Blogging Secrets

A blog’s functionality is highly dependent on the plugins of the blog. Some plugins are almost a necessity. With each plugins having different functions, below are 7 plugins that I would personally recommend to any bloggers out there.

1. All-in-One-SEO – This is a highly recommended plugins for Wordpress. The plugin allows unique meta description, keywords and titles to each page of your blog and blog posts, to rank well in search engines.

2. Feedburner Feedsmith – When creating your WordPress blog an essential part is having RSS Feed subscribers, and the most important of having subscribers is to be able to track them and keep the count. Which is when the service of feedburner came in play. This plugin converts all of your RSS Feeds, to your custom feedburner feeds, so all of your subscribers are subscribed to one feed therefore you get the most accurate count of your subscribers.

3. WP Super Cache – I highly recommend WP Super Cache to all bloggers. This plugin makes a copy of your web page on the server and by doing so it decreases the page load time and reduces the resource consumption. As most internet surfer are busy, they will hardly wait for more than 3 seconds to check what your site is all about. This plugin helps reduce the possibility of losing traffic due to having a long page load time.

4. Wordpress Database Backup – Wordpress Database Backup is important for a number of reasons. First of all, you can never predict when things will go wrong. Secondly, the plugin provides a peace of mind to bloggers, knowing that they have the latest backup to fall back on, just in case their blog’s data got wiped out.

5. CommentLuv – Comments are a wonderful thing to receive on your blog. With CommentLuv, you can give something back to your community right away by including a titled link for their latest blog post on the end of their comment. The plugin fetches the feed of the commenter while they type their comment and extracts the last blog post title with link and displays it below the comment form. When they submit their comment, the last blog post link gets added on the end of their comment for all to see.

6. Popular Posts – Popular Posts integrates with Wordpress.com Stats plugin, providing a widget to show the most viewed posts. This plugin works great to keep readers attached to the site and subsequently increases visitor’s time on site. Simply add the widget to your sidebar.

7. TwitThis – This plugin adds “TwitThis” to every blog posts to allow your readers to share your article to their Twitter followers. As sharing your article is a matter of a click, the chances of your articles going viral are higher.

Although plugins also plays a big role in building traffic and increasing audience, whatever plugins you use, keep in mind that no plugin can get you traffic without great contents.

Nik Imran is the author for I Make A Blog, a blog that provides guide on how to make a blog. Visit I Make A Blog for more recommended plugins.

On OK to Make Money Online, let’s take a more in-depth look at Search Engine Optimization (SEO). SEO comes down to nothing more than staying on subject with your blog or website and using properly researched keywords or long tail keywords.

Take a look around, not in the blogs you know, but in general. Most websites do not even care about keyword optimization. Most are a collection of unrelated subjects. Take a cooking site for example. Inside the site, you will have everything from grandma’s breakfast recipe to a late night snack. So how does Google index this site? Cooking in general? Now this may be the author’s intent but it does not work for the internet-marketing person.

Take most sites: they are all over the place with the subject matter. One article may be about shoes, another about clothes and on the same site cooking utensils. So how does Google rate the site and what ads does it display? We have to help Google out here and in response, they will rate your page higher in page ranking.

If we look over at a cooking site, can you find the main topic? Would it be desserts, beef, American, French, or general? Now therein lies the problem: the information is too general. If we are doing a niche site, we need to be more specific. So we need to break a general site into ten or twenty sites, with each site concerned with one food group, say beef or salads. Now we are talking about a niche. Got the idea?

With a list of topics or categories in hand, we need to create a website of each. The hard part is going to be the URL name. This is the one area where the name is important. So how do we determine the best name? By using our keywords. But wait you don’t know what a good keyword for your subject or category would be? OK, let’s ask the expert: Google. You can use the tool Google uses to sell ad space under Adwords, Keyword Tool. With this tool you can input your subject, category and Google will return a list of the searches that people have entered and the keywords they used.

When you have gathered your keywords, run over to Blogger or check the URLs for your keyword being available. If it’s not, add a few words to the back or front to create a unique keyword, but don’t use hyphens to separate your keywords. After installing your site, create your privacy page, about page and your introductory page making sure to use your keyword.

Take any articles that were already on your old site and rewrite them using the appropriate keyword for the article. Make sure you use your keyword or phrase in the title, opening paragraph, body and closing paragraph. Copy that article to the new website and publish it.

Some articles will contain pictures. Make sure you have your keyword or keyword phrase in the description area of the picture, usually found in the HTML code. This is often the text that is displayed while you are waiting for the picture to be displayed.

Last, make sure not to exceed one or two uses of your keyword per one hundred article body words, or Google may flag you site for keyword stuffing and sandbox you until you correct the problem.

Review of the rules: make sure your site sticks to one topic, make sure you research your keyword or long tail keyword, and use your keywords in every article and page on your site to make money online. Then as always, get as many backlinks to your site as you can (i.e. traffic).

Michael