Archive for December, 2009

Organizing Your Categories

Posted by Kent in Blogs, Internet on December 3rd, 2009

If your blog has hundreds of posts, it is important to make sure that your readers will be able to find what they are looking for. One way to achieve it is to introduce categories. Categories can be very helpful. For example, if a blog discusses a variety of topics, but the reader is only interested in the “WordPress” category, then your reader would benefit from a list of categories. The reader is going to see all of the posts he is interested in when clicking on the “WordPress” category. Categories are especially useful if a blog covers a broad range of topics and has all types of readers. I have seen some blogs with over 30 categories. Of course, so many categories will work well with blogs which have high posting frequency. That is because you do not want to have only one or two posts in each category. Here are some things to keep in mind when it comes to categories:

  • Try to create categories that can clearly describe the topic of posts. Category names should consist of one or two words, and should not be too complicated.
  • Only create categories if you plan to write posts that would fit into this category. It is easy to fall into a trap of creating dozens of categories; however, they will not be beneficial at all unless you will be adding new content on a regular basis.

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    Pinging Your Blog

    Posted by Kent in Blogs, Internet on December 3rd, 2009

    First of all, pinging is for those webmasters who want blog search engines and directories to know almost immediately that you have updated your blog. It ensures that new content is indexed and available as soon as you post it. Almost everyone would agree that it is beneficial, but some say that it takes too much time and effort. I am going to show in this article that pinging does not have to take a lot of time. I have listed a few ways that you can ping your blog, from the least practical to the most.

  • After you publish a quality article you can manually go to blog search engines such as Technorati, Weblogs, or Feedcrier to ping your blog. Usually each time you will need to enter your blog address and feed address. The problem is it takes a lot of time.
  • After you publish a post visit a site like Pingomatic that updates multiple services and search engines about updates to your blog content. All of this with a single ping. You can ping around 20 search engines just by visiting one website, so it is a lot more effective way of pinging.
  • WordPress blogs are set up to automatically ping Pingomatic after publishing each post. While Pingomatic can ping many search engines/directories it still does not ping a lot of them. In this case you can add more sites you would like to be automatically pinged after you publish a post. You can do it by going to the WordPress Admin Panel, then Settings Tab and Writing Tab. Scroll to “Update Services” and add more update services. The services that I would recommend are http://rpc.technorati.com/rpc/ping, http://pingqueue.com/rpc/, http://pingoat.com/goat/RPC2/, http://www.bloglines.com/ping and http://ping.feedburner.com.

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