How to Blog When You Don’t Have Much Time

by sitemanager

Want to know the secret to running a successful blog? It's publishing fresh, high-quality content on a regular basis. Content will drive both search engines and human visitors to your blog, boosting its search rankings in the process. But what happens if you work a full-time job or have other responsibilities that restrict your time allowance for blogging? Schedule Posts in Advance Even if you are unable to log into your blog every other day to publish a new post, you can still schedule posts in advance. Most of the major blogging platforms, including WordPress, have a built-in post scheduli...

5 Easy Ways to Boost Your Blog’s Traffic

by sitemanager

city traffic at night, increase your blog traffic

Traffic is a direct indication of a blog's success. If a blog receives little-to-no traffic, it's not going to gain any momentum for its respective niche. But how exactly do you encourage people to visit and engage themselves on your blog? Share Posts on Social Media One of the easiest ways to boost your blog's traffic is to share new posts on social media. Whenever you publish a new post, log into your Facebook, Twitter, and Google+ profiles and link back to it. Assuming you have a decent number of followers, this will give your new posts an initial burst of traffic. And in some cases it ma...

Blogs vs Standard Website: What’s the Difference?

by sitemanager

We all know the importance of having a blog: it instills greater trust in your audience while allowing for a deeper, more personal connection. But what is the difference between a blog and standard website? They are both essentially "websites" with their own domain name, so what distinguishes one from the other? Navigation Structure While there are always exceptions to this rule, most blogs are designed with a special navigation structure consisting of categories, tags and/or archives. When a user first lands on the blog's homepage, he or she can choose a category in which posts, pages, or b...

WordPress to Develop Accelerated Mobile Pages Plugin

by sitemanager

As more and more Internet users toss out their clunky desktops in favor of smaller and more convenient mobile devices, there's a greater emphasis placed on creating mobile-friendly websites. But just because your website looks fine on a smartphone or tablet doesn't necessarily mean that it's properly optimized for mobile compatibility. Mobile devices often render pages more slowly than desktops, which may cause some users to click the back button in their browser before waiting for the site to load. Accelerated Mobile Pages Project This has prompted Google to launch its Accelerated Mobile...

Best Title and Description Length for Blog Posts?

by sitemanager

best title and description length, tape measurer

Title and meta descriptions are an essential component of on-site SEO. When optimizing your blog for higher search rankings, you should create unique titles and meta descriptions for each page. The meta description is used to describe the content of a webpage to search engines -- and it's also used when creating search listings -- whereas the title tag is generally used by search engines to create a snippet of the page as part of its search listing. But how long should you make the title and meta descriptions for your blog posts and pages? Why Title and Description Length is Impor...

The Hidden Costs of Starting a Blog

by sitemanager

coin dropping into piggy bank, blog costs

One of the reason why so many bloggers choose WordPress is because it's free. Other blogging platforms may cost hundreds of dollars per year, but WordPress is completely free to download and use with no strings attached. However, there are other, more discreet costs to blogging that shouldn't go unnoticed. Blog Images There's a reason why every blog post we publish has at least one image: because images improve user engagement while boosting traffic in the process. If you plan on starting a blog, you'll need to find a suitable source from which to acquire images. Copyright laws prohibi...

Free vs Paid WordPress Themes: Which Should I Choose?

by sitemanager

screenshot of wordpress themess and templates

One of the reasons why WordPress is such a popular blogging platform is because it supports the use of interchangeable templates known as themes. Rather than coding a new blog design from scratch, you can simply download and activate a theme. Within seconds, your blog will have a new appearance while still retaining all of its existing content. But should you choose a free or paid/premium theme for your WordPress theme? Attribution Links It's not uncommon for free themes to contain attribution links in the footer. These are classified as site-wide links, meaning they show up on ever...

How Many Pages Should My Blog Have?

by sitemanager

Frequently Asked Questions, number of blog pages

This is a question that many first-time bloggers ask. Conventional wisdom should lead you to believe that bigger blogs are better than smaller ones. However, you must also consider the work and time requirements that go into creating a blog. So, how many pages should your blog have? Let me first start off by saying that there's no easy answer to this question. Because every blog is unique, lengths are going to vary depending on a number of different factors. If your blog is new, for instance, it may only have a half a dozen pages, which is perfectly fine as long as you continue to build n...

Things I Wish I Knew Before Starting My First Blog

by sitemanager

You Can Schedule Posts for Future Publishing We all know the importance of publishing new blog posts on a regular basis -- well, most people know this, at least. But what if you are unable to log into your blog to create a new post every couple of days? Thankfully, WordPress, Blogger, Tumblr, and other popular blogging platforms have a post scheduling feature. Using this feature, you can schedule your posts to be published at a later date, eliminating the need to manually log into your blog to publish them. Visitor Comments Matter Blogs are unique in the sense that they place an emphasis on...

How to Keep Your Blog ‘Fresh’

by sitemanager

While the exact number remains unknown, some sources claim there to be more than 152 million blogs on the Internet. Unfortunately, the vast majority of these blogs fall into the abyss where countless others have gone before it. When bloggers fail to update their blogs with new content on a regular basis, their traffic dies down and so does their search rankings. So, how can you maintain a fresh blog that people actually want to visit? Mix Evergreen with News-Style Posts Regardless of niche, blog content can be broken down into one of two different categories: evergreen content, which consis...

Keep up with John’s Blogging Tips