Blog Tips & Tricks »

by Colin Lim

Ever wanted to tell the big search engines what to go??! Well you can.. not quite in the way some of you may be thinking of though (I think there are some forums around that will let you let off a little steam about the search engines). You can basically tell a search engine which parts of our blog you want it to crawl and include in their index.

Why would you want to stop a search engine crawling your entire blog?

There are several reasons that you want this, here are a few:

1. I’d say that most blogs include a bunch of folders that shouldn’t really be visible to the public and/or are irrelevant to the blog’s subject such as your cgi-bin folder or other folders that Wordpress notoriously creates to make your blog work but are irrelevant to the blog itself, like wp-content, wp-admin etc.

by Colin Lim

There are a lot of factors that affect how the major search engines (Google, MSN, Yahoo, etc) rank your site in their search results for your keywords. A tip for bloggers who want to have their site ranked well, especially within Google, is to create a sitemap and then have this uploaded to Google and other major search engines.

Why are sitemaps important? Here is what Google says about it:

"Google uses your Sitemap to learn about the structure of your site and to increase our coverage of your webpages"

Apart from this, sitemaps also allow you to easily tell the search engines about updates to your blog. Obviously search engines aren’t going to immediately re-index your blog when you update your sitemap but they will allow for easier and quicker re-indexing of your blog. If your blog is new, or if you have a significant number of new (or recently updated pages), then using a sitemap can be vital to your success.

by Corey Geer

By the end of 2004 blogs had established themselves as a key part of online culture. "Blog readership shoots up 58% in 2004 6 million Americans get news and information fed to them through RSS aggregators But 62% of online Americans do not know what a blog is." - Pew Internet & American Life Project

1. How and Where Should I Start? You should begin your blog with a free blog hosting service such as Blogger (blogger.com), or other similar free services such as JournalHome.com, LiveJournal.com or Blog-City.com. The learning curve for using such free services allow you to spend more on developing your content rather than worrying about the advanced areas of scripting, hosting, or programming.

by Jeff Casmer

Blogging news stories as they unfold is one of the most exciting and controversial applications of technology that bloggers have discovered. One thing that makes the blogosphere so active is the fact that it is possible to update a blog instantaneously, so the news on blogs tends to be more current than the news in the paper, or on television. Unlike news delivered by these other media, news that appears on blogs does not have to travel through a series of editors and administrators before it reaches the public eye. This has some advantages, and some distinct disadvantages.

One of the most notable cases of news hitting a blog before appearing in other media took place in July 2005 when terrorism struck London. As passengers were evacuated from a subway car near an explosion, one man took several photographs of the scene with his cellular phone, and within an hour these images were posted online. First-person accounts of the catastrophe began appearing on blogs soon after these photos appeared, and people all over the world learned about the events in London by reading the words and seeing the photos posted by bloggers.

by Codrut Turcanu

Blogs often fail because their owners run out of topics to write about, and in a fit of frustration and writer’s block, they give up. People have trouble coming up with ideas oftentimes, and that’s okay. It doesn’t say anything bad about your ability as a blogger. It just means that you need to come up with a new method of developing ideas.

Here’s a good writer’s best kept secret: when you run out of ideas of your own, look to other people for inspiration. The following are great tips for developing blog topics when your own creativity well comes up dry:

Tip for Developing Good Blog Topics #1: Go to the Search Engines

I myself have found Google to be very accommodating in providing me with blog topics. Run a search that focuses on your blog’s niche. For example, let’s say that your blog’s niche is tattoos. You may consider typing the following phrases into the search engine: