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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.

Linking your Facebook Fan Page to your Twitter account

ashish — Wed, 20 Jan 2010 19:41:42 +0000

So, you have an account with Facebook (and you know that for effective promotion of your blog, you need a Facebook Fan Page, not just depending on your profile), and your posts even directly get imported to Facebook. Similarly, you have an account on Twitter and your updates are also posted to this Twitter as tweets for your followers to read. You could even use the same tool to post to both social networking tools, or you could use different tools (I use Twitterfeed to post to Twitter, and use Networked Blogs to post to my Facebook Fan Page; because I could not work out how to post to the Facebook Fan Page using Twitterfeed)
So, why do you need to directly connect Facebook and Twitter ? Well, consider that you have an active Facebook Fan Page with enough fans that they post tips, comments and useful content. This is actual content that your users would like and would read, and by just keeping it there on the Fan Page, you are restricting your Twitter followers from getting this content; and if you get this content on Twitter, it increases the chances of more people hitting your blog.
So, how do you associate your Facebook Fan Page and your Twitter account ? Well, first you need to login into your account, and then visit the following page (http://www.facebook.com/twitter/), and then click on the button that says “Link a page to Twitter”. The next page will show you all the Fan Pages that you own, and then you can map any of them to the desired Twitter account by clicking on the “Link to Twitter” button. You will need to agree to the next set of security warnings and login into your Twitter account. You can select what type of content you want to update and you are all set.

Uisng Google Friend Connect to share to Twitter and Facebook

ashish — Wed, 23 Dec 2009 19:09:12 +0000

In today’s world, it has become pretty important to ensure that if you want your website to get promoted and get more readers, you cannot just depend on adding content to your site (even if the content is very rich and useful) to get more readers. You need to be proactive, and add tools and mechanisms to make your site reach more people; and in this perspective, the concept of viral marketing is very important. Viral marketing means that your readers are doing the promotion for you, and people will do that if:
- they find your content appealing and worthy of sharing
- they have the tools to share the content easily from your site
Now, how do you do this sharing ? You can share through various sharing mechanisms such as “Addit”, through links that provide the facility to send email to anybody else, and through sharing to various social Networking sites. Now, Google is also providing a set of tools called “Google Friend Connect”, and you can leverage these tools to engage the visitors to your site, allow more sharing, and eventually increase the number of readers to your site.

Read more about the “Share It” gadget on this page (link)
If your blog is on Google’s Blogger service, then read the instructions given at this page for installing this gadget (link)

However, if your site is not a Google Blogger hosted site, then you would need to do some further steps such as registering your site on the Friend Connect site as well as add a couple of files to your site (complete set of instructions here)