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Link Tips: 06 April 2008

April 6, 2008

We have a mono-thematic collection of links this Sunday: improve your website. You will find huge lists with tips and techniques to improve your website, design better, optimize your blog, make it load faster and market it.
  • Improving Your Website: Not for the faint of heart. This list includes 101 five-minute fixes to improve your website. Worth a bookmark.
  • Why having a slow website is bad: You probably heard before that having a slow website is a bad thing. If you are still not convinced, or if you want to know how to solve the problem, check this post.
  • E-Books for Web Design: The Mashable folks compiled a list with over 20 e-books and white papers that you can download to improve your web design.
  • Internet Marketing Tips: 59 important internet marketing tips and techniques that you should be doing.
  • Optimize your blog: 52 easy ways to optimize your blog while having a coffee break. Got love those simple yet effective tips.
Partner: MakeUseOf.com Amazing Websites and Tools you Never Knew About Read more

Written by Daniel Scocco · Filed Under brand positioning, top tips | Comments Off 

SEO Tip: Almost 7 Ways To Re-Optimize Your Posts

March 18, 2008

re-optimize-blog-posts.jpgThe following SEO Optimization post was submitted by Linda Bustos fromElastic Path. Smart bloggers often use keyword research tools to brainstorm “long tail” opportunities and keyword niches. These keywords are then worked into blog post titles, image attributes, headings and body copy as part of an SEO strategy, knowing that this “low hanging fruit” can drive some very valuable traffic. While this is a great strategy, it’s not without its downsides. Keyword research tools are often expensive, the data can be unreliable or too general to reflect your readership. If you use Google Analytics, you’re sitting on a very valuable keyword research tool that’s free, accurate and can tell you so much about your readers. I’d like to share a “hack” with you - how you can use Google Analytics to identify your most valuable keyword referrals, and how you can re-optimize your posts to raise your rank and drive more traffic for these keywords. Read more

Written by Darren Rowse · Filed Under brand positioning, top tips | Comments Off 

How to have a Constant Stream of Blogging Ideas

March 17, 2008

This post on generating blogging ideas was contributed by Graham Jones from grahamjones.co.uk. Most bloggers give up after a short while; even though there are millions of blogs online, few are updated regularly and most have been abandoned. The difference between success and failure in blogging is often down to persistence. But, when I speak at meetings about blogging, people often come up to me afterwards and say “Ah, yes, that’s all very well, but I run out of ideas after a while, so I can’t blog regularly”. So, how can you be sure of coming up with a constant stream of blogging ideas? How can you be certain that when you open your blogging software you will always have something to write? If you think about your daily newspaper it does not have a choice. The number of pages is set by the amount of advertising space they sell. Each day, though, has varying amounts of news - some days, very little happens. But it would be no good the journalists filling up the first few pages and then printing a notice on all the others saying “if we’d been able to think of anything to write we would have put it here”. No matter how little is going on around them and no matter how much space they have to fill, newspapers simply have to fill the space allocated to them - plus they simply MUST do it before a specified time. The only way they can achieve this is to have a system.

Develop a blogging planning system

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Written by Darren Rowse · Filed Under brand positioning, top tips | Comments Off 

If YOU Were Starting Out in Blogging from Scratch - How Would You Promote Your Blog?

March 17, 2008

Blog-Promotion StrategiesOver the past week I’ve shared five strategies that I’d use to promote my blog if I were starting from scratch again today. We started off by looking at how the majority of your efforts need to be focused upon Readers You Don’t Already Have (obvious but important) and then looked at the five strategies of:
  1. Guest Posting
  2. Networking
  3. Advertising
  4. Social Media
  5. Viral Content
Together I believe that these five strategies pursued together would give a new blog a good start (note: pursuing just one of them might have some impact but together they are more effective). Read more

Written by Darren Rowse · Filed Under brand positioning, top tips | Comments Off 

How I built an effective blog comment spam blocker

February 6, 2008

Mention comment spam and most people, in particular those crazy WordPress users, mention Akismet. Great tool and I have nothing against it but I wanted to build my own, avoiding the external call to the Akismet service. What has been interesting to see, is just how effective it is. Turns out, my spammers are quite obvious. As you might see, I don't use CAPTCHAs and I don't use JavaScript detection. I just use a number of rules that validate each comment on the server. Oh, and I don't use nofollow.

Points System

I use a points system, which I got the idea from Movable Type, whose spam protection is also based on a points system. For everything in a comment that I like, you get a point. For everything I don't like, you lose a point (or two, or three). If you get a 1 or higher, you've made it on the site as a valid comment. If you get a 0, it's set for moderation and I'll take a look at it. If it's below 0, it's marked as spam and I'll never see it (although I check every couple weeks just in case a legitimate comment needs to be unflagged). If it falls below -10, I don't even bother saving it to the database since it is so obviously spam. Read more

Written by Jonathan Snook · Filed Under design corner, top tips | Comments Off 

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