Wednesday, October 10, 2007

Creating Relevant Categories And Tags For Your Posts

Build A Better Blog Day 8

You're probably getting real good at writing content for your blog. We've covered several aspects of blogging which I think are important in driving traffic to your site. Now lets talk about categorizing your posts so visitors can find similar content to what brought them here in the first place.

Categories are not tags. A category is a way to group similar posts together rather than having one big list of posts. For instance, you might have something like Cats, Dogs, Technology, Writing, Books and so on. Personally I think categories should be somewhat general. An example might be a review you write on a book, and you would categorize it in Books. A tag on the other hand gives a post a little more detail and are good for search engines. Using our book example, you may tag a post book, fiction, dragons, swords and so on.

While surfing the Internet I've landed on sites where they have 200 or more categories. Why? You can't possibly have that much variety in your posts. This is where people confuse a category with a tag. I would suggest coming up with a handful, no more than 10, categories that represent the subjects you write about. When you have dozens of categories visitors will just bypass looking at them and either move on or head right to the search. You do have a search feature right?

Here is a link to a fantastic article on Categories and Tags. It's Wordpress specific but the concept can be applied to any blogging software. The point here is to logically group your posts together and then use tags to drill down.

ProBlogger's day eight post: Comment on a Blog You’ve Never Commented On Before
read more...

Tuesday, October 9, 2007

Thank Those Who Comment On Your Blog

Build A Better Blog Day 7

There is no better feeling than to be acknowledged by the person who's blog you've commented on. Blogs are interactive and I know from past experience the disappointment when I comment and there is no response.

Take the time to ask your readers to comment. Ask them what they think. Ask for opposing or supporting views. But once they have commented take the time to respond back, or at the very least write a response that may cover multiple comments. If you get so lucky that you have a lot of comments on a post, at least respond to some of them.

New blogs tend don't always get comments until you have been posting a while or you are blogging a niche that may attract a large target audience. Don't worry too much about the number of comments, just focus on good content and the comments will follow.

ProBlogger's day seven post: Plan Your Next Week's Posting Schedule

read more...

Create Short Custom URL’s With doiop.com

doiop.com is an interesting site that let's you create small URL's similar to tinyurl.com, only you get to choose the keyword. This gives you the opportunity to choose a vanity word for you links. Only problem I can see long term is running out of real keywords. The site doesn't look to be protected from spammers, meaning I could run a program to just kick out a bunch of keywords to spam pages. But for now it's kinda cool. Check it out.

Learned about this site from twitter.com/dmode

read more...

Monday, October 8, 2007

Track of the day: Sonido Total by The Pinker Tones

More Colours! The Million Colour Revolution Revisited - Plus Exclusive Bonus TracksThe Pinker Tones
"Sonido Total" (mp3)
from "More Colours! The Million Colour Revolution Revisited - Plus Exclusive Bonus Tracks"
(Nacional Records)

Buy at Napster
More On This Album
read more...

A Prize From MightMugs And ProBlogger

I think I have mentioned the word ProBlogger about a hundred times this week. The marketing campaign seems to be working. During the Birthday Bash giveaway, I entered one of the contests and won a very cool prize from MightyMugs. Please take a minute and visit MightMugs and order yourself or someone you love a mug with your mug on it.

Thanks ProBlogger and MightMugs.

read more...
 
Copyright © 2003 - 2014 Thom Allen Weblog • All Rights Reserved.