Vishal Vasu's Blog » Wordpress

Blogging – Opening Doors to Social Media Marketing

Vishal Vasu — Sat, 08 Jan 2011 13:16:32 +0000

For most of the small business that are looking at options for Social Media Marketing, blogging seems to be the first logical and cheapest option. A blog is the best way to take advantage of a set of powerful tools – most of them available free or at a nominal cost – while also gaining some immediate return on investments.

So What is a Blog?

In simple terms, a blog is a software that allows anyone who can post content to a website and displays the same much like a journal i.e. in chronological fashion. This content can be anything that the owner of the blog or author of the post chooses to write. Readers of the blog pages can make comments or subscribe to a blog so that they are automatically notified whenever a new post is made. If the blog is multi-authored, more than one author can post content to the blog. Whenever such content is posted, search engines automatically receive a notice or a PING (as it is called in technical terms) so that they can further index it. Search engines basically love blogs!

Where to Start?

As outlined earlier, blogs are run by a piece of software and so the first task is to determine what software to use. A quick search in Google would give you hundreds of options, but we are going to focus on few popular choices:

Windows Live Space: a free tool from Microsoft that allows you to setup a blog with all the right tools. Moreover, you can also add it to you Office Live Small Business Web Site.
WordPress: Comes in two flavors – plain vanilla hosted version running on www.wordpress.com and a sundae version from www.wordpress.org. The plain vanilla version provides a hosted platform with all wordpress installations and configurations taken care of while the sundae version allows you to download the entire platform and setup it up on your own web hosting space.
Blogger: another free tool from Google for setting up a blog.
TypePad: another hosted service with many features and a simple start-up process.

What Next?

The following tips do help in getting the most of your new blogging practice:

Read other blogs and see what and how others are writing. Subscribe to blogs that interest you so that you are notified whenever new posts are made. Moreover, reading what others are writing is a great source for inspiration and new ideas.
Post as often as possible. Make it a habit or setup reminders so that you do not miss posting. Remember, this builds up reader loyalty and readers who know about your blog would be awaiting some fresh content from you.
Network with other bloggers and make comments in their blog postings. This is important in building up your own readership. Do not spam or write irrelevent comments for the sake of it. Make relevant and useful comments and you shall begin to see some traffic and links coming back to your blog.
Encourage your readers and visitors to make comments. Write in a way that asks for readers opinions, ask questions. Engage them.
Spread your wings and link out to other relevant content and blog sites. Adding feeds to sites like Technorati, Delicious, StumbleUpon, Twitter, Facebook, etc. really helps spread your post to thousands.

There are so many good reasons for a small businesses to use blogging as an essential web marketing and communications tool. For those who have still not seen the value or had thought about it but never found the time to start – think seriously.

Remove index.php from URL for WordPress

Vishal Vasu — Wed, 10 Jun 2009 07:04:57 +0000

Many WordPress uses prefer to host their web sites on a Linux server so that they can get rid of the index.php that get’s in to the URL by using mod_rewrite module on Linux. This is not supported on Windows Server’s IIS.

The main idea is to make the URL more simple and SEO friendly. Normally, when you setup PermaLinks in IIS, we get something like this:

http://www.yourwordpresssite.com/index.php/2009/08/02/your-blog-post/

This means that each link to the post carries index.php in the URL which is not good. Outlined below are steps that can help to achieve the same results for a WordPress site on a Windows Server running IIS.

STEP: 1

Get the URL rewriting component on the Windows Server hosting your WordPress site. If you are not in control of the server or are not the server administrator, you can request the setup of the component from them. Click here to download the component from the vendor’s site. The component is absolutely free and distributed under GNU General Public License.

STEP: 2

Once the component is downloaded, copy the wp-url-rewriting.dll file to the Windows Server’s SYSTEM32 directory. Register the component so that it is available to IIS by using the REGSVR32 WP-URL-REWRITING.DLL command from the command prompt.

Note: You may get an error that the DLL entry point was not found, but let that not bother you.

STEP: 3

Once the DLL is registered, login to your WordPress admin area and navigate to PermaLinks and change the common setting to use Custom Structure. Add /%category%/%postname%/ as the choice and Save Changes.

That’s it! We are done. WordPress should now show the URL’s without the index.php in it.

I invite everyone to share their experience or any other methods that they might have used.

Few Tips to Increase Traffic on Your Blog

Vishal Vasu — Sun, 07 Jun 2009 11:37:41 +0000

Everyone today has taken up to blogging or is planning to setup a blog in the near future. It’s time that the blogs are taken a step further by promoting them on the Internet to get more traffic and maybe make money too out of it. It’s definate that everyone with a blog would like to have it discovered when a praticular keyword or keyphrase is searched for. Today with so many websites and blogs on the Internet, it is essential to focus on search engine optimization. Here are a couple of ideas that could give your blog or site a boost.

Hosting Your Blog
Many resources are available which allows one to host a blog for free but I strongly recommend investing in to a good domain name and hosting service to run the blog from your own domain. Initially, it may be a good idea to host the site on a free service provider, but eventually it should all be moved over to your own domain name.

Formating the Title Tags
Nothing goes far then a good formatted and descriptive Title tag. Try avoiding the blog name or your personal name in the title – do not waste the valuable space. Try and format the title such that they directly relate to the post that you have written as that would increase the overall importance of the page from the perspective of the search engines. Ensuring that you have good title tags is important while you are building up your blog readership as it is the search engines which are going to send you readers.

Post Often - Post Valuable Content
The more frequently you post valuable and feature rich posts, the more the bots and spiders will fall in love with your site. Search engines love fresh sites and fresh content and so it really makes sense to feed these content hungry bots and spiders with what they want. Posting something which is really valuable is like a cherry on the cake.

Rewrite URL Structure
Most of the blogging platforms allow you to tweak the URL structure. Go ahead and get a URL rewriting plug-in such that the URL does not show up like http://www.yourwebsite.com/?p=2 but something like http://www.yoursite.com/this-is-a-good-url-structure. The later one is a search engine friendly URL and it would also be a good resource to stick in some keywords.

Build Links
Yes, invest time in link building. Link to relevant sites and request them to link back to you. If you are blogging about a book or a story or a movie for that matter, link to the original web site. To add more value to links, format your link name such that it acts as a keyword. For example, lets assume that we are writing about Wolfram Alpha and you want to direct users to that post. Instead on hyperlinking on a word like “click here” use something like “Wolfram|Alpha: First Impressions“. Trust me, this has more weight and importance.

RSS Feeds
Don’t ask me the full form of RSS as it has changed many names. Way back in 1999 it stood for Rich Site Summary and was later dropped and given Really Simple Syndication as a new name. Remember that more and more RSS services are discovering feeds and indexing the content. Now that you have optimised the site, go out and spread the word.

Moved to WordPress from Blogger

Vishal Vasu — Sat, 04 Apr 2009 11:50:07 +0000

Finally I decided to move away from Blogger and setup my own blog using WordPress. This does not mean that blogger is not good, but I wanted some extra flare on my blog which only WordPress could provide. The main thing behind the decision was the way WordPress offered ‘categories’, plugins and widgets.

The import from Blogger to WordPress is like a cherry on the cake. I could easily import all my old blog posts from blogger to the new blog in WordPress with a press of a button with the only exception that it broke all my links to the images. This happens because WordPress stores images in a different manner than Blogger.

Another feature that floored me was Permalinks. WordPress allows me to save my pages with static links. This really helps with the SEO part.

The plug-in called AKISMET also helped in protecting the comments on my posts from SPAM. This used to be a problem with Blogger.

Final word: my 2 cents to wordpress blogging.