Webenso » Blogging

Throw out your keywords and go creative with your blog titles

Kathy Alice — Sun, 08 Apr 2012 03:38:45 +0000

For choosing your blog titles, here’s the advice I’m sure you’ve heard:

Build a keyword list of your blog’s main topic.
Choose some criteria to pick the most promising keywords (search volume, evidence of long tail, competition or CPC)
Write a post that has the keyword term in the page title, post title and at least a couple of times in the post body.

Google Analytics doesn't lie - Sex Sells

I could have come up with a blog title such as “Beware of Facebook’s social reader” or “What are your Facebook social apps sharing about you?” Both are reasonable given the search volume on “social reader” and “Facebook social apps”. But I didn’t. I went for broke and used the title “Four Things You Do To Kill Her Sex Drive”. We don’t always like to admit it, but sex sells and is of interest to a broad audience (many which would find a discussion of Google Analytics totally boring). It seems that it worked, after I published the blog post Sunday night, my traffic jumped up significantly the next two days (see Google Analytics chart above).

This highlights one drawback of using keyword tools, they show you historical data and won’t show you an emerging trend, which often is an excellent source of traffic. Catch such a wave and it will trump your most carefully crafted keyword rich post. Getting in on a new thing such as being the first to write a review of a new product or comment on a recent news worthy announcement are the opportunities to look for. There is a reason why news channels do so well. Twitter is excellent for this kind of prospecting as news is frequently reported there before the mass media picks it up. For regional trends, log in your Twitter account on twitter.com and check out the trends on the left for your area. For worldwide trends spend time with search.twitter.com.

Also, something those of us that write more technically focused content lose sight of, don’t forget the importance of an inviting title. When you write your title, put your audience’s hat on, and ask yourself honestly, does this title compel me to click on it and find out more? Sometimes you just have to lose the keywords and write more creatively to perk up interest.

16 Blog Directories – The Good, Bad and the Ugly

Kathy Alice — Mon, 21 Mar 2011 00:39:46 +0000

I’ve seen several “top blog directories to submit your blog to” articles, however these lists are often light on details or out of date. Here are 16 blog directories that I went to take a look at. Like regular web directories, some blog directories will only list you for a fee, and yet still more request a reciprocal link before they will list you. Some are rather sneaky about it, you don’t figure out you have to reciprocate or pay until you are a step or two into the submission process.

That being said, just like web directories, it might be worth paying for a listing in some of these blog directories, however that analysis (choosing which one to pay for) is for another day.

For some of these you should be prepared to create an account and choose a category that your blog belongs to. Some ask for a full profile. Some have validation/ownership verification processes. It WILL take more time than you expect. Many of these will have a human review the submission before publishing it. That’s ok, in fact it is good, as google looks more favorably on directories that have editorial review. Here are the 16 I reviewed, I’ve grouped them into “Free”, “Paid”, “Reciprocal” and “Ugly” Free

Blog Catalog Once you create your account, Blog Catalog expects you to either put a link to blogcatalog.com on your blogroll or add a “Meta” tag to “verify ownership”. Unfortunately before I got around to adding the meta tag I was distracted by other priorities. When I came back to re-obtain the meta tag they had “deactivated” my account. I’ve requested reactivation. If I am able to complete the process I will update this post.
Technorati More than just a blog directory. Technorati is a world upon its own. You can set up a full profile here and interact with other bloggers. To complete the submission process you have to write a blog post with a code in it to verify you own the blog. Here’s mine: 7QJWXUWT59VX
BlogPulse Quick and easy, you can submit multiple blogs here. Click on the contact us link if you can’t find the submission link.
Google Blog Search – When I checked my blog was already listed here, if yours is not you can submit it here.
IceRocket Another straighforward submission, in this case I just added http://rpc.icerocket.com:10080/ to my WordPress update services.
GlobeOfBlogs Tends more towards the personal blogger, expect to fill out a profile to submit your blog.
bloggernity.com After you create an account, validate your email and then submit, it politely asks you to put their badge on your blog. Perhaps the link in this post is a good alternative.
bloggapedia.com Also requests reciprocal link, not particulary clear if it is required

Paid

eatonweb.com There is a reason it asks for a paypal enabled email when you create the account. $34.99 for a listing.
blogsearchengine.com $14.99 for a listing
bloggeries.com $49.99 for a listing
blogarama.com $1.99 for a listing

Reciprocal Link

ontoplist This was one of the sneaky ones. After going through the process, it became clear they will only give you the listing when you place a badge on your website or pay $29.99. I went ahead and added the badge (see under “recent entries”) so readers have a sense of what they look like.
bloguniverse.com Reciporal link or paid listing

The Ugly

superblogdirectory.com – domain is for sale
spillbean.com – submit page has been hacked

There are many more blog directories, please feel free to comment on any I might have overlooked.

Preventing Image Theft & Copyright Violation

Kathy Alice — Fri, 21 Jan 2011 15:01:08 +0000

Copyright law exists to protect the creators of a original work, whether than be an article, a photo or a drawing. As soon as you create it you have copyright to it, which stays in place 70 years after the author’s death; at that point it belongs to the public domain. Unless you grant license for someone else to use your image, it is considered a copyright violation if they use without your permission. Image theft is an important issue on the web, especially to people who make their living creating visual art. Just this week there was a furor over the site http://lxixixl.com/ which was copying and hosting entire collections of images from people’s websites. Complaints shut it down but there are others that are doing the same thing. Theft of content and image happens every day on the web, so what can you do?

Inform: Show that it is your original work by placing a copyright notice on your website. For example “Copyright 2011 Pablo Picasso”
Make it less desirable: Many artists will only put low resolution copies of their images online. So if they are stolen they are not of full quality.
Make it difficult: Implement functionality that makes it harder to steal the images. For example, disable the right click functionality with javascript. Note this will annoy some visitors who expect the right click to work for legitimate uses. Another approach is to place a transparent image over the real image, so when it is saved the thief gets a blank image. WordPress users might want to check out the iProtect plugin. Keep in mind that that neither one of these are complete solutions. Disabling right click doesn’t help when the thief finds the image in Google Image Search and gets the image there. Which brings me to ….
Hide them from Google and Bing: Keep all your images in one directory and tell Google and Bing not to index that directory by placing a directive in the robots.txt file. Note that this action is useless if Google has already indexed your images.
Watermark them: Perhaps the most effective solution, this alters the image so that it is “marked” in an identifying way. It’s the same idea as branding cattle back in the cattle rustling days. There are also WordPress plugins that watermark the image “on the fly”.

Ultimately it is up to you how much effort you want to put into preventing image theft and violation of your copyright, but don’t just ignore the issue, decide on an approach and take action.

Using Images in Blogs

Kathy Alice — Mon, 17 Jan 2011 18:52:34 +0000

One thing I don’t do enough of, is make a practice of using images in my blog. I admit, I’m lazy and don’t want to do the extra work, and there is all that confusing copyright stuff, and where do you find them?

Up to this point the images I had included were screenshots that I had taken to help illustrate a how to post. Since I created the image, I didn’t have to think about finding it or the attribution. But today that is changing, it’s the new year after all and I want to improve my blog.

What you need to know – Copyright issues Yes, you can find images on the web to use in your blog. You don’t have to source them all yourself. But before you run off to Google Image search and grab the first cool image you come across, educate yourself about the copyright issues.

Public Domain and Creative Commons For most of you, who just need an image to make your blog post more visually interesting and to get the topic across more quickly, public domain and images published under the creative commons license are the two sources of images you will be dealing with. However keep in mind that there are different licensing rules if you modify the image or use it for commercial reasons. I’m not covering those topics in detail here but read the rules and you should be fine.

Images from the Public Domain are free to use, with no strings attached. They have been contributed to the public for its use. The “thinking boy” image above, is an example of such an image. He is from The Open Clip Art Library and was contributed by Ryan Lerch. This is a great resource for illustrations.

If you use an image published under the Creative Commons License, in most cases you are expected to include an attribution to the creator as well as state that the image is licensed under Creative Commons. Creative Commons licenses give artists control on how others may use their work, for example they may or may not grant permission for image modification. A really popular source of images licensed under Creative Commons is Flickr. Flickr Creative Commons Search is a great place to look at photographs to use in your blog.

Free versus Paid Images For Free images there are a number of resources. Generally you will need to create an account to download them and the images are free to use but often you will need to create an attribution/link back to their site. Sometimes you have to pay for the higher resolution versions. Here are a few sites to check out:

For images that you pay for, you have more freedom to “use them as your own”. While it can get expensive for the higher resolution images, low res images are fine for your blog and are cheap. For example $1-$2 is common at iStockPhoto. These royalty free images are a great solution for websites where an attribution would look out of place.

Want more? This post by PresentationZen has a more extensive list..

Useful Searches Here are a few ways to search for photos other than going to the sites above.

Google Image Search – filter by usage rights in the advanced search
PhotoRee – searches the Flickr database
Flick Creative Commons

With all these great resources, it opens a new world of possibilities to make my blog posts more visually appealing. Although I’m still working on the “lazy” excuse.

Other fellow bloggers to check out:

For some “nuts and bolts” info on working with images in your blog check out this problogger introduction post .
Protecting copyrighted images from illegal use is a huge issue on web, read this artist’s perspective. A topic for a future post.

Cool WordPress Themes: Socrates Theme Review

Kathy Alice — Sat, 18 Dec 2010 21:22:49 +0000

I’m always trying out cool WordPress Themes and recently I built a website using the Socrates WordPress theme. Judging by the number of sites that I have recently found using Socrates, it is proving to be very popular. I found it easy to use with a number of cool features.

Socrates Theme Styling Menu

Header The number one thing that most people want to customize on their blog, Socrates comes with a number of built in header images (over 100 images, organized by topic) that you can choose. If you want your own custom header, it’s straightforward, just make sure that the header is 960 by 150 pixels wide and upload. Similarly you can choose a pre-provided background image or upload your own.
Colors In the Socrates configuration settings you will find a menu item called Styling. (See picture above). This is where you determine not only the colors of the navigation bar links, but also the colors of the post links and more. You have the ability to choose hover and links colors. As you can see I didn’t get too creative with colors, I stuck with the tried and true blue for the link color, with green as the hover color to match with the site colors
Navigation Socrates comes with a pre-built navigation bar. One drawback of the theme, is that sites that are built with it are instantly recognizable due to the navigation bar. But if you don’t mind that, the navigation is easy to set up, just enter the URL of the page you want as a navigation menu. I did a mixture of pages and post categories for my nav bar. Socrates also provides for footer navigation (see example below). Since I was building a site rather than a blog, I wanted the list of posts to be named “Articles” rather that “Posts” I had to go into the php code to make that change. Similar if you want to get rid of the search bar .. however the online documentation for Socrates tells you how to do that.
Layout/Templates You have the choice of customizing the default layout with 5 choices. If you want to customize your layout for an individual pages (ie. no sidebar) you can do that with Socrates using templates (eg. Squeeze page, Skinny Sales page etc.) (under the page attributes menu). Once you choose the template there are checkboxes to customize further, for example, to turn off the blog header or even to mark the page no index, no follow.

One of Three Socrates Navigation Bars

Socrates has a lot of built in support for Adsense and other advertising, which I did not take advantage of. This makes it ideal for affiliate marketing, especially for Clickbank products. However it has enough flexibility so you can use it for other types of sites (the site I used it for sells its own product). There are tutorials and forums to help you with the customization and configuration. I didn’t bother watching the tutorials so I can’t comment on how helpful they are .. but that in itself, tells you the ease I figured out how to use Socrates.

Socrates is available for single domain use for $47.00 and unlimited domain use for $77.00, click here for more details on the Socrates Theme.

A Blog Elevator Pitch

Kathy Alice — Wed, 08 Dec 2010 05:53:16 +0000

Now that I’m blogging more often, I want to improve my blog to attract more traffic. So I downloaded Problogger’s Guide “31 days to build a better blog”. Darren Rowse’s Guide gives you a task a day to improve your blog. What I had in mind was some technical changes I wanted to do (I’m really ready for a new theme), however the first task Darren’s guide put in front of me to was to write an elevator pitch for my blog. Definitely more of a challenge than changing the link color, at least to me. We can break down an elevator pitch for a blog into a few things. You need a tag line on your blog. And you need something longer (a few sentences) that you can use in conversations, especially when people ask you to explain further your tag line. The tag line for my blog is “Making Sense of the Web”. Although I wrote that a year or so ago, it still resonates true for me. What I do well is break down complicated technical problems and processes into bite size digestible chunks. The technical world is too vast not to specialize, so I focus on web technology as that is what my passion is. I like to follow technology trends and reflect what they might mean to the larger non techie world. I hope that my writings have helped others understand and even master technology. Any good elevator pitch describes the audience it’s targeting. For example “Typically I work with people who have challenges with their …..”. So what is still up in the air, is audience I’m writing for. Although I often write for the entrepreneur who just wants to grow their business without technology getting in the way, I frequently get into more technical topics that is better geared for a different audience. I’m not sure I want to narrow the blog’s scope … even though I know that it would be better for it. That will stay up in the air for a while. While the tag line has been in place for this blog for a while and I’m happy with it, the “About” page could definitely use some work. So as a result of Day 1 of the “31 Days to Build a Better Blog“, my about page is getting updated with an elevator pitch as well as a pointer to additional details about me.

Ann Evanston’s Blogger Monday

Kathy Alice — Tue, 03 Aug 2010 00:19:34 +0000

I love following and interacting with natural networkers. Unlike those of us who have to make a point of getting out of our own private Idaho, a natural networker is a joy to behold, they are always finding innovative ways to connect groups of people. Ann Evanston is a great example of a natural networker. Case in point: check out her Facebook page called Blogger Mondays. Here is how it works: Ten blog post URLs are posted to the Facebook page. The rules are that everyone who posted then needs to comment on the nine other blogs. With the additional activity, as well as the backlinks (even though yes, they are no followed), your blog gets some google love and you get to read some interesting blog posts. Many people who don’t post a blog post still comment anyway. This week I didn’t submit my blog, but still commented on a few blogs posted on the page. Check Blogger Monday out!

When to use “microsites”, subdomains vs. folders

Kathy Alice — Sun, 11 Apr 2010 17:31:51 +0000

I saw a blog post on when to use microsites vs. multiple domains. The blog post wasn’t that helpful, but reminded me that I wanted to sharpen my understanding of when:

use of subdomain is called for versus a sub-directory
when it makes sense to create a whole separate domain altogether

In my corporate web job, we often used subdomains because we were hosting the new website (usually an application rather than a pure HTML site) on separate servers. But then we would often create a “vanity URL” on the main site that redirected to the sub site. Interesting, but not necessarily helpful to answering the question or when, from the marketing or SEO perspective multiple domains is called for. I was confused on what the term “microsite” meant. The wikipedia definition: “cluster of pages which are meant to function as an auxiliary supplement to a primary website … most likely has its own domain name or subdomain” helped quite a bit. From both the technical and user experience perspective, it makes sense to install something like a forums, catalog or other separate feature on a subdomain, like maps.google.com .. or even on a completely separate domain. And if it will have a distinct brand identity, a separate domain is called for. One more reason, mentioned by the wikipedia entry, is that it can help target your PPC keywords more accurately. Subdomains appear to be treated similarly to sub-directories by search engines per Matt Cutts, which means you may not get much SEO benefit for the added complexity. So microsites usually mean additional domains. However just because you want to expand your web presence into a related but different topic than your web site already covers, doesn’t necessary mean a new domain. A new domain adds management and other costs, and you might have to start from scratch to get it indexed by the search engines. You are also missing out on the opportunity to get your original site to rank for more searches because it has more content. However, I’ve seen creation of a blog on wordpress.com or blogspot.com with links to a main site be quite helpful for ranking for desirable keywords. A specific tactic to keep in mind.

Roundup of Twitter and other Social Media plugins

Kathy Alice — Tue, 06 Apr 2010 02:55:58 +0000

Share Your Blog Make it easy for your blog readers to tweet, digg, facebook your posts:

More Auto Tweeters Feed your twitter, or get more enhanced with URL shorteners

Soon, follow mes and embedded tweets.

AddThis simple way to share your blog

Kathy Alice — Tue, 30 Mar 2010 03:32:22 +0000

There are far too many ways to add social media links and icons to your blog. However, if you are playing the social media PR game, it’s a necessary part of your web presence plumbing, those share, tweet this, facebook icons on your site and your blog. Up to now, I had been happy with my socialable plugin, resisting the siren call of adding bolder and bigger social media icons to my sidebar. Then I looked at AddThis.

AddThis button bar is simple to add to your blog

It’s so dead simple, you can’t help but to just do it. As long as your wordpress theme is widget aware, all you have to do is cut and paste HTML code into a Text Widget that you drag and drop to your sidebar. The step by step instructions are right there on the AddThis web page. The simplicity of the user experience is something that should be strived for by all webdesigners. You can see it in my sidebar to the right. I still have sociable but I updated the settings to show it only on individual blog posts so I didn’t have dueling social media button bars on my home page. AddThis also generates cut and paste code for your website, blogger.com and myspace for four different types of buttons.