This is the first in a series of posts on how to increase your search engine positioning. It's actually a new start on an earlier series of search engine optimization and marketing tips. I just wanted to offer a fresh approach based on new search engine webmastering research I've been accumulating. There may be, however, overlap on tips I've already offered. My intent is to build a thread of posts on BlogSpinner in order to become a search engine marketing resource.

Here are a few basic tips. I'll expand on them in future posts.

1. Don't be a link farm. Minimize the outgoing links on a given page. Unless they are truly relevant, reduce the number of hyperlinks you use. Provided you are not listing hundreds of links, you're probably okay.


2. When linking inside your domain, use appropriate keyword text for the links.


3. When linking outside of your domain, use appropriate keyword text for the links.


4. If you are doing a link exchange with other webmasters/bloggers, make sure their blog/site is directly related to your topics.


5. Write articles for the freebie article sites. Select a good site, with lots of authors/members and articles, and submit well-written articles about the topics you want to be associated with. A high volume article site will produce higher traffic to your site (linked in your article). The value of this is obvious, but if these surfers are using the Google Toolbar (IE, Firefox), then it's my educated guess that the higher the number of readers clicking on your links from another site, the higher your domain's rank will rise, at least in the SERPs (Search Engine Results Pages), if not in terms of Google Pagerank. This is just a guess, mind you.

Details available in upcoming posts.

(c) Copyright: 2005, Raj Kumar Dash, http://blogspinner.countwordula.com/

Technorati : blogging, multi-blogs, pro blogging, search engine, search engine marketing, search engine opitimization, search engine positioning, sem, seo, writing

Some of you may have noticed that in the past few weeks, some of my BlogSpinner blog entries have links throughout the text of the entry and some have them at the end of the entry, just before the copyright notice. This has been mostly intentional.

The idea here is to defer the links to the end of a post so that readers don't just randomly click on whatever links they see and don't come back. (But then, everybody has their own websurfing preferences.) The idea comes from the academic papers I used to write, where the bibliography section would list references.

I haven't thought about how to track the effectiveness of deferred links. But I'm hypothesizing that more people will read through my posts, then click on links. If this is true, then at least people will read what I've written. And isn't that what most writers crave anyway? (Besides fame and money :)

(c) Copyright: 2005-present, Raj Kumar Dash, http://blogspinner.countwordula.com/

Technorati : blogging, keeping visitors, multi-blogs, pro-blogging, writing

In the last post, I talked about using Feedburner's "BuzzBoost" feature to excerpt one of your blogs in another blog or website. Maricopa Community Colleges offer a similar feature, Feed2JS.

Feed2JS is a small piece of javascript code that you generate after entering your feed (aka web feed, RSS/Atom/XML feed) URL. This code is simply inserted in that part of your blog or website page template where you want the excerpt to appear.

Both Feed2JS and BuzzBoost output can be set to plain text or HTML. If you select HTML, both outputs can be styled using CSS (Cascading Style Sheets - see CSS Zen Garden as a starting point). However, the Feed2JS service actually lets you select one of a couple dozen predefined stylesheets. It'll output the CSS code for the style you select, which you can just copy and paste into your page template (along with the snippet of javascript code).

The only drawback of the Feed2JS is that it only works with RSS-format web feeds. So blogger.com users are out of luck, unless they use another service to convert their blog's Atom-format feed into RSS first. (Feedburner offers this, but then why not use Feedburner's BuzzBoost, as I mentioned in the last post?)

Links: Feed2JS, Feedburner, CSS Zen Garden, BlogSpinner BuzzBoost blog entry.

(c) Copyright: 2005-present, Raj Kumar Dash, http://blogspinner.countwordula.com/

Technorati : blogging, blogs, combining blogs, multi-blogs, pro blogging, writing

Recently, I mentioned in a comment that I left on another blog that I wasn't getting any traffic from Feedburner.com. I'm embarrassed to admit, however, that I now realize I didn't even set it up correctly.

Sure, I'm a programmer by trade, but hey, I make mistakes too ;D. So I "burned" a new feed on my Feedburner account, adding the blog you are reading. I also added a pile of "buttons" to the inner navigation column at right, to make it easier for readers to add my site to their RSS/Atom/Web Feeds readers/accounts. The primary purpose of doing that is so that you'll know when I've updated this blog, without having to come check the website.

What's more, I used one of Feedburner's features to do something I've been wanting to do for a few months now. The "BuzzBoost" feature lets you excerpt your feed and place it on another site of yours. To see an actual example of BuzzBoost in action, go visit my Chameleon Integration main site. At the top of the content section of the home page, you will see a heading that says "Recent Blog Posts". I only have one blog there (at the time of this writing), so you'll a teaser of its most recently posted entry.

Essentially, you use Feedburner to generate a little piece of javascript code that you can then insert into whatever other blog or website you want. This is an excellent idea if you have a group of related blogs that you want to excerpt. I plan to use this feature for my "WebGuru" multi-blog on my MathGurusOnline.com website. This blog will actually consist of several technical blogs that I am keeping separate for reasons I won't get into here. (I could use a blog platform, such as WordPress, that supports post categories, but I actually don't want. I'm hoping to explain my reasoning in some future post.)

I'm also using the "Headline Animator" feature to promote BlogSpinner V2.0 on ChameleonIntegration.com and on my older Blogspinner V1.0 domain. This feature generates a small banner that dynamically rotates headlines from the selected blog. I've noticed that while I still get a lot of search engine referrals (relatively speaking) for the older BlogSpinner blog, not many of those visitors come over to the new BlogSpinner blog (the version you are currently reading). I'm hoping that the Headline Animator changes that.

There are many more Feedburner services available for promoting your blog and its "web feed". I'll try to get into them in later posts. Now I'll just have to continue as before, blogging and promoting my blog(s), hoping that this effort pays off, at least in readers if not in revenue.

Links: Feedburner.

(c) Copyright: 2005-present, Raj Kumar Dash, http://blogspinner.countwordula.com

Technorati : blog promotion, blogging, blogs, feedburner, multi-blogs, pro blogging, seo, web traffic, writing

This post is not so technical as it might sound. If you want to be a professional blogger, tracking the health of your blog is an important activity that you have to learn and perform regularly...

The long tail phenomena is a cozy theory that digital content consumption follows a gracefully declining curve in terms of sales/ pageviews/ visitors, etc. If you haven't already done so, you should check out Chris Anderson's well-written blog/site, The Long Tail. Actually, better still, first read his Wired magazine article on the Long Tail phenomenon. The general principle is that the long tail phenomenon applies to many forms of digital content, but it actually represents many typical behaviours of human beings as a collective.

Here is an approximate graph of the underlying behaviour:




I've previously written about the long tail of blog archives (blogspinner v1.0), so I suggest you read that post as well. But to summarize, digital content consumption generally appears to decrease in a graceful curve over time (exponentially decreasing, to geeks like me). But the idea behind the long tail is that there is more consumption in the tail of the curves, i.e., in the declining years, than in the first year.

This seems to be a natural phenomenon that only differs in initial consumption level and rate of decline. But the curve of consumption is almost always gracefully declining. The interesting thing is that other digital measurements show a reverse longtail of increase. For example, if you were to plot the quantity of daily visitors to your blog over several months (preferably years), you'll see a gracefully increasing curve. Well, actually, you'd see a wildly oscillating line. But if you applied "moving averages" (aka trend lines) to the visitor statistics, you would see said curve.

A moving average basically is a sliding average. I tend to use multiples of 28 days (4 weeks x 7 days/week) for my "sliding windows". The longer the window, the smoother the trend line. This technique is used in the stock market to determine trends that have already occurred, and trends that might occur. What you do is choose a window that is preferably a multiple of 28 days, say 4x28 = 112d (medium term). Now calculate the average of visitor traffic for the first 112 days (days 1-112). Next calculate the average for days 2-113. Keep "sliding" this 112-day window and calculating averages until you reach the end of your visitor statistics. This collection of averages is called "moving averages". Now plot the averages to get a trend line.

The longer your sliding window, the more graceful your trend line. If your blog went on for years, and your sliding window was a year (52x7 = 364d), your trend line might look something like this:



Of course, all "organisms" eventually go into decline. A blog is in fact a type of organism, and it will have a life span. So, ultimately, it will reach a peak of visitors, then go into the typical long tail curve and gracefully decline.

But here's what I really wanted to tell you: The blogging effort you undertake to get to your peak visitor level can be broken down in to levels similar to the ones that an electron has to undergo in moving from one quantum level to the next. Initially, you have to put in loads of energy to get from one level of blog visitors to the next. It takes lots of energy. Once you get to the next level, it is relatively easy to stay at that level. To get to the next level again takes energy, but maybe a little bit less than before, ad infinitum.

(c) Copyright: 2005-present, Raj Kumar Dash, http://blogspinner.countwordula.com/

Technorati : blog lifespan, blogging, blogs, longtail, mult-blog, pro blogging, tracking visitors, web analytics, web metrics, web traffic, writing

I had myself a not-so-nice shock today when I found that every single one of my websites once again had a Google Page Rank of 0. Surely I didn't do anything to deserve that, I thought. So I headed over to the blogging fountain of wisdom, ProBlogger, and found that Darren had posted an entry about the recent mini-update. In the post, there is also a link to an older entry that Darren wrote in April which has a "future page rank tool". If you don't have time to read the post, you can go straight to SeoChat's future page rank tool.


I used the tool to check the future page rank of about half of my blogs and websites, and it appears that some of them are actually about to move up from where the were just before this mini-update in the Google databases occurred. So don't panic. Use the tool to see if a page rank drop isn't just a temporary situation.

For reference, here's my older posts on Google page rank change.

(c) Copyright: 2005-present, Raj Kumar Dash, http://blogspinner.countwordula.com/

Technorati : blogging, blogs, google page rank, multi-blogs, page rank, pro blogging, search engine marketing, search engine optimization, sem, seo, writing

(If you have not read the intro to this mini-series of entries, please do so.)

Factor 6: Relevancy of keywords in a given blog entry compared to the rest of your blog entries.

I see a lot of well-written blogs about a certain topics, and then all of a sudden there's an entry about something completely unrelated and irrelevant. For example, several of my favourite cooking blogs have this sort of strange behaviour. A couple mention their dogs or cats. (Hey, I admit I did it too, but I tried to make it relevant to food.)

One blogger regularly intermingles great food-related posts with cries of "Impeach Bush" (US President George W. Bush). While highly irrelevant, this blog still manages to be in the top ten of one of the directory listing services under food blogs. But despite any personal feelings I may have about certain politicians, I find this kind of behaviour highly annoying. But hey, that's just my opinion.

Moral of the story: Try to keep your entries relevant in relation to what topics you want your blog to represent. Do this for your readers. Most people who want to read about food don't want to read about impeaching the president, and vice versa. If you annoy readers with irrelevant posts, I doubt you'll keep them as regulars.

You may still get lots of transient traffic from the search engines, but is this what you want? If they aren't clicking on ads, then why else have two unrelated threads of posts on a single blog? I'm not talking about censorship. I'm just saying start another blog and blast more than just one politician. And write well-researched posts about why they are so bad, and you'll get tons of readers. Eventually.

Series Navlinks:

• Intro
• Part 1
• Part 2
• Part 3
• Part 4
• Part 5
• Part 6

(c) Copyright: 2005-present, Raj Kumar Dash, http://blogspinner.countwordula.com/

Technorati : ad clicks, ad ctr, ad revenue, adsense, blog traffic, blogging, multi-blogs, pro blogging, writing

(If you have not read the intro to this mini-series of entries, please do so.)

Factor 5: Length of posts.

The jury is still out as to whether blog posts should be short or long. Informational bloggers like myself tend to write fairly lengthy posts, even series, about a topic. For people that really want to learn details, that is a good thing; satsify them and you'll eventually have them as loyal readers. But as far as search engines go, not all of them index the full content of each of your posts. In which case, shorter is better.

However, if your blogging platform is set up so that the home page displays an excerpt of each entry posted, as well as a "Read More" type of link, then longer posts are generally fine. This latter situation also gives you the green light to go display more entries at a time on the home page.

Moral of the story: Try to choose a blogging platform that either has the "excerpting/read more" feature configured, or can be configured as such. MovableType already is configured this way. WordPress is supposedly preconfigured to do this as well, although I used a plugin so I wouldn't have to remember to apply the code for each post. Blogger.com, despite popular belief, can be set up to do this as well. (There's an explanation on the Blogger.com help pages, but it requires a small bit of effort with CSS stylesheet code. I'll try to disseminate this information in a future post.)

Note: Zoundry.com's BlogWriter client, at the time of this writing, has a glitch that mangles hard line breaks. So if I'm using BlogWriter to post to MovableType or WordPress, I have to manually edit the entry in the native interface afterwards, if I want these blogging platforms to generate the excerpt properly. At worst, though, the full text of a post appears. It just looks odd if one full post sticks out compared to a bunch of excerpts.

Series Navlinks:

• Intro
• Part 1
• Part 2
• Part 3
• Part 4
• Part 5
• Part 6

(c) Copyright: 2005-present, Raj Kumar Dash, http://blogspinner.countwordula.com/

Technorati : ad clicks, ad ctr, ad revenue, adsense, blog traffic, blogging, multi-blogs, pro blogging, writing

(If you have not read the intro to this mini-series of entries, please do so.)

Factor 4: Number of blog search engines and directories pinged per post.

To acquire regular traffic to your blog, you need to be listed not only in regular search engines, but also in blog engines and directories. The more listings you have, the better. The fastest way to get listed in these specialized blog engines (and directories) is to use a "pinging" service.

To date, I use three "blog pinger" services regularly: Pingoat, Pingomatic and Pinger, in descending order of preference. Pingoat seems to be the fastest, and submits your URL to the most engines/directories. Pingomatic appears to be a close second. Pinger is also fast, but submits to only a handful of listings.

I also make sure that I add Technorati-style tags to my posts. Tags are essentially a means to apply multiple categories to a single post. My blogging client, Zoundry.com's BlogWriter, let's me automatically add tags to listing services such as Technorati, Del.icio.us, Ice Rocket, and others. On the other hand, I have found absolutely no traffic has come from RSS-listing services like Feedburner. Although I'll admit I haven't exactly done my part in promoting this properly.

Moral of the story: Find your favourite pinger, or use several without overdoing it. Always ping the blog engines each time you post a new entry, even if it's a couple of hours later. Keep in mind that some services penalize you for over-pinging. Pingoat has an unwritten daily frequency. My guess is that it lets you ping the same URL about every 3 hours, although I may be mistaken. You could, however, use the "permalink" URL of a new post to pinging a listings service, if you are posting to the same blog many times a day. (But Pingoat is very good at detecting sp.am. Sometimes a little too strict.)


Series Navlinks:

• Intro
• Part 1
• Part 2
• Part 3
• Part 4
• Part 5
• Part 6

(c) Copyright: 2005-present, Raj Kumar Dash, http://blogspinner.countwordula.com/

Technorati : ad clicks, ad ctr, ad revenue, adsense, blog traffic, blogging, multi-blogs, pro blogging, writing

(If you have not read the intro to this mini-series of entries, please do so.)

Factor 3: Time of day that entries are posted.

I've noticed that regardless of which blog I am posting to, if I post at least one post late at night, say between midnight and 1 am (EST, -0500 time zone), and at least one other post the next morning or afternoon (preferably more several times), my pageviews for that blog and that calendar day seems higher than for other days. However, if I post two or even three posts the next morning/ afternoon/ evening (but on the same calendar day), I do not get a proportionately higher pageview count.

I can only guess at the reason for this. I've tested this theory at different times this year, and on different blogs, and it seems to hold. The reasoning might be that, as I am in a Western time zone, posting at midnight might capture those people in Europe or Asia who are doing their morning blog-surfing rituals. These people may not be surfing at home, after work. (While this is changing, disposable income per person in Asian countries tends to be far lower than for European countries or Canada and the United States. Readers from Asian countries may simply not have access to the Internet at home.)

Moral of the story: Find your "sweet spot" time slot by experimenting. Start by dividing the day up into 4 slots of 3 hours. Post to each time slot regularly, if possible, and track your visitors for each page. (These stats will be skewed for your blog's home page, as it's hard to tell what a visitor came for - unless they used a search engine.)

Ideally, you should divide up the day into slots of 1 or 2 hours in length and test each slot. I'll save you some time. If you are in EST (Eastern Standard Time, zone -0500) in North America, there's almost no benefit to posting anything between 2 am and 5 am. I'm usually asleep between 5 am and 9-10 am, so I have no stats for that period. I have found that posting between 10-11 am does generate some traffic for late afternoon and evening. (This is partially due to scheduling of search engine spiders. Anyone who uses RSS or visits my blog regularly sees posts earlier.)

Series Navlinks:

• Intro
• Part 1
• Part 2
• Part 3
• Part 4
• Part 5
• Part 6

(c) Copyright: 2005-present, Raj Kumar Dash, http://blogspinner.countwordula.com/

Technorati : ad clicks, ad ctr, ad revenue, adsense, blog traffic, blogging, multi-blogs, pro blogging, writing

(If you have not read the intro to this mini-series of entries, please do so.)

Factor 2: Number of entries posted per day.

The number of entries I've posted per day to a single blog seems to have a profound effect on the number of pageviews I end up with, not just for that day, but sometimes for a few days afterwards. The reason for this, simply put, is that the search engines love fresh content.

The more often you post, the more often some of the engines will index you, sometimes several times a day if your post frequency warrants it. That means your topics are fresh and factor high in your SERPs (Search Engine Results Pages). It also means that you provide more avenues for potential visitors to find you, and thus the result is usually more pageviews in a given day.

From the human aspect, if you are providing valuable content several times a day, readers will take notice and check back. But any lapse in posting frequency (daily, weekly) will have a negative effect on traffic that you will need to rebuild.

Moral of the story: Post frequently, at least 2-3 times a day, if you want to be "the" blogger on a specific topic. It takes work and patience, but relevant, informative content will get you there. And it doesn't all have to be ultra long posts like mine tend to be. In fact, the shorter the better. Break up longer posts into parts, if possible.

Series Navlinks:

• Intro
• Part 1
• Part 2
• Part 3
• Part 4
• Part 5
• Part 6

(c) Copyright: 2005-present, Raj Kumar Dash, http://blogspinner.countwordula.com/

Technorati : ad clicks, ad ctr, ad revenue, adsense, blog traffic, blogging, multi-blogs, pro blogging, writing

(If you have not read the intro to this mini-series of entries, please do so.)

Factor 1: Number of days per week that entries are posted.

As a both a former (commuter) and present (work-at-home) workaholic, my work schedule is usually very wonky. I'm typically up until 4 or 5 am from late Spring to early Fall (Northern Hemisphere), and 2-3 am the rest of the year. I'm the kind of person who would rather go to bed at 4 am and wake up at 10 am. If I "oversleep", I get groggy.

Nevertheless, I've learned that we all need some down-time. I've picked Sundays as my "relax" day. I'll do analysis and prep for the coming week, but I generally won't blog. My own stats show that this does not seem to affect my blog traffic significantly. In fact, I often appear to get more traffic on Sundays than Saturdays. Possibly because anyone surfing at home might do more of it on Sundays.

For me, my weekly blog posting frequency is generally 5-6 days per week. I work outside the house on Thur-Sun, so I find that if I don't prepare entries ahead of time, I may end up neglecting certain blogs. In fact, lately, I've ignored my newest cooking blog (CurryElvis.com) for as long as two weeks. It's not because I don't have anything to write about. It's primarily because all I have is either a list of topics, or hand-written scribbles that I wrote on the bus to work and haven't had time to type in.

What's more, I've completely neglected my technical/programming blogs for well over a month. Again, it's not because I haven't got any topics to write about (too many, in fact). Rather, I've been trying to design a new homepage for them as a collective and there just isn't enough time in the day.

Moral of the story: If you are not pro-blogging but want to be, discipline yourself to follow some sort of schedule. Write all your posts in one or two days each week (not necessarily always the same days), then post as necessary.

Series Navlinks:

• Intro
• Part 1
• Part 2
• Part 3
• Part 4
• Part 5
• Part 6

(c) Copyright: 2005-present, Raj Kumar Dash, http://blogspinner.countwordula.com/

Technorati : ad clicks, ad ctr, ad revenue, adsense, blog traffic, blogging, multi-blogs, pro blogging, writing

I've been "pro blogging" full-time now for about 5-6 months and have noticed a direct correlation between the amount of traffic, clicks, and ad revenue I get on a particular day and a number of causal factors:

1. Number of days per week that entries are posted.
2. Number of entries posted in a given 24-hour period.
3. Time of day that the entries are posted.
4. Number of blog search engines and directories pinged per post.
5. Length of posts.
6. Relevancy of keywords in a given blog entry compared to the rest of your blog entries.

Mind you, I don't yet have a significant amount of steady traffic on any of my blogs/sites to prove any direct evidence, which is why I use the term "correlation" (which means that there appears to be a connection, but it's based on educated guess and visible patterns rather solid evidence).

I've also noticed that my cooking blogs tend to get a fair bit more engine traffic than repeat visitors. That may simply be because I've been woeful negligent in posting regularly (factor 1), or that readers are only looking for one-off information, or they are not finding what they need. (Without comments from readers, it's difficult to be sure.)

I must say, however, that most of the time, I have intentionally been applying a haphazard posting frequency on all of my blogs to experiment and see what the traffic results will be. This mini-series of blog entries provides a bit of insight. Details are in individual posts (see navlinks, below). Each "Part" number is related to the items in the list above.

• Intro
• Part 1
• Part 2
• Part 3
• Part 4
• Part 5
• Part 6

(c) Copyright: 2005-present, Raj Kumar Dash, http://blogspinner.countwordula.com/

Technorati : ad clicks, ad ctr, ad revenue, adsense, blog traffic, blogging, multi-blogs, pro blogging, writing

Google probably never realized how in-demand web analytics services would be, especially a free one. For a week now, I've been frustratedly waiting for one of my two Google Analytics web profiles to show some stats, to no avail. One profile does show stats, but they take a few days to show.

When Google is able to get the server horsepower they need to let people add more profiles (and for new people to signup), the value of the service will be immeasurable. With the trickle of stats I've been getting, I've already learned a fair bit more than I've been able to get from other free services such as gVisit.com and Blogflux.com (MapStats) - both of which I like and use regularly.

It's to be seen whether or not Google Analytics will put other web analytics/tracking services out of business. I always prefer diversity of choice over monopoly - and Google is far from being a monopolistic force. Go see "Google Analytics stops at 234,725 accounts" on ZDNet.com for a more detailed article about the temporary disabling of the signup feature.

(c) Copyright: 2005-present, Raj Kumar Dash, http://blogspinner.countwordula.com/

Technorati : blogging, multi-blog, pro blogging, seo, tracking visitors, web analytics, web metrics

This post discusses some of the tools I use to aid my blogging - not so much in terms of management, but in actual writing and researching content, and creating links.

One resource I use frequently when working on my blogs is a search engine - which I genrally use for facts-checking. As a former search engine webmaster, I've long been aware, however, that this isn't always the easiest way to find recent, relevant content. However, many search engines have changed their algorithms to favour sites that update frequently, focus on specific topics, etc. It's getting easier to find what you are looking for.

Another tool I use frequently is Wikipedia.org (this page offers you your choice of language). Zoundry's BlogWriter blogging client software even has a built-in feature that creates a link to the English version of Wikipedia after you select a word or phrase to link on. Wikipedia, of course, is a popular online encyclopedia. When I want to let readers know where they can find out more about a specific term, I link to Wikipedia (which, if you are not familiar with it, is open; you can post terms and definitions to it). This saves me having to try to awkwardly discuss a term that some readers may already be familiar with.

When comes down to generating content, though, I have to do actual research. Search engines are a starting point. But I also employ a number of sources: newspapers, magazines, tv shows, other blogs and websites. How do you view a lot of content quickly, though? Web feeds.

Forgive me if you're already familiar with web feeds. To those who are not, web feeds (two formats: Atom and RSS) are like a headline service. You can view a set of headlines, and by clicking on one, see an excerpt of an article/blog post, or in some cases, the full content. By further linking to source, you can see the rest of the article, if you want to. The fact that you can view feeds from several websites in short order is the entire reason for their existence in the first place.

To do the same kind of research via a web browser requires you having to enter a new URL each time you visit a site, and each day you do so. With web feeds, you "subscribe" to a feed by saving its URL, then just select its folder when you want to see headlines. This is a huge timesaver, and yet conflicting research shows that only between 3-12% of Internet users know what web feeds are or even use them. (Visit RSS Diary for more info on the value of RSS/web feeds.)

On a side note, I have to say that one good thing that blogging has done is motivate a lot more people into reading as entertainment.

(c) Copyright: 2005-present, Raj Kumar Dash, http://blogspinner.countwordula.com/

Technorati : blogging, blogs, multi-blogs, pro blogging, rss, web feeds, writing

Another site that I ended up on today is Performancing.com.According to their banner, their motto is: "Helping Bloggers Succeed...". Based only on a cursory glance of their home page, this actually appears to be a good resource for bloggers. They have several people blogging (they recently invited members to blog), and their take on blog improvment and promotion appears to offer something new, including non-digital ways of promoting your blog/site. The overall feel of the site appears to be professional but friendly.

Two of the several posts that caught my eye are "Build Your Blog Profile Through Conventional Media" (non-digital promotion) by Peter Brady and "Positioning Your Blog" (applying marketing principles) by Chris Garrett. Chris also has an ongoing series of posts reviewing several blogging platforms besides Wordpress and Movable Type.

The only thing that I really find quite surprising is Performancing.com have ignored the wisdom of using keywords in the URLs of posts/articles and used cryptic URLs instead, which reduces the relevancy ranking of their articles in most search engines. Nevertheless, if you are a blogger, this is a site worth checking out. I've read about 10 articles so far and all of the advice seems rather level-headed and informative, and definitely well-rounded. Much of the content goes beyond the standard fare found elsewhere.

(c) Copyright: 2005-present, Raj Kumar Dash, http://blogspinner.countwordula.com/

Technorati : blog traffic, blogging, managing blogs, pro blogging, promoting blogs, writing

I apologize in advance for the title of this post, as it's a bit misleading. I try to track what my visitors are searching for and I noticed recently that a few have been using the search terms "converting blogger to wordpress.

This is just a short post to let you know that it can be done. Wordpress has a plugin that lets you slurp in your blogger.com's blog posts into Wordpress. I haven't actually used it, but apparently it's rather easy. The reason I haven't used it is as follows:

• I wanted to maintain my old blogspot.com domains/URLs because of a reasonable amount of search engine traffic.
• Some search engines penalize you for duplicate content. So if you do replicate your blogger.com posts into Wordpress, just don't have any direct or indirect links between the two domains.

For those of you inclined to do so, however, there are instructions on either the Wordpress.com site or with the plugin in question. I'll try to do a bit of research in this matter and post later on it.

(c) Copyright: 2005-present, Raj Kumar Dash, http://blogspinner.countwordula.com/

Technorati : blogger, blogging, managing blogs, multi-blog, pro blogging, wordpress

Today, I came across entries at two different blogs for increasing traffic for your blogs. One is an amusing, tongue-in-cheek offering titled "The Ten Evilest and Mostly Unethical Blogging Hacks", by liberalcowboy at Jack of All Blogs (part of the Fine Fools network). This one talks about ways to boost traffic without getting in trouble. Some are actually acceptable, others are downright sneaky.

The second entry is a more serious offering: "HOW TO: Boost Your Blog Traffic", by Paul Stamatiou. Paul echoes what I said about using Technorati tags (although liberalcowboy scoffs at the use of Technorati, Feedburner, etc.). Although it's very brief, Paul offers a paragraph saying that your blog has to have some style, to be unique, and to have navigation that isn't annoying.

Paul also says that the content should be unique. People eventually get sick of seeing the same thing over and over. Agreed. Do what Darren Rowse suggested a while back: blogging in formation. If I've understood Darren's advice correctly, this essentially means that if you do blog on a hot topic, add something to the collection discussion instead of rehasing.

One acceptable way, in my opinion, is to write a summary of a couple of blogs on a single topic (like I've done here) and add your spin to the discussion. The point is, according to Paul, is that your content has to be useful. So either be first on a topic, or add something new.

(c) Copyright: 2005-present, Raj Kumar Dash, http://blogspinner.countwordula.com/

Technorati : blog traffic, blogging, pro blogging, writing

Vinnie Garcia has a detailed review of WordPress, TextPattern, and MovableType, three of the most popular "advanced" blog CMS (Content Management System) packages, over at Australian publisher SitePoint's website (link at the end of this entry).

This two page article does get into a bit of geek lingo, but for the most part, non-programmer bloggers should have no problem following along. It's an important article to read, especially if you haven't yet selected a platform, or are not happy with your current blogging platform.

Here is a summary of Vinnie's article: WordPress is the easiest to install; MovableType is the most portable; and WordPress has the best rating for "support community", followed by a tie for second place for MovableType and TextPattern. Vinnie also has a link to an article called "The Blogger's Primer", by Aaron Brazell (links below).

I've used both WordPress and MovableType in production blogs, and evaluated TextPattern. My personal feeling to date is that WordPress needs a lot of custom tweaking for all but the most basic setup. For the MovableType blog I write, I did not configure the setup; I simply use the interface to write and post entries. TextPattern is a platform that I initially liked better than WordPress, although it is difficult to explain why. It just seemed to have a rich feature set, yet seemed cleaner in implementation.

That said, my favourite blogging client, Zoundry's BlogWriter software, has a future support for TextPattern (which I'm supposed to help beta-test but have unfortunately been too busy to). I haven't yet come across blogging client support for the TextPattern interface, but that doesn't mean it isn't out there.

Overall, I still prefer Blogger.com's interface (with my own domain names) for it's simplicity, but am leaning towards a very customized version of WordPress for multiple blogs that I'm trying to develop. [Actually, it'll be developed with Morfik.com

Links: SitePoint, review of WordPress, TextPattern, and MovableType, The Blogger's Primer, WordPress, MovableType, TextPattern.

(c) Copyright: 2005-present, Raj Kumar Dash, http://blogspinner.countwordula.com/

Technorati : blog management, blogging, cms, movable type, multi-blogs, pro blogging, textpattern, wordpress, writing

Google recently rolled out their Analytics service free of charge. If you've been hoping for a stats package to track your website or blog site statistics, this just may be what you're looking for. The service is free if you either have a Google AdWords account in good standing, or if your site(s) get less than 5 million pageviews per month. (Ah, that'd be something wouldn't it? In this case, I'll have a while to wait before I have to worry about paying.)

I'll be honest in saying that I can't talk about the quality of the package, as I only just signed up. However, some of the features are:

1. A map of the world to show the origin of your traffic.
2. A chart of visits and pageviews.
3. Info about visits by new and returning readers, and more.
4. A calendar, which presumably can be used to quickly retrieve information for a particular day.
5. Export of data to three formats: tab-separated text, XML, and Microsoft Excel spreadsheet format (which can be imported into the OpenSource OpenOffice spreadsheet.)

Apparently, it takes about 12 hours to see reports after you first sign up. So I'll collect a few days worth of data on two of my sites (blog and website) and discuss some of the above features in more detail. If you do sign up, beware that as Google is updating AdWords accounts, there appears to be some delay for the Analytics sign-up process. It took me an entire day just to set up tracking for two domains.

(c) Copyright: 2005-present, Raj Kumar Dash, http://blogspinner.countwordula.com/

Technorati : blogging, geo-plotting, pro blogging, web analytics, web metrics

In a recent post, I talked about BlogFlux's new free LinkLog service. Link logging refers to the tracking of the visitors and where the are going when they click on a link on your site, but where the link goes outside of your site. What I said in my last post was that this would be a way to track which ads your visitors are clicking on. Well, I was mistaken.

Let me clarify. LinkLog does track ad clicks. But you don't get the details of such clicks unless you upgrade to BlogFlux "Pro" status. I'm guessing that this is a new designation, as I don't even recall seeing the links on the weekend.

Nevertheless, the free version of LinkLog still provides useful information that you should collect, whether you do it through BlogFlux's services or through some other means. Here's why: If you have ANY links on your blog that go outside your blog's domain name, you'll want to compare the number of outgoing clicks to the number of pageviews of your blog.

For example, let's say that your blog is getting 200 pageviews per day and 100 outgoing clicks. That's a ratio of 100/200 = 1/2. That's treading into a danger zone, as visitors may just not be finding what they want on your site. Do I need to explain further :? (Okay, if all the outgoing clicks are for ads, maybe you don't care.)

(c) Copyright: 2005-present, Raj Kumar Dash, http://blogspinner.countwordula.com/

Technorati : blogging, multi-blogs, pro blogging, tracking visitors

One of the fundamental differences between a regular website full of articles and an informational blogsite full of posted entries is that the latter shows articles on the home page posted in reverse chronological order. In other words, the most recent posting is shown first. As you go down the page, the entries get older.

The problem with this is that when your blog is new, and your readers are few, the chances of having readers that come back every day is low. Building up "subscribers" takes time and relevant content. This is true for regular websites, too, but a professional website has had its navigation designed for optimum use by visitors.

A professional, informational blog should be no different. (Understand that I am focusing on informational/educational blogs that can both be read on a daily basis as well as used as a reference site long after certain entries are posted.)

In fact, to be successful against hordes of competition, a to-be-popular informational blog needs be both findable via the search engines, as well as navigable. At the very least, you need the following components in your blog:

1. Relevant content with appropriate titles and URLs containing keywords. This helps you get the search engine referrals.
2. A list links to your recent posts. This is a part of helping your visitor find an appropriate blog entry. This is in case they land on your blog home page a few days after the article they thought they were linking to was indexed.
3. A list of categories for your posts. Using a service like Techorati is highly recommended. (Follow the links at the end of the this post to get an idea of what I'm talking about. I get a fair number of referrals from Technorati, when people search on a tag I've used. What's great about services like Technorati is that if I post frequently using my selection of tags, I tend to stay pretty high up on the search results because of the SEO work I've done.) But Technorati-tagging isn't always enough, once I get a visitor. If the visitor arrives at your blog home page and doesn't find what they were looking for, seeing a list of categories at least tells him/her that they have (or haven't) come to a suitable blog.
4. Regular references to older posts, as relevant. Create regular readers by pointing them to information you have previously posted that they either might be interested in, or need to understand before reading a new post. Because I write a lot of informational blogs, and because I am a very verbose writer, I have recently started breaking up my content into a mini-series (or threads) of posts. But certainly readers will be frustrated if they arrive at part 7 and can't find any of the earlier parts. While I have currently only referred back one entry in a series, I am working on a reference page that lists the series I have so that new readers can follow them from the beginning. (This is difficult to do if you are using free blog hosting; which is I've left it until I could set up countwordula.com.)

This is just a summary of some tips that make it easier for your visitors to really find what they are looking for. I'll eventually set up a tipsheet on BlogSpinner and update as I collect new tips and techniques.

(c) Copyright: 2005-present, Raj Kumar Dash, http://blogspinner.countwordula.com/

Technorati : blogging, multi-blogs, pro blogging, seo, serps, writing

I suspect that most people that read this blog more than likely already read Darren Rowse's excellent ProBlogger.net blog, whose content I always try to supplement instead of re-treading. But some of you may not know about JenSense.

Jen does a fine job of covering the various and sundry issues related to specific blog advertising programs, most particularly Google AdSense, but also YPN (Yahoo! Publishers' Network), Chitika eMinimalls and more. Again, I always try to supplement what my favourite bloggers are doing instead of (intentionally) re-treading topics. So I'll point you at her latest post, about why blog ad revenues may be down during holidays.

By the way, I've noticed that, since most of my traffic is American and Canadian, that holidays do affect my pageviews/puny revenue. However, on the start of the next business day, I often see a small spike equivalent to what I've lost during the holiday period. This is why I've learned not to worry about short-term fluctuations and concentrate on the long-term. (I'll show you how to do it that in a near-future post.)

Speaking of Darren Rowse, his latest post talks about the experience some bloggers are having of seeing reduced referrals from the Google search engine. He provides very thorough suggestions about what to do and not do about it.

Darren is part of b5media.com, and new "small" blog network that recently under went small merger, bringing b5media's tally to 50 blogs or so. Darren's cohort, Duncan Riley, is still running his 100 blogs in 100 days feature. If you feel your blog is up to snuff to stand up to reader's reviews if Duncan profiles you, go request that your blog be considered. But hurry. There are only about 36 days left.

(c) Copyright: 2005-present, Raj Kumar Dash, http://blogspinner.countwordula.com/

Technorati : ad revenue, adsense, blogging, multi-blogs, pro blogging, seo, serps, writing

Note: While this post is about blogging-related software, don't be scared away even if you are not a programmer, just a blogger. I'm talking about blogging software I'll be offering soon that anyone can use.

Every once in a while, when I go into serious withdrawal symptoms from not programming (because I'm so busy blogging or doing web architecture work), I make up a big list of web-related software projects that I'm working on. Since my focus this year hasn't been the Math MSc and PhD degrees I had planned to work on, and instead has been in blogging, my software projects are also focused on blogging.

Well, the good news is that I'm working on a bunch of blog software tools that I plan to release hopefully for free. The bad news is that I have no time line. Here's what I've got on (a loose) schedule:

1. A means of adding categories to Blogger.com blogs, whether they are hosted on blogspot.com or on a private domain.
2. A web browser-based integrated application that allows you to read email and RSS feeds at the same time, and lets you write and post blog entries to a variety of platforms. Everything in one single command centre.
3. Original plugins for WordPress.
4. A number of linguistics-analysis tools that would give you a profile of your blog writing habits. These tools would be for purely esoteric reasons.

Notes on (1): The Blogger.com platform does not support categories. I've determined a very simple way to add categories, as well as to categorize your posts and display links. This service requires inserting a tiny piece of javascript code into your Blogger.com blog. The javascript code in turn will call a piece of PHP application code that interacts with a set of databases. The databases will store your category information, as well a categorization for each post you add to your "profile". It sounds complicated, but should be rather easy to use. I'm hoping to have this service to offer before the end of this year.

Notes on (2): Originally I was going to write this in Java (differerent than Javascript) using the open source Eclipse platform. However, as it's taken me 10 years to motivate myself to learn just the rudiments of Java, I've decided to use the new Morfik.com JST (Javascript Synthesis Technology) open source web application builder software to write my app. This JST app uses high-level code resembling your choice of either Basic or Pascal. It then compiles the code and converts into an AJAX (Asynchronous Javascript and XML) engine that can run on pretty much any web server.

The unfortunate thing is that Morfik won't even be releasing a beta version of JST until March 2006, if I've read their website info correctly. So I may just try to write this from scratch, then upgrade it later with JST. I don't know when I'll have this app. (Originally I was hoping to give parts of the Eclipse version away for free, then charge companies for the server-based stuff. If I can give away the clients software and later sell the whole shebang to some software giant, great :D)

Part of the reason I am able to offer these services is due to the fact that one of my host providers, GoDaddy.com, recently boosted their free mySQL databases from 1 up to 10. That means I've got about 60 databases sitting around, 50 of which would otherwise go unused. They have also increase monthly bandwidth per domain.

With a bit of judicious XSS (cross-site scripting), I can harness the entire bandwidth of my GoDaddy domains. However, I do still have to keep the bandwidth of these services in check, as I have no way of paying for extra costs. So these offerings will be available to a limited number of people on a FCFS (first-come, first-served) basis. At least until I can figure out a way to pay for excess bandwidth. (No splogs please; every blog will by manually approved.)

Keep an eye on this blog for (semi) regular updates on these projects. I may have early versions out very soon, so if anyone is interested in being a beta tester (at least for the Blogger.com categorizer app), let me know. My comment system on this blog is NOT working right now, despite being visible. I'm working on that. So just send me email to rdash001-at-yahoo-dot-ca (address mangled to fool scrapers).

(c) Copyright: 2005-present, Raj Kumar Dash, http://blogspinner.countwordula.com/

Technorati : ajax, blogging, blogs, javascript, jst, managing blogs, morfik, multi-blogs, pro blogging

One of the biggest problems I'm finding is that, as a single-person blog "networker", it's impossible to do everything that needs to be done on a regular, daily basis. If you want to run custom templates and add non-blog web pages, guides, etc., it's nearly impossible to run it all by yourself. And that's just for a single, full-fledged hybrid blog-website. So what if you want to publish several blogs? Hoo boy. Fuggedabout it? (Sorry, watching too much TV.)

So while I'm trying to do all the infrastructure work of setting up a new blogsite, I'm neglecting writing for other blogs. Some of my blogs haven't seen a post in over a month, and it gets kind of frustrating. So what can you do to manage multiple blogs? Here are a few tips, some of which I've already implemented and others which I am in the process of doing.

1. Use a blog platform that supports categories and combine related blogs together. I used WordPress to combine my 4 old cooking blogs that were on the Blogger.com platform into a single blogsite (which I've neglected for the past week because I spent so much time setting up this new BlogSpinner site). The main reason this saves you time is purely psychological. If you have a blog with categories, it's probably easier to come up with 2-3 posts a day and feel as if you accomplished something significant. On the other hand, if you are running one blog per topic, then it's much harder to come up with 2 posts per day because obviously that's a lot more daily writing. What's more, combining your related blogs together, if appropriate, will likely result in higher single-blog traffic, which may increase your Google AdSense earnings per click (based on "smart pricing" rules). In other words, it's better to have a single blog with categorized posts that gets, say, 500 pageviews per day than 5 related but separate blogs that each get 100 pageviews per day.
2. Use a single blogging client to write and post all your entries with ease. I've tried Blogger.com's plugin for Microsoft Word. It's easy to install and use, but it didn't jibe with the way I write my blogs. What's more, I really love Zoundry's BlogWriter, which is perfect for my multi-blog, multi-platform blogging style. BlogWriter makes it easy to add Technorati-style tags to categorize your posts for a number of blog directories. I've also got BlogWriter set up to manage about 6 different blog accounts on three different platforms (Blogger.com, WordPress, MovableType). In fact, I had plans to add platforms like TextPattern as well, but that support is still in the beta stage. (Lawrence, if you're reading this, sorry. I'll contact you guys shortly to help beta-test.)
3. Hook up with some other bloggers you admire and create your own blog network. Seriously. This seems to have worked for a number of high-profile bloggers out there. While a blog network usually still uses multiple domain names, the synergy of a network probably means higher traffic for each blog than if each blog were an entity unto itself. This may reduce the massive effort required to boost your blog traffic. (But it still takes time.)
4. Hire some college students as apprentice writers. This means you can free up some time for webmastering tasks. You may be able to work out a deal with a college English, History, or Marketing department to give an apprentice (i.e., unpaid) writer a course credit to blog for you for a semester. Make sure you plan out what topics you want covered, and what kind of writing style, and present that to the department head. If you're lucky, you may find a writer like my brother, who is able, at the drop of a hat, to write pretty much any passage in the style of Papa Hemingway or some other classic writers. Better yet, find one that writes like you do.
5. Write a custom PHP+mySQL-driven application that uses AJAX (Asynchronous Javascript and XML) and lets you manage all of your blogs. Or hire a college computer science student to tweak the open source code of WordPress for you. This frees you up to focus on the writing aspect of blogmastering (once the application is ready).
6. BONUS TIP: Hook up special electrodes to your brain. Plug the other end of the electrodes into a special USB connector that in turn plugs in to your custom AJAX application (tip 5) and automatically downloads all of your thoughts, formats them into blog entries, and posts them on a custom schedule that you can simply think of and which will be automatically implemented. In fact, I'm working on this wondrous application right now. Except that it's all in my head :D

Note: This post is a continuation of a series on BlogSpinner V1.0 blog. Here is MultiBlogging Techniques Review Part III.

(c) Copyright 2005-present, Raj Kumar Dash, http://blogspinner.countwordula.com/

Technorati : arrggh, blogging, blogs, managing blogs, multi-blogging, pro blogging, writing

The move of the BlogSpinner blog has been an utter pain in the bee-hind. For several weeks, I've been debating with myself what the impact of the move is going to be, and for the most part, there are a lot of negatives:

1. Having to set up and configure a new blog.
2. Having to rebuild search engine rankings for the new URL. This means
3. Having to create a new template to personalize the site so that it doesn't look like a cookie-cutter blog.
4. Possibly setting up a new blogging platform.

Let's address these points.

All of my research into search engine opitimization and marketing suggests that once you've built up a URL, you want to stick with it, primarily because of any search engine referrals you are receiving. However, blogspot.com-based URLs have lately been under attack by blog engines and directories due to some perception that a lot of them are splogs (spam blogs). Some engines/ directories are outright not listing new post from blogspot.com blogs.

As well, I wanted to group a number of writing-related blogs together under one banner. The only way to do that, of course, is to set up a new domain (CountWordula.com). Unfortunately, this means I have to rebuild my search engine rankings for the new BlogSpinner URLs through the same techniques I used for the earlier BlogSpinner V1.0).

In addition to a new URL, I wanted a new template. It was relatively easy to sketch out a new design (actually, I went the last of about a dozen ideas), but then I had to decide which blogging platform to use, and then tweak the template for that platform.

After much internal debate, I decided to stay with the Blogger.com platform purely because of its simplicity. My original intent was to move over to the WordPress blogging platform, as I did with my new Curry Elvis Cooks website/blog site. However, because I wanted to use my own template, and because of a shortage of time, I chose to stick with the Blogger.com platform.

Surprise, surprise. After about 16 solid hours of frustrating tweaking, I have my new template set up for BlogSpinner V2.0, but the comment form is not active (even the comment links are showing). I have new found respect for all those generous souls that create templates for various blogging platforms and give them away free. (Mine will be made available after I finish tweaking it.)

Overall, though, because I am currently more familiar with the Blogger.com platform, I spent less time on setting up the new BlogSpinner blog than I would have if attempted to tweak my te