Top blogs

I am writing this short post prompted by questions blogger friends have asked about using traffic services from Fiverr. If you don't know, Fiverr is one of the sites that sell services at a cheap price. As the name suggests, most of the offers here are for 5 dollars. There are thousands of people selling a poster, a passage editing service, a SEO plan, a web-audit... for $5 or its multiples. There are many others including FoverUp, GigBucks and Zeerk and SEOClerks. On such penny-offer websites, a large number of people offer 'gigs' to do 'genuine' and 'proven' SEO and increase 'relevant' traffic manifold in a short time. They give hundreds of testimonials of 'satisfied' customers.  I would request you to NOT fall for such offers, which look attractive because of claims and the very low price charged. The claims are mostly false and testimonials are mostly procured by force or are outright fake. Their claim of having sites with 'P...

      What does "canonical" mean?     In simple English, canonical means what is according to canon or rule. That means what is authoritative. Canonical URL is more equal among equals. In website/ search engine optimization terms, canonical has a similar connotation: the URL that you take as most authoritative out of many that point to the same web page.For example, the following URLs may refer to the same website: www.xyz.com, xyz.com, xyz.com/index.html, xyz.com/home.asp, xyz.com/index.htm, www.xyz.com/, https://www.xyz.com. In addition, one could be maintaining two websites with similar content but differing in some respects; in this case there would be two distinct URLs but with same content. Modern websites that are dynamic/ code-driven create a variety of URL paths, all referring to the same webpage, that result in dozens of URLs.  Why is canonicalization necessary?     When the same website can be reached in differe...

This post is on a study by Orbit Media on the state of blogosphere in 2017 in terms of use of blogging. They have based their findings on the basis of responses from 1377 blogger to 11 questions. Summary of findings: 1. Bloggers now take more time in composing blog posts than before. The time spent on creating a blog post has been found to be increasing over years since 2014. Now a blogger spends 3 hours 20 minutes on an average in creating a post. In addition, the number of bloggers who spend over 6 hours in composing a post has more than trebled over the last four years and they have said, they get 'strong results' by posting big! 2.  Most bloggers post weekly or around that, and the overall frequency has gone down. But it is not that the drop in frequency gets good results even when the content is big. Frequency matters in getting good results, bloggers report. 3. More bloggers are using editing support than before. 4. The size of blog posts now averages 1142 ...

Users of Blogger and Wordpress free blogging platforms sometimes want to give up the independent domain they had mapped with the blog/ website. It mostly happens when they do not make good money from the blog. If you are one of them and have decided to junk the custom domain, you need to take some small but important actions so that the damage is minimal and your free blog regains life. Read on... Removing the custom domain This is the simplest task. When you stop paying for renewal of the custom domain, it will automatically be inactive. Full stop.  But just letting the custom URL vanish might create an issue for some days: when the visitor types the free URL, the browser might still try to take him automatically to the custom domain and when the browser does not find the custom URL, it might give 'Site does not exist' or 404 Error. To avoid this,  on Blogger, go to 'Settings', 'Publishing' and then click on 'x' next to the custom domain; ...

WHAT IS A BUSINESS BLOG Simply speaking, a business blog is one that promotes a business. It can be part of the main website, or it can be a standalone blog. I assume that you already have a website, because no business - except perhaps nomadic or hyper-local trade - can survive without a website these days. Normal websites are static in the sense that their content does not change too frequently. Even if some part of it is dynamic [e.g. share quotes in an equity investment website] or a part is updated fast [e.g. websites introducing or reviewing new products], the updation is part of the core of website. On the other hand, the blog is there for updating on matters that the website may not do routinely (We'd come to that in the third section). photo courtesy: Pixabay The blog is not only an extension of the website but also a platform to engage existing and potential customers. But unlike Facebook and Twitter,  the blog is not a 'quickie' social networking pl...

  If you want to see the updated list please visit this list of top literary blogs in India . The post below is from maintaining archives of Top Blogs articles.   -------------------------- Topmost 2 dozen literary blogs in India We took out the top literary blogs in India out of the 2017 edition of the Directory of Best Indian Blogs. We then did a lot of web search and found a few more good literary blogs written in English by Indian authors/ readers/ reviewers. That brings you these top Indian literary blogs in English.  We might have missed one or two good blogs on literature. If you have seen such fine blogs, please tell us and we'll include them here. ajaykontham - The Shaded Shadows anieshabrahma - Aniesha's Musings anureviews - Anu Reviews artofleo - I Rhyme Without Reason bookgeeks - bookGeeks ddsreviews - b00k r3vi3ws fatema - Life As Freya geetaavij - Fabric of Life inderpreetuppal - Inderpreet's Eloquent Articulation jaiarjun - Jab...

Yesterday, I was sent a question by a friend on Quora asking how can he write a 3000-word post. I wrote an answer about what techniques he could use, and then sat thinking more about the intent of the question and what can a well meaning blogger do if she/ he is struggling with 'writer's block'. So, this post. A painting by Leonid Pasternak Why write long posts on blogs? Long posts are seen to be valuable, because they are likely to contain information on different aspects of the issue. Therefore, visitors are more likely to refer them to others and visit the page again and again. Long posts are also liked by search engines. Google has said, it likes long, well-researched, blog posts and articles. So, they are good from SEO point of view too. So, a long article is likely to get more readers, better search placement, more links, more social shares and more engagement, and more traffic. How big a blog post is considered long enough? Blogging platform Mediu...

An eternal question, asked all the time and on almost all social media platforms! We bring you here the distilled wisdom which is current and effective in 2017 and will remain so in 2018. Before we go to the techniques, let's hurriedly remember that what we need on our blog or website is relevant traffic , not any type of traffic. Whether for spreading your messages among people who will appreciate them or for earning money from blogging, relevance of the traffic is of paramount importance. What relevance of traffic means is: Are the people who are visiting your blog interested in your content? When the traffic comes from bots and spammers, people who landed on your page due to presence of your website on search engine pages for wrong search terms, people landing there due to your email or someone's reference or a link but finding your website not what they were expecting, traffic from link farms, traffic for which you made payment, or your own traffic - this is poor quali...

Domain name registration is done only through registrars registered with ICANN, the international body for internet naming. So, all domain name registrars have to abide by the norms set by ICANN. Generally speaking, you are free to change your registrar. However, in certain cases, you may be denied such a transfer, e.g. if some fee payment is pending or someone else has represented to them to be the real domain name holder. The present registrar might even charge you for the transfer, and that is supposed to be legal! Domain transfers are allowed only after 60 days of purchase of domain or its earlier transfer. The process is slightly procedure-bound. Registrars generally have a facility for domain transfer, which once clicked guides you till you agree to their terms, and then it generates a code for unlocking the domain for transfer. You then apply to the new registrar for accepting the transfer through such a link on their website, and supply the code. The new registrar usua...

This article applies to Wordpress free/ personal/ premium/ business blogs as well as blogs created with wordpress.org CMS. Wordpress bloggers are fascinated with plugins because these little bits of software can add great functionality to the blog, ranging from improving SEO to installing a beautiful comment box to what not. And in most cases, you don't need to know coding at all. Yes, plugins are a wonderful way to add great things to the blog, which you cannot do without knowing a lot of PHP - the computer language used by Wordpress. Moreover, a number of plugins are free. Wordpress offers more plugins and allows you to install third-party plugins as you go for paid plans. On Wordpress-created self-hosted blogs, you can install plugins by dozens. For self-hosted blogs on Wordpress CMS, the number of plugins available is growing by the day. Its depository already has around 52,000 plugins! In all, plugins are such an important part of Wordpress ecosystem that withou...