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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.

SEO Tips: Part 36 – Optimizing Post Title for Search Engines

ashish — Fri, 02 Jul 2010 19:46:39 +0000

In this post, we talk about how the Title of the Post is something that needs a lot of careful attention. Till the time that I learnt how to be effective about the title of a post, I used to use large post titles, something that I learnt could be a waste of effort, and in some cases, could cause a penalty from the search engines (related to keyword stuffing). Let me provide an example from this post itself. If I was using my previous process of defining the title of a post, the post would have the following title “Search Engine Optimization Tips and Tricks – Learn how to increase visibility in Search Engines – Part 36 – Ensuring the post title is optimized for Search Engines”. I used to think that the more descriptive a post title along with keywords in it, the better would the reception in the search engines. And I knew about keyword stuffing, and how search engines are using penalties for such stuffing rather than getting the user the benefit that they expect.
So, what is it about the title of a post ?
Well, most search engines look only at the first 60 characters of the title of a post, and ignore whatever comes after that. So if you consider the alternative lengthy title that was there in the previous paragraph, the search engines would have ignored the actual title of the post, which came near the end “Ensuring the post title is optimized for Search Engines”. Instead, the first part of the title, dealing with Optimization Tips and Tricks would have been used by the search engines, and we know how hotly contested those keywords are. Instead, by changing the post title, it is more likely that users searching specifically for why the post title is important for SEO would find your post, and they would also find the content valuable.
Next, if you look at the earlier proposed title, it contains the keywords ‘Search Engine’ 3 times. This is an absolute no-no, since search engines are getting much more efficient about penalizing sites that seem to do keyword stuffing, and this case would have fallen right into that bracket. Why take that chance, especially when you are not likely to get any benefits from this. And then the title is so long that it would get wrapped in many instances, especially if people are looking up search results from mobile phones and tablets, and likely to make it more difficult to read. You want people to be quickly able to read the title of your post when the search engines display a long list of search results, so that it is more likely that they will come to your site.
So, if you want your post to have a higher chance of being picked up in search engine results and also being selected by users peering through a whole page of search results, learn how to optimize the title of your post. Trust me, it will be well worth it, especially since the effort required is very minimal.

Search Engine Optimization Tips and Tricks – Learn how to increase visibility in Search Engines – Part 7

ashish — Sat, 27 Feb 2010 10:07:39 +0000

The previous post (optimizing sections inside your post structure) talked about some assorted steps you can to optimize your post (such as permalinks, bread crumbs (example, the Breadcrumb NavXT plugin), speeding up your site, and so on).
This post looks at optimizing the images on your site for better SEO. I can just hear some of you saying, Huh ! Why do we need to do something for images. Well, consider that Google Image Search drives a large number of people (on one of my blogs, it drives more than 70% of visitors, and this is not a photo blog), and Google, when displaying search results, many times shows images as a part of the search results, right near the top. If you were able to get your blog in there through some image optimization, would it not be worth it ? Well, if you are convinced, here goes:
- Number one item, you should ensure that all your images have an ‘Alt’ tag filled out properly. A search engine cannot read the image, and can only find out what the image is by the alt tag, and by the context in which the image appears. And of course, you earn credit from some visitors who are visually challenged and use these tags to figure out what the image wants.
- If you are not able to add ‘Alt’ tag properties / text to your images manually, make sure that they are not blank. Use a plugin such as the ‘SEO Friendly Images’ (link – automatically updates all images with proper ALT and TITLE attributes).
- This one is more speculative, but it is believed that if you host your image on a popular image sharing platform such as Picasa Web or Flickr, then you get a slight boost to your SEO rankings for the image.
- If possible, ensure that your images are in a separate folder that is accessible by search engines
- Don’t put too many images per page, so if you load 100 or so images, then it is taken negatively
- Make sure that you change the image file names that come from the camera and make it something distinctive. Don’t use something like P121765.jpg, instead make it something ‘Photo of Sydney Opera House from water level’. This helps in search engine ranking and gives a boost to the image ranking
- Now, something that is different. Look at the words surrounding a photo / picture, and make sure that the photo or picture sits in a section of text that describes it some degree and has some keywords in it. This also boost the ability of the Search engines image search crawler to rank the images higher.
- If somebody requests you for being able to use your photos or a thumbnail of your photos, then consider whether the photo is exclusive enough. If you feel that it is fine to do so, ensure that there is a link to your original blog post under the photo in the other site, since this helps in giving your link popularity a boost.
- When you are giving a link to your photos somewhere, don’t use the words ‘link’ or ‘click here’, instead use descriptive text as the anchor since doing this naming also helps in SEO
- Ensure that your photos have a standard aspect ratio, since search engines show thumbnails and these thumbnails are easier to show when they are of a standard size.

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Search Engine Optimization Tips and Tricks – Learn how to increase visibility in Search Engines – Part 5

ashish — Thu, 25 Feb 2010 12:26:52 +0000

The previous post in the series (Duplicate content and Search Engines) talked about duplicate content, how search engines ignored such content, and could potentially penalize you for the same.
This post talks more about how to structure your content for improving your rankings in Search Engines and involves the use of keywords in H1 and other headings. In a previous post, we talked about Keyword density should form around 4-6% of your post contents (not more, otherwise it will look like keyword stuffing). Identify key phrases that you want to emphasize in your post before making the post, and get a general idea of the location where you should use these keyword phrases. So, for example, if you consider this post, you should use the following keyword phrases ‘Search Engine Optimization’, ‘SEO’, ‘Content’, ‘Search Engine Ranking’, and similar such phrases.
- The title and H1 tags in your post should contain some of these phrases, but always keep in mind that the they should still be readable and be comprehensible to your readers. So, if you have a title such as ‘Search Engine Optimization Search Engine Ranking SEO’, it has a number of keywords, but does not form any sort of correct grammar (and keep in mind, that for titles and headings, you can use phrases instead of sentences), then it can look strange to readers. It is not very hard to have a correct combination of a keyword dense title that makes sense.
- With the above example, as you get down to the H2 and H3 tags, include the main sections of these keywords such as using ‘Search Engine’, or ‘Search Ranking’, so you are not stuffing your keyword phrases in all your headings, but are still using some of these keywords in a way that makes sense to your readers
- In the body of your message, use sections of your keyword phrases such as ‘Search Engine’, ‘Ranking’, etc, utilizing them in the body of the message, but keep in mind that your usage of the phrases should fit in with the body of the message and not break the flow of the post body.
- The way to start in this technique is to first write your post in your regular flow, and then optimize it for Search Engine Optimization. As a part of this, make sure that you use around 60 characters for the title of your post. Now, review your post and then consider breaking up the sections of the post using H2 tags; this helps to guide your readers through the post, and also provides relevant tags for the search engines.
- A typical WordPress installation has multiple links to the same content, and it makes sense to reduce some of the potential duplicate nature of these content that is visible to search engines when they spider your site. Using a plugin such as the All-In-One-SEO can set noindex for some of these locations, reducing the areas where this duplicate content is visible
[Consider this video about how to use the All-In-One-SEO-Pack (link)]

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Keep your title of the blog as long as possible – for social networking tools

ashish — Mon, 08 Feb 2010 19:28:46 +0000

I have always believed in keeping the titles of my blog posts short and sweet, but then I started discovering something. I have an automatic process using Twitterfeed to update my blog posts to my Twitter account, and using Networked Blogs to update my Facebook Fan Page. On Twitter, what I found was that with my short beautiful title, only that much amount of the title was showing via the Tweet. Now, this is configurable, and you can set for the update to pick up the following text of the post if the title proves inadequate, but considering that people can find your blog post via Twitter search, and many more services which pick up Twitter posts, you should work to make sure that you have a title that looks sharp, and yet has enough text in it such that it can get picked up from Twitter posts. Craft your title so that on reading it, somebody can immediately see it as the answer to their question.
For example, if you consider the above title, the blog title could have been “Benefits of keeping a long title”, but I decided to keep a longer version of the title, as you can see above. When this shows up on Twitter and Facebook, somebody viewing it can immediately make out that the need for this title is because of social networking tools such as Twitter and Facebook.
Now, to get the exact correct title everytime that also contains the desired keywords will take some time and effort, and I am ready to make the required effort, it it means that I am able to get a title that causes benefits in terms of users coming to my blog from Twitter search. Usage of Twitter is only increasing, and it is better to spend time to learn about how to optimize ones usage of Twitter.