How to decide who to follow on Twitter
We’ve already established that how you act on Twitter is paramount in determining your success when using this microblogging platform. What you say, how you engage others, how you act towards them, all these matter in positioning you as either an ideal Twitter user to follow or a nuisance.
The following question is how to effectively choose people to follow on Twitter. There are literally millions of options to choose from and in most cases you know nothing of that user prior to seeing their Twitter profile page. What should you look for, what criteria are there to be used to decide if clicking the follow button is a good choice?
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WordPress Plugin to Remove ‘Category Base’
Setting up correctly the permalinks in WordPress is one of the things that contribute to your blog’s better search engine optimization (SEO). Using relevant slugs for categories, pages and posts will help improve your general ranking. Those looking to get the most out of these permalinks will want to remove the ‘category base’.
There are about a dozen tutorials out there, telling you how to handle this job on your own, editing PHP files, the .htaccess file and adjusting WordPress settings, but what you actually need is one small and efficient plugin that does it all for your, with no extra effort, other than the download and installation process.
WP No Category Base
The WP No Category Base plugin will remove the category base from all your linkd in a SEO friendly way, using 301 redirects for all your old permalinks to the new ones. Also, it is compatible with other Sitemap plugins and works with multi-level categories.
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How to Write a Good Link Bait Blog Post
The internet is filled with websites competing for the same niche, which makes it very difficult to attract visitors to each individual website. Without proper promotion, a website could just sit idle for days, weeks or even years and people wouldn’t notice it.
Website owners know this fact, so they have learned to adjust to the online fast-paced environment and one method of promoting websites they’ve come up with is to use link baits on their sites.
In this article you’ll find out what is a link bait, what types of link baits are there and how to plan and write the perfect link bait blog post.
What is Link Baiting?
The term ‘linkbait’ is used to describe a tool for websites designed to “lure” or generate incoming links to a particular site. It is there for the purpose of attracting web users to visit a website (increasing traffic), and as a result, they generate material which is linked and picked up by other sites.
Link baiting also pushes a site up on the search engine ladder, as a lot of search engines look at how many websites link back to yours, their quality, and measure your site’s value through these links.
Link baits definitely help promote a website, although not all link baits can be considered “good”. There are two basic types of link baits: good and bad link baits, based not on their effectiveness, but on their “attitude”.
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FeedBurner Email Subscription in Simple Balance 2.0
Since its launch, over 1800 people downloaded the Simple Balance 2.0 WordPress theme. For that, I thank each and every one of you!
The idea behind this theme was to keep it as simple as possible, yet effective. Simplicity in administration is one of the keywords behind its creation. But some things need a bit of coding knowledge to tweak.
One of them is the email subscription form, which, once you install the theme, serves only as a design template that does not work unless proper code has been added to it.
I’ve been asked via comments and email what’s wrong with it, or how can it be made functional and this made me write the following step-by-step tutorial on how to integrate the FeedBurner email subscription form in Simple Balance 2.0.
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A Blog Reader’s Nightmare
How many times did you come across a blog post that seamed to deliver the right information, but the post itself was just too hard to follow? Countless times, I bet.
And so, what seamed like the perfect solution for your searches, easily turns into a nightmare.
Quality content is NOT enough
Writing a good article is obviously not enough to make people read it. There are many things that can be done to attract readers and back links to it. In the past, I wrote a few blog writing tips on how to make your blog post more readable and the proper structure of a blog post. Now, it’s time to take a look at some of the things that you should not do when writing a post.
The traps of WYSIWYG editors
For most people, the WYSIWYG editor (What You See Is What You Get) built in the blogging platform is a great tool, one that easily allows us to style our content in just about any way we want, but this “power” is tricky. Here are a few things you need to take in consideration whenever publishing a new article:
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How To Get 1000+ Visits On Your Blog From Day One
I know I wanted those visits and I got them! Further more, I kept on getting lots of new visits for a long period of time. Even now, almost 3 months after.
For me, a blog’s design is always a key element (of course, along with content) in deciding whether to come back and read again, or not. I know, I’m a designer and I have an appetite for good looking websites. But then again, would you prefer reading the same content in a unique, beautiful layout or a poor, overused one? This is one thing I’ve already told you in my past blogging tips articles, now let me argument that!
When launching Blogsessive I had to deal with the choice of winning time buy using a free, but customized theme, or creating a new one from scratch. For 2 weeks I used a free template, until I finally managed to find time to develop the one I currently use.
Beautiful easily turns into popular
When I applied the new theme to my blog, I took the time to submit it to almost every important design gallery I’ve found on Google, and went through all of them from the first 2 results pages.
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Where To Find Free Images For Your Blog
After reading Kevin Muldoon’s review of PicApp.com, I’ve though about sharing some tips on where and how to find free images to use in your blog posts, like I do.
I know for a fact (and Kevin confirms this too) that many bloggers use Google’s Image Search to find free photos to use on their blogs, which is cool, but not necessarily legal. Let me explain.
The Google bot has a nasty habit of indexing every information and file that is linked from your pages, which basically gives him access to the /images directory of every website. This can be fought by using a robots.txt file to prevent search engine access to directories and files.
By indexing these folders, Google will share through his results copyrighted images used to develop the websites, or images from professional photographers’ portfolios. So, these images are not free. And so says Google:
“Image may be scaled down and subject to copyright.”
So, why risk using copyrighted images when you have quite a few options of free or extremely low-cost photos available? Check them out below.
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How to Make Your Blog Posts More Readable
Have you ever come across a post title that startled your interest, but as soon as you got to the content you couldn’t read it? I did! And why didn’t I read the post if the title was so interesting? Because the content was too cluttered. Because no matter how valuable was the information, I simple could not pull my self to go through a labyrinth of words to find the good ideas.
When you’re offering quality information, are you willing to lose your readers because you did not organize your blog post the right way? It’s extremely important to have a better structure in each blog post, before you hit that “Publish” button, and by doing so, you will dramatically increase your blog’s readability.
What I need to find in a blog post
As I said, I often come across long, cluttered posts that annihilate the initial interest. I bet that most of them offered great insight on different matters, but, to make me read them it would have taken some of these elements to guide me:
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How to Improve Your Readers’ Perception
A blog’s success is measured by the number and loyalty of its readers. Not by how many visits it receives daily, not even the number of backlinks. In the end, the more time your visitors spend on your website, the more pages they visit and the more they come back or further recommend your blog are the real measuring tools of your blog’s perception. In this post I’m going to cover 5 important factors that can improve this perception.
While writing about topics of interest or optimizing your blog for better search results could be enough to generate visits, the readers’ interest has to be maintained through a perception improvement.
Readers tend to react better to bloggers to whom they can relate, to bloggers that have similar views, ideas, even lifestyle. That’s why it’s very important to find your voice and give everything you write a personal note.
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How To Remove the White Space in wp_list_pages()
wp_list_pages() is one of the most common WordPress template tags. Sometimes, the little white space that some browsers add to the output of this function can create a big mess in your theme’s template, making it hard to style, especially when trying to create a horizontal list. The fix for this is quite simple and requires minimum coding knowledge, if none at all.
The Problem
The wp_list_pages() generates either a series of <li> elements containing links to all of you blog’s pages, or a full unordered list with a heading at the beginning.
The output of this list looks like this:
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