Author Archive for Guru

Guru is the SEO persona of mother, blogger and freelance writer, Hannah Grace Gamis. She spends her spare time shuffling back and forth to doctors' offices, managing the household, watching movies, and developing her latest project the "Special Child", which she just doesn't seem to have any time for.

Mar | 16 | 2008

Blog SEO: Choosing Your Keywords

Posted by Guru as Marketing and Search Optimization If you have a blog you and you wish to get more traffic you should know by now that even though content is still king there are other things you also need to pay attention to in order to get the amount of traffic you want. The other things I am talking about is of course SEO. One of the most basic things you need to know about search engine optimisation is that it all revolves around the search terms that users enter when looking for information using both generic search engines and blog search engines. In order to be ...

Comment (1)

Mar | 13 | 2008

Wordpress Plug-ins

Posted by Guru as Marketing and Search Optimization, Plugins, Software Features, Software and Widgets If you blog using Wordpress and can't do something that you want done like adding Sphere-related content at the end of your blog posts you might be surprised to find out that there are already plug-ins available that make it happen. To find good Wordpress plug-ins all you need to do is search for “wordpress plug-ins” in Google and you'll find more than enough results to choose from. If you don't feel like having to click through pages and pages of sites that actually offer just a handful of plug-ins but a whole lot of ads go directly to ...

Comments (0)

Mar | 10 | 2008

Blog Usability: Feeds

Posted by Guru as Blogging Tools, Syndication, Tips I have written about the importance of RSS and/or Atom feeds to blogs. By providing feeds you will not really be increasing the on-site usability of your blog but its overall usability. Regular blog visitors often prefer checking the contents of their favorite blogs using feed aggregators (i.e. Google Reader). The reason for this is very simple: it is a whole lot more efficient to check an RSS aggregator for blog updates than check each blog you like one by one. This is especially important to people who read blogs not just for liesure but to keep themselves updated with ...

Comments (0)

Feb | 27 | 2008

Blog Usability: Navigation Elements

Posted by Guru as Design, Tips As I promised in my previous post I will be listing down ways you can make it easier for readers to look for the information they need in your blog. The truth is that this is all you need to do is give readers several options to navigate through your blog. This is very easy nowadays since most blog tools (Blogger, Wordpress, etc.) automatically generate the code for you. All you need to do is drag and drop and of course specify some fields. Some of the most common and useful ways to help your readers find the information they ...

Comments (0)

Feb | 26 | 2008

Blog Usability: Looking for Information

Posted by Guru as Design One of the great things about blogs is that they are updated really frequently, at least when compared to static websites. Because of the constant influx of new posts you can be sure that a blog generates lots of information. This is a good thing but just like papers that keep on piling up in your desk it can become almost impossible for people other than the writer to look for the specific information needed without specific instructions on where to look. With blogs the site structure is pretty simple since everything is organised chronologically. However this structure is virtually useless ...

Comments (0)

Feb | 22 | 2008

Blog Usability: Page Title

Posted by Guru as Design, Tips One of the most important aspects of blog usability is the choice of page titles. The blog name usually appears as the page title (Note that when I mention page title this means the text that appears on the tab). This is good practice since it will make it easy for your readers easier to find the tab that contains your blog in case they shift to another tab to browse other sites. However, in case your blog name is not that descriptive or somewhat cryptic what you should do is add a phrase to describe the contents of your ...

Comments (0)

Feb | 21 | 2008

Blog Usability: An Introduction

Posted by Guru as Design Blogs have a very basic design with the blog title/header, tagline, content, and sidebar(s). Despite the fact that most blogs basically make use of the same elements the difference between the feel of various blogs is very noticeable. Many blogs with just the most basic of elements use very straightforward navigation but end up really boring and offers no real choice when it comes to looking for more specific information. Some blogs are littered with too many ads and obviously exist mainly to generate profit. On the other hand, there are blogs that really do stand out in terms of ...

Comments (0)

Feb | 19 | 2008

SEO and PR

Posted by Guru as Linking, Marketing and Search Optimization, Promotion, Tips Lee Odden wrote a very interesting post on SEO for Public Relations. Here's a summary of the important points of the post. 1. People also search for information using news search, which means that we should also optimise news articles (interviews, press releases, etc.) in order for users to find the information they need (and we want them to see) more easily. 2. Help clients raise brand awareness and optimise the news article by coaching them to use keywords BEFORE an interview starts. 3. For press releases do not be a stickler about keyword density but make sure that keywords can be ...

Comments (2)

Feb | 18 | 2008

Social Media Shouts to Promote your Blog

Posted by Guru as Community Building, Promotion, Tips It has been established over and over again that the social media is a very useful tool for promoting websites on the internet. One way people like to promote things is by using shouts (called that in Digg called some other thing in other social media sites but you get the idea). The problem though is that spammers seem to find their way to everything they can exploit so that shouts have become littered with spam shouts so that people tend to ignore shouts. The good thing though is that many social media sites have caught up with these spammers ...

Comment (1)

Feb | 12 | 2008

Search Marketing Expo - SMX West Registration Details

Posted by Guru as Marketing and Search Optimization If you are interested in learning more about search marketing and would be somewhere near California this last week of February you'd better take the opportunity to attend the Search Marketing Expo. This year's SMX West has something to offer to everyone from newbies in the search scene to experts. Newbies get to participate in a boot camp where they can learn all the fundamentals of SEO and search marketing. Those with more experience in SEM can also attend sessions that fit their skill level. Registration is open now and costs $249 for a Networking Pass, $745 for ...

Comments (0)

« Previous Entries Next Entries »

Our Features

Design and Themes

Is Your Blog W3C Compliant?

Last night I checked my personal blog’s code hoping I can proudly display the W3C Validated Button. Since I use Blogger and do not really do anything to clean up the code (beyond adding Alt-tags to the images I embed) I wasn’t surprised at all to find that my blog contained lots of errors - [...]
Read on
More Design and Themes Features
Software and Widgets

Wordpress Plug-ins

If you blog using Wordpress and can’t do something that you want done like adding Sphere-related content at the end of your blog posts you might be surprised to find out that there are already plug-ins available that make it happen.
To find good Wordpress plug-ins all you need to do is search for “wordpress [...]
Read on
More Software and Widgets Features
Reviews

A Friend In Need

I’m helping out my friends from the UA&P - IShareHappiness Blog Team.
Whenever you feel pessimistic, angry, troubled, frustrated, and depressed – what have you – you need someone to talk to. Someone who could help you be more optimistic and help make you feel that there is hope. Sometimes it’s hard to talk to someone [...]
Read on
More Blog Reviews
Monetization

How To Find Top Blogs In Your Niche

We talked about the importance of identifying the best blogs in the niche you are targeting in the previous post. To recap, it is important to do so because you can learn a lot from the best blogs. You can check out what they are doing right – and wrong – and learn [...]
Read on
More Monetization Features
Marketing and Search Optimization

Building your blog brand step by step

Building your blog’s brand does not need to be difficult. However, when it comes to branding you should always remember to exert effort to be consistent with the image you wish to portray or you’ll end up with confused, turned-off, and/or skeptical readers. Branding inconsistencies will make it obvious that the image you’re putting up [...]
Read on
More Marketing and SEO Features
Blog Resources