Make Money from Blogs » Content

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 34 – What happens when you have too much inline script code and CSS ..

ashish — Sun, 20 Jun 2010 09:29:39 +0000

The previous post talked about the use of frames (Frames and SEO) in your site, and how this impacts your SEO efforts and your ranking. In this post, we will talk about another common practice indulged in by a number of page owners, and which can impact their rankings. This is related to having scripting and CSS code inside their web pages, mixed with content. For some time now, a number of sites have been advocating that such scripting and CSS should be moved to linked files rather than inside the common page. In this post, I will explain the reasons for the same, and implications on Search Engine Optimization.
It may seem very convenient to put scripting code and CSS within pages (or use PHP server side functions to insert the code inside the page when the server is rendering the page). However, it causes problems to search engines. When you have all these content in the page content files, it causes the page to bloat up and the search engine crawler has to do more searching to find the actual content in the files (and you do want you actual content to be easily found by the search engines, not the ‘beautifully’ created code and CSS files that look like junk to the search engines). Given the amount of content that search engine crawlers have to go through (after all, they have to content the entire universe of content on the web), if a page seems very long and complicated and slow to search engine crawlers, they can very ignore such content and move on. You need to make it easier for them to find the relevant content in your pages. Further, the closer that content is to the start of your HTML page, the better (and when you have code and CSS that is present, it is typically above the content and hence likely to make it more difficult for your content to be found by the search engines).
What can you do ? Well, you can move all your script and CSS code to a separate file that is called from within your page. Of course, it does not mean that you need to take all your code and just move it to a file, there will need to be references to this file in the page; this will need to be done carefully and tested to make sure that it works and there was no slipup in the process of doing this. However, once it is done, then there are no further issues and the reader will be unable to make out any difference (unless the more technically interested reader looks the source of your file). And of course, such external files are also cached by some browsers, so if your readers frequently come to your site, the same files will not be loaded again and again and will enable faster loading.
One final advantage, and this is of benefit to you. If you keep your scripting code and CSS in a separate file that is being called by other pages, then any maintenance needed on your code or CSS is much easier and less messy.

Search Engine Optimization Tips and Tricks – Learn how to increase visibility in Search Engines – Part 32 – How do users see rich content such as Flash, Movies, etc.

ashish — Thu, 10 Jun 2010 18:10:18 +0000

This is a subject that has come up before in a smaller way, but needs more details and more explanation. In the last few years, the use of content has expanded to include rich multimedia content. Using Youtube Videos, using other videos, using Flash animations and even using Flash for menus and for hosting images (such as one major company has done for their photo hosting site) has had a dramatic increase. It is recognized that the usage of such rich media helps keep users interested, and when you consider the adage “A picture is worth a thousand words”, this increases when you have a Video that keeps your users interested, and allows you to increase the time that people spend on your site (Imagine a site where a review of gadgets is done, the effect is increased manifold when the visitors can see the same review of the gadget in the form of an additional video where they can actually see things working – in such cases, if they are impressed by the review, a properly placed affiliate link to buy the product can actually catch a fair number of people and earn additional money). So, this should make you want to change your strategy to add more rich content to your site, after all, it will bring additional visitors to your site who will stay longer.
The problem with the above statement is that part of it is not true if your site depends on search engines for its visitors, and has not yet built up a strong position on the first page of results. The reason for that is very simple – Search engines are still not able to index the contents of these rich media effectively. So, even though Google has been trying for some time to understand the content of Flash, and even try to figure out stuff from inside videos, it is a long way away from being able to properly index your rich content (what this means in simple English is – if you have a great video review of a new camera, a search engine cannot figure out that this is a video of a review and cannot make out what the details of the review are all about). So, if you are a big site that routinely figures in the top search results, then you can go in for the rich media content to a much larger degree, but if you are a smaller site, then if you decide to go in for increased rich media, make sure that you are not betting your entire strategy on these rich media. Visit the site using a browser that is configured like a search engine crawler, and you will realize that search engines will almost totally ignore such rich media. If you do want to have these rich media, then there should be enough text based content to satisfy the search engines, as well as enough title text on these rich media so that the search engines can understand what these rich media are all about.

Search Engine Optimization Tips and Tricks – Learn how to increase visibility in Search Engines – Part 31 – Observing copyright law

ashish — Wed, 12 May 2010 18:07:39 +0000

Observing copyright law mean not seem relevant to a post on what is good Search Engine Optimization. And you might be thinking that with the need to get fresh content, what is wrong on taking some content from other sources and modifying them slightly in order to get fresh content for your site. However, keep in mind that Copyright Infringement can have serious legal issues, and if you are challenged, this can have pretty bad results for your site, and also on your rankings with search engine. So here goes some layman advice on Copyright Law (remember that for specific advice and queries on such a critical topic, you will need to consult a lawyer or expert and not depend on posts like this one). Here goes:
- You are allowed to quote sections from other posts or sites if these are meant for positive or negative acclaim, since this is covered under free speech
- However, for the above point, there are limitations. If you copy the main point of the other site or article, or copy huge sections of the other article, then it is beyond the fair use right and you are technically doing what some US courts have ruled as copyright violation
- There are many sites that allow the use of their material freely and you can use them in any way; however, keep in mind that just because a site or any kind of media does not have an explicit copyright, they are free to copy. Sites that allow free copy should have an explicit point stating so.
- You can even use company logos or names in your posts, subject to the same condition as above; you need to use them for acclaim or review; but you cannot use them for any kind of commercial purpose without approval from the owners of the company logos or names
- Quoting additional material from other sites beyond review fair use needs approval from the owners of the copyright
- There can be many different kinds of copyright notices, so you need to check about the kind of copyright notices that are present on the site from where you are planning to get content to ensure that you are doing the right thing
- If people come after you alleging copyright infringement, then you can be in serious trouble; especially if they come after all your hosting service or going after search engines where your site is ranked
- Hence, be very careful about the type of content you are using from other sites, do not look at this content as a way of filling your content needs; only use content under fair use

Search Engine Optimization Tips and Tricks – Learn how to increase visibility in Search Engines – Part 24 – Making sure that you have fresh content on a regular basis

ashish — Thu, 01 Apr 2010 18:12:57 +0000

The previous post talked (Understanding the robots.txt file) about learning what the Robots.txt file is, and how you can use it to tweak the way that search engines index your site.
This post will move onto one important area that I have talked about briefly in other posts before (having regular content), but it is important enough that we talk about it again. So, here goes. What do we mean by regular content for your site ? We mean content that is fresh, is something that does not like it has been copied from a million other sites, and seems interesting to your users. When search engines find new content on your site on a regular basis, this results in an increased ranking of your site. However, this new content needs to be fresh, and not copied from other sites, since the search engines will not rank sites higher if the content is copied (and can actually penalize sites). For example, I had a site which was a content aggregator for my other sites, and apparently Google believed that the duplicate content on the site was actually an attempt to deceive the search engines, and had marked this aggregator site with a penalty. Even though I started adding new content to this site after this warning, Google still has not ranked this site with any kind of PageRank, and I believe that the site has some time to go before I can start getting some PageRank. This is an extreme case of the duplicate content penalty, but any site that seems to have willfully copied the content from other sites face such problems.
In addition, your readers would expect regular content on your site. People who subscribe to a site can be very fickle, so if you are irregular in terms of adding content, then expect many readers to move away from your site, and even people who subscribe to your site will not be sticky. I have found that as long as you have a regular pattern of new content, and your readers know this pattern, you will have readers who tend to be more sticky (and this is increased when you have content that is interesting to your users). I have also found that getting new content updated on a daily basis ensures that your content is updated very frequently, and search engine crawlers come visiting to your site frequently (which is important, since you do not want your content to show up on search engines with a lag).
If you are not able to generate the required amount of fresh content, then look for more ways to get such content. This can be through hiring people to generate this content, or trying to get people impressed by your content to write their own articles. Look for such options to generate more content for your site.