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Blog Spam: How It Will Affect You and How to Minimize It
There is one basic fact of life when it comes to blogging; your blog is going to receive spam in one form or another, and most likely all forms!
The most prolific form is comment spam. Experienced spammers use highly advance programs (known as spam engines) to leave comments on thousands of blogs which contain links to the product they are promoting - much the same as those spam emails you receive daily.
They have evolved to the point where they can read the verification images displayed by some anti-comment spam plugins. Some can read and interpret javascript code, and renaming your form variables in the comment files is not a worthwhile solution. They can still find the necessary variables by reading and interpreting the comment form code.
The Askimet plugin which comes with WordPress is pretty effective at stopping spam comments appearing on your blog, but it places them in a moderation queue so you still have to review them and manually delete them. Unfortunately it often places innocent comments in the moderation queue, so you have to check regularly.
To use the Askimet plugin you will have to sign up for a WordPress.com account in order to receive an API key for use with the plugin. When you enter your details into the sign up form, make sure you use the “Just a username, please” option. Once you have succesfully opend a WordPress account, they will send your API key via email.
There is another option for reducing blog spam offered by the plugin called HashCash from Elliot Black which slows down advanced spam engines and virtually eliminates most automated spam comments from getting near your blog in the first place. The advantage of this is you don’t get spam held in a moderation queue because the spam is stopped before plugins like Askimet can do their job of filtering it out.
It works by picking a random large number every four hours. Whenever somebody visits your posts, a javascript is called which first decrypts itself, then executes itself again to retrieve a secret value saved in a .htaccess protected folder, which it then sets in the form. If a comment does not have this value, it is rejected. If a comment is rejected more than four times, the user is blocked for a specified period of time.
It is important to note that this will not stop a spam comment left by a visitor to your blog, so the best option is to use HashCash in conjunction with plugins like Askimet. This way you only have a few comments to moderate instead of hundreds or thousands.
Most spammers who leave trackback spam will never place a link to your blog on theirs. There is a plugin called Simple Trackback Validation by Michael Woehrer which reduces spam trackbacks by retrieving the web page located at the URL used in the trackback (in the comment on your post) and checking if the page contains a link to your blog: if not, the trackback is placed in a moderation queue and is not published on your blog.
Unfortunately there is no 100% reliable automated method of accurately identifying, trapping and deleting spam. Normal comments will be trapped (known as false positives) and you will have to review your moderation queue on a regular basis, but by using plugins you can dramatically reduce your moderation workload.
Happy Blogging and have a great weekend!
Alejandro Reyes
916.947.2455
skype: whoisalejandro
Popularity: 78% [?]
Decision Time: Do You Want Readers to Leave Comments or Not
One of the quickest ways to increase content on your blog is to allow readers to leave comments, but for this to be effective you have to leave prompt replies. During the initial growth phase of your blog, you will not receive many comments… The volume grows as your readership increases.
At some point you will get into a situation where the sheer volume of comments becomes too much to handle on your own. You will spend too much time answering comments and not enough time writing posts.
The problem is not just the replies to the posts you have just published; the problem is compounded by visitors who find your old posts in the search engine listings. You will have to reply to comments on posts you published a long time ago. If your blog receives thousands of visits daily, many of those visitors will want to leave some sort of comment.
This leaves you with two options to consider:
1) Don’t accept comments
While this might effectively solve the problem outright, your new blog is not going to grow very quickly.
If you are creating an RSS fed blog which will run with little or no intervention on your part, then you don’t want to accept comments. Nothing will ruin your blog’s reputation quicker than unanswered comments on each post…
2) Stop accepting comments to posts after a certain time period has elapsed
Use the Comment Timeout plugin by James McKay which will allow you to automatically close comments on posts after a predetermined period of time. It also has an option which allows you to keep comments open for longer on older posts if recent comments have been left.
All settings are made through the “Options / Comment Timeout” page of your WordPress control panel.
This plugin will allow you to stop comments being accepted by setting the time period to zero.
Until tomorrow folks,
Alejandro Reyes
916.947.2455
Popularity: 80% [?]
Keep your Readers Happy: Make it Easy for Them to Find Your Posts
It is fairly easy to get visitors to your blog from a link on another website or a search engine listing, but it’s just as easy to lose your new visitor when they find it difficult to find related information on your blog. The default WordPress installation is not visitor friendly, and the historical archives are a complete waste of time… Offer your visitors an easy way to find similar posts to the one they are currently reading, and don’t make it difficult to find other information.
In the previous chapter we discussed the concept of linking related posts together and not leaving them isolated. Here are a few more ideas:
1) Display a site search utility
Internet users are becoming savvier and many people are comfortable using a blog search facility if you make one available. WordPress comes with a fairly simple search facility which most blog themes will incorporate.
When you first start your blog the WordPress search facility will be quite adequate, but as your number of posts increases you will need to enhance your WordPress blog search results by using the Search Reloaded Plugin by SemioLogic which uses an advanced search algorithm.
2) Display a list of related posts
If your reader reads your entire blog post, there’s a very good chance they will want more information, so offer them a list of related posts at the end of each blog post. You can accomplish this by using the modified Related Posts plugin from Peter Bowyer. He has enhanced the original plugin by Alexander Malov & Mike Lu because the original plugin did not always display decent results. Additionally, using the keyword option to identify related posts meant having to edit all previous posts.
The modified plugin takes the post content, and calculates word frequency using weightings for different parts of the post (eg URL, title, content). It then matches these against your WordPress database, and returns results which are more relevant.
The downside of this plugin is that it is not supported, but it does work with WorPress 2.1
The three advantages of this plugin are:
- It is simple to install.
- It will work correctly with existing posts.
- It gave the most relevant results of all the plugins I tried.
3) Display a list of the most read posts
In your blog side bar you could list a number of your most popular posts. If people find a post interesting it makes sense improve the post’s exposure and make it available to every visitor to your blog.
The bsuite plugin by Casey Bisson will display (among other things) a predetermined number of popular posts based on the number of times it has been read.
4) Display a list of recent posts
Perhaps not as important as the previous three points, but if your blog is a news type blog then the most recent posts will be current news and of interest to your readers. The easiest way to display recent posts is to use the Fuzzy Recent Posts plugin from Semiologic.
Stay tuned tomorrow as I will be talking about “going away and still leaving posts.”
To YOUR Success,
Alejandro Reyes
skype: whoisalejandro
Popularity: 49% [?]
Improve Readership and Rankings with Effective Blog Posting
1) The Effect of posting regularity
During my research into effective blog posting, one point came up time and time again:
As soon as bloggers reduced their posting frequency or stopped posting altogether their website traffic began to drop off, and their search engine rankings began to slide.
On the opposite side of the coin, posting too many times in one day seemed to have the same effect…
The general consensus for effective posting seemed to be one of consistency; of creating a blogging schedule and sticking to it. For example, one or two posts per week of at least 200 words, and one or two posts of 500 words or more.
The shorter posts could be a quick note referencing an interesting article or blog post you have found, while the longer posts could be an explanation of some particular procedure or a review of a product or service. The longer posts are the ones to concentrate your search engine optimization efforts on as they are more likely to be indexed and ranked.
2) Reveal Some of Your Personality
People visit blogs regularly because they form an affinity with the blogger. They either agree or disagree with the blogger, but if they respect the blogger’s opinions, they keep coming back for more.
Being too personable has the opposite affect. People are not interested in your personal life, or your possessions. They are interested in your opinions and advice. This means taking a stand on issues and products and not bragging about your latest Porche or complaining about your latest misfortune!
If you like, or don’t like something say so, but explain your reasons. Your personality will show through as regular readers begin to understand your likes and dislikes. This is when some readers will begin to form an affinity with you. Others will decide they don’t like you and stop visiting your blog… You will get the odd one who sticks around to ruffle your feathers, much like a forum troll - just delete their comments and hope they get the message.
3) Don’t Leave Your Posts Isolated
Internal linking plays an important role in search engine optimization. When you write a post link it to other related posts. Make sure you use the main keyword phrase of the post you are linking to in the hyperlink.
For example if you were writing a post about “green widgets” and had previously written a post about “blue widgets” you could reference your “blue widgets” post by creating a link to it, the html code of your link would look like this:
<a href=”http://www.your-blog.com/widgets/blue-widgets.php”>blue widgets</a>
When you are write a post using WordPress simply highlight the text you want included in the hyperlink, click the “Insert/Edit Link” button and a popup is displayed where you can enter the link URL (http://www.your-blog.com/widgets/blue-widgets.php in the example) and click the insert button.
This serves two purposes:
i. It creates a back link to the blue widgets post giving your search engine optimization for that post a slight boost.
ii. It gives your reader a link to another related article which they will probably go and read, and so you get an extra opportunity to impress your reader and ultimately expose them to your advertisements.
Your primary goal in improving readership and rankings is to keep your readers happy. Keeping the search engines happy is secondary. You might employ every SEO trick in the book, but once your readers lose interest they will stop visiting your blog. This means you stop getting return traffic, new back links and bookmarks. The search engines will soon notice this reduced activity and your rankings will begin to slide.
Hope you find this post to be helpful to your blogging efforts.
Tomorrow we’ll be discussing “How to keep your readers happy…”
Until then!
Alejandro Reyes
916.947.2455
yahoo: whoisalejandro
skype: whoisalejandro
Popularity: 96% [?]
Improve Your Search Engine Ranking Potential: Essential SEO Plugins
The basic “out the box” WordPress SEO settings are not enough to fully optimize your blog, but there are a number of plugins you can use to enhance your WordPress blog further:
1) Make a decision - to use, or not to use, the www. prefix in your blog URL’s…
If your blog uses URL’s which include ‘www.’ and others which do not, the search engines will index two versions of your blog and aside from the possible waste of bandwidth from double spidering, one of them will be filtered as duplicated content. While this problem might be real or just a storm in a tea cup, being pro-active seems to be the wisest option. You need to decide which system you want to use and stick to it, always!
The Redirections plugin by John Godley allows you to specify which system you want to use and will automatically create ‘301 redirection’ for other URL’s. For example, if you decide to use the ‘www.’ prefix any link to your blog that does not contain the prefix will automatically be redirected to the correct URL which contains the ‘www.’ prefix.
The major advantage of using this plugin is that it also creates re-directs if you choose to change a post slug (used for the post file name). It also creates redirects if you decide to change your permalink structure and already have posts indexed in the search engines using the old permalink structure.
2) Create Optimized post title tags
The SEO Title Tag plugin by Stephan Spencer is an essential plugin. By default WordPress places your blog name, a separator and then your post name in the title of each page (i.e. between the <title> tags). The SEO Title Tag plugin reverses this and places your post name before your blog name in the title. From a search engine optimization stand point this is advantageous, because:
- It gives the keywords in your title more prominence.
- It provides more meaningful search engine listing results.
- It provides more meaningful browser bookmark names.
One of the major advantages of this plugin is that you have the ability to create a unique title tag for your blog index page and separate title tags for your category pages. By default, WordPress just uses the blog name for the index title and category names for the category page titles.
3) Include description and keyword meta tags in your blog’s <head> tags…
Including meta keyword tags in your blog’s header is not a necessity, most search engines ignore them, but including them won’t harm your search engine optimization chances on some of the simpler search engines.
Some search engines will use your meta description in their search listings, others like Google will display all or part of a sentence which contains the first instance of the keyword or phrase being searched. The most obvious thing to do would be to add your keyword phrases into the meta description tag, but these must contain a call-to-action (e.g. make the reader want to read your article).
Creating a compelling meta description which includes all your keyword phrases makes it somewhat difficult for programmers to build a plugin for creating automated meta description tags…
The most common meta description solutions are plugins which take the first 100 or 150 characters from the first sentence to include them in the meta description. The most effective meta keywords plugins are those which also handle the tags you add to each post. Here are two plugins for you to consider:
i. The Ultimate Tag Warrior plugin by Christine Davis is the ultimate tagging solution for bloggers, but it can also include the tags you add to your posts as meta keywords. This plugin can be used for a number of different features on your blog, so it makes sense to use it instead of different plugins for each feature.
ii. The Head META Description plugin by Kaf Oseo takes your post excerpt or if you don’t enter one, the first 20 words of your post content and includes them in a meta description tag.
To get the most out of this plugin you need to get into the habit of writing an attention grabbing post exert (or first sentence) for all your posts. This is a good article writing habit to get into whether you use the plugin or not.
Instructions for installing all the plugins during these 17 days and for configuring your blog are given in “Installing the Plugins” post…
See you tomorrow.
Happy Blogging,
Alejandro Reyes
916.947.2455
yahoo: whoisalejandro
skype: whoisalejandro
Popularity: 64% [?]
5 Reasons Why Blogging is a GREAT Internet Marketing Tool
Blogging is a concept that started in late 90s. It used to be a way to comment an existing webpage, an opportunity for visitors and readers to react or voice out one’s opinion on the said page. What started as a single-sentence commentary has evolved into pages of personal take on just about anything and everything under the sun. As it continues to move forward, online advertising has tapped into the blog’s potential. Here are 5 reasons why you should use blogging as an Internet Marketing tool.
1. Blogging is simple. The simplest way to get your piece on the net is through blogging. No skills are necessary… an average adult can read and type, or at least click a mouse. It’s like having a virtual piece of paper and you just write your ideas, experiences, new products, and hope that the truth behind your articles comes out and entice your reader to also try your product. If you have a computer and an Internet connection (who doesn’t?) then you can blog and advertise.
2. Blogging is authentic. In this day and age where advertising saturates our lives, we question the credibility of promoters’ claims. However, in blogs, real people share their real-life experiences, unscathed by paid advertising. Reading blogs about first-hand product use is like talking to people about their first-hand experience. You definitely want to buy a tried and tested product.
3. Blogging is free. Because blogging is yet to be proven as a mainstream online advertising media, most sites see it as something to augment current marketing tools and thus offer it for free. Any opportunity for free webspace is definitely a bonus especially to businesses that are starting up. Needless to say, paid blog pages can generate more income for your seriously growing business.
4. Blogging builds credibility. As you get more and more into writing your experiences on a particular product or industry, your readers come to realize that they can depend on your posts for their own information needs. As such, you become an expert on it; as a consequence, more readers visit your site and more bloggers link to your blogs. As companies and professional organizations notice the growth of your readership base, they may soon get in touch with you for advertising on your blog page, or make you an affiliate, which pays for every referral generated from your blog site.
5. Blogging builds your market. Unless you are a Hollywood star, chances are, only your Mom reads your posts. Mom has a lot of friends, so she lets her friends know how interesting your blog site is. But you need not depend on Mom to increase your readership base. Look into the following ways to build your market through blogging:
Give your business or online presence a boost by effectively using blogging as an Internet marketing tool.
To your Online Success,
Alejandro Reyes
Online Entrepreneur
916.947.2455
skype: whoisalejandro
yahoo: whoisalejandro
Popularity: 99% [?]
Over the next few weeks I’m going to to be sharing information about “Blogging”, what Blogs are are, and how Blogging can help you: express your thoughts, expose your business, and make money online.
I hope this information is useful to you! Here we go.
Blogging 101
If writing is an art, then, blogging is one way of using words to come up with an art. This is because people who are into blogging are the ones who are artistic on their own sense, carefully choosing words that would best describe their feelings, sentiments, wishes, desires, and everything.
Basically, blogs were first introduced as weblogs that refer to a “server’s log file.” It was created when web logging hit the virtual market. Since its inception in the mid-1990s, web logging gradually saturated the virtual community making the Internet a viable source of greater information.
However, with web logging, you still need a web site and domain names, but with blogging, you do not need anything just an account with blog providers. In most cases, these kinds of blogs are free of charge.
With the onset of blogging in the industry, personal journaling had been a common ground for people who wish to be known all over the world. However, not literally famous as this is not a case on being popular or well-known personality.
Generally, blogs are created for personal use. Like a journal, people can write their daily adventures, sentiments, and whatever ideas they want to express online.
Nevertheless, with the advent of the online businesses, blogs had gradually taken the limelight in providing businesses a chance to boost their productivity online. This is where the business blogs have taken the limelight.
Business blogs are, basically, created to advertise the services or products of a certain web site or online business in order to increase online sales.
Moreover, business blogs are also one way of promoting the company so that the other readers will know that a certain company exists online. With blogs, entrepreneurs are able to establish a name in the virtual market through articles that can be very useful in the reader’s life.
From there, you can make money out of blogs by simply syndicating it to your business’ web site. This can be done through the RSS technology.
So, if you are thinking to create a blog, whether for business or for pleasure, you need to know some tips that could help you get through and make your blog one of the interesting blogs online.
Here’s how:
1. Consider your audience
Even if your blog is generally personal, still, it would be better to consider the minds of your readers. You have to think of something that would interest them.
After all, most of the reasons of people who write blogs are not at all confined to their own personal motives. Most of them would love to be “heard” (or read) and would love to be known, in some way or another, even for just a minute. Hence, it is very important to come with a write up that everybody can understand, not necessarily that these people can relate to it but they can understand it.
2. Pictures speaks a thousand words
To make your blogging worth the browsing effort of your readers, it would be extremely nice if you will put some pictures in it. It does not necessarily mean you have to place a picture of yourself. Any photographs will do as long as it does not pose danger or insult to anyone who will be reading your blog.
3. Make constructive and beneficial blogs
Even if you are free to write anything you wan to say to the world, still, it would be better to create some write-ups that would be beneficial to your readers.
After all, its information technology that you have there so better be inclined to provide information rather than sheer quirky entertainment.
4. Avoid making multifaceted and complicated blogs
In order to have an interesting blogs, try not to use some highly technical and highfalutin words. After all, it is not a science discourse or a debate that you are making, so better stick to simple facts and short blogs.
Bear in mind that most people who use the Internet usually do more scanning than scrutinizing each site word for word. Therefore, it would be better to come with blogs that will not bore your readers just because you have these lengthy articles.
5. Make it interactive
As much as possible and if your capacity will allow it, make your blog interactive. Yu can do this by placing some video or audio clips in your blog.
You can even place an area for comments or for some feedbacks. In this way, you can get some impressions or reactions of other people. Who knows, you might even gain some friends just by making them feel at home in your blog site.
Indeed, blogs are not created just for the mere fun of it. It also has its own purpose in the world of the Internet.
Therefore, for people who wish to harness their craft, as far as writing is concerned, blogs are the best way to do it.
As they say, blogging is the contemporary term of creative and commercial writing.
Until next time folks.
Alejandro Reyes
916.947.2455
skype: whoisalejandro
yahoo: whoisalejandro
Popularity: 50% [?]