Blog SEO, Blogs, Tips

Blog Post Title – Did you think before you posted?

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Did you know that your blog post tiles are very important for the SEO of your blog? There are some simple but important considerations to get your post (more) popular. Are you doing it the right way?

You must have heard that you must spend 5 times more time on your headline than your sales page. It applies equally well to the blog post titles. A good curiosity enhancing title can make more people consume your post. Here are some interesting options for the post title:

  • How to <do whatever you are writing about>…
  • 7 (or some other number) ways to <something you are writing about>…
  • Are you making these mistakes <in your whatever>? Or some other question?

You will notice that Wordpress or Semiologic will create a slug from your title that will become part of the URL. You should edit this to take out all sundries like did, or, of, the etc while keeping the meaning intact. Think newspaper headlines. Study how they create a meaningful sentence with the minimum words.

Changing page title and meta-tags in Semiologic

As a final tip (only applicable if you are using Semiologic or a SEO-plugin enhanced Wordpress), edit the title of the page. Normally the title of the page (the meta-tag, not the headline) is same as the blog post title. You can edit this to score well on the SEO front while retaining a different blog post title.

You can see the image on the left to see how you can enter a specific set of meta tags for each post.

Blog SEO

Blogs Shine When Tagged

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Further to my earlier post about improving the SEO potential of your blog with a suitable title, today I will like to cover the use of tags to improve the rankings.

In all your posts, you should add a few tags related to the subjects, name of people or other important topics that the post covers. Note that the tags are different to the category. While there are only a few categories which indicate the main subject of the post, tags are specific to this post. You can use some generic as well as some long tail tags to mark this post.

I will be putting this post under the Blog SEO category but will use several tags – some general, some very specific. The tags pages can help a lot in distributing link juice to the different pages and are very useful for SEO.

Blog SEO, Blogs, RentABlogger, Tips

Home Page Title for SEO on Semiologic Blogs

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If you use Semiologic as your blogging software (I call it Wordpress on steroids), make sure you enter a keyword rich and attractive title for the home page. The blog generally defaults to displaying your blog description as the title of the home page, which is not such a great idea.

In admin section, you can click on Settings and then choose SEO to enter a title and some other parameters for the home page. I have got a nice improvement in rankings of some of my client blogs by this change alone.

Announcements, Blogs, Reviews, Tips

Wordpress Plugins: Make Your Blog Do Amazing Things

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Do you know what makes Wordpress so popular? While Wordpress is very lean and thin just out of the box, it can be extended to do some amazing things by using plugins, that extend its functionality. There are plugins to display RSS feed data in the blog, replace text by affiliate links automatically, create a tweet whenever you post… the list is endless.

Yet there are times when you feel that you need a plugin that will do a specific task that you want your blog to do and you cannot locate a plugin for that. Why bother with freelance programmer sites, paying crazy money to people you don’t even know are reliable to create your plugin.

The excellent Wordpress plugin tutorial and source code reference site makes it very easy to write your own plugin. Since you refer to an existing plugin source code and adapt it from there, you can write your new plugin very easily… and quickly.

Nothing to beat the feeling of having created your own plugin and make it do exactly what you want is wonderful. Have a look at the write your own wordpress plugin site. You will love it!

Blogs, Tips

How To Retrieve Blog Password When You Don’t Have Access To The Registered Email Address

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This is a question that has come up quite frequently recently – “How do I retrieve my blog admin password when I don’t have access to the email address I registered the blog with?”. Here is a simple remedy:

If you have access to the blog database (may be through the site control panel), you can access the wp_users table and change the email address linked to your user account. After doing so, you can visit the login screen of your blog and click on the “Lost my password” link. Wordpress will first send you a link to reset the password and after you click it, it will send a new password to you.

Announcements, Blogs, RentABlogger

We Upgrade Your Wordpress Blogs for $25 each

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We upgrade your Wordpress blogs for $25Do you have a Wordpress blog that needs to be updgraded to the latest version? Are you aware that you should keep your Wordpress based blogs upgraded to take advantage of the latest features and also to avoid the risk of people exploiting the security bugs that some of the earlier versions have?

While wordpress is a great content management system and the most popular blogging platform, a large number of users find it very cumbersome to upgrade their blogs. If you are a techno-shy user or just don’t have the time for these upgrades, we can upgrade your blogs at a nominal $25 per blog per upgrade.

Just send us the FTP details (preferably the control panel details so that we can back up before the upgrade) and your payment by Paypal to arun AT ebizindia DOT com. I highly recommend you to take a backup of your blog – we take all precautions before and during the upgrade but it never hurt to take preventive measures.

Case studies, RentABlogger, Tips

Moving a Wordpress blog from a sub-directory to the root directory

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This is a case study of a blog I recently moved from a sub-directory (/wordpress) to the root directory (/). You can get some interesting tips by reading this or better still, assign the move to us at a nominal cost and save yourself all the hair-pulling 🙂

Step 1: The site was on Cpanel, so I took a full backup of the site to avoid chances of a major disaster happening if something went wrong (you know the Murphy’s laws, don’t you?).

Step 2: I upgraded the current blog (at /wordpress) to the latest version so that the database structure will be up to date.

Step 3: I downloaded all the files in the root directory to a local folder so that I can replace the overwritten files, if any are required.

Step 4: I then uploaded a full copy of the blog software to the root directory (public_html folder as this was a cpanel site). If there are any special plugins used, you should download the software from the previous location and then upload this in the new location so that the plugin files are also uploaded.

Step 5: I uploaded the wp-config.php fie in the root directory so that Wordpress will refer to the same database.

Step 6: I accessed the database through PHPmyadmin and opened the wp_options table. Updated the values of the site_url and home options to http://www.domain.com by replacing http://www.domain.com/wordpress.

Step 7: Now I accessed the blog through the root URL and it opened fine. However I noticed that the posts were still being linked to www.domain.com/wordpress/postname/id. 

Step 8: I accessed the admin console and recreated the Permalinks so as to update all the post URLs. 

Now the whole blog was working fine without any issues.

Lastly, I needed to make sure that Google and other search engine would redirect the old indexed /wordpress/post URLs to the new ones. For this, I edited the .htaccess file in the root directory.

Inserted the following code before the # BEGIN WORDPRESS section (if you don’t keep this code out of the WORDPRESS section, Wordpress will remove this when you update Permalinks or do any other act that works with .htaccess file).

RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /
rewriterule ^wordpress(/.*)? $1 [L,R=301]

This effectively creates a permanent redirect for all files with /wordpress/something name to /something names.

Bingo! The blog is now accessible from the root directory of the domain. You may like to rename the /wordpress directory to /oldwordpress directory and keep it for a few days, then delete it when things have stabilized.

Now you can move your blogs around as and when you wish. However if you are techno-shy or don’t have time to play with all these wordpresses and PHPmyadmins, feel free to assign your “move my blog” cases to us. You can write to me at arun AT ebizindia DOT com (you know how to convert that to a working email address).

Announcements, Blogs, Reviews, Tips

Posterous.com: Blogging by Email

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So you don’t want to login to your blog’s admin panel and create a new blog post? And you don’t want to bother with uploading images and linking to them? You will take none of the nonsense related to embedding YouTube videos in your posts? Not even thinking of multiple images and image galleries and all that techno-geek stuff?

Have heart. You can still blog – just by sending an email. Here’s how:

Just send an email to post@posterous.com. Put your headline in the subject and write whatever you want to post, in the body. Want to embed a YouTube video. Just include a link. Need to include images? Attach them. PDF, Word, MP3 – all accepted. Send and your post is done. How’s that for ease?

Check out my ebizindia.posterous.com blog. Put a comment if you like the idea and free reports. Subscribe by RSS and you will be informed the moment I make the next post. Enjoy! Life is simple. So is blogging – by email.

 

Blogs, RentABlogger, Tips

10 Reasons Why Ecommerce Etailers Should Blog

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I recently got this interesting question from a client: "I have an ecommerce site. Should I blog? If yes, what can I write about?" Here are some interesting tips about blogging for ecommerce etailers:

By now, it is clear that I recommend blogging for people who own ecommerce sites. A client owns multiple blogs which act as the funnel to his main site and he has been very successful in increasing his online sales with blogs. Let us see what you can write about on your blog.

  • You can make a blog post if you have introduced a new range of items on your site. Discuss why you introduced this range (there was a popular demand, customers frequently asked me to carry this range etc), what is the special feature of this range and who can buy and how will they benefit.
  • You can announce your periodic promotions through your blog.
  • You can answer important and frequent customer service questions on your blog. Of course, you should also include them in the FAQ section.
  • You can highlight some recent testimonials received from satisfied customers. This is a powerful social proof (others are liking this range, so it must be good).
  • You can blog about how to use a complicated or uncommon aspect of your products. Some of your customers might not be able to take maximum advantage of your products because they cannot use a particular feature easily. You can create a short video or carry some snap-shots that will show how to use that feature.
  • You can publish important industry news with your take on it. This positions you as an industry expert. You may comment on some government policies affecting your trade. Generally you should add your opinion and not just report the news.
  • The ecommerce sites are quite mechanical generally without much human element. As you might know, "people do business with people and not companies." If you talk about a few key people of your company, post their photographs, highlight some personality traits (don’t get too personal, just talk about how he serves insistent customers with a smile, how he solves complicated service problems in a few minutes), some prospects and customers may find an increased traction towards your company.
  • You can highlight any awards or recognition you got recently. This will increase the brand value and increase customer confidence.
  • People love stories. Why don’t you make some posts about how a customer averted a major crisis in his life (personal or business) by using your products or because you shipped same day despite receiving the order late in the evening?
  • You can run periodic customer surveys and ask them what part of your products and company they like most or use most. You will be surprised at the answers you get – it may not be what you thought and will give you an entirely new aspect to highlight in your marketing.

With a little bit of publicity like a link from your main site home page and submission to some top blog directories, you can stake your claim on another ranking position in the search engine results page. I strongly recommend you to link to your internal and most relevant pages rather than link to the home page always.

If you want to get some help in setting up an optimized blog for your site, please check this out.

Announcements, Blogs

Jeff Johnson Offers SEO Optimized Blog Software

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Jeff Johnson, a reputed marketer and SEO specialist has released a customized copy of SEO enhanced Wordpress blog software, wherein he has included some nice plugins and settings for getting together a SEO optimized blog so that you can make money while writing about your favorite industry and products. The blog should get good rankings and traffic quickly.

While he does include easy to understand instructions, we appreciate that you may not be feeling adventerous and excited about doing all that work. If so, you can take advantage of our hands-free setup service for a nominal $40 per blog. You just need to send us the details of your domain name and hosting account and we will setup your blog exactly as Jeff recommends. Write to me at arun AT ebizindia DOT com (you know how to write that address in your email) and I will send you instructions for payment.