Blogging Basics
The above are some simple steps that could just improve your writing skills as a blogger almost instantly. Let me know your thoughts on the same.
Author's Corner, Professional Blogging
Search Engine Optimisation, commonly referred to as SEO, is the art of optimising your blogs or websites to achieve higher ranks on the Search Engines like Google, Bing, Yahoo etc. The two important aspects of SEO are: On Page SEO and Off Page SEO. These terms are no rocket science, basically, they are they refer to optimizing your web pages (on page SEO) and building quality back link to your content (off page SEO).
This article covers several good practices that could eventually get rid of the pain to manually try building back links to your website. A simple practice of writing for a reason, to share and help will result in gradual and dependable reputation building.
With Great Content how is On Page SEO Done?
Let us ask ourselves, why do we blog or write content? is it really all about increasing traffic and making money only? Nope! We write to share, we write to help and spread good, useful information. With this done righteously, half the task is accomplished, the rest is optimizing enough so that your content does not go unnoticed – this is on page SEO.
On page SEO includes organizing your content properly, internally linking relevant content within your blog or website and giving the right weight to the right content area. Use Heading tags (like H1, H2, H3 etc.) for your content headings and use the relevant keywords and have the correct density. All these combined together will ensure your on page SEO is done right.
How does quality content automate off-page SEO?
Firstly, let us understand that off-page SEO means building links to your content / web pages from other quality websites and that is not an easy task. There are tonnes of low quality websites, blogs and directories out there ready to link back to your for a backlink from your website – this is forced SEO and does no good for your page rank.
On the flip side, if you are writing good quality, unique, useful content on your blog, this process is automated with webmasters discovering your content and linking to them willingly from high quality websites. Who doesn’t love giving credit to the source of great content, this practice will continue on to grow your website’s online reputation in the eyes of humans and search engine algorithms.
Why should I NOT be in a hurry?
Search Engine algorithms are becoming smarter day by day. These algorithms are written and built by industry experts and engineers who are quickly understanding the pattern of how forced Search Engine Optimization is done by most webmasters. Several aspects like the frequency of back links added, nature of links (quality and niche), the anchor texts used (linking keywords) all together form a pattern, however hard you try to fake it, it becomes evident.
Such actions to force Optimize your websites and get to the top of SERPs (Search Engine Ranking Pages / Positions) will only result in a possible penalty when discovered. By building naturally good quality content, we get credited automatically by webmasters who find the information useful and this is the way Search Engine companies expect the internet to be.
[box color=”gray”]Take Home: By now you might be already knowing what we should be doing in the long run to get to the top. Write good content, organize it and when people start discovering great content, quality backlinks start pouring and your website will be naturally optimized for high rankings. Wishing you all the luck with your website, the tips are common for any niche based websites.[/box]
Author's Corner, Professional Blogging
Widgets are powerful elements of a WordPress blog that allows you to simply drag and drop to showcase various information and functionality on your blog’s sidebar. Now let us try to approach the use of widgets in a different perspective. Ever imagined adding or embedding your blog widgets within a post or page? Yeah, that is possible!
First of all, you need to install and active the plugin called “amr shortcode any widget”. As soon as the plugin is activated, navigate to widgets. There you would find a new sidebar created called as “shortcodes”. Any widget you drag and drop into this sidebar, will be ready to be inserted into a WordPress blog post or page. All you have to do is use the appropriate short codes each time you want a specific widget needs to be inserted.
For example to insert a calendar widget, you will have to use:
[box][do_widget calendar][/box]
To insert a pages widget, you will have to use:
[box][do_widget pages][/box]
If the widget name has space in it, then you need to add widget name in quotes like this:
[box][do_widget “recent posts”][/box]
The plugin simply opens up a lot of new possible ways you can publish information on your blog combining useful interactive widgets. Hope this helps you make your blog more useful and interactive. Try out this awesome free plugin and let me know how much you liked it.
Professional Blogging, WordPress CMS
Do you blog on a regular basis? Not everyone can cater enough time to blog everyday especially when you are engaged in a permanant day job. Hence this post is clearly aimed at those bloggers who have already taken up their blogging journey on a professional level.
I will today share my schedule and plan according to which I drive my professional blogging activities on my two primary blogs that I work 5 days a week on. If you are earning a livelyhood from your blog, it certainly demands enough time and effort from your every single day. I work on two blogs on a daily basis and ensure I spent atleast 200 minutes (mostly not more than that) every day on blogging and related activities. Here is how the 200 minutes are split into several webmaster activities.
50 Minutes of writing & researching content everyday (2 x 50 = 100 minutes)
Researching content and planning your article is as important as writing / publishing the same on your blog. I spend about 50 minutes for one good post and that includes both research and writing activities. Repeating the same on two of my major blogs will easily account for about 100 minutes spent this way.
30 Minutes of Publicizing and Professional Networking (2 x 30 = 60 minutes)
Publicizing your content and professional networking with other blogs and bloggers is equally important as publishing great / unique content. This activity requires attention every day because, it does not make sense promoting a post written today, after one month. Publicizing and networking includes commenting on other similar niche blogs, taking part in related communities, replying to posts on popular forums etc.
20 Minutes of Maintainance and SEO / SMO (2 x 20 = 40 minutes)
Maintainance is a critical activity when it comes to enhancing your blog features and keeping up the quality of the content management system as a whole. SEO (Search Engine Optimization) and SMO (Social Media Optimization) are two sides of the same coin where the former is long term content promotion and the latter is immediate content promotion.
The activities sum up to a total of good two hundred minutes and is just over 3 hours of your day, leaving you with another 21 hours to spend time with your family and focus on other activities. Such a plan if seriously adhered to, am sure you blog and online brand will recieve the attention and success it deserves! Let me know your daily blogging plan..
Professional Blogging, Webmaster Central
Google’s Hangout is an AMAZING tool that is less explored and is slowly turning out into a product that is changing the way how people collaborate and learn as a team in REAL. Unlike a broadcast on YouTube, there is an element of interaction here that makes it very special.
In addition to collaboration and discussion, the Hangout has ability to air it as a live program and auto publish to YouTube to add icing on the cake. The free broadcast system is especially an advantage to bloggers and website owners which allows them to form a closed group and share information that’s restricted to only a special few. Its also interesting to see how even Governments, film stars, politicians, celebs all have started using Hangouts to interact with the world!
How to start a Hangout and make it big?
Starting a Hangout is very easy and only takes a couple of seconds by clicking on “Start a Hangout” Button on your Google+ account. Its recommended that you do a bit of publicizing and preparation before starting off the Hangout by informing and briefing your closed group of bloggers or mastermind group members about the agenda.
Further create a Google+ public event announcement few days prior to your Hangout. In addition to this ensure to open a “Hangout on Air” as these hangouts stream live on YouTube and are automatically added to your YT channel after you hit “end broadcast”.
[highlight color=”eg. yellow, black”]Do a little research on how to use Hangout, invite members, stream it live and make the content available on YT for your members who could not attend the live Hangout.[/highlight] I guess by now you might have felt how powerful this awesome feature can become. As of now, a live hangout can be only attended by 10 people, hope Google will upscale this in near future. Till then you can do Hangouts for the special 10 mastermind group members / bloggers and publish the content for other.
Professional Blogging, Social Media