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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 22 – Understanding the search engines crawler

ashish — Thu, 25 Mar 2010 17:59:35 +0000

In quite a few posts on this site, I have mentioned terms such as search engine crawler, bot, etc. Many readers who are somewhat new in this field will not know what these terms means, and why they are important to you. So, a simple description of how search engines operate, and what do these crawlers do. When you enter a term in a search engine, it does not go searching off into the internet to find what you want, instead the search looks at a huge database owned by the search engine company and finds the relevant search terms. To make it even more clear, your site needs to be in this index, else you can forget getting visitors from search engines. So, how do the search engines create this index, and how does your site end up in this index ? Well, this is achieved through what are called search engines bots or crawlers, or robots. No matter what the term, these are automatic scripts whose primary function is to crawl through the internet, using the links present on web pages, and keep on making a copy of all the content that they find. These are very simple scripts, which really do not have the intelligence to be able to process Javascript, or images, or any other complicated stuff used on sites. Consider the experience as similar to using a text browser on your site, and then reviewing how your site looks on this text browser.
You can actually try this, look for a browser called Lynx (Wikipedia) and view your site on it. You will find that all your complicated JavaScript / DHTML / Flash based navigation is unrecognized by this browser, and it can get stuck. Similarly, if your site does not have easy ways of finding all the posts you have done (such as a sitemap or a simple navigation method), then many of those will not get indexed, and can prevent search engines from finding such posts and making them available to search engines.
So, this is one simple lesson. You need to make sure that whatever nice jazzy stuff you show to your viewers, you should have a way to let the search engine crawlers easy access to all your site, including setting up robots.txt file properly. Further, since the search engine crawler makes it way across the internet using links, you should be linked from other sites, and you should also be linking to many relevant sites.
Once the content is available in the search engines, they rank these based on extremely secret algorithms that constantly evolve. This search engine ranking is what determines how many people visit your site from search engine results, and also means that you need to be constantly at work to ensure that the search engines rate your site high, and any changes in how they use their ranking logic (including frowning on many practices) should be incorporated in your techniques.

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 17 – How to get links (contd ..)

ashish — Wed, 10 Mar 2010 17:32:17 +0000

The previous post (Links for SEO) was an explanation about how to get incoming links for the purpose of SEO. However, this topic is too long to explain fully in one post, so this post will continue with the same topic, with more detail about how to get quality incoming links for SEO purposes.
- Search for quality directories and post your blog over there.
- Yahoo answers is a great initiative where you can earn quality incoming links. The idea of Yahoo Answers is that anybody can ask questions, and if you answer the question and it is judged to be a good answer, and the question itself is popular (and search engines also index the question and answer), then you can get some traffic coming your way
- Ask your friends and relatives (those who run sites and blogs) to link you; in this case, you should be able to get a high success rate
- Create a Facebook Page (How to create a Fan Page) and link up your blog posts to your Facebook Fan Page so that you can start getting Fans (and if you have good content, slowly you will start seeing an increase in the number of fans). On the Fan Page, provide a link to the Blog.
- Be active in forums and discussion boards related to the topic of your site. If your information is found useful and people value the updates your provide, then some of them will want to explore your site as well (make sure that your site is there in your signature) and many of them will also link to your site
- This one will take more effort, but many human edited directories ask for editors; become an editor and also take the chance to easily submit your own sites as well
- When you are writing a post that refers to another post of yours, then refer to that post using a link with keywords as the anchor text. You might think that an internal link does not matter, but you would be surprised.
- If you have multiple blogs and some of them are ranked higher, then you should have a link from these blogs to your other lower ranked blogs. Why not take advantage of some link love from your stable of blogs.
- If somebody has already linked to your site using some non-descriptive text such as ‘click here’ or something similar, request them to change this to something more descriptive – ideally supply them a short keyword rich phrase along with an already formatted link
- Keep on monitoring your logs to see which are the keywords that most people use to link to you, and then modify your posts that are on the same topic to become more keyword centric, and also focus on those keywords when requesting links from third parties
- Prepare newsletters and send them out on a regular basis to your subscribers, and at the end of the newsletter, ask people to link to your site if they feel that the newsletter was useful or informative to them
- If you are a product company that orders a lot of equipment from many vendors, then ensure that all of these vendors have provided a link to your site. Since you supply them business, most of them will indeed do that.
- Do a competitor search, and if you find sites linking to your competitors, then write to them requesting them to link to you as well. If you write politely, and if they don’t have any association with your competitor, many of them will honor your request.

As always, this post is getting about as long as I would like it to be .. so the next post will continue on the same line.

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 …