Keep your readers happy-  Effective Blog Posting

An excellent article i found on effective blog posting .

 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.

 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.

 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:

1. It creates a back link to the blue widgets post giving your search engine optimization for that post a slight boost.
    
2. 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.

Google faster, better, bigger……..

Google penetration in the internet application space is tremendous. Just other day when I was walking down near a café, I got stopped by this old gentleman who could barely walk; he was looking for some street directions. He asked me direction toward mayroll drive, I myself not so sure, politely told him “I’m not so sure sir”. His next statement really amazed me, he said “I should I have printed the Google maps, it would have been helpful”. I was surprised, the reason being the man must be at least 80 years old and his understanding of Google and its technologies was something challening for me to comprehend. I asked him if he is a technology person, he said “NO”. The gentleman said he hardly knew anything about computers. He mentioned he was born in the days where a calculator and landline phone were called mysterious devices. He said “I just see my granddaughter using these things and she shows him how they work. Another bombshell he pulled out a navigator from his pocket and launched his favorite Google maps applications and told me how it helps him to get back home every day.

I am wondering Google penetration in people lives on day to day basis and how it is positively changing the world we live in. Google popularity in the internet world really amazes me. Google is not only for some twenty first century technology geeks but it is also a familiar name among people of all ages or should I say centuries, who believed that calculator was a mysterious device. With its ever-increasing share in the internet application space Google has been able to make life easy for people of all demographics. Applications like Picasa, Google maps, Google gadgets are blessings not only for tech savvy people but also for common citizens who just know the name “Google”. One thing seems to be sure & clearer, with its ever increasing popularity Google is here to stay and will be faster, better and bigger……..

Yes, that’s the question somebody asks me other day. Well in my opinion it has never been a good time for print media to maximize their profit. Newspapers over the world have shown decrease in terms of advertisement revenue from past few years. However just blaming internet won’t help those news daily’s, they need to evolve from the primitive methods and look at alternative method of making content available to users. To be successful and make your content read and available to users, print media needs to move to alternative methods like news on mobile, RSS, dynamic websites, kiosk etc.

Is Internet a is a threat to print media? Is internet an enemy of friend? Let us know your thoughts….