All Blogging Tips
Everything About Blogging
As a blogger we have got lot of things to do (posting, research, social media, videos, link building, etc…) and we don`t find time to check our own blog comments. Then, why to comment on other blogs?
Commenting on other blogs, benefit you with lot of things! Here I have listed few reasons Why You Should Comment on Other Blogs? [Read more…] about Why You Should Comment on Other Blogs?
First of all tell me why should anyone read your blog?
No idea?
Let me clear your doubt why should someone read your blog.
People read your blog to solve their problems not to listen your bragging!
Blogging is not only the best way to make money online but it also provide a better platform to share your opinions and to build a brand.
Isn’t it?
But only few bloggers succeed online. Well, most of the remaining bloggers quit blogging within 6 months, how terrible?
Ammar is very lucky as he had recently completed his 6 months blogging journey and published over 199 posts, this the 200th post which you are reading now!
Coming back to the point. Why your blog will never grow and what can you do to stop it? Ready?
If you have pathetic content and writing style then no one will be interested to read your so called blog.
Create something that you will be proud of.
Don’t post just another posts to update your blog. No post is better than the worst post. And I know it’s bit difficult to create great content especially when you are just starting out.
All you have to do to create better content for your blog is: being helpful to your readers. Know your targeted audience first. Then try solving their problems.
How to know their problems then?
Good question which I always love to answer.
Try solving your own blogging problems! I will explain you more better here.
If you are just created a blog and thinking what to write in your first blog post, you can write “How to write your very first blog post”.
You can rank more better in Google if you are the first person to write on the trending hot topics!
At the end of the day, you must create compelling content, readers will come one or other day for sure!
Read: 10 Crucial Points To Help You Write Better Blog Posts.
Invest some money on buying premium themes like Thesis or Genesis, their coding is so simpler and easy which can make your blog to take next level.
Make your readers easily to read your content. Don’t make your blog design complex! If you strain their eyes, they will go away.
If you can’t afford premium themes, just make use of minimalist themes like pagelines etc.
They look simple and easy to read the content without having any strain.
Read: Selecting Your Blog Design Theme Design
Creating valuable content alone is not enough, you must network with others in your niche. Spend some time to respond to your comments, email others to read your content, be in touch with your readers etc.
Blogging becomes much easier when you have like minded people around your network. If you have unique tone and content, you can absolutely stand out from the crowd to make a difference.
You don’t need to be creative marketer to network with others. Just focus on Win/Win approach i.e give and take policy.
It works better when you network with others. Try to help them and solve their problems, surely you will make positive impact on them.
Read: How to Create a SCADA System For Your Blog!
Instead of spending your time on blog commenting for 2 to 3 hours, spend that time to write quality guest posts for others. It can do wonders.
I’m not saying to stop blog commenting. But if you have less time to blog, spend time productively. And this is the best way to build your blog fast.
Guest blogging gives you:
Do you know Danny Iny aka freddy krueger of blogging?
Here is a snapshot of Danny Iny’s traffic in his first year of blogging.
And look at him now! He is almost everywhere in the blogosphere. How does he made it? The credit goes to guest blogging!
Read: How to get Maximum Benefits from your guest post…
What are the suggestion would you give to build a better blog?
Note from Ammar: Hurray! I’m so excited to announce that this is the 200th post on my blog. All the credit goes to you. Without YOU I can’t reach this position so fast. As you all know that I started this blog just about 6 months back. And it has been growing super fast from then with your support. Thanks for your love and I will promise you that I can do more better for you in the upcoming days.
So, you have a photography blog and you’ve been posting pictures for a long time and you’re still not getting enough traffic. The same happened to my friend. Traffic means a lot especially for blogs. It’s easy to manage a photo blog, but when it comes to traffic it may be difficult to get it. In this article I’m gonna show you how to increase traffic to your photo blog making the best use of the social networking sites.
One of the best way to increase traffic to your photo blog is to share your pictures with your blog URL watermark or use some text like this on the image – “For Full Size Visit This Website – [YOURBLOG].com”. You small size pictures while sharing, and tell them to visit your site for the full size images.
There are many groups on Facebook for photographers, you can find them in the search bar in the Facebook homepage, then there you’ll find some posting there, send a friend request to anyone of them, and then, after he accepts the request, tell him to add you to the group. And then post your images(which should have watermarks). And then wait for a few days, you’ll see the increase traffic to your blog!
Pinterest is the largest growing social networking site. You can drive large amounts of traffic from Pinterest, if you have good amount of followers. You may google it to find tips and tricks about how to increase followers and repins. Here are a few tips to get more followers –
As you know, Flickr is one of the largest image sharing sites. Add some images in Flickr with a watermark text(make sure your blog URL, is in the watermark text.)
SEO is the best way to increase traffic for any kinda blog. This is the same for photo blogs too. Here are few tips to optimize your images for search engines –
1. Use keyword in file name
For example, let us think you’ve bought a new Mercedes, and you want to post that image in your photo blog, then the image with file name my-new-mercedes.jpg would get a better ranking in search engines than IMG00010.jpg
So, it’s better to use a keyword in a file name, to get a better ranking.
2. Descriptive Alt Tags
The alt attribute describes the contents of an image file.(You can read about the importance of alt attribute in the image publishing guidelines). An image with alt attribute is market up as follows –
<img src="my-new-mercedes" alt="My New Mercedes" />
3. SEO Friendly Images WordPress Plugin
SEO Friendly Images is a WordPress Plugin which automatically updates all images with proper alt and title attributes. It makes your SEO for images easy. Read more about this plugin here – http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/seo-image/
You can read more about optimizing images for SEO here – http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=114016&ctx=sibling
Hope you find this article useful :)
On April 24th Matt Cutts, the head in charge of webspam team at google announced that there will be another algorithm change to the google search engine and it will be named as google PENGUIN update.
Oh wait I said google search engine; yes my friend google again updated its self. But again the same question arises as it came last year during panda update. Why there was a need of a new algorithm? While the same simple answer to reduce or nullify the webspams and to make google SERP better.
To quote Matt’s words:
“The change will decrease rankings for sites that we believe are violating Google’s existing quality guidelines. We’ve always targeted webspam in our rankings, and this algorithm represents another improvement in our efforts to reduce webspam and promote high quality content.”
That’s the bad news for only those who use to spam google and make their blog on high SERP with specially use of black hat techniques. Black hat hummmm I don’t know whether you know about this, or not but still to explain you,
BLACK HAT SEO– this is an illegal activity which is done by most of the bloggers this technique just make any one blogs reputation up by awfully activities. Mostly it consists of keyword confusion games which mean wrong keyword stuffing, getting indexed within seconds and many more.
Yes that’s true for few days or forever this black hat techniques are stopped due to update. But again same thing goes as black hat peoples cracked panda update, there is maximum probability that they will crack down google penguin update and remove more technique to recover them self but I personally suggest you that if you are blogging to make money wait for few days and just belief on your hard work.
If you have started getting low search engine traffic it’s most likely that your website has penalized by google for not following guidelines of google.
As last time when Panda update took place in February 2011, the chief goal of that date was to penalize those site’s which contain poor quality content, site’s whose content doesn’t match with query. As it was a high profile update it affected the web spammers largely.
Every blogger and website owners should keep in mind that google is tracking your each and every moves. Google always tweak search engine algorithms because it’s the company which has multi bullion dollar a year business and it’s their responsibility that they make accurate and quality search result.
Mutt Cutt even says
“Google just wants to provide Search result which will enhance the experience of the users”
How Google Serves up Results to Users
Google works hard to make its search result better. Its working is quite simple it’s like a filter which filters the website according to your query. There is lots of website which contain the words which you input in search box but google knows that you won’t like to crawl on 100s of site but a user want what he wants. So the billion dollar company always works hard to make it better and valuable in minds of people.
How will google penguin update affect your sites?
For starters if you have created and maintained with solid and original with quality content articles which has been organically rising up the ranking then you won’t have much to worry.
By saying organically means the article you wrote where ranked in google and was indexed by search engine and steadily your page ranking and alexa ranking was increasing.
But if you have tried to fool google by use of short cuts and tried to rank you website above higher quality content websites with poor content, by using black hat techniques. Then there will be subsequent decrease in google page rank and traffic in few coming months.
Following are few things which would make a website to penalize.
You might know about Akismet Plugin if you are using wordpress, just go to administration panel of this plugin and watch out how much garbage your Akismet filters out of your comment area.
All those spam are comment are from people or from automated robots which leave comments with links going back to their site in the hope of that they will get one backlink. Sometimes that spammer cross the limit as their comment don’t even relate with the article. One more technique which spammers adopt is create an account in any famous fourm and post links of their website which is an illegal process giving the person lots of traffic and good quality backlinks. This things where previously building huge number of backlink and also increase search engine traffic. This type of tactics is now targeted more readily by google and this will be largely addressed I google penguin update.
In the effort of making any website full of content in a very short time period some people use what are known as article spinners. That is they start to recycle existing content which are already on other websites. This type of thing is an illegal activity which makes a blog without the new and fresh information and overall there is nothing new of yours. This thing is been seen by google and google is targeting such website which use article spinners and span over all SERP.
Some of the spammers do this type of activity which refers of using unnatural placements of keyword in content. The keywords are those which rank better in SERP and when you actually read the content on website it doesn’t make any sense but its only stuffed with lots of keywords.
There is lot more things in black hat technique but this are on the top list which makes a blog to Get Penalized by Google Penguin Update. Read also : Common SEO Mistakes & Tips From Google for New Bloggers
In future when your blog will be in surveillance of google may get penalize due to such activity which you use to make you website famous in SERP. The only way to rescue from penguin beaks is to only perform White Hat SEO techniques and nothing else. If you have already harmed by penguin update then just leave a comment I will try my best to help you out.
Do you already own a smartphone? If you’re a blogger, chances are you do. After all, bloggers as a whole are technically adept people. But merely owning a smartphone isn’t enough for a blogger. We need to become heavy users, becoming attuned to all the little aspects of the smartphones. In other words, we need to become power users.
At this point you might be asking why we need to use our smartphones heavily. The answer is quite simple.
More and more people move from regular cell phones to smart phones every day. That means shifting behaviors in general. It also means changing behaviors for reading. People seem to enjoy reading on their smartphones. Web sites, particularly with mobile plug-ins, are laid out well. There are many RSS applications as well. Smartphones make reading easy.
If more and more people are reading your blog on your smartphone, shouldn’t you become familiar with their device of choice? That isn’t to say you should go rush out and buy the newest iPhone or Samsung cell phone just because your readers are using those devices. But it does mean you should be exploring all facets of the smartphone you do own.
Remember, blogging is about connecting with your audience. If your audience is reading on smartphones, you should become familiar with how they’re reading so you can create a deeper connection. Make sure you see what they see, how they see it. Here are a few tips for become more intimate with your smartphone.
If you do nothing else, you should be reading your own blog from your smartphone. Sure, you know all the content. You either wrote or edited it. But you probably did that right from your computer — you know, the one with the big screen and keyboard. Reading your site from your smartphone changes the experience, and gives you an idea of what your readers see when they visit you.
When you visit your blog on your smartphone you might start to realize some things. For instance, the first time I visited my site from my very first BlackBerry I realized that it looked like crap. It loaded slowly and was difficult to read. It was clear that we needed to install a mobile plugin. Now that I use Android phones and the iPhone, I make sure that my sites look good on both of those. That way my readers get the same experience.
You might be the person who creates the blog, but your blog is nothing without the audience. Make sure you see things how they see them.
While mobile plugins have made it more pleasant to view blogs on smartphones, they don’t necessarily make commenting easier. Since many of your readers will want to leave comments, you should make sure that it’s easy to do from a smartphone. The best way to accomplish this, unsurprisingly, is to leave comments yourself.
This doesn’t have to be anything time consuming. In fact, you can do it while waiting on line or on the train, since you’ll be doing it from your smartphone. But just make sure that you know how easy or difficult it is to comment on your blog from a smartphone. That will motivate you to make it easier for your readers.
While you can always ask for feedback, there is no substitute for first-hand testing. Since more and more people are reading on their smartphones, it is the blogger’s responsibility to ensure an easy mobile reading experience. It doesn’t even take that much effort. Just make sure that you’re reading and commenting on your blog with your smartphone. If it’s easy for you, it’s easy for your readers. They’ll thank you for it.