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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% [?]
Mind Freeze: What To Do If You Can’t Think of Anything To Write
You are going to go through stages when your mind will freeze up and you won’t be able to write anything for your blog. Often this will happen just after you have written your first sentence. Here are a few tips to get you writing again:
1) Go and read the latest posts on all the blogs you frequently visit. If you find an interesting post, write a few brief comments on the post and include the URL to the original post. Once you get into the habit of writing good articles, other bloggers will do the same for you.
2) Go to EzineArticles.com and search for articles related to your blog. Read as many as you can and write down any interesting points you could include in an article. Never copy text directly from any of the articles, just jot down the main points in your own words so you can expand them in your own article.
3) Go through the comments left on your own blog (or other related blogs) and jot down the main points of the questions being asked. Your answers will be the basis of an article.
4) Visit forums related to the theme of your blog and find questions being asked by members. Make a note of the questions and replies to these questions and write your own article based on the replies.
5) Once your blog starts receiving a good amount of traffic use the plugin by Survey Gizmo to employ surveys asking your readers which topics they would like to receive more information on. You can write articles based on the results.
6) Go to any of the social bookmarking websites and find popular bookmarks for sites with a similar theme to your blog. Make a note of the most popular topics and then visit the bookmarked pages. Take notes on the points covered in the articles on the various pages and use them as the basis for your own articles.
7) Go though your own blog posts, especially the more popular ones and figure out whether you have missed anything. Make a note of the missing points and write an article covering them. Remember to add a link to your original post in the new article.
Finally, when all else fails, “how to” articles and blog posts are some of the most sought after, linked to, and bookmarked content online. Pick an important process related to your blog’s theme and explain how to do it…
To Your Success,
Alejandro Reyes
skype: whoisalejandro
yahoo: whoisalejandro
Popularity: 58% [?]
Going Away but Still Want to Post to Your blog?
Posting regularly is necessary to keep your readers and the search engines interested in your blog. This becomes a bit of a challenge if you decide to go on holiday. The answer is to use one of the great features of WordPress, which is the option to save your posts and publish them at a date and time you specify.
In the “Post Timestamp” drop down box on the right hand side of the “Write” page, you will see a check box that says “Edit Timestamp” with a drop down box for the month above text boxes for the date and time. You can change these to the date and time you want your post to be published. You must check the “Edit Timestamp” check box in order for the change to take place. Forget the check box and when you click “Publish”, your post will be published instantly.
There is another aspect of blogging which makes this WordPress feature useful, and that is you will find inspiration for writing posts comes in fits and starts… One day you will get the urge to write a number of posts, while on other days you will draw a complete blank when you site down to write. When you do get the urge to write, create a number of posts and schedule them to be published over the next few days or weeks.
If you have opted to use the “Update Services” feature of WordPress and have entered a list of ping services into the WordPress “Options / Writing” page, the post will be pinged as soon as you save it. If you are saving a lot of posts they will all be pinged as soon as you save them and might be construed as spamming by the update services. The answer is to use a service or plugin which only pings the update services when your posts are actually published. Here are two such options:
1. The No Ping Wait plugin has been used for some time by bloggers, but with recent versions of WordPress some bloggers have reporting that saved posts are no longer being pinged when they are published. The PingFix plugin by Jan Piotrowski addresses this issue and only pings update services when your posts are published.
2. The other option available to you is to use the Autopinger service which checks your blog every thirty minutes or so and will only ping the blog services when a new post is published on your blog. If you decide to use this service, make sure you delete all the URL’s in the update services option in your WordPress admin panel.
To your Success,
Alejandro Reyes
skype: whoisalejandro
yahoo: whoisalejandro
Popularity: 49% [?]
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 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% [?]