending how you look at it) things about being a blogger is that you’re the publisher, editor, writer, and graphic artist rolled in into one. Apart from finding out a good topic to write about, most bloggers look for a good template to use, whether the blog is on WordPress or Blogger.
One of the most common questions that stump in the template decision is “How wide should my blog’s template be?” And there’s a a couple of good reasons to why this is a bottleneck in the template selection decision.
See, the thing is that screen resolutions are as varied as the topics about blogging. It used to be that the only relevant resolution was 1024 pixels by 768 pixels (1024×768). But now, only roughly 1/3 of screens out there have 1024×768. The majority is now a resolution bigger than that.
The other reason is readability. With the changing resolutions, I won’t be surprised if people also tweaked their screens DPI (dot per inch) setting. This setting can make text and images to be displayed bigger (or the same with a lower resolution screen), even when the physical screen becomes bigger. This makes text more readable even with a ultra-high resolution display. Nonetheless, the upper limit in nice, readable web typography is 75 characters wide, give or take a few characters.
Now, with the variety in user needs, what’s the best width for blog templates? (Length or height is rarely an issue because people are used to vertically scroll).
Assuming you are using a 14 pixel size for the text and default character spacing, you would need at least 520 pixels for the main content area. Plus, if you add two columns 160 pixels wide (Why 160 pixels? This is to accommodate the widest standard skyscraper ad size), you would need an extra 320 pixels. Finally, you’d need approximately 10-15% buffer for margins. The final total? 924 to 966 pixels wide.
Surprisingly, this is very near the favorite 960 pixel-wide designs today. This number also seems optimal for common screens based on W3Counter’s final 2009 stats, 60% of displays out there range from 1024 pixels to 1280 pixels wide.
Categories: Blog Design, Blogging Tips
Tags: Blog Design, blog readability, blog template
by Dee Barizo on January 3rd, 2010
The link request can be a very effective tool for link building but it seems to be underused by bloggers. Many of them are hesitant to ask for links. They think it is too intrusive and spammy. Or they are not confident in their content.
Others have tried sending a couple requests but they didn’t have success so they stopped.
If you haven’t had success, here’s a principle that can help. Also, this principle can build your confidence and help you realize that link requests don’t have to be spammy. Read More
Categories: Blogging Tips
Tags: link building, link request, seo, Sunday Morning SEO
by Regnard Raquedan on December 31st, 2009
One of the books I’ve read in 2009 that I think is very helpful to bloggers is “Neuro Web Design: What Makes Them Click” by Susan M. Weinschenk. Although the title suggests a focus on web design, there’s a chapter there that talks about three triggers that enables web folks to”speak” to the unconscious mind. It may sound like psychobabble, but the the thing is, it is grounded on psychological research.
The three triggers are danger, food, and sex. If you notice, these are the basic elements that fire-off red flags in our collective instincts. This is because the way our brains are configured due to millions of years of evolution. All three items relate or our self-preservation instincts.
The premise is that the brain is hard-wired to get immediately attracted to words, images, and videos that pertain to danger, food, and sex. And if people are aware of these content, there is a higher likelihood that interest will be developed and the desired action, which is clicking (if it’s a hyperlink), will follow.
Here’s a few suggestions in incorporating the triggers:
- Danger - Make the wordings of your links to be more active and, if appropriate, place “threatening” images or images that convey cautionary measures.
- Food – The author of the book says that people pay attention to food (and that’s why there are plenty of food bloggers out there). If possible, place food items or benefits people can derive from your blog and blog posts.
- Sex – I’ve mentioned this is in the past and that sex is always a powerful attention getter.
2010 is just around the corner and it may be a good new year’s resolution to make your content more interesting. Just rememebr the three key triggers: danger, food, and sex.
Happy New Year!
Categories: Blogging Tips, Opinion
Tags: blogging, clicking, content, Interesting, tips
by Dee Barizo on December 27th, 2009
Rand Fishkin has an interesting prediction in his recent post, 8 Predictions for SEO in 2010. He believes that Twitter will become a part of Google’s ranking algorithm.
His argument is that Google has a history of innovating their algorithm to take account the most relevant link sources. And now it seems that Twitter has become the top place to share links instead of blogs and social news sites.
Read More
Categories: Blogging Tips, Blogging Tools
Tags: seo, Sunday Morning SEO, twitter
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