wordpress blog icon
Is there a “secret technique” that will allow your blog post to rise above the multitudes of other blog posts and climb the Google results ladder?
Actually, yes there is.
And it’s really not that big of a secret, it’s just that most people don’t take the time to implement a strategy.
A blog post strategy will make a big difference in your results.
To start with, your blog post is about something. You know what it’s about, but do the search engines? You need to make sure that Google, Yahoo, and Bing all can figure out what your post is about. I recently heard several comments on this subject and everyone was in agreement on a few basic techniques for making your blog post stand out.
First of course is the title. Put you main keyword or keyword phrase in the title, and try to get it front-loaded in the title as well. For example if your blog post is about bird watching, you might start with something like this: Bird Watching for Dummies: A Relaxing Hobby
Blog Post Success Tips
- - Use a question as the title of the blog post
- Always include your keyword in the title
- Use your keyword two or three times within the blog post, once in the first paragraph, and once toward the end.
- Try to use your keyword early in paragraphs. Using your keyword phrase at the beginning is quite effective.
- Don’t use keyword stuffing. Too many repetitions will hurt your results rather than help.
- Use theme keywords to avoid overuse of one specific keyword or phrase.
- Utilize a question as your title. This is a good way to add variety to your titles.
- Start your title with a number, e.g. 7 Tips for …
- Engage your audience right away (first paragraph). Make them want to read more. Stories are a good way to accomplish this goal.
- State a problem that the reader has, and then set about giving a solution.
- Use lots of white space. That means no long paragraphs, and use bulleted lists as a way to help explain your solutions or provide your information.
- Be helpful. The reader should feel glad they read your post.
- Provide tips or resources that will be of immediate value to the reader.
- Link to another one of your blog posts (for added traffic potential). Make sure it’s relevant to the topic.
- Link to an external page, possibly your website, that will provide additional useful information.
Well, there are a few blog post strategy ideas that should help make your blog posts achieve higher prominence in the Google search results, and also ensure that you give your reader valuable information that will make them want to learn more from you.
Tags: blog google results, blog post effectiveness, blog post strategy
I’m fully aware that it’s important to post to your blog on a regular basis in order to continue to provide valuable content for readers. My blog has been idle for a while now, not because I haven’t wanted to post, but because I’ve been unable to post.
Last week I crashed my car and spent 5 days in the hospital. I wasn’t injured although the crash was severe. I passed out while driving and I don’t actually remember anything of the crash. I spent many days in the hospital undergoing evaluation and numerous tests to try and figure out what happened that caused me to pass out.
I still don’t have an answer.
I got home a couple days ago, but had no time to get on my computer. Even now, I haven’t gotten into my regular mode of operation and just wanted to put out a quick post to anyone who reads my blog. I’m hoping this weekend I can start up putting out some good content.
A custom 404 page come in handy when someone is searching for a page on your website that does not exist. Perhaps they typed in the name wrong, or the link was broken, or it’s even possible that you’ve renamed the page or taken it down.
Here’s the problem: what happens when someone requests a page on your site that does not exist? Well, they don’t arrive at the desired page and they are redirected to a 404 page (404 is an error code). Usually, the 404 page is generic as set up by the hosting service, but you can replace it.
I’m actually not going to talk about creating your own page today, but something very similar: redirecting to a page of your choice.
It turns out that by knowing a little behind the scenes code, you can make this happen quite easily.
A good resource for this type of information is www.htaccesstools.com, and that’s what I’m going to use today. Open up www.htaccesstools.com and on the right side under Htaccess Generators heading, select Error document.
That opens up a page where you can type in the desired redirect URL. Do so, fully qualified, now copy and paste the result and save the text as a .txt file, say 404error.txt for example.
Now, upload the file to the root of your domain, where you want to set up the 404 page redirection.
Before you do the next step, determine if you already have a file named .htaccess in your root directory. The root directory would be without any extra sub-directories, such as www.domain.com. If you already have an .htaccess file you can’t use the technique directly, although you could edit the .htaccess file.
Let’s assume you don’t have anything called .htaccess, and you have uploaded your new 404error.txt file. Rename the file as .htaccess with no other extension or prefix.
This .htaccess file tells where you want your 404 page error code to redirect when a requested page is not found.
Although it sounds a bit complicated, it’s really easy if you are the least bit familiar with uploading pages to your website hosting account.
While we didn’t actually create a new 404 page we did enable the request to be handled by redirecting the user to a valid URL of our choosing. This could be the root URL or any other URL you want.
Tags: .htaccess, 404 error, 404 page, 404 page error code, 404 page redirection, custom 404 page
As I recently joined Twitter, I have been playing around with it a little and looking for useful features. Tonight I received a picture from another member via Twitter and that made me wonder - how do they send Twitter pictures?
Well, it wasn’t hard to find out. And now you will know too: visit TwitPic.com and it’s easy.
Most people don’t seem to know about this option, but my guess is that it will become quite popular.
At any rate, if you need or want to send Twitter pictures, use TwitPic and you’ll be all set.
Tags: TwitPic, Twitter, Twitter pictures
