posts – Page 6

Blogburst – syndicate your content

Shortly after I started blogging in 2006 a new company opened for business. This company’s name is Blogburst. It’s a syndication service that places your blog content on top-tier online destinations. Namely online news sites like Reuters, USA Today, Gannett, McGraw-Hill, Fox News and Internet Broadcasting.

What could I get out of listing my sites with Blogburst? Well increased visibility for one – especially if any of my sites or posts got picked up by online news services, plus a greater audience reach and increased traffic. Online publishers in turn would get more material to use on their sites in order to broaden their reach and increase their own page views.

So I signed up my sites and kept on blogging as usual. Nothing much happened for a long time. I’d go and check my account to see if any of the news services had picked up any of my posts every now and then and I was disappointed to find out that they had not.

I wasn’t ready to give up though and I kept my sites listed on Blogburst.

Late last year Blogburst started a service where they would provide quarterly revenue to their top one hundred bloggers who’s posts got picked up by online services consistently. Obviously I was not one of those bloggers. I believe that Blogburst has plans to expand compensation to bloggers as their reach grows and more online services start to use Blogburst’s bloggers for content.

Yesterday while I was checking site statistics for my blogs and my husbands two blogs I made a surprising discovery. One of the sites bringing new visitors to my husbands site was USA Today! It seems that they just started picking up his weird news posts from Odd Planet at the beginning of March. We hope that they continue to do so.

Now that I’ve actually seen how it works I can tell you that the online service- In this case USA Today, will pick up a post and place a short summary of the post on their site. Visitors to their site who want to read the whole post are brought directly to your site. This increases visitors and hopefully your sites popularity in the long run.

Naturally we were thrilled that Odd Planet was picked up by USA Today.

Pleased, I went on checking site stats for our other sites and made another amazing discovery. USA Today, and IBS (I believe this must be Internet Broadcasting) had been picking up some of my posts from As the Garden grows since early February. I think that over 33,000 post views have occurred since early February via those services. How had I not noticed this earlier?

I promptly got busy and placed a number of our other sites on Blogburst. I’m now keeping my fingers crossed that posts continue to get picked up from As the Garden Grows and Odd Planet and perhaps some of the other sites that we added to Blogburst.

Maybe we’ll end up on their top 100 list of bloggers and end up making some money through Blogburst. As of now I’m just happy that we should see an increase in visitors.

This certainly is incentive to create excellent content on all of our blogs.

Put an Image in a WordPress post

by Tricia

I’ve been hanging out on some blogging related forums and one of the questions that often comes up is how to add an image into a post. There are actually several ways to do this, and once you’ve done it a few times you’ll find that it’s very easy.

I’m writing these instructions out for the WordPress blogging platform, but some of the techniques that I’ll discuss will likely apply quite easily to other blogging platforms.

How to add images to your blog post:

Method one – using image links:

If you have images uploaded onto a free photo hosting site such as Flickr or Photobucket you can easily add the image link to your post. Simply copy the image link from the photo hosting site and use the image button in the top of your post writing area to paste the link into the box that pops up after you’ve clicked the image button.

Just be sure that your cursor is in the area that you’d like the image to be placed when you click on the image button. Otherwise you’ll have to cut and paste the image code into the correct area.

Method two – uploading and image:

If you’ve taken photos with a digital camera or saved photos to your computer it’s pretty easy to upload them into your WordPress post. All you need to do is use the upload section that is directly below your post writing area in WordPress.

One thing to keep in mind before uploading photo files to your server and then into your post is the size of the file. If you are posting in Rich text format you can easily adjust the height and width of any image, but you can’t adjust the kilobytes. You should make sure that the file is preferably less than 20 kb in size before you upload it into a post otherwise it will dramatically slow the loading time of your post.

If you have photo editing software use it to edit the post for the web by making it a compressed jpeg or gif image – try to maintain the quality of the photo while you reduce the size in regard to kilobytes.

Now, when you are in writing mode in WordPress take a look just below the post content box. You’ll see an area called “Upload”. If the upload area isn’t open click on the + sign to open it.

You’ll see an area that says “File” within the Upload box. Select browse and find the image that you’d like to add to your post. You may chose to also file in the title and description information for the image file at this time as well.

Once you’ve selected the image file on your computer, click on the word upload in the bottom right of the Upload area.

After a moment the file will be uploaded and you’ll see a small thumbnail of the photo.

In WordPress 2.0 you must click on the picture to choose between adding the thumbnail of the image or the full size image to your post. Once you’ve selected which image size you’d like to use, place your cursor in the area of the post that you’d like the image to be placed, and then go back to the image and click on the words “Send Image to Editor”.

In WordPress 2.1 you’ll see several selections beside the thumbnail of the image. You can use the full size or thumbnail of the image, and you can also choose to link to the image file or not.

Since I often edit my images ahead of time to make sure they are of an appropriate size for the post I usually choose full size and none before selecting “Send to Editor”. If you’d like to use a thumbnail of your image in the post you might choose to link to the image so that your visitors can click on the link and see a larger image on a separate page.

Once you are done selecting the image size and any thing else that you’d like to choose for your image click on “Send to Editor”. Just be sure that your cursor placed in the area of the post that you’d like the image to be placed. Otherwise you’ll have to cut and paste to get the image in the right area.

Then TA DA you have a photo inserted into your post.

So how is that? Clear as mud or do you have a better understanding of how to place an image in your post now?

Don’t forget to read my article on how to center or align your image to the right or left of post text.

DIY Search engine Optimization tips #2

by Tricia

Continued from DIY Search Engine Optimization Tips #1

6. When writing your articles or posts on your pages be sure to include important keywords and search phrases at the beginning, middle and end of the article.

If you are using good writing technique when composing your pages and articles you shouldn’t have a problem with this phase of SEO. As you might know, a well written article usually begins with a paragraph that describes what the body of the article will be about; the mid section of your article goes into more detail or greater depth regarding your initial statement in the first paragraph; the end of the article should come to a conclusion regarding the information you have discussed in the mid portion of the article.

Write naturally, but do remember to use terms within your post that might be used by people when they are searching for the type of information that your article contains.

7. Place your keywords and phrases in the link text of your web pages.

Keywords should be used in your links. When you are linking to another page or subpage on your site use a descriptive keyword or phrase to describe the clickable link. Don’t use terms like “click here” as that offers no description of what the link is for the search engines.

8. Make sure your site can be navigated easily by your visitors as well as search engines

When someone links to your site, or when you submit your site to a search engine it is often only the index page of the site that is given to the search engine. When the search engine visits your site it will index your main page. Your main page should contain some links that lead deeper into your site but if you have a javascript based navigation system the search engine spiders may not follow the links deep into your site as easily as if your links are text (html) based.

9. Build a site map page or use the Google sitemap option.

It’s important to get all of the pages on your site indexed by the search engines. Creating a page that contains links to all of the pages within your site, a sitemap, helps the search engine in this matter. As you probably know, visitors using your sitemap will be able to find items on your site easier as well.

You can create an xml version of your sitemap and submit it to Google Sitemaps. Google has links to third party XML sitemap creators in it’s Webmasters tools area. Once you’ve created your xml sitemap you can submit it to the sitemap area and google’s spiders will visit your site on a regular basis depending upon how often you update your site.

10. Off-site optimization

Now that you know how to optimize your site, and write articles and sub pages for search engine optimization you should concentrate on off site optimization. Google places a high measure of importance as to where you site is ranked on factors such as how many other sites link to your page, the page rank of the sites linking to your site, and the type of sites linking to your site.

The best way to get off site links of course is to create a website with valuable information that will make others want to link to you. If you exchange links with other sites try to exchange links with sites that are similar to your own. For example if you have a gardening site you should attempt to link up with other gardening sites – of all types.

You can also write informative articles and get them published on other websites which will result in a link back to your site. This may also help increase the amount of visitors coming to your site as well. Submit your links to all of the main directories- Google, Yahoo, MSN, the Open directory, and directories that are perhaps related to your sites genre as well. Participate in forums in order to promote your site and perhaps get more visitors to your site as well.

All of the tips that I have listed should help you promote your site and get better rankings on the main search engines.

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