Comments (1)

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.

Comments (2)

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

Comments (1)

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.