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Google Tip of the Day: Submit your content to Google, and more…

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submit your content

I was pleased to see that Google made it really easy for webmasters to submit their content to Google’s Engines of Search. The page details almost every content-related site within Google that I can think of and is a valuable reference for would-be webmasters.

So if you are looking to get your website in Google’s search engine, you would certainly start with:

Step 1: Get Included

Add Your URL to Google’s Index
Submit your website for inclusion in Google’s index

Step 2: Webmaster Tools

Webmaster Tools
Submit a Sitemap of your website to Google

Step 3: Submit Your Blog

Blog Search
Make your blog searchable in Google’s blog index

 

To get your site additional traffic, you can also…

Step 4: Ping Your Blog

Pingomatic

Step 5: Ping Your Sitemaps, too.

You can also ping updated sitemaps (when you create a new page/post, for example).

Many of these have suitable plugins for WordPress and automate the process. In fact, some features are already included in WordPress. So I think WordPress makes running a website easier and smarter than using Joomla.

Chris, this is for you as you are building your website! Hope it really turns into something great!

Great Ideas: It’s easy to lose them, so don’t.

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2

Grahame Green, the famous English novelist, was in many ways an inspiration for many writers. Dare I say, bloggers, too. For me, he was an inspiration: he was reputed to keep a journal near his bedside so he could write down many of his ideas, some of which would work their way into his novels. I don’t know if this is true or not, a couple of cursory searches indicated that it was not.

Whether or not it is true, it highlights a problem I’ve been having recently: keeping a track of those flashes of insight, ideas for posts, quotes, and other memes that come to me, as the muse does. Whenever I have one of those flashes of optimism, I really try hard to remember it so I can use it in a post later in that day.

The sad thing is: I then sit down to blog about those very topics, only to find that the ideas are evanescent as the warm winds of September in Taiwan. What am I to do?

So I have adopted several means to help record them: I’ll use email to send notes to myself, it’s easy to open, and create, and save. If a computer is not available, then I’ll keep some notes in my little notebook, small enough to fit inside my own wallet. If not, I’ll find scraps of paper to write down whatever I need to remember. Then I’ll collate the notes into titles or first sentences, and save them in my blog.

The result can be quite effective, but if not done properly, it will fill up notebooks/wordpress with numerous headers. These are easily recovered but making sense of them later is often a challenge, especially when the original mood is gone.

For example, I wrote a long half post about frustrations dealing with our photocopy company, then I saved it. A month later, the original mood is gone, facts are half-remembered, and I wonder if I will ever write it. At least I have the basics that I could write or re-write as needed. If I didn’t have these, I wouldn’t have the choice to develop the post or not.

So, if you are stuck for ideas: remember – your best ideas will often come to you at very odd times. Find a way to take some notes so that you will have a list of topics that you can write about when things are a little dry.

From internals to externals: five plugins to boost your blog readership, posting and appearance

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Quick plugin update: I’ve come across five plugins that I thought might be worth downloading: to increase readership, reading times, and reader retention rates. Then you can improve your blogging speed by using templates, switching posts to pages, and making your first page look sophisticated!

#1. Unblockable Popup

MaxBlogPress Unblockable Popup

is a plugin that allows your website to post a popup on your website that can’t be blocked. That, of course, raises questions about whether you should be using such a plugin, but I can imagine some circumstances where it can be used to advertise your mailing list or FeedBurner subscription! It could also be used for advertising purposes as well! I haven’t downloaded it yet, but some of the features used wisely could really bolster your readership numbers without unduly inconveniencing readers.

In MaxBlogPress Unblockable Popup 2.0, we have tried our best to fulfill all your earlier requests on how you wanted your popup window to be, and this is what we’ve got: >> Choice of Popup Style- Simple Box or Default >> Improved stylish Text Editor >> Flexible placement of “Close” button >> Easy to spot settings with collapsible blocks >> Choice of showing the popup only in specified posts or pages >> Advanced choice of plugin injecting mode Get more info on how and why MaxBlogPress Unblockable Popup 2.0 has accomplished to meet your expectations. Take a short tour of the improved version and see the screenshots that ellaborate the above-mentioned sleek features.

#2… Magazine Style

Magazine style drop caps and first paragraphs come courtesy of this plugin

. Take a look:

magazine-style-posts plugin

It’s good for longer articles and feature articles, too. And can help keep reader’s attention on the page. Some visual variety in your post presentation will certainly retain viewers longer (did I say ‘viewers’?) and increase those important pageview times! This is an aspect that I’ve been working on for some time! Take a look at the plugin by clicking on the image to see the website!

#3. Featurific

… Another plugin that I have been using on my blog to increase pageview times is Featurific. This plugin allows you to have a slideshow presentation on your frontpage. It works on most themes, once uploaded and activated. It takes images from the post (or default images) and uses them as background for each slide.

featurific

The site says much more but here’s an excerpt: “Featurific for WordPress: * Requires no configuration (although you can tweak nearly any aspect of the plugin if you so desire) * Provides an array of user-customizable templates * Integrates with the WordPress.com Stats Plugin to select most popular posts * Allows extensive customization of options such as the number of posts to display, post selection type, screen duration, auto-excerpt length, etc.”

#4: P2P Converter

Page2Post (or Post2Page) Converter

. It’s a simple plugin that converts your posts to pages or vice-versa. I know that I had a lot of pages that had built up over the years, and the original hierarchy had got lost. Not wanting to delete them, they were piling up in my ‘pages’ menu, simple answer: convert them to posts, they’re then archived! Alternatively, if you have a post that is a classic or a foundational type post: why not make it a page? You no longer have to copy and paste it. One click! Voila!

convert pages

You can see the button on the far right. It also works well with blogging applications that don’t support page creation. So, simply create a post when you need. Don’t publish, then when you login, convert it!

#5: Template Plugin

Post Templates

is a simple plugin that helps you to create a ‘standard’ post template that you can then use to create a bunch of similar pages. This would be useful for regular report-type plugins or reviews all of which have similar structures or wording. I’m planning to use it on my BlogCarnivals, since there are two of them, but the wording of the beginning and end is ALWAYS the same. In fact, I’ve long suspected that John Chow uses a template for his regular blog income reports (by the way, where is July’s? … Did I miss it?)

post template

There are also menus on post pages, manage post pages and elsewhere. The multiple hooks are quite effective!

templatize

Hope you find these plugins useful. There are dozens of plugins out there, the usual batch of popular ones, but these I thought would help improve your blog, both externally and internally. Post edited for accuracy, errors, and keywords.