Entries from July 2007 ↓

1. Add Quotes from Respected authors.

A quote is a way of setting your advice against the wisdom of established experts. A well chosen quote also breaks up the monotony of your own prose. There are many quotes on writing here is one illustrating how we should never allow a lack of talent to dissuade us from writing.

It took me fifteen years to discover I had no talent for writing, but I couldn’t give it up because by that time I was too famous.

~Robert Benchley

2. Choose an Engaging Title.

Titles are of great importance for setting up a short article, more so on the internet, than anywhere else. A Title should be clear and also catch the attention of the reader.
See: Choosing eyecatching titles

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Matt Cutts spoke at a conference WordCamp 2007. These are some of the points he raised.

1. Don’t Put Your Blog at the Root. Instead put it at /blog. The argument is you can do more things with the URL, you will also get links to both root and /blog. - Well it’s too late now. I don’t think it’s a problem, as I can always add a new section at: /newsection/
2. Use Hypens in URLs. /seo-tips-matt-cutts/ - /seo_tips_matt_cutts is second best. /seotipsmattcutts is worst
3. Use Alt tags in Images, videos and other media. - A sign google will reward use of images, the old maxim “S.E. can only read content” may change, after all viewers value images.
4. Include Keywords naturally in posts - Nothing new here, common sense.
5. Don’t mix (www. and non www) recently I forced all urls to http://www.netwriting.co.uk - Don’t split your links, google may view it as separate sites
6. Don’t include date in URL. Wordpress is good for being able to change this. Still some blogs may benefit from using date.
7. Moving Hosts When Moving between hosts use 301 permanent redirect and wait until googlebots have found new host, before taking down old one.
8. Check your blog on a mobile phone - not so sure this is important
9. Use FeedBurner’s MyBrand feature to take control of your feeds (i.e., feed.domain.com instead of http://feeds.feedburner.com/domain).
10. Use section targeting for adsense

Daily Blog Tips - 15 Tips from Matt Cutts

Links for featuring in Blog Carnival

• Blog Carnivals Making Money Online at Elizabeth Rose.info

Recently I wrote about the art of writing a good email

An interesting report in the Independent suggest we are being swamped by emails.

Invented in 1971 by the computer engineer Ray Tomlinson, e-mail now controls us, rather than us it. A recent study from AOL suggested that many people are increasingly addicted to e-mail, checking their messages while in the bathroom, at church or while driving. Researchers also report that between 10 and 50 per cent of work time is now spent using e-mail, which is having a huge impact on productivity.

Another study, cited in Gail Fann Thomas’s 2006 article ” Re-conceptualising E-Mail Overload” in the Journal of Business and Technical Communication, found that the average worker had 2,483 inbox messages and 858 filed ones. This is hardly surprising. Recent figures from web portal Lycos reveal that one in 10 e-mail users in Britain receives more than 200 mails every day (including spam). As Lycos spokeswoman Stephanie Sanders warns: “UK internet users are in danger of reaching overload as they struggle to deal with out-of-control inboxes.”

 The End of Emailat independent

The interesting thing is that company’s are seeking an alternative to email. One solution is to use Wiki’s where information is stored, edited and added to. This can be a more efficient way of sharing information.

Everynow and then I submit blog entries to blogcarnivals. It’s a good way of getting links, traffic and a wider exposure.

I submitted one hear to performancing.com. It looks a good blog, and will be a good blog carnival to take part in. I like the way Raj gave thoughtful comments on the entries.

The blog entry I submitted was “Do you Stand out from the Crowd?”

Raj suggested it would be better to have keywords in the title, why?

Advantages of having keywords.

1. More traffic from Google.
   If you want traffic from google make sure you have keywords that you search for. (For example, it surprises me how much traffic my mortgage site has had through the keyword “Harry Potter” (I made a throwaway joke about Harry Potter and mortgages, - don’t worry if you missed it BTW)
2. Anchor Text Link.
   If people link the article like in the blog carnival, it is good to have anchor text which is related to your blog. This means you will rank higher for these target keywords.

Therefore, often when creating a blog post it is good to think of the keywords in the title. However, does this mean that you always need to use keywords in the title?

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At Blogging Tips I offered a guest post. “What stops you Writing”

It is a look at what stops us from writing and how we can overcome it.

I came across Blogging Tips, when it was a very new site. I think Blogging Tips is destined to be a very successful blog for various reasons:

1. Aims High.

To be a successful blogger, you can’t afford to be half hearted. Blogging Tips is on its own dedicated server and Kevin has paid for quite a few paid reviews at related blogs. For example, he paid $400 for a blog review at John Chow.com. This brought a big increase in traffic and RSS subscribers. See John Chow effect 

Of course, it is not necessary to advertise your blog, but a little investment now can quickly build up your RSS readership quickly. To capitalise on these paid reviews your blog has to give good reasons  for people to stay.

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If you have a domain such as: http://www.economicshelp.org/

You might like to add a blog to that. e.g. http://www.economicshelp.org/econ.html

1. Blogger. FTP publishing.

Blogger enable you to use their software to add a blog onto your existing site. The blog is published through your server.
Note: this method means you cannot use Blogger’s new widgets. It is more difficult to customise your blog this way.

• To add a blog goto: Blogger home
• Click on: Add blog.
  Choose second option Advanced setup (http://www.blogger.com/adv-create-blog.g)
• You will need to add the FTP username and password.
  The blog url could be for example: blog.html

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There are many “average to good” articles on the internet. To be more precise there are billions of “average to good articles” on the internet. But how many exceptional articles are there? How many blogs regularly make for compelling reading? If you aim for churning out competent, good articles you are competing against 1000s of others in your niche. Anybody can churn out standard grade articles; but, how much do people want to read these?

If you can increase the quality of your articles by 10 - 20% you can get a much bigger % return. This is because the distribution of quality tends to follow the standard Bell curve of distribution. Most people are concentrated in the middle.

If you can get into the top 10% of quality, the number of competitors falls drastically. If you can get into this category, you have a chance of being picked up by experts in your field, getting on the front page of Digg e.t.c. It is these articles that can push your blog to the next level.

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Today, Problogger is encouraging us to answer reader’s questions. Well, I have to say that’s a much better idea than writing by numbers. (see: top 10 reason lists are rubbish) So I thought I’d enter into the spirit and give it a go.

The first problem, as Darren predicted, is that you may not be so lucky to have a nice collection of reader’s questions to answer. So, since I’m a reader of this blog, there’s no reason why I can’t ask myself a question:

How Can I encourage Readers to ask Question?

• A Blog post and link in sidebar. see this link to add a question as a comment
  
• A Free Link, and free publicity in recognition of the question. E.g. Thanks to Juggling frogs for some useful questions.
• Help People pass their exams. My most popular question and answer section is at another Blog: Economics Help. Before the exam season I was getting upto 20 questions a day. It was a really good period for me.
  • I was very productive in answering questions
  • It helped build up the archives very quickly.
  • Thinking of topics is often the most difficult challenge of writing.
  • I wrote on obvious topics, so obvious I wouldn’t have thought writing about.
  • The only problem was that some days were so busy, I fear the quality may have suffered a little. But, it did help them pass their exams. Also, once they have finished their exams the questions start to dry up pretty quick.
• Blog Contest. Maybe I will have a blog contest, in which the competition is to invite the most interesting, unusual questions. The best question gets a prize of a free

An important element of SEO is to rank highly for certain keywords. For the purpose of this example we shall choose the keyword “cycling clothes” In practise your chose keyword will depend upon the objective of your site, however, the basic principles are the same.

1. Choose Good domain name.

Your website should preferably have “cycling” and or “clothes” in the title. If it is possible to get a domain like cyclingclothes.com you will be very lucky. There are many potential variations on your theme. e.g. bestcycling-clothes.com. However, I would recommend choosing a domain name that is relatively short, and doesn’t sound “spammy”. If your domain name is: cheap-best-cycling-clothes.com - It may fit your keyword, but sounds bad to visitors, you will lose authority.

UPDATE: Note it is quite possible to rank highly for “cycling clothes” without the keywords in the domain. I think keywords in the title are less important than previously. The main reason for having cycling in your domain name is that it is easier to get “cycling” as the anchor text in your link.

2. Stick to your Niche.

If your target is cycling clothes you need to focus on content related to the keywords. It will be unhelpful to get distracted from your website’s topic and start writing about politics and the state of the economy.

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By mistake, I gave the wrong title to a previous blog entry:

Instead of How to Write Compelling Blog posts“, I wrote “How do I write compelling blog posts?”

Of course, the problem with the second title is that I make the assumption I  always create compelling blog posts.

It doesn’t sound too good, and even the kindest reader may point out, some posts are less compelling than others.

With the new title of “How to Write Compelling blog posts.” The post is partly advice to myself.

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