Tag Archives: post

OMG, I’ve been doing SEO all wrong!

Posted on Wednesday 22 May 2013 by Alice • 4 Comments

Talking about bloggingI’ve been very busy lately doing lots of research for my next Lunchtime Learning video all about search engine optimisation (SEO) so I can give you top-notch information on that subject. Such a fascinating subject, especially since it has changed so drastically since last year.

But lo and behold, I’ve just found out I’ve been doing it all wrong over these past years! Why – what have I done?

I’ve always been a good girl and have been adding lots of my tags to my posts, carefully selecting them from the content so that they are relevant. I thought I was doing a good thing regarding SEO as surely the search engines would pick on on at least some of these tags to index my post.

But – overstuffing yourself with good things (like chocolate cake) will only make you sick. The old adage “Too many cooks spoil the broth” comes to mind, as putting all the herbs and spices from your kitchen into your soup will probably make it taste revolting and nobody will want to eat it.

Just like the over-saturation of keywords in blog posts pre-2013, which made them totally unreadable and frankly ridiculous, over-saturation of tags will do the same thing. The poor old spiders, when confronted with all these tags, get totally confused and their response would be to not index anything at all because they don’t know which one is the most important.

Would you like to know how many tags I have collected in this blog since I started it? 1,467! Yes, that many! No wonder the poor spiders were running away as fast as their virtual legs would take them.

This requires some serious measures to rectify the situation. There is a lot of tags to go through, but I need to sort out which ones are the most relevant to what I write about, and then use them more frequently. The more I use them, the more they become attractive to search engines to ultimately optimise my blog posts.

So, the answer is, once you’ve worked out the best keyword for your post, select up to four sub-keywords which will become the post’s tags. If they have been already used in previous posts, so much the better. They will need to be added to your post in the tag menu purely to supplement and lend weight to the primary keyword, and also in whatever SEO plugin you have chosen.

You don’t need to choose the same five for every post, but a healthy select few that are totally relevant will be helpful. That’s why it’s worth pre-planning your posts beforehand, or at least being clear on the subject matter or the readership you’re aiming at.

 

Filed Under: blogging success, use of words, Writing tips

Finding somewhere that makes it easy for you to post

Posted on Thursday 24 January 2013 by Alice • 0 Comments

Blog tuitionNow that I blog more frequently, I need to be able to post whenever I get inspiration, otherwise I forget all sorts of good stuff (must be a sign of getting old). So with the acquisition of a much beloved iPad, I search out places that have free wi-fi and settle down to write.

It amazes me that there are still places that make this difficult or near enough impossible. You’d think fancy hotels would think outside the box and offer free wi-fi to encourage people to meet and drink coffee? Yet it is the smaller establishments that happily supply this service without obligation, like this garden centre I’m blogging in now, a green tea at my elbow.

In fact I’m so impressed I’m thinking of holding a blogging surgery for people who would like to meet me for a cappuccino and quiz me with their blogging queries. With this free wi-fi and my trusty iPad or laptop, this could be a fantastic opportunity where I’d be happy to try solve your posting problems or design delimmas! And if you’ve got kids there’s a soft-play area to stop us being disturbed (too much).

These sorts of places are very good at providing inspiration, as they get you into a different environment and stimulate your thought processes – certainly better than staring at your office’s four walls. It’s the open spaces, excellent light and bright colours that do wonders for me, not too mention the presence of other happy humans enjoying chocolate cake.

If if anybody likes my idea of a blogging surgery, let me know, and I’ll be happy to arrange a suitable date.

Filed Under: blogging encouragement, Blogging help, blogging success

Magic Moment: How to show tweets within posts

Posted on Monday 2 July 2012 by Alice • 0 Comments
Fairy Blog Mother: blogging help

Click my logo to ask me a question!

Whenever WordPress is updated, there is usually a nice new feature to explore and marvel at.

In the latest version (3.4), WordPress allows us to display tweets in posts (as shown below). When you mouse over it, you’ll find that it is also interactive, so you can follow the twitterer, retweet or reply to the tweet, or even mark it as a favourite.

(It’s so nice when I get complimentary comments – maybe I should show more of them…)

And it’s easy to do this yourself. Go to the twitterer’s timeline, find the tweet in question and click on it.

Tweet details exposedIt will then expand. Look for the time and date in light grey just above the reply field, and click on the word ‘Details’. The tweet will open into a separate page with its own URL.

Copy that URL and then paste it into your blog page you are writing. Although you only see the URL in your text, when you preview your post the tweet will be shown in all its glory!

–oo0oo–

And now I’ve just found another facet within this feature. While preparing another complimentary tweet, after I clicked on ‘Details’ the tweet expanded to show the conversations before and after, with the light grey link ‘Embed this Tweet’ appearing in the same place. This resulted in a menu that provide me with the HTML code for the tweet:

Embed this tweet

HTML tag(remember to pull the field down with the little arrow in bottom right hand corner to reveal the whole of the code, or highlight it all via Ctrl A before copying) which, when copied into my post (click on the HTML tag at the top of the posting field for pasting in HTML), appeared as this:

After HTML tweet pasted

but when your preview or publish, it appears like this:

which in spite of the typo I think this is pretty cool!

And hopefully without going overboard, here’s another example:

Happy tweet-blogging!

Filed Under: blogs and blogging, Free Wordpress blogs, non-jargon, other social media, Self-hosted Wordpress blogs

When is the best time to blog?

Posted on Friday 22 April 2011 by Alice • 1 Comment
Fairy Blog Mother: blogging help

Fairy Blog Mother

Everybody has different body clocks, so they choose their own time to write their posts. Some people get their inspiration first thing in the morning, others late at night once they’ve been suitably stimulated by various happenings during the day. Of course you can write your post whenever suits you, only to save it in draft for later editing or, if you’re sure it is ready, schedule it to go out at a more appropriate time.

So when is it a good time to publish? I find this varies quite considerably, according to which particular media I have ‘fed’ my blog post to, so it can be read by the audience that populates it.

It all depends when my readership is more likely to be participating on social media. With Twitter the pace is so fast your post could easily be superseded by other news as soon as it hits the Twitter-stream – unless your followers have set up their own streams which includes you in it. That’s how I keep abreast of the worthwhile Twitters so I can interact with them and follow their blog posts whenever they are published.

You need to work out when is the most favourable time your fellow social networking friends are going to be around to read your posts. Do you catch the early birds, the mid-morning browsers, the lunchtime feeders, the afternoon skivers, or the evening perusers. Ideally you need to schedule your post’s feed so it either catches the most popular time, or multiple entries to get a better chance of being read at another part of the day.

Feeds to other social networking sites such as Facebook and LinkedIn will allow your post to be visible for longer before it is usurped by its successor, and subscription posts that are sent to email inboxes or search engine reader pages will languish there quite happily until they are read.

And a post’s journey is not finished with the subscriber – the practice of sharing posts, through Twitter, social bookmarking sites and natural referral techniques will prolong the life of a post so it can reach another form of readership.

So the answer is to find that ‘optimum’ time that will spark off the chain reaction to send your post on its merry way, as it transverses across the world wide web in pursuit of both new and tried and trusted audiences.

Filed Under: blogs and blogging, Free Wordpress blogs, increasing business visibility, Self-hosted Wordpress blogs, social networking

What does a forward slash signify?

Posted on Thursday 12 August 2010 by Alice • 0 Comments

Fairy Blog Mother

Driving to work today, a relevation came to me. For years I had just accepted the forward slash as being parts of a URL or web-address which I didn’t need to question. They seemed to be like the mortar that held the bricks together.

But now I understand them as gateways for the server (the hosting area where your domain name is held) to direct visitors (or spiders) to another portion (file/section/page/post) of your blog.

For example, the URL for this post http://fairyblogmother.co.uk/what-does-a-forward-slash-signify/ shows the domain name (the web address of this blog) followed by a door (the forward slash) to go to the page (the blog post) which contains the above title. (Don’t forget that each post has its own page and therefore a URL allocated to it.) The forward slash also allows these elements to be separated, comprehended and archived.

Let’s look at this URL for the beginning of my WordPress.com blog course: http://fairyblogmother.co.uk/com/create-a-blog/.  First is the domain name of this blog, with a door (slash) leading to the parent page ‘com’, with another door/slash which leads to a child page ‘create a blog’, with another slash ready should a grandchild page become available.

If you wrote the full URL without slashes, the server wouldn’t understand that a) the information was separated and b) which areas (page or file) it was to go to, and there would be no methods of conveying the blog user in the right direction.

Well, that’s my interpretation of the forward slash – what’s yours?

Filed Under: blogs and blogging

How to put a video onto a WordPress.com blog

Posted on Tuesday 1 June 2010 by Alice • 2 Comments

Fairy Blog Mother

One thing about a WordPress.com blog is that generally it doesn’t accept HTML code or script if you want to add in special features such as a sign-in box for your newsletter in the sidebar, or a coded badge for your Twitter-stream, for example.

refers to .com blog

But there are exceptions. One is for the chicklit logo for RSS so subscribers can follow your posts through a search engine reader, and another is to post in videos from YouTube.com.

So how do you add a video to your post in a WordPress.com blog? Well, first you need to upload your video into YouTube.com because once this is accomplished, you will be given a URL for your video and code for your website (and also your blog).

I’m going to use an old video I made for my business many years ago, which I have buried away in YouTube.com.

Click on ‘Edit’:

And then ‘View on Video Page’:

And click on the ‘Embed’ button:

This is where you can get the code for your video. If you are posting it into your website, you can play around with the colour scheme and screen size too!  But now we need to go into your blog’s dashboard (see ‘How to accessing a blog’):

Here is the WordPress.com blog I use to show the examples in my visual blogging e-courses you can access from the Free Resources Library in my sidebar. Let’s create a post (see ‘Writing Posts’):

I’m going to concentrate on using your video’s URL given to you by YouTube.com first. You can upload that via the Video icon at the top of the post-writing box:

Once you’ve clicked on that, go to the ‘From URL’ tab:

And you will see a space for your video’s URL. Go back to YouTube.com:

And copy your video’s URL from the browser at the top of your webpage. Then go back to your blog and post it into the URL box:

Click on ‘Insert into Post’:

Where you will see the URL correctly displayed. (If you just paste the URL directly into your post-writing box without doing this procedure, it will just become a link that goes directly back to your YouTube.com page which contains your video.)

Now click on ‘Preview’ to see the video window:

If you would like to use the code given by YouTube.com as an alternative method, here’s how. Go back to YouTube.com:

Highlight and copy the code of your video, and go back to your post-writing box in your blog and paste in the code where you want your video screen to be:

Here’s when WordPress.com allows HTML script to happen properly. Click on ‘Preview’ to see your video screen:

Although it looks the same, you’ll see the sentence before reminding you I’ve used code instead of the URL.

Now all you need to do is to finish writing your post, add in your tags and allocate your categories, and publish!

Filed Under: blogs and blogging, Free Wordpress blogs, increasing business visibility, social networking