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10 Advanced Techniques to Improve Your Blog

Written by: William Gissen

Article Overview: Once you’ve established a blog, you can use it for many purposes, including improvement of the search engine ranking of your company’s web site. To do so, here are 10 useful techniques you should consider to set your blog apart from the standard cookie-cutter variety.

10 Advanced Techniques to Improve Your Blog

Once you've established a blog, you can use it for many purposes, including improvement of the search engine ranking of your company's web site. To do so, here are 10 useful techniques you should consider to set your blog apart from the standard cookie-cutter variety.

1) Move your blog from an external host to an internal component of your web site.

Wordpress.org offers the best software to do so with a step-by-step instruction sheet that boasts of a "five-minute" installation process.

Blogs on external hosts boost the vendor's web site instead of your own. Using an internal blog will help your entire site benefit from both inbound links to the blog and from an increased volume of web pages.

2) Use the "sociable" plug-in to create icons linking to social media sites at the end of each blog post.

Plug-ins are created by outside experts to increase the functionality of your blog. Wordpress.org is famous for having more plug-ins than any other program, and you can access them directly from the software. Each plug-in contains its own installation and activation instructions but adding them is relatively easy.

The sociable plug-in provides a slew of social media sites, and the user can just click on the ones he wishes to appear at the end of each post. This improves the marketing of your blog as visitors can easily spread interesting entries to entirely new audiences.

3) Use the "All in one SEO" plug-in to improve the search engine ranking of your posts.

Blog writers experience a dilemma. To maximize readership, they need cute, interesting blog headlines, but these headlines are not always the best for SEO purposes. The All-in-One-SEO plug-in lets you create more topical blog titles and descriptions of the content.

4) Activate the Askimet plug-in that comes with Wordpress.org software.

This plug-in provides a filter to prevent spam comments to your blog.

5) Reduce duplicate content created by blog programs.

A category archive is sufficient for visitors to look up blog content. Any chronological archives should be deleted.

6) Use a Google Sitemap Generator.

Sitemaps in general help Google spiders to navigate your web pages. But it is next to impossible to keep your sitemaps updated with the constant addition of material to blogs, especially because each entry appears to the spider as an entirely new web page.

The Google Sitemap Generator is a plug-in that keeps your XML sitemap up to date after each blog post.

7) Always update your blog with the latest version of Wordpress.org software and the latest version of any plug-ins you may be using.

Wordpress.org will automatically notify you when new versions are available.

8) Always back up both your Wordpress files and your Wordpress data base as frequently as possible, and especially before upgrading the software.

Wordpress files are simply saved by using an FTP program to move them from your hosting program to the hard drive of your computer. Saving the Wordpress database (MySQL) is a little more complicated, but it can be facilitated by activating another plug-in called WP - php My Admin. Go to the plug-in home page for step-by-step instructions.

9)Change the permalink structure on your dashboard.

Permalinks stand for "permanent links," and they refer to the URL generated for each new blog entry. Go to the permalinks option on your dashboard, click on "custom structure," and add the code /%postname%/. This will eliminate useless information in the URL such as the date and the name of your blog.

10) Improve your blog URLs by adding a post-slug plug-in to your blog.

The post-slug plug-in will improve the permalink even more by deleting short words in your entry headlines. For example instead of "the-cure-for-cancer.com," a post slug will change the URL to "cure-cancer.com," much better for SEO purposes.

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Article Tags: advanced blog techniques, improving your blog



Related Forum Posts
Re: Which would you start: a Blog or Online Community? - It is a difficult decision to make. Lets start it this way - What are you more interested in? Money? or Friends? or Both? If its purely Money, then Blog might be an appropriate answer. But consider this - It will be people (visitors) that will bring traffic to your blog and then Money will follow. This will be possible after a time and during this time it will be your friends who will be the starters. If you are looking for friends only, then its true that not many will be interested in knowing how you have beaten them in the game or the other way round. So it will be preferable to have a Forum where they can share ideas with you and others. But you can share your insider knowledge with them and invite comments from your Blog. You can also put up information on what others (including your friends) don't know about Tennis. The blog you create can provide News, Inside Information and also Techniques that can be used by the new entrants in the world of Tennis.
Re: The Best Method for Online Marketing - we must choose the most suitable one to use.. there are so many diffrent strategy here.. 1. Start with a web promotion plan and an effective web design and development strategy. 2. Get ranked at the top in major search engines, and practice good Search Optimization Techniques. 3. Learn to use Email Marketing Effectively. 4. Dominate your marketing niche with affiliate, reseller, and associate programs. 5. Request an analysis from an Internet marketing coach or Internet marketing consultant. 6. Build a responsive opt-in email list. 7. Publish articles or get listed in news stories. 8. Write and publish online press releases. 9. Facilitate and run contests and giveaways via your web site. 10. Blog and interact with your visitors.
Re: Best Internet Marketing Strategy - Hi David, I agree about the Blogosphere. You have a smaller group that Blog, but do so on the premise that they think they should, but have never really considered the purpose of their Blog. Then I think there are a few SEO or Internet Marketing types that see Blogging as just another link building strategy. But the largest group of Bloggers, tend to be people who enjoy writing and discussing their topics of interest. Blogging is good for link building, but the true Blogger is a breed apart from the rest. They want to dialog, to debate, to have feedback and they are very willing to link to other worthwhile conversations that are relevant to their topic. I agree with you. These group of Bloggers obviously are passionate about their writing and together, they create huge conversation trails interactive and travel from Blog to Blog. But the evidence is clear with this group that loves what they write about. With comments enabled on a Blog and having a Blog tuned to a specific purpose you already have the evidence of original Social Media.
Re: Alexa Ranking Goals - That's great GT! What method did you use to put up the Entrepreneur Blog Network in your Wordpress Blog? We're always looking for the easiest methods to help bloggers who are not techies get involved.
Re: Bad SEO techniques? - There are few more techniques which also known as the Bad SEO Techniques or Black Hat SEO Techniques. Such as: - Relying on keyword metatags - Purchase Links (From Spamming or blacklisted sites or doing purchase links on high level for site marketing) - Horde Page Rank: This is one of my favorites, because it's one that most webmasters don't understand yet. This is because it changed over the past year or two. The concept people have in their mind is that page rank is a key part of site rankings and linking to other sites "leaks page rank" from your site. However, the world has changed. - Swap Links: Another oldie, but not goodie. Search engines want links to represent endorsements. Swapped links represent barter, and they are trivial to detect. Don't swap links for the purpose of building page rank. It's a waste of your time - Implement duplicate content - Use Session IDs on your URLs - Use lots of Javascript - Implement your site in Flash


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