Short list of useful blogging tips

Blogs are taking over the world. They are everywhere and about everything. Everyone can have a blog. And people make money from their blogs. You can see good blogs and bad blogs, seo blogs, entertainment blogs, personal or even an autoblogs.

How to create a popular blog? It is not an easy task and many people start and then give up.

Here is my list of advices for beginner bloggers:

• Establish a blogging schedule
• Write good content
• Don’t copy blog posts
• Copy successful bloggers
• Use common sense
• Offer useful information
• Get cool and easy to understand blog theme
• Have simple blog navigation
• Select a niche and stick on it
• Comment on other blogs in your niche
• Participate in comments discussions
• Participate in forums
• Create videos
• Use photos
• Drink your morning coffee before posting
• Think before posting
• Use twitter to promote
• Use sense of humor
• And have fun
• Learn SEO
• Read blogging news
• Be creative
• Create goals
• Follow your goals
• Analyze, analyze, analyze (your visitors, traffic, achievements)

Stolen content

These days I found the articles from one of my blogs on an unknown website. Obviously, my content was stolen. Later I found some more websites with my articles on them.

Several sites were using its RSS feed to publish my articles without link or mentioning, stealing my traffic and Google SERP. In fact my site got penalty for duplicate content. My own content!


So I did a little research what to do when site content is stolen.

How to find stolen content?
If your search engine traffic is going down no matter what you are doing or you don’t receive any visitors for your new, fresh and good articles, check for scrapers. The fastest way to find stolen content is to run a search with some specific text from your article in quotes.

What to do when your site content is stolen?
The first thing to do is to contact the scam site owner to remove your content. This part can be easy if he have a proper contact form or email on his site. In my case both sites hadn’t email or contact form. So I used WHOIS service to get their owners details. I got anonymous mails and I mailed them. No response.

Let’s see what Google says.
I found a post in Google Webmaster Central Blog - Duplicate content due to scrapers and this one on Google Adsense Blog - My content, your content, other people's content.
In short you can use this link https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/spamreport to report spam site. If you have problems with your traffic, you can try and ask for reconsideration from Google Webmaster tools. And you can fire a DMCA. Here is detailed information on how to do it - http://www.google.com/dmca.html.

You can contact the scraper’s hosting company and try to ask them for action.

In some of the above links I found one very useful advice. Always include your full link in your posts.

Stolen content is a very sensitive topic. It is not always easy to defend your work from cheaters. Most of the time search engines filter scam sites correctly but there is noting perfect. If you find your content stolen don’t panic and take the right actions.

Stolen Content on my SEO Strategy Blog.

Optimize your blog for search engines and human visitors

Blogging is a popular way to express your self and share your thoughts with the world. With the invasion of PPC services blogging became a way to earn a living. This is the reason for increasing number of blogs in any niche.
Getting new visitors become harder and harder in this competitive environment. Many niches became saturated.
Every blog needs more visitors despite the reason it’s created. To draw more visitors you need to put in some efforts.

Content
Have you heard the phrase “Content is king”. It’s a controversial phrase but not fully true or false. Good content will bring you loyal visitors. Good content can make your loyal visitors to share your blog with their friends. And search engines like what people like (most of the time).
You need to update your content regularly to get the attention of the search engines. The biggest ones give most credits on new and regularly updated content so if you want to go up in SERPS update, update, update!

Links
Link building is very important for your SEO campaign. You need quality links from prestigious websites with high PageRank.
Of course you can start with submitting your website link to many blogging networks like TopOfBlogs, BlogCatalog. Find a list of dofollow social bookmarking sites and submit your post links to them. Create both regular and deep links.
Submit your blog to general and niche link directories.

Forums
Find a list of forums related to your niche and start posting in them. Create fun signatures with your link in them. Post controversial topics and use linkbaits. Forums can bring you readers and links so don’t forget to write quality posts.

Platform
Best blogging platforms by my opinion are blogger and wordpress. There are many pros and cons to use either of them but I won’t discus which is better here. Both are well optimized and you won’t have many SEO problems with them.

Design
You need human and SEO friendly design. To be SEO friendly your site needs to satisfy several requirements. Here are some of them:

• Use regular links for menus.
• Use tags and categories.
• Don’t use JavaScript for menu navigation.
• Your main content must come before the sidebars.
• Use SEO-friendly urls.
• Optimize your images.
• Don’t create deep navigation trees. Every article must not be further than three clicks away from your homepage.

Social Networks
Join Twitter, Digg, FaceBook and start to make friend and followers. Select your best posts and share their links with few words of explanation. Write tweets and posts with 20% to 50% general talk, 30% your niche information and 20% with your links. Don’t spam with links cause people tend to unfollow persons with such behavior.


Work regularly. Don’t stop to improve your blog. Learn from other bloggers and don’t be afraid to experiment. Many successful bloggers have published their stories on internet – read them and find your inspiration.

Google Wave

Currently, a new wave of talk shows on internet. Bloggers make a lot of buzz about this.

Google Wave is a new communication tool presented by Google. With it people can interact with one another in real time. Wave can be used for work and free time as it can work with maps, rich text, images, videos, and so on.
I wasn’t surprised to see Google Wave as trending topic in Twitter for some time.

As a communication product Wave looks very promising. Google Wave API makes possible for webmasters to embed Google Wave in their website or write bots for automated tasks.




Links:
Google Wave
Google Wave API

42 tips to get more traffic

1. Use high quality content.
2. Keep adding content on a regular base.
3. Use SEO friendly URLs.
4. Use keywords in page titles.
5. Use linkbaits.
6. Use pictures.
7. Use videos.
8. Use presentations.
9. Be creative.
10. Be unique.
11. Write about hot topics.
12. Write controversial posts.
13. Do a keyword research.
14. Tag your content.
15. Remove broken links.
16. Study your logs. Value what visitors like.
17. Build a brand.
18. Write press releases.
19. Post to related mailing lists.
20. Invite guest bloggers.
21. Be a guest blogger.
22. Do offline advertising.
23. Make lists like this one.
24. Submit to directories.
25. Submit to social bookmarking sites.
26. Write articles and submit them to article directories.
27. Use trackbacks.
28. Comment on other blogs.
29. Use your links in forums signatures.
30. Run contests.
31. Give away freebies.
32. Join Twitter and make a community.
33. Tweet regularly.
34. Join Digg and make a lot of friends.
35. Join SpicyPage.
36. Join MyBlogLog.
37. Join Blog Catalog.
38. Create MySpace page and make some friends.
39. Answer questions on Yahoo answers with link to your blog.
40. Use StumbleUpon.
41. Add your blog to Technorati.
42. Use viral marketing.