All Entries in the "Blog Post Tips" Category

Tags And Categories: What’s The Difference?

One thing that confuses beginning bloggers often is the distinction between a tag and a category. Knowing the difference can mean driving traffic to the best parts of your blog or the most important parts for your visitors. At any rate, you can help your visitors better find the information they are looking for by knowing the difference between these two methods of cataloging your blog posts.

Generally speaking, categories are like folders in a paper filing system. If you have a smaller number of categories, that works best. They should be broad enough that you can fit a large swath of blog posts into each category. For instance, under “internet marketing” you can put anything related to blog marketing, article marketing, SEO, pay per click marketing, affiliate marketing, contextual links, or any number of other subjects related to marketing a business online.

Tags can be a great compliment to categories and they should be more narrow in scope. One blog post can have several tags. Some people say you should put each blog post only into one category. I think you can have a blog in more than one category, but if your categories are broad enough you’ll never have a blog post in more than two or three categories. If you find yourself putting many of your blog posts into more than one category then you probably need to broaden the scope of your categories.

However, you could be using categories like they were tags. A tag can be narrow in scope because it pertains to that specfic blog post and not a broad range of blog posts as the category does. You can have several blog posts use the same tag, but often you’ll find that blog posts in different categories reference the same or similar tags because, just like in a book, you’ll have the same subject pop up in different chapters because it might relate in several different ways to broader areas of knowledge.

I hope this clears up any questions you might have about tags and categories. Think of it this way: Categories are like chapters in a book. You want fewer of them. But tags are like entries in the subject index of the book and you’ll often have hundreds of those in a ten chapter book.

13 Ways To Write Knock Out Blog Posts In 10 Minutes Or Less

Since I write several blogs I day I’ve learned a few ways to write fast. I can usually knock out a decent blog post in 10 minutes. Of course, I’ve spent as many as four hours writing blog posts too. So there’s both ends of the spectrum.

But what if you absolutely have to do it fast? You’re in a time crunch, the day is almost done, you haven’t made your post for the day, and time is a tickin’. Now what?

Well, Michael Martine at Remarkablogger, one of my favorite bloggers on blogging, has 10 suggestions for you on his blog. In a nutshell, Michael recommends:

1. Pick three blogs you respect and introduce your readers to them
2. Go to the main category page for one of your categories, copy and paste five of your best posts
3. Ask your readers to ask you questions
4. Answer a question from your readers
5. Ask a question of your readers and have them answer it in the comments
6. In the same vein, put together a poll and post it
7. Google for the top ten sites in your niche and post them
8. Record a video at YouTube
9. Embed a video
10. Write something nice about the coolest new person you’ve met, recently

All of these are good ideas and with the exception of recording a video at YouTube, I’ve done them all. One of these days I may get around to actually posting a video at YouTube.

But I have three other ways you can knock out a blog post in 10 minutes or less. Here are my three suggestions:

1. Find a blog within your niche and copy/paste a snippet from it then comment on what you’ve read. Agree or disagree, it doesn’t matter. But start a conversation across blogs. Trackback to the blog that you borrowed from. This invites that blogger and his/her readers to your blog to continue the conversation.
2. Take an article from an article directory and publish it on your blog. You can comment on the article or not. I usually do. Again, agree or disagree; it doesn’t really matter. Just start a conversation. I’ve actually had article authors visit my blog and comment on my response to their articles or thank me for publishing them.
3. Focus on a keyword. Some people might consider this spam, but if you do it right you can take an important keyword for your niche and just focus your blog post on that keyword. Include it in your title, write a first sentence using the keyword, then follow up with two or three paragraphs backing up your thesis (first sentence) statement. End the blog post using your keyword in the last sentence. Now you have a keyword optimized blog post with a little content value for your readers.

Thanks for Michael for giving me something to blog about today. 10 minutes and I’m done.

Has Your PageRank Dropped Unexpectedly?

There are plenty of reasons why PageRank might drop. But one of the chief reasons you could see a drop in PageRank is if you write to your blog less often. I have a blog that I wrote to daily for a year and within 6 months I had achieve a PageRank 5. After one year of daily blogging I scaled back to writing just when I had the time. It averaged out to a couple of times a week. Within 6 months my PageRank had dropped back down to a PageRank of 4.

This is an object lesson. You should write to your blog daily. It will increase your credibility and authority. Anything less than daily blogging will provide fewer benefits.

Notice that the quality of my blog posts did not decline when I wrote less often. The quality has always been high, but now I write less often. That’s a key indicator for Google that your blog is less authoritative than your competition’s is. Don’t let them think that about you. When Google decides that your blog is less authoritative, so will your readers. That’s why you need to write every day.

Blog SEO: As Simple As 1-2-3

I’m going to let the secret out of the bag. Blog SEO is as simple as 1-2-3:

1. Make sure you write a great blog post that uses your most important keywords in just the right amounts
2. Include a link or two with the right anchor text pointing to the right page on your website
3. Optimize your blog post title with your keyword in the first three words of the title

That’s about it. And as an additional measure, you can tag your blog post with the right keyword tags and place it in the right category as well. There’s nothing wrong with writing a blog post that appeals to your readers either.