Write Better Blog Posts

One of the questions I’m frequently asked is "how do I write a blog post so it gets noticed?"

The first thing to consider is that when you are writing your blog posts, you have to please both the search engine spiders as well as your human visitors, but there are ways of creating great blog posts so you please both. 

The second thing to consider is that no matter how beautifully your blog posts are written - they could sound like prose from Shakespeare - if they are devoid of keywords, you’ll find it harder to get free search engine traffic.  Google for example thrives on keyword focused content that is relevant to the reader, but without stuffing your posts with keywords that make it look and sound artificial. 

Google now uses something called Latent Semantic Indexing (LSI) to match phrases on a page or post to determine it’s relevancy and with over 600,000 phrases used to compare against your blog posts, I would say the days of keyword stuffing are truly over. 

But before I lose you with technical jargon, let’s look at the 5 top ways in which you can ensure you write better blog posts to please both the search engine spiders and your human readers:

• Try and include the keyword in your title.  This truly is important because this is the first thing the search engine spiders see when they come to view your web page - and each blog post is a separate web page to the search engine spiders.  If using the keywords in the title say using WordPress, you can use the all in one SEO plugin, which will give you the option of writing a more appealing title for your human readers and then using a manual override for the search engines.
  
• Use a H1 tag where possible and again, unless it will make it look artificial, add the keyword to the H1 tag.  This isn’t just appealing to the search engines, it’s kind of a follow on or sub head to your readers who will get more of an understanding of what your blog post is about.
  
• Inject some human life and personality into your blog posts.  I read some blog posts and feel as if I’m writing my dissertation all over again.  If you write as though you are addressing one specific person, may be a friend, then your writing is likely to flow better and sound as though you really are interested in writing about the chosen topic.  And it’s okay to use "I" instead of "WE" MBA’ers! 
  
• Use relevant links in your blog posts and where possible, link your keywords - which could be an actual word or phrase.
  
• Break your blog article into sub headings and/or bulleted lists.  This really does help the reader skim if they prefer but also removes what can feel like an arduous task out of reading longer posts.

Hope you found this useful,

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HTML Color Codes

If you manage the "look and feel" of your own blog, you’ll know how important finding the right HTML color code is, as well as how frustrating finding the right color code can be.

I personally use it all the time and usually have to scour a few different sites on the Internet to find the right one, or open my "cheapy" design editor to find the color I want.  But it’s not always right and I usually end up fiddling about until I get the right shade.

Well, thanks to Denis de Bernardy, I now have the color scheme in one place.  I do know there is a good Hex color code chart online, but I prefer what Denis has created over at his site. 

So, if you’re a blog webmaster, go check it out, put it in your favorites if this is going to be one of the resources that you’ll use time and time again. 

WordPress 2.2 Not “Cutting It”

Should you be upgrading to WordPress 2.2?

As I told a new client yesterday, I usually wait until all the bugs are ironed out, but with that, decided that since it was a new blog I would go ahead and use the new version.

Fortunately, I had the good sense to do my homework before starting the customization and came across this link via Denis de Bernardy’s site…

http://trac.wordpress.org/ticket/4264

So in answer to the question, "should I upgrade to WordPress 2.2" I would have to say "no."  Wait until version 2.2.1 which will apparently iron out the current issues, one of which is the sidebar widgets.  Most people rely on the sidebar widgets plugin to add flexibility of their blog and this has presented a "look and feel" irritation if you’re using IE7, in that the widget content is centralized. 

You can see the comments yourself by going to the site via the above link.

Happy Blogging,

 

Creating An Audio Blog

Just how easy is it to add audio to your blog?

Audio blogs and video blogs are a big deal this year and you can either create them the hard and expensive way, or go the easy and economical route.  I don’t know about you, but I prefer methods that work and they’re not always the most expensive, complicated ways of doing something.

If you’re using WordPress then adding audio to your blog is easy although it can seem complicated if you don’t know what you’re doing.  This is the reason I created this short video to show you how to add audio to your blog.

This certainly isn’t the only way of adding audio, but it’s free and it works!

 http://trishjones.com/audio/blog_audio/adding_audio.html  

The video does assume that you already know how to download a zipped file and upload it to your server, changing the permissions if necessary.  If you don’t know how to do this, then ask your webmaster who should be able to do this for just a few dollars.

You’ll need to download the zipped file from www.1pixelout.net and just to let you know that the theme I’m using is called Semiologic Pro.