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When to time your latest blog post ?

ashish — Sat, 05 Nov 2011 19:00:25 +0000

You are already trying your best to write on a regular basis, and you may have learnt that it makes a lot of difference if you write a post per day. However, it can sometimes be a challenge to just get to meeting this daily basis concept; after all, unless you are dedicated towards your blog in a true sense, there can be many interruptions in getting the content for your blog on a daily basis. Getting your posts out on a regular (or a daily) basis can make a huge difference to attracting more readers to your blog. Now suppose, you are able to get onto a regular pattern of publishing a post at a particular time, the next item would be to optimize the time of your posts. Does this matter ? You could after all have a software that picks up the feed from your post only at a specific interval, and so ensures that your readers get the post at a specific period of time. But as your popularity grows, there are some advantages to be gained from posting at a specific point of time.
On the basis of your posts, you have picked up a number of people who visit your blog every day, and you think that a lot of your work is done. However, over a period of time, you would have also learnt that these same blog posts can be also be circulated on social networks such as Facebook, Twitter, as well as other means such as Technorati, StumbleUpon, and so on. These are all means to get more people to read your posts, and with social networks such as Twitter and Facebook being picked up by a large number of readers, making sure that your posts get to people on these networks is also very important.
So, you have configured your posts to get posted to these social networks, and feel that you have covered all your bases. What next ? Well, the next thing you need to do is to time your posts. This is especially true for social networks such as Twitter and Facebook where there can be a large number of posts / updates flowing past readers every minute. You want your post to be flowing past potential readers when they are reading these posts, rather than happening when your prospective readers are not looking at them. So, if you have a topic that relates to women at home, then you better make sure that your posts happen only at a time when they are done with the daily chores and have some time for themselves and are looking at their computers / tablets / smartphones. This is especially true for Twitter and Facebook where the amount of competition can be intense, and nobody really looks at updates that have already gone by. Similarly, if your post is meant for computer geeks, your post may be better suited to go live after dinner, when most geeks stay up on the computer and start their reading.
All blogging software allows you to time your posts, what you need to do is to determine the best time that your prospective audience is online, and ensure that your posts are live at around that time.

Search Engine Optimization Tips and Tricks – Learn how to increase visibility in Search Engines – Part 21 – How to select the right SEO consultant

ashish — Wed, 24 Mar 2010 17:20:27 +0000

By now, you would have learnt that Search Engine Optimization is one of the most critical items to ensure that your site / blog is popular, and there are a number of techniques and optimizations that you can do to increase the page ranking of your site (as well as some of the items you should avoid). However, many of you would have also learnt that it is not easy to do all this, with the techniques that are relevant getting modified over a period of time (and some of them turning negative over a period – as an example, earlier it made sense to pack your site with keywords, but doing so now can get your site penalized by Google and other search engines). Hence, it is fairly easy to rely on professionals to do this for you, and this is where SEO consultants come in – these are people or companies that promise to ensure that your site can do wonders in terms of increase in search engine rankings and in turn, some of them can be fairly expensive. However, hiring SEO consultants can do wonders for your site, subject to certain conditions and checks:
- Before you start hiring a consultant, do some research on your own, in terms of where your website ranks as opposed to your competitors
- Determine the keywords you want to rank for, find out where your website stands in terms of ranking for such keywords, and where your competitor stands for. Explore alternative keywords that are less sought after, but are still good enough to draw traffic
- Do a search for various companies and individuals who are involved in the business of SEO consultancy, including reading about their success stories and projects that they have worked on
- Talk to the company or individual and find out about their success stories, including whether they have managed to get their own SEO site listed in top ranks of Google. If they quote sites as as part of their success stories, then check for the ranking of those sites
- Ask the experts for the steps and processes they will take to promote your site, and find out whether they will be following White Hat strategies, or dubious strategies. Be very wary of experts who promise to bring your site to the front page results within a matter of weeks
- If a consultant or company claims that they will submit to thousands of directories and link farms, find out more. Many link farms are not rated well by search engines, and you can suffer if you are listed by such search engines
- Evaluate the performance of the consultant, and set out goals. Also talk to multiple consultants in terms of defining a possible time based strategy and result matrix before selecting one of them

Search Engine Optimization Tips and Tricks – Learn how to increase visibility in Search Engines – Part 16 – How to get links

ashish — Tue, 09 Mar 2010 17:34:12 +0000

In the previous post (Avoid paid links), I explained how paid links can cause problems to you, in terms of search engines not liking the concept of paid links, and penalizing you if they detect your buying or selling links.
In this post, I will write about some ways of generating links that do not offend the search engines, and give you the required boost in search engine rankings without getting you in trouble with the search engines. These are a combination of organic and inorganic methods (to explain, some of these happen on their own, while for the others, you have to take an extra effort).
- Write good content. If you write content that is unique and interesting, people will link to you on their own. It sounds very simple to say this, but a lot of good links that a site generates is because of rich content that other people like linking to. This sort of linking is very valuable
- Create content that people like to link to. As an example, when people look for a way to ensure tight security for their sites, a site that presents content in the form of a checklist or similar works a lot. So, if you create a post with the title as “10 steps to increase security for your site” and have good easy to read and useful content, a lot of people will link to such content
- Create resource sites of links; for example, if you are interested in photoshop tutorials, it is very useful to search for the best such tutorial sites and link to them with a structure such as “Best Photoshop tutorials”. Inform the owners of such sites that you have done so, and many of them might feel gratified enough to link back to you
- There is a lot of balyhoo about comments being useful. However, comments directly do not get you any PageRank since most commenting software is now configured to prevent any PageRank from passing through. However, when you post a comment that is useful, adds value, and is otherwise interesting, a fraction of people will come to your site, and some of them may add links.
- Using link farms and link exchanges is not a very feasible option nowadays, since search engines have learnt to ignore such inputs now, and in some cases, these turn out to cause more harm than good
- Search for article sites, some of which are pretty high PageRank sites. Consider for example, a site such as BlogCritics (link), where users can post articles and where you are allowed to post your own link (to your own site). This site is a PageRank of 7, and you get pretty useful PageRank. There are many other article syndication sites, which allow you to post your own articles and earn some useful links.
- Ask people for links, while many of them will refuse, others will indeed link to you. Ask politely, already have a reciprocal link on your site (even though they may be a competitive site) and provide them a readily formatted link that they can just copy and paste. Even if this works for only a fraction of the sites to whom your write, it can give you a nice supply of links that add to the ranking of your site.

This post will be continued with more information and techniques …

Search Engine Optimization Tips and Tricks – Learn how to increase visibility in Search Engines – Part 8

ashish — Sun, 28 Feb 2010 04:49:41 +0000

In the previous article (Optimizing images for SEO), I talked about how to ensure that you are getting the required boost from your images as part of Search Engine Optimization.
This post will start talking at a preliminary level, since we are going to start talking about an important part of the overall SEO gameplan; I will start explaining today about what keywords are, and how they are important for the purpose of Search Engine Optimization. Learning about keywords as a part of SEO is extremely important if you want to boost your blogs rankings in the top search engines, and you need the higher ranking to drive more traffic to your site, which in turn should generate more revenue to you. If you have done any kind of website optimization, talked to a SEO consultant, or read articles on this, all of them will jump out and shout ‘keyword’ to you.
So, what are keywords / key phrases ? Keywords or phrases are those single words or word phrases that are contained in your page, in the content, and that help in driving search engines to your site. They are supposed to represent what users typically search for, and if you are ranked highly by search engines for those tags, then there is a much better chance that when users search for those phrases, they will find your site. So, for example, if you have a site on selling cameras, then you would really want your site to be ranked high when users search for ‘digital camera’, ‘low priced camera’, ‘camera’, ‘SLR’, ‘Canon camera’ and so on. If you are ranked high, then more visitors, and hence more money.
Earlier, people would use a meta-tag (a tag in the header portion of the HTML page) to add such keywords, but because of people trying to exploit the system by adding irrelevant information in the meta-tags or by stuffing the meta-tags, it is believed that search engines have learned to ignore meta-tags (and in the worst case, penalize any site that tries such tactics); what they believe is that if such tags are included in the text of the contents of the page, then they are counted. So why do people not make pages entire in this format “canon digital camera low price SLR camera flash digital”, and so on. After all, this content adds a lot more keywords. Well, such a text would quickly turn off readers, and now search engines have got smarter, and they expect that such keywords will only form a small percentage of the overall text, else the text would not be proper content. Further, each search engine tends to have its own algorithm of what to use and what not to use.
As a starter (and future posts will provide more advanced technologies related to finding keywords which are of higher value, or used more), start to visualize as to which are the keywords that you would use were you searching like your customers, ask other people around you, look at forums, and then you will get an idea as to which are the keywords that you need in your content.
Next post looks at this topic in more detail ..

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The name of the URL should be as descriptive as possible – primarily for WordPress

ashish — Tue, 26 Jan 2010 16:15:35 +0000

You would have done many steps / tips to ensure the optimization of SEO for your blog, to ensure that you get as high a place in search engines, including Google Search. But this quest to further optimize your blog needs to be an ongoing quest, and since search engine placement is an evolving art (especially since people keep on working out how to game the search engines and the search engines keep on evolving to ensure that the results are as accurate as possible, free of influences such as people twisting their login by tricks and tactics). As a part of this quest, I was reading about more tips on how to ensure that your blog / post gets that slight extra bit of promotion.
This tip was something that was a bit surprising, and unexpected, but now that I think of it, it seems a continuation of making content more relevant. You would have known by now that tricks like keyword stuffing, using more keywords the same color as the background, etc, do not work, and in fact result in the search engines enforcing penalties. Further, you would also know that it is important to ensure that you do not have copied content, that you do not indulge in tricks such as buying links (since search engines also have people who know these tricks and enforce penalties).
You would started getting used to the fact that you need good unique content, that is one of the most critical tricks needed to ensure that you get a higher boost in search engine rankings, and cause more people to link to your content (as well as send your posts to more people on their own – something called viral marketing).
But, you can do this:
Make sure that your URL’s also have some unique nomenclature, rather than be some default numbering scheme. If you are running a WordPress Blog, then you need to go the following option:
Login into your account -> Settings -> Permalinks.
The default selection is the one where your final post URL ends up in something called

http://earn-cash-tips.com/?p=987

This is not a URL that is guaranteed to be very attractive, and does not let anybody know what the URL contains. However, if you select the “Day and Name / Month and Name” option, then you get a URL such as this one:

http://earn-cash-tips.com/2010/01/the-name-of-the-url-should-be-as-descriptive-as-possible

Anybody who sees this URL will be able to easily figure what this URL means, and what kind of article will be at this location. Apparently, search engines also value this extra bit of nomenclature. You also need to apply this to images that you post, where you need to name the images before they are posted.