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By Les Scammell, September 29, 2009 12:51 pm

As my online life gets busier and busier my time gets absorbed in the million and one things that are going on at once. I occurs to me I need a blogging timetable. Not a timetable of posting, but a timetable of activities.

Does anyone use a timetable to manage their time online? By timetable I am referring to a schedule of events. For example, on a Sunday you would prepare a newsletter, send it out on a Monday, manage your subscriber list on a Tuesday, filter Akismet on a Wednesday, update plugins and other maintenance issues on a Thursday, deal with advertising/affiliates on a Friday, review everything on a Saturday ready to start all over again on the Sunday.

Doe sit help? Is it easy to stick to or do you get side tracked away from your timetable easily? I already schedule certain activities on a daily basis. For example, I write in the mornings, review in the afternoons and research/socialize in the evenings.

At the moment I do everything else on an adhoc basis. If my Akismet comments look to be getting full – I go an empty them. If I notice a plugin requires an update, I go and update it. If I am reading a post and it mentions a good plugin – I will go and look at it. It’s all very adhoc and time consuming.

How do you manage your blogging time? Do you have a timetable? Do you use any time management software? I would be very interested to hear your views – feel free to comment.

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By Les Scammell, September 28, 2009 12:22 am

Bounce rates are one area of search engine optimization that I have difficulty coming to terms with. If you write a darn good post that visitors find interesting  should be good for your site. However, if, after reading your post they move on to other things and DON’T click a link on your site – they are said to have bounced so up goes your bounce rate.

On the other hand, if my post is only so-so and the visitor clicks a link to another page hoping to get better info, they haven’t bounced so my bounce rate goes down.

There are other things that affect bounce rates. Hands up those that have marked their links to open in a new window? I used to as well. It seems if a link opens in a new window it doesn’t count as a click so, even though they are reading other content on your site, your bounce rate will go up. From what I can gather, it also includes external links – they have to open in the same tab to count as a non-bounce.

The higher your bounce rate, the lower your sites authority. If I have that all wrong, please feel free to correct me.

To move on – how do you then reduce your bounce rate? There are several methods. The most obvious that I see frequently is my using the READ MORE option in a post.  If you can write a great introduction then it can work well.

Another option that I particularly like is to break good posts into two distinct sections – this is great for list posts. The first section is a sales pitch in a way. You are looking to convince your reader to click through to another section. 

The second part, the meat if you like, is not published as a post but as a page. The end result is two pieces of content for the price of one. A static page that you can link to on a regular basis – it isn’t affected by categories or archives and is easier to find and edit should it need updating. In the mean time, you have encouraged your visitor to click through to a page thus reducing your bounce rate.

WordPress has ‘pages’. Have you ever thought of using them for Pillar Posts – or do you just use them for About Me pages? They can be quite versatile and with careful use, add a lot of value to your site.

photo credit: spettacolopuro

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By Les Scammell, September 27, 2009 12:06 am

If you are the kind of person that frets and stresses over stolen content – don’t. At least, don’t worry if you’re wearing protection. What sort of protection – easy, an internal link or a link to your home page. I noticed that my post – The Politics Of Iran – Why I Don’t Care – was rather heavily scrapped – Now I have link protection, I am not too worried.

It’s very rare for scraped content to outrank the original. If it does, make a spam complaint to Google and that should fix that problem. If it doesn’t outrank you – why worry. In fact, if you include links to your own content, a scraped copy may just add to the number of inbound links you have. Sure, they are not quality links, but use decent anchor text in your links and it will at least help to boost your pages for that keyword.

Even Matt Cutts from Google agrees with this sentiment:

Here are two tips that may help.

• Place a link to your own content in the first paragraph – there are many scrapers that only take the first one or two paragraphs.

• Grap a plugin that puts a resource box at the foot of every post -  DDAdSig is one – check WordPress for more.

Now, to all those scrapers out there – please feel free to scrape my content – you may just make my day!

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By Les Scammell, September 25, 2009 2:36 pm

Are you ready for hidden comments on your web sites? Not just blogs BTW, I am talking about all web pages. The comments will not appear on your site and you will have no control over them.

Google is releasing a new toy called SideWiki. It is what the name suggests, a Side Wiki. It is a tool that is downloaded and installed into your browser. As you are surfing it brings up comments that have been left by other SideWiki users. It will also display links to relevant sites – that is one area that should disturb those that include Google ad unites on their pages. Visitors will be able to click away – for free – you wont get paid a cent.

The idea is that as you are surfing, you leave comments on the fly, in the SideWiki, not on the site it self. I know I would prefer my visitors to leave their comments here, not in some sidebar hidden from most users.

Check out the video and tell me if you like Google’s new toy.

If the concept takes off – and that is a big if – it could have severe downsides for many websites.

Fortunately, this is one concept that I expect to see die in the A?. Most people don’t like installing toolbars, particularly if they get in the way of normal surfing – a sidebar probably will. Users will also have to create a Google profile to activate the SideWiki.

All-in-all, if I was a Google shareholder I would be disappointed in what they are spending their money on.

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By Les Scammell, September 8, 2009 10:47 pm

I can tell you from personal experience that being hacked is not a nice experience. I was fortunate, or unfortunate depending on your view of things, that I suffered a double hack. The first to one of my WordPress blogs (not this one fortunately), the second  was to the same site but was a malware attack.

When I say fortunate, the malware attack was reported and my site shut down by my webhost. It was a tough job tracking down the actual malware but it alerted me to check through everything else. That is when I found the WordPress attack.

What is even more galling is that I could have prevented it with just a few minutes work. If you have a WordPress blog I hope you read the notices on the Dashboard page. There have been a lot of notices about attacks on older versions of WordPress. Upgrade to the latest version ASAP is my recommendation.

As to my site, my second piece of advice is also just as simple. Change your passwords frequently and make sure the passwords are easy for you to remember but long enough to be hard to hack. Include a mix of capitals, lower case, numbers and symbols. I got lazy and was using a six digit password which, on reflection, was easy to hack. Not now I can tell you.

It is very easy to take your blog for granted. We sail along posting each and every day – most of don’t give much regard to passwords or upgrading our sites. The latest versions of WordPress make upgrading much easier. My message to all:

Don’t take your blog or site for granted – make security at least a weekly priority. If you don’t, somewhere, sometime, when you least expect it, someone will come along and knock it out – you could potentially lose the lot. It’s your site – it’s in your hands.

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By Les Scammell, September 7, 2009 2:18 pm

There are a lot of WordPress plugins around these days and finding the best ones for your blog can be difficult. Here are four plugins that may add a little more to your blog.

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TweetMeme Button

If you’re a Twitterer and Tweet your posts then this little plugin is a must. It adds the TweetMeme button to your posts so your readers can re-Tweet the post if they think it is worthwhile. The button is also included in RSS feeds.

There is very little setup required – just upload it to your plugins folder on your site and activate. photo credit: NevilleHobson

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Cookies For Comments

This is an anti spam plugin that works by sending a cookie when a page is loaded. If the cookie is not present then the user is not able to leave a comment.

A cool little plugin if you are getting spam that is getting past Askismet. Bots tour around leaving comments, however, they don’t take on cookies and with no cookie, there is no comment. The downside, if your reader has cookies disabled, they will not be able to leave a comment either.

Upload and activate – couldn’t be easier. photo credit: Mrs Magic

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Post Teaser

This has the potential to be a neat little plugin. It truncates your posts on the home page and leaves a teaser. You can set the number of words to the teaser (default 100 words). It places a read more option and provides post data such as word count, image count, and an estimated reading time.

There are a couple of issues to watch. If you have graphics within the teaser section, it will make a mess of your site (just look at mine here). If you set the teaser to 100 words, place any graphics outside that 100 words.

Another issue that is worth remembering is that many visitors want to see the complete post when visiting your home page. Hopefully this will convince them to click through and so reduce your bounce rate. It would have been nice to have an option to leave the first post in full and place teasers for all other posts.

Upload, activate and edit the length of the teaser – or just leave it at the default 100 words. photo credit: Andy Woo

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WPtouch: WordPress on iPhone, iPod & Android

This is a neat not so little plugin that provides a slimmed down version of your site for iPhone, iPod and Andoid users. There are a few options you can tweak including the skin. If your site is a little heavy for mobile browsing, install this plugin.

Upload, activate and edit the settings. Great for sites that include content relevant to mobile searches.

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By Les Scammell, September 6, 2009 3:43 pm

That may be a strange statement given the banner that will fly on this page throughout September. In all honesty – I don’t particularly care about the politics of Iran, or any other country really, even though I am a political person.

I have a serious distrust of all politicians as I feel they are not in office because they care about us, the general population. They are there to push their own agendas and often, we, the general public, suffer for that agenda.

Reports from Iran suggest the election was rigged. Perhaps it was, perhaps it wasn’t but in a way, tell me any election that isn’t rigged. Here in Australia we have compulsory voting. I didn’t like any of the candidates standing at the last election, yet I had to vote for one of them. Is that not some form of electoral rigging?

One of the arguments used to prove the Iranian election was rigged was that government opponents even lost in their home towns. Referring again to Australian politics, former Prime Minister John Howard became Australia’s only Prime Minister to lose his seat in office at an election. It does happen.

So why this post and why the banner? It matters not the politics nor the country. Where I will stand up and have a say is when free speech is denied. China and Burma have been classic cases of restrictions in free speech particularly when it comes to the blogosphere. Free speech is the life blood of blogging and I will always stand up for our freedom. I was struck by two paragraphs of a post by Andrew Sullivan on the Daily Dish:

“The forces of democracy have marshalled in Iran for accountability, transparency and fairness. Wherever they marshall, we should stand with them, especially in the blogosphere, where our Iranian brothers and sisters built the foundation for this moment.”

Putting aside the philosophy of democracy. The point that stands out for me is the use of the blogosphere to form a movement because this leads into a second paragraph later in the post:

“Ever since I penned The Medium Is the Middleman: For a Revolution Against Media, I’ve been waiting for this moment, which I predicted, twelve years ago, would come: a great day when the corporate media got pushed out of the way by authentic media from below. What is occurring worldwide, with the Iranian crisis as catalyst, is the emergence of the very kind of media from below that the human race – particularly the working class and the poor – so desperately needs.”

The media that everyone has access to is blogging. Whether you’re a multi-millionaire or the poorest person around, if you can access a computer and the internet, even in a public library, you can voice your views. In fact you can do it almost completely anonymously. Of course I don’t support blogging that is anyway destructive on a person level or designed to malign innocent individuals, it can be an important weapon against injustice.

Add to the blogosphere the power of Twitter and other social media and you have the potential for a new political force around the world – at least – a huge voice.

I don’t care about the politics in Iran, or China, or anywhere else. I do care about the rights of individuals to have the freedom to voice their opinions – DO YOU?

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By Les Scammell, September 6, 2009 10:58 am

I received an email recently inviting me to add my site to a new directory. This directory is geo targeted directory which, although my humble blog doesn’t target any particular part of world, is not new in theory still interested me. the directory is aimed at blogs, businesses, and Twitterers.

Let’s face it, a directory listing is a directory listing when it comes to links. The directory goes by the name LoadedWeb – not exactly an inspiring name for a geo-targeted directory.

Listing your site is easy and can be done in just a few steps. Entries are hand edited to ensure they are listed in the right categories and are not sites that could cause issues (gambling, porn etc). photo credit: Katey Nicosia

Whilst this is just another directory, it is probably well worth listing your site whilst it is still young and not overblown. If it does get traffic then you may well see some flowing through to your site. The sites homepage already has a PR of 5 so it has got plenty of links flowing to it.

Whether or not any of that juice comes back is another matter. According to the information provided when you first list your site, a banner placed on your site, similar to that tiny little one in my sidebar, will result in a do-follow link. Time will tell.

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By Les Scammell, September 2, 2009 10:09 pm

What Is A Table Of Contents

As you can see from what I have included here, a table of contents (TOC) is just that, a list of what is in your post. However, it is not just any list. This list is created through the use of header (H) tags. Header tags have a range of H1 through to H6 – you can always find that one of those tags will suit your theme. The title of each section in this post is published using the H4 tag. This has been done in the past using anchors and hand coding the TOC – not any more!

Why A Table Of Contents

Generally speaking, you probably don’t need a TOC in a majority of posts. However, if you have a particularly long post then you should divide it into sections. For SEO purposes, each section should have a heading using a header tag.

There is another benefit to using a TOC. People like to scan a post before reading. With a TOC, they can scan the post above the fold. Add to that, if you check my TOC, by clicking on one of the titles in the list, the cursor will jump to that section. That’s pretty handy for your readers.

How To Create A Table Of Contents

To create a TOC in WordPress, you will first need to install a plugin. Table of Contents Generator WordPress plugin is the one I am using here and these instructions cover this particular plugin. If you do a search there are others around.

Once the plugin is installed and activated, create your post. The TOC is generated from the use of header tags so include a couple of header tags throughout your post.

Once you have completed your post, place the cursor at a point where you want the TOC generated and use the (!–TOC–) command – note, replace the ( ) with < > symbols.

And there Any SEO Benefits Too

It seems there may be SEO benefits with Google taking on page navigation links as mini site links. Site links or internal links help the search engines find your content. For on page navigation, what you could be building is a set of long tail keywords – one for each heading in the TOC.

My thanks to Ann Smarty on Search Engine Journal for her post titled “how to add intra-page navigation to your blog posts“.