What Is A Wordpress Blog?

“Blog” is an abbreviated version of “weblog,” which is a term used to describe web sites that maintain an ongoing chronicle of information. A blog is a frequently updated, personal website featuring diary-type commentary and links to articles on other Web sites. Blogs range from the personal to the political, and can focus on one narrow subject or a whole range of subjects.

Many blogs focus on a particular topic, such as web design, home staging, sports, or mobile technology. Some are more eclectic, presenting links to all types of other sites. And others are more like personal journals, presenting the author’s daily life and thoughts.

Generally speaking (although there are exceptions), blogs tend to have a few things in common:

• A main content area with articles listed chronologically, newest on top. Often, the articles are organized into categories.
• An archive of older articles.
• A way for people to leave comments about the articles.
• A list of links to other related sites, sometimes called a “blogroll”.
• One or more feeds like RSS, Atom or RDF files.

The Blog Content

Content is the raison d’être for any web site. Retail sites feature a catalog of products. University sites contain information about their campuses, curriculum, and faculty. News sites show the latest news stories. For a personal blog, you might have a bunch of observations, or reviews. Without some sort of updated content, there is little reason to visit a web site more than once.

On a blog, the content consists of articles (also sometimes called or “entries”) that the author(s) writes. Yes, some blogs have multiple authors, each writing his/her own articles. Typically, blog authors compose their articles in a web-based interface, built into the blogging system itself. Some blogging systems also support the ability to use , which allows authors to write articles offline and upload them at a later time.

Comments

Want an interactive website? Wouldn’t it be nice if the readers of a website could leave comments, tips or impressions about the site or a specific article? With blogs, they can! Posting comments is one of the most exciting features of blogs.

Most blogs have a method to allow visitors to leave comments. There are also nifty ways for authors of other blogs to leave comments without even visiting the blog! Called pingbacks or trackbacks, they can inform other bloggers whenever they cite an article from another site in their own articles. All this ensures that online conversations can be maintained painlessly among various site users and websites.

Things Bloggers Need to Know

In addition to understanding how your specific blogging software works, such as Getting_Started_with_WordPress, there are some terms and concepts you need to know.

Archives

A blog is also a good way to keep track of articles on a site. A lot of blogs feature an archive based on dates (like a monthly or yearly archive). The front page of a blog may feature a calendar of dates linked to daily archives. Archives can also be based on categories featuring all the articles related to a specific category.

It does not stop there; you can also archive your posts by author or alphabetically. The possibilities are endless. This ability to organize and present articles in a composed fashion is much of what makes blogging a popular personal publishing tool.

Feeds

A Feed is a function of special software that allows “Feedreaders” to access a site automatically looking for new content and then post updates about that new content to another site. This provides a way for users to keep up with the latest and hottest information posted on different blogging sites. Some Feeds include RSS (alternately defined as “Rich Site Summary” or “Really Simple Syndication”), Atom or RDF files. Dave Shea, author of the web design weblog has written a comprehensive summary of feeds.

Blogrolls

A blogroll is a list, sometimes categorized, of links to webpages the author of a blog finds worthwhile or interesting. The links in a blogroll are usually to other blogs with similar interests. The blogroll is often in a “sidebar” on the page or featured as a dedicated separate web page. and blo.gs are two websites that provide some interesting functions or help related to blogrolls. These sites provide methods for users to maintain these rolls effortlessly and integrate them into weblogs. WordPress has a built-in Link Manager so users do not have to depend on a third party for creating and managing their blogroll.

Syndication

A feed is a machine readable (usually XML) content publication that is updated regularly. Many weblogs publish a feed (usually RSS, but also possibly Atom and RDF and so on, as described above). There are tools out there that call themselves “feedreaders”. What they do is they keep checking specified blogs to see if they have been updated, and when the blogs are updated, they display the new post, and a link to it, with an excerpt (or the whole contents) of the post. Each feed contains items that are published over time. When checking a feed, the feedreader is actually looking for new items. New items are automatically discovered and downloaded for you to read. Just so you don’t have to visit all the blogs you are interested in. All you have to do with these feedreaders is to add the link to the RSS feed of all the blogs you are interested in. The feedreader will then inform you when any of the blogs have new posts in them. Most blogs have these “Syndication” feeds available for the readers to use.

Top 10 SEO Tips

The following tips are not necessarily in order of importance, but are in the order you should consider when building a new website from scratch. My top 10 tips ranked by order of importance for high rankings are displayed elsewhere.

1. Know your geographic market and ensure your domain has the correct TLD.
   If your primary market is the UK it is important to use a .UK TLD and ideally have your domain hosted on UK based servers.
2. Include keyword in Domain name (using hyphens if necessary).
   This doesn’t mean having a domain name like keyword-keyword-keyword-keyword.com try to stick to the one hyphen and not read as spammy. A good example is a site that sells wheelchair ramps with the URL of the site being www.wheelchair-ramps.co.uk
3. Create as much content about your products or subject as you can.
   After doing this divide in to 4 or 5 sections (this will help later when creating your navigation structure)
4. AFTER you have your site content start keyword researching
   There are tools you can use for keyword research; Wordtracker and The Google AdWords Keyword Tool to name but two. I personally use a combination of the Google Keyword Tool, Google LSI and T.J. Common Sense.
5. Decide on 4 or 5 primary keywords to use as main sub-sections
   Ideally have an idea of 4 or 5 main keywords, call them your Primary Keywords and then try to position secondary keywords with the Primary Word most closely associated with it.
6. Sit down and sketch out your navigation system
   Put a lot of time in to this and play around until it is right, use Primary Keyword as headers for 5 main Sub-sections and use secondary keywords as headers for content pages under each Primary Keyword

   

   The above diagram shows the early stages of constructing a navigation system. The green section (Sub-1) shows how all other sub sections will be. The Home page, All 5 Sub-section, About us, Terms, Contact, Privacy, Resources and Sitemap pages are always interlinked with each other forming 12 strong pages (more about this later)

7. Re-write content using knowledge previously gained about keywords and phrases
   This doesn’t mean totally re-writing and stuffing the page with keywords, it requires writing paragraphs ensuring the right phrases are in the right places but isn’t obvious that the phrases are written for the search engines. Do not write too much information on each page and do not stray of in to writing about something else.
8. Structure each individual page
   With your content rich, keyword balanced page written, you now have to create the page structure. Each page should be seen as an individual website.
   Starting from the top,
   • Page title should reflect the content of the Page ensuring you use the primary keyword for that Page
   • Meta keyword tags, (although not overly important), should list 4 or 5 individual keywords related to the Page you have created.
   • Meta Description tags, this should be a short concise description describing what the Page is about. This is very important as a selling point as you can manipulate the search engines in to displaying this when the person searches for the keyword used in the description. A favourite of mine is “Provides information about the latest KEYWORD now in stock and available online” or words suitable for the product.
   • Avoid bloated code by using external style sheets and minimum coding.
   • Main page layout was previously discussed whilst sketching the navigation system, but it is important that all links are seen by the engines and are using the correct anchor text related to the pages they are pointing too. Avoid using javascipt for links and if you have to use images ensure you use the correct alt attributes. If the page has too many links on it and looks messy this can be overcome by using a combination of css and javascript to create drop down boxes, but should only be used if you know what you are doing. If you have the opposite problem, and want to include links on the page but not necessarily have search engines follow them, this can be achieved using drop down option boxes.
   • With yout general layout and your linking structure sorted you should now sort out your headings. The main page heading of the page should use your Keywords and be in H1 Tags, this should be followed by your most important paragraph, ideally working down the page you should use secondary headers from h2 to h4 (always using the keywords if possible)
   • If you have used images on your page ensure keywords in the Alt attributes, this doesn’t mean keyword stuff them but just describe the image using the keyword.
9. Proof read your completed page and get a 2nd opinion
   With your page completed try and get someone to check it for you to see if it reads to spammy and to see if you have missed out any obvious key phrases that should be on the page.
10. Construct your site.
    With the previous procedure completed for all pages it’s now time to put the site together. Simply use the previously devised linking structure, group similar pages together under appropriate sub headings and ensure all links are active and using correct anchor text.

Most article marketers short change themselves by only submitting their articles to one or at most two directories.

If you ever want to achieve maximum results-getting more people to read each article-you have to change this submission habit.

Now, for most people, this is a real revelation. Most of the time, people preach the “only submit your article to one site” message.

Shame.

Think of it this way:

It’s far easier to research once…and write once

It’s far easier to find keywords once

It’s far easier to come up with one idea

It’s a no brainer.

It’s much easier to write and spin 1 article properly than it is to write hundreds of original articles and submit them to just 1 or 2 article sites.

Never forget that it is much easier to edit your writing than it is to start from a blank page…

Start submitting your articles to the article directories that really matter and start seeing article marketing success that you could only have dreamed of.

One Way vs Two Way Reciprocal Google Website Links

The search engines look very favorably on websites that have an incoming link from a prominent website, where that website does not link back to the other site (This is not surprisingly called a one way link). It’s also known more commonly as a backlink.

The search engines as a rule give less importance to a website involved in two way link (where both websites link to each other) since this has been abused so much in the past by webmasters seeking to achieve high search engine rankings.

Remember that the website you are linking to (or getting one way links from) should have content related to the content on your website.

One way links are far and away the best way to boost your rankings in the search engines, ultimately bringing you more traffic as more people find your website in the search engine results.

The more “important” (from the point of view of the search engines) the site that is linking to you is, the better, and this is what separates the men from the boys in relation to search engine rankings.

One good way to get the ball rolling is to submit articles to article directories (see the Articles Directory article for specific information). The key here is to make sure the article directory you are submitting has itself got a good page ranking with Google.

It’s very important to ensure that your one-way links have related content to your site. Even if it’s coming from a high ranking page, if your incoming link is from a website selling cars, and your selling flowers on your website, it’s unlikely to help you much. If however your site was all about car tyres then the link would be far more likely to provide a benefit to you in search engine rankings.

The more one-way links you can get from relevant, trusted (in the eyes of the search engines) and quality content sites the better. Remember that a single quality one way link will probably provide more of a benefit to your website than be 20-30 low quality links (un-trusted, sub-quality, not entirely relevant content to your website, or combinations of these problems).

The other thing you will definitely want to do is to mix-up your anchor text from these one-way links (Anchor text is the text shown on screen for a link to your website).

Wherever possible you will want to try and control what is in the anchor text on these sites (obviously this will not be possible some times because it’s not your website, however I’ve found many web masters are happy to help).

You definitely don’t want to have the same anchor text for many incoming links from many websites as this can set a red flag to the search engines, who may well rate your website less importance because they believe you may be manipulating the results (I’m not saying that the anchor text for every one way link needs to be unique, just that you should ensure you have a number of combinations of them in use).

You want to have your best keyword phrases in use with your incoming links, but use a lot of variation and even just some regular links (just your domain name in the anchor text) will help keeping things natural.

The other thing you want to do is be sure to not always link to your root directory of your website, but rather directly to articles, etc. This allows your incoming link to be targeted for a particular page.

For example with overwhelmingtraffic.com I have submitted articles to various article directories that are a subset of a more comprehensive article. In this case I’ve chosen to link from the article directory article direct to the more compressive article on my website. I’ve also ensured that the article is not just a duplicate, since search engines dislike duplicate content and will mark down your websites importance if duplicate content is found.

Of course one way links to your website will not only boost your website’s search engine rankings, but it will also bring traffic to your site.

Start slowly and build up the links over time, you will find your likely to get far better results doing it this way, and that it’s also more likely that your great search engine rankings are likely to “stick” in the future.

Video

Strategies Used To Create One Way Non Reciprocal Links To Your Website

A site should always contain more incoming than outgoing links. Due to search engine requirements, incoming links have more value in page rankings than reciprocal or outgoing links. (more…)