SEO Consulting Blog - Seo Smarty

How My Blog Guest Has Been Growing (Infographic)

Ann Smarty — Thu, 26 Apr 2012 15:20:38 +0000

These have been fun and crazy two years (actually 2 years and a few months). My Blog Guest, my first huge project, has been growing steadily and at some point I thought we were lucky that that was not a sudden huge growth. The way (and the rate) we were developing was a blessing for us because we had time to solve issues we came across on the way.

The hardest part about MyBlogGuest was that we were the first. Our platform is unique in many ways. The tools we have been developing are completely ours. We had no examples to follow, no competitors to beat and no one whose experience we had to learn from.

That’s the main reason I’ve enjoyed the ride. And I still love every day of running the site: lots of invaluable experience daily.

MyBlogGuest has NOT been built to earn money. We started as the forum with no monetization plan behind it. All I wanted was to build contacts with bloggers and learn from that.

The way we’ve been running it has always been the same: we have been listening to every single word our members are saying. We are following their recommendations and feature suggestions. And we are working hard every day to make it a better tool for everyone who is using it.

We have our strong and weak points. I am a control freak who is always seeking to make a perfect product – this is why we have never stopped working: MyBlogGuest is always the work in progress.

When I started MyBlogGuest, I had no idea it would once become my priority. It was a hobby. And because I enjoyed running it so much, it quickly grew into something bigger.

The Team

Today we are lucky have a great team of people working on MyBlogGuest:

Michael is the head of our development team. He is my brother and the person who has been running MyBlogGuest from day 1. He is the one who implements all our users’ feature suggestions. Without him, there would be no MyBlogGuest.

Sana is our awesome administrator. She manages customer support, helps new-comers and answers all questions. Sana is my right hand and we need a separate post to describe all she is doing for us and how much we love her for that!

Phil is our Gallery mod.

He keeps an eye on the quality of all the content being posted there.

Louis is also our moderator as well as one of the oldest members of MyBlogGuest.

I’ve known him for ages!

Deborah is our community building strategist. She moderates our Twitter chats, promotes our users’ guest posts and managers our social media accounts.

****

And lastly, Ann, who you probably know since you are reading this blog now. I do the rest of less important stuff.

We have not built a perfect platform (yet) but we take pride in our customer support and community building efforts!

MyBlogGuest Freebies

My philosophy has always been the same: MyBlogGuest will always be 100% usable for free. We started as a free platform. None of the initially free features has been made paid since then.

Thus we have a few great free tools and resources which will always remain free:

The Forum

When we started, I had no idea where we were heading. So the simple forum interface made perfect sense then. We have then tweaked it a bit to improve structure. Everyone joining MyBlogGuest can build contacts using the forum, send PM, use “follow up” reminders, etc.

Sana is also browsing the forums daily to make sure everyone gets help. She also collects the best offers from it into one great “Featured Offers” thread which you can subscribe to be updated of most recent and most powerful opportunities.

For more insight into our features, see how our members are using MyBlogGuest: Here’s our official Youtube Playlist for our users’ video reviews and tutorials. So play all of them to discover *your* favorite free feature.

The Free Resources

Since guest blogging is such a widely misunderstood tactic, we have done our best to promote our own way to use it. The way we firmly believe in. The best ways to access that information are:

Join our Twitter chats weekly: each Thursday 11 a.m. EDT / 3 p.m. GMT
Download our free formatting checklist
Download our guest blogging eBook

The Past and the Future

That’s been a fun ride and we are not planning to stop. We will definitely keep coming up with new features and options. Stay tuned!

When we launched our Infographics Gallery, one of our very smart users suggested that we should create the infographic on how MyBlogGuest has been developing and promote it there.

That’s what we are planning to do. So far you can enjoy it here:

{Click to enlarge}

See you on MyBlogGuest!

Case Study: How I Got 10 Powerful Links to My Infographic in Two Days

HOW TO: Write Lots of Great Original Articles: Lessons in Content Re-Focusing

Ann Smarty — Tue, 20 Mar 2012 13:36:49 +0000

Now that I have some time for creating content and blogging (which I thoroughly enjoy!), people start asking me the question: how do I manage to write so many articles and guest post so often.

Well, I have no secrets at all.

Below is the exact way I was coming up with new and new content ideas and writing new and new articles.

The keys: (1) learn to research + (2) learn to re-focus smartly!

So let’s see how you can re-focus your content to always come up with absolutely *new* and useful content.

1. One Research => Several Articles

Here are just a few tricks I am using to get inspired and research a topic:

Get Inspired: Here’s my article on finding (linkbait) inspiration (in case you are stuck): use Google Images, Flickr groups, StumbleUpon (Stumble) button, etc.
Start your research on Google: Here’s my article on how I do research online with some actionable tips and examples: (1) start from some very specific keywords (like [shopping online women] or [gender differences shopping]), use define: operator to get some more ideas on the topic (like [define:bargain hunters]). (2) Now expand your keywords to find more information (try using ~ and * operators to include more results, e.g. [~gender ~differences shopping] and [gender * shopping]). (3) Lastly, expand your tools (try Twitter search, for example, for recently discussed articles within your topic)
What if you don’t really know how to start? Here’s my quite old (but still valid) guide on searching Google when you are not really sure what you want to find. Use it if you *feel* you want to write something but not really sure what.

So now that you have started your research, you are getting a lot of various interesting results: the exact article topic is forming. Not all of the results you get will be useful – likewise, not all of them fit your initial idea, but many of the articles and tools you are coming across are very useful and fun!

So learn to form several post ideas while doing one research. Open several (notepad) files and sort useful ideas and tools are finding by topic. Write several articles simultaneously.

That can result in a week of work, but in the end, you’ll get several absolutely awesome articles written.

Here’s a real life example

A couple of weeks ago I got really excited with various ways marketers are using Google Spreadsheets. While doing my research of different tools and scripts they are using, I was able to find some fantastic ideas. So, instead of writing one article, I wrote 4:

The Easiest Reputation Management Tool (Google Spreadsheet) (This one I built myself based on the scripts I found);
5 Essential Spreadsheets for Social Media Analytics – This guest post on Mashable was a result of the same research but I re-focused it to “Social”
Three Awesome Google Spreadsheet Hacks for Marketers – This one lists *different* tools and tricks that can be applied to general marketing;
HOW TO: Archive Twitter Search Results in a Google Spreadsheet (and Analyze Them!) – Lastly, I didn’t mention this tool in any of the above articles because it was too awesome and deserved a separate review.

The result? Four detailed and useful articles at high-profile blogs (including Mashable and MarketingProfs) – all coming from one in-depth research!

Old Trick + Old Tool => New Content

Even if everyone knows the trick you were very excited to find, you can still apply your knowledge to make it a new idea! That’s why I love tools: if you know the tools, your content is always useful and fresh!

Here’s another example to demonstrate the point.

A couple of weeks ago, I decided to aggregate all my guest accounts in one feed: The result is this page listing all my most recent guest articles. That wasn’t easy to figure out how to actually *create* author feeds where you didn’t have one. Therefore I was very excited to find Feed43 tool (that took me about 3 hours to figure).

But those 3 hours were not wasted: I wrote a huge tutorial on creating a master feed of all your your (guest) author accounts… and didn’t stop there.

A couple of weeks later, I was quite excited to “discover” that you can see all the pins originating from your domain by going to this URL:

http://pinterest.com/source/YourSite.com/

(Like: http://pinterest.com/source/seosmarty.com/)

I immediately saw the post opportunity, but was quite disappointed that it was obviously a well-known trick:

But wait! The pinterest.com/source/ page lacks one great option: there’s no way to track your content on Pinterest using an RSS feed!

I immediately remembered the RSS creation tool I discovered earlier. Since I already knew how to use it, it took me about 10 minutes to create the RSS feed for the Pinterest source page and 20 minutes more to play with the created feed (in Google Reader and other cool tool).

The result? My guest post was very well received on Mashable!

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3. Old Content + New Format => New Content

OK, this one is widely used. I did a detailed post on content re-packaging here as well as a more specific one on re-packaging your content into an image.

Re-packaging is another great way to re-use your old research into the new content. Besides, content re-packaging gives you more freedom for promoting your content. If you turn your content into an image, you can promote it on Flickr and now Pinterest. If you turn your tutorial into a screencast, you’ll get great exposure from Youtube (and other video sites if you have more time).

And again an example!

Once I decided to look into and compare TOS of most popular social media sites. That took me at least a day of reading, dropping results into a table and then compiling a post. In the end, I was much more knowledgeable about what you cannot do on social media. But that’s not the only benefit.

I did a guest post on how to avoid getting banned on social media.
Then a couple of weeks later I compiled the same research into a nice-looking social spam infographic (which drives really good traffic from Pinterest by the way);
Lastly, I wrote a case study on I created and promoted that infographic using MyBlogGuest new Infographics Gallery.

If you work both hard and smart, you can achieve some great results and improve your content strategy greatly!

Please let me know your thoughts!

Post image by Joost J. Bakker IJmuiden

4 Accolades of Twitter Chat

Ann Smarty — Mon, 12 Mar 2012 12:29:09 +0000

This Thursday 11 a.m. EST we are going to run our first official MyBlogGuest Twitter chat. Feel free to follow and participate using #myblogguest hashtag. Our Twitter chat moderator Deborah is sharing her experience with Twitter chat in this guest post. Enojy!

I have been participating in a wonderful weekly twitter chat with the fearless leader of the GoGirls Music, Madalyn Sklar. Through her expertise in leading and inspiring, I have come to value and appreciate the “Twitter Chat” process (in addition to the wonderful GoGirls and GoGuys who hang out there)!

I’m sure there are many reasons to participate in a Twitter Chat, but let’s start out with just 5 Reasons, otherwise known as “Deborah’s Four Accolades of Twitter Chat.”

What is Twitter Chat?

The simple answer? It is a chat session that goes on via Twitter, sending your messages out via public tweets. How do you know who is chatting with who without getting confused in the noisy airwaves called Twitter? Easy, really. You have a pre-designated #hashtag and a pre-designated time. So, for the GoGirls chat, the #hashtag is #ggchat. During the pre-designated chat time, everyone appends their tweet with #ggchat. By filtering the tweets (various methods, but I will tell you about one, below), you can view just the chat and not all the other tweets in the universe. Hence, you are participating in a Twitter Chat, my friend!

Before I start, I have to tell ya, I was forever interchanging “Twitter Chat” with “Tweet Chat.” I have settled, in my mind that it is called “Twitter Chat” because it is a chat session using the Twitter platform, but, don’t put the phrase “Tweet Chat” out of your mind, just yet. Why? Because it is a wonderfully helpful tool, as you will see, below!

“All Around Good Time.”

Think of it like the tv show, “Friends,” but virtual, and you can do it in your pajamas (or less), you can pick your nose (or other things), and all the while, having a wonderfully, social time! It is a BYOB time! Really want to “see” the fellow chatters? No problem! Use the twitter chat to schedule a G+ Hangout with video. Want to really hang out in person? No problem! Schedule regional hook-ups and use ustream.com to broadcast live, and record and publish on YouTube… Ok, I’ll stop now, but you get the idea, I’m sure!
Be informed.

Get to know what is going on in your niche. Many Twitter Chats surround a niche, target group, common interest, etc. So, the #ggchat that happens on Thursdays is a bunch of GoGirls and GoGuys that are a part of the GoGirls group founded and wonderfully led by Madalyn Sklar. You could participate in a college alumni chat, a company-wide chat (i.e. global), a giraffe loving chat group, you name it. Only the sky is the limit, here! And, bringing it full circle, what better way of being informed than to learn what is going on, the trends, etc. from other like-minded individuals?
Meet New Friends / Network.

In many cases, especially with a weekly hook-up, you connect further, beyond the chat, like Facebook, LinkedIn, G+, etc. And, more than likely you will continue with some people via Twitter during off-chat hours. You will have the opportunity to network with people and develop friendships. And, honestly, there simply is no price tag for friendships!
Klout Score increase.

Just goes to show that the more your interact, in a chat environment, the more that you are going to favorably trigger the Klout algorithms that calculate your influence on your network, so your Klout score goes up. Not sure what Klout is? Check out Klout.com.

How Do I Get Started?

First, I recommend using the online tool, TweetChat. You can check it out right now, if you like, so you get an idea of how it works. If you are not already logged in to Twitter, you have an opportunity to do so with the button in the upper right corner, and you will be presented with the option to allow the TweetChat app access.

When you are logged-in, you type in the #hashtag in the box at the left and hit “go” and you are in the groove, baby! You now have a view of the chat that is filtered just for that #hashtag and it automatically appends the #hashtag to every one of your tweets so you don’t have to do it!

No doubt, there are so many more wonderful things to say about Twitter Chat and my mind is abuzz with it now, but, that will have to wait for part 2, or part 3, or maybe, “50 *more* accolades of Twitter Chat” LOL.

P.S. I’m still in search of the perfect list of available Twitter Chats (that aren’t defunct). In the meantime, keep an eye out for announcements on Twitter and use Google search. Many times the moderators include the info in their Twitter bios.

Deborah has used social media to help move her to top of the charts on Reverbnation, as a Jazz Singer. In addition to loving music, she loves people and Twitter Chats are on that list, allowing connections with people! Her blog, SocialWebCafe.com continues the theme, “because the web should be fun!”

cc licensed ( BY ) flickr photo shared by John-Morgan

5 Must-Have WordPress Plugins for Perfectly Optimized Images

Ann Smarty — Wed, 07 Mar 2012 20:58:33 +0000

Long time ago I wrote a short (yet quite complete) post on image SEO which obviously needed an update, so a couple of weeks ago I wrote a bit more detailed and up-to-date article on optimizing images for search and social media.

Today’s article lists most essential WordPress plugins to optimize and make the most of your image content you post on your blog.

That’s not yet another 20-best-plugins article listing an enormous number of more or less useless plugins you don’t want or need. Here are the 6 most essential ones you *must* have to see your traffic spike!

SEO-Optimize Images: File Name + Alt Text + Size

1. Optimize Alt Text and Title of Images

SEO-Friendly Images is the plugin by the awesome Vladimir Prelovac (who obviously knows a thing about WordPress SEO). It helps you optimize all your existent and future images by automatically adding an alternative and TITLE text to them. It lets you:

Automatically add the alternative and TITLE text to your images where you already don’t have either.
Make the the alternative and TITLE text different by combining the following four variables:
- %title – replaces post title
- %name – replaces image file name (without extension)
- %category – replaces post category
- %tags – replaces post tags

If you’ve been wondering about the purpose of the alt text and title attribute for images, here’s a very concise chart that makes the difference obvious:

(Note: they are both more or less essential for SEO nowadays, but that’s not the reason to make the two identical just in case)

2. Optimize image file names!

While being (arguably) not the most powerful SEO-relevant image element, the file name is crucial for getting your images to rank in image search results.

Media File Renamer is the easiest plugin ever and with only one functionality: it adds an option to change the image URL slug (i.e. image file name) to optimize it. To change the image file name, just change the title field when uploading. Easy but pure gold!

3. Optimize the Size and Image Load Speed

Nowadays we are all well aware of the importance of your page load speed for SEO and user experience. Google loves fast pages and images can make your pages much slower.

WP Smush.it is an invaluable plugin that uses the awesome Smush.it API to optimize the images you upload to your blog on many levels:

It compresses the images to load them faster;
It strips unnecessary colors from indexed images;
It converts certain GIFs to PNGs for better performance.

It works for the new images “behind the scene”: just upload images and it will optimize them. It can be run for already published articles from your “Media Library”:

Note: This one may have your site hang for quite some time, so run it on the slowest (least active) day and time

Social-Media Optimize Images (Facebook)

4. Control Your Content Thumbnail

I have already done a detailed post on how to point Facebook to the best image to use in the readers’ wall updates when they are sharing your post.

WP Facebook Open Graph protocol generates Facebook Meta information to your blog pages automatically:

It uses “Featured Image” for the post thumbnail; OR
It uses the first image in the post content; OR
(if the above two images are absent)It uses the image you specify.

Protect Images: Watermark

5. Automatically Watermark Your Images

Watermark Reloaded is a cool plugin that adds a watermark to images you upload to your blog. You can configure it to:

Set the image type you want watermarked;
Align the watermark;
Set the color and size of the font:

+1. Protect Images from Downloading and Re-Using

(I am not using it myself as I seldom use my own images, but I can definitely see the value of it!)

No Right-Click for Images is the essential plugin, especially if you are the creator of the images you upload to your blog and you don’t want them to be re-used. It won’t help for all cases of plagiarism but it does what it does: the plugin doesn’t let your readers use the right click on image files to copy or save them.

WordPress plugin for image optimization	What does it do?	Bulk-updates previously uploaded images (in old posts)?
SEO-Friendly Images	Adds image alt text and title attribute	Yes
Media File Renamer	Adds the option to change image file name (URL slug)	No
WP Smush.it	Optimizes image size and load time	Yes
WP Facebook Open Graph protocol	Adds Facebook Meta dat to your blog pages automatically => points Facebook to the best image to use in the wall update	Yes (You’ll have to clear the Facebook cache of your pages using this tool to see new thumbnail)
Watermark Reloaded	Adds your brand watermark to all images you upload to your blog	No
+1. No Right-Click for Images	Disables right-click on image file to prevent them from being downloaded	Yes

Any other essential plugins for image optimization? Please share your thoughts in the comments!

cc licensed ( BY ) flickr photo shared by MahPadilha

Case Study: How I Got 10 Powerful Links to My Infographic in Two Days

Ann Smarty — Wed, 22 Feb 2012 15:22:45 +0000

Last week we announced quite an innovative tool we are working on: the Infographics Gallery that lets content marketers easily get traction for the infographics they promote (provided they have unique content to go with the infographics).

Our tool is in no way the linkbait-generation machine – there’s no way we can fake the viral effect, that’s true (and my experiment below only proves that). What it can do though is to help create the momentum or let you gain at least some traction for those infographics that fail to.

Going viral is really complex: you can’t fake it, you can’t predict it (with 100% certainty) but you can still help it, to some extent. Our tool is unique in many ways.

As the graphic content creator you get the full control over the infographic spread:

You are able to choose which bloggers will publish your infographic (and choose the strongest publishers);
You can get your infographic re-published as many times as you want (provided you have a unique and interesting description each time);
You control the links and credits that accompany your infographic.

Here’s a quick video tutorial:

Here’s a quick case study on how I promoted my infographic on Social Spam and got it re-published 10 times in two days!

Step 1: Publish an infographic on your own blog

That’s what I did. The easiest part of that one is that it didn’t even require any indepth research or work. I simple re-packaged my Mashable guest post.

Step 2: Create interesting descriptions (mini-posts)

That doesn’t take much time especially if you did your own research before creating the infographic. Now, just brainstorm different ways to mini-refocus your research results in a number ways and get it done (while being an easy part, that’s the most complex one in the whole process).

For me these were, for example:

Spam Free: Social Marketing Without Spamming
Are Your Social Media Accounts at Risk?
3 Types of Social Media Spam You Didn’t Know You Created
etc

Step 3: Upload the infographic to MyBlogGuest New Infographics Gallery

The process is still being refined, but for those who are used to our tools, that’s no-brainer. Just upload your infographic and publish all your unique descriptions (Pst… sorry for repeating “unique descriptions” again and again, but that’s the part many people still don’t seem to quickly understand).

Step 4: Wait for the Offers: The more unique descriptions, the more offers!

The offers from bloggers will start coming to your email inbox as well as to your PM inbox at MyBlogGuest. You can check each one or you can wait for the offers to accumulate and come back in 6 hours to accept some while rejecting the others:

Step 5: Choose one offer per description (e.g. 10 descriptions = 10 offers)

If one description seems to be getting more traction, feel free to only accept the offers for some of them and let the rest hang in the gallery until you get an offer you can’t miss!

Step 6: Wait for the posts to go live!

This can take a few minutes for some blogs and a few days for others, but they all will get published. Again, PMs and emails will notify you of each published post for you to go ahead and help promote it for even more traction!

Step 7: Keep all the data online or download as CSV file!

At any point you can access all your published “guest infographics” within MyBogGuest (Published) folder as well as download all the data and keep in Excel file (if at any point you decide to discontinue the paid service, you’ll still have all the records to pitch the bloggers with your future guest articles or infographics)

Not all of my articles are live yet, but I have ten of them already in two days! Not bad at all considering most of the work is being done on auto-pilot!

What are your thoughts?

→Feel free to join My Blog Guest for free to give it a try!←

cc licensed ( BY ) flickr photo shared by Krikit ♥

So Are YOU Spamming Your Favorite Social Media Site?

Ann Smarty — Wed, 15 Feb 2012 15:15:38 +0000

Note: Would you like to get access to the continuously updated stream of infographics with unique descriptions tailored to your site? Or would you like some help promoting your own infographics. Check out MyBlogGuest Infographics Gallery!

My relationships with social media have never been easy. I always really *love* the site I am using but I still manage to break rules from time to time. When I was just getting acquainted with social media sites, I thought they were simply for self-promoting my own articles. I saw no other point of using them.

Later when I saw the real point in actually getting involved and giving back to the community, I was still under radar. I was banned from StumbleUpon. Then I was publicly accused of gaming Sphinn (sadly, those Tweets are nowhere to be found today but now looking back at that issue, I do feel I was rightfully accused).

The trick with spam is that you actually never know. Different people have different opinions as to what is acceptable and what is not. So how about the official Social Media TOS (click the image do see the full version)?

Do you want to share this infographic on your site? Please do!

This infographic is the re-packaged (and a bit advanced) version of my recent Mashable guest post. What can I say, I love content re-packaging!

HOW TO: Create a Master Feed of All Your Guest Posts (and Publicize It)

Ann Smarty — Thu, 26 Jan 2012 12:49:53 +0000

If you guest post as much as I do, you are (1) probably guest blogging too much and (2) already losing track of what, where and when.

My guest posts are usually the best of what I can. It’s unfair to this blog readers if I am not sharing my best articles with them. Besides, sharing your guest posts on your own blog gives you much more:

Link to your guest posts to give more exposure to them;
Share your guest posts with your loyal community and readers;
Create your guest posting portfolio for your clients and partners to check.

At MyBlogGuest.com one of our PRO features allows our users to automatically share all their guest posts via a customized widget (you can see the sample here in the right sidebar).

Besides, one of my old posts shares two more wicked ways to share your guest post on your blog.

This post adds to the above tips: let’s try to create a master feed of my main guest accounts and publicize the feed here!

1. Create a Feed Where You Don’t Have One

Some of the blogs I contribute to have no separate RSS feed for the author page. For those pages I have to create an RSS feed.

There are quite a few tools that can do that, but the one that has proved to be the most effective is Feed43

It requires no registration but it did require some considerable brain effort from my part. I don’t pretend to be too tech-savvy, nor am I too stupid, but I spent like 40 minutes trying to figure it out. I was quite happy with the result though!

RSS feed for the author pages should be no-brainer: the page consists of links to your articles – all those links have the same HTML markup, so all you need to so is to learn to extract that repetitive markup and turn it into the RSS feed.

Note: While creating your own author feeds is a good way out, it’s not the best option (most of your self-created feeds will lack “date” parameter). So whenever you can, use original author RSS feeds. In many cases, you can find your author RSS feed here: http://www.blogdomain.com/author/author-name/feed/

Also, “Fetch Feed” module inside Yahoo! Pipes will help you find an RSS feed where you lack one. Here’s Kristi’s guide on using the module.

In case neither of the above works, you’ll have to create a feed for your author page. To make your life easier, here’s what I did at Feed43 to create RSS feeds for my author page at MakeUseOf. All you need to do is to replicate these steps while adapting them to the HTML markup of your own author page:

Step 1: Specify your direct author page URL.

For me that’s:

http://www.makeuseof.com/tag/author/annsmarty/

Step 2: Identify the repetitive code:

Obviously, in my RSS feed I want:

My article title
My article direct link.

Looking at the source code of my MUO author page, I see that both the link and the title are wrapped up with

code:

Step 3: Define extraction rules at Feed43:

In this step we point the tool to the repeatable HTML patterns to extract the info we want to be present in our RSS feed.

All text you want to be extracted to the RSS feed should be substituted with {%} variable, see:

Step 4: Identify which parts exactly you want to make it to the feed

If you have done everything right in the above step, you should see the following:

Obviously, we need the following elements in our RSS feed:

{%1} (direct link to the post)

{%2} (the post title)

That’s what we specify to the tool:

Now preview:

And get the link to the RSS feed:

Note: the feed will be updated every 6 hours and there will be “– Delivered by Feed43 service” as long as you are using the free version. If you try to use the feed and love the service, you may want to upgrade (that’s what I did eventually).

2. Combine All Your RSS Feeds in One

OK, now take a deep breath. The hardest part is passed. Now to the easier step: combine all your author feeds in one master feed.

There have always been quite a few RSS feed mergers. Unfortunately most of them are unreliable or even discontinued due to massive use.

Yahoo! Pipes is still the most reliable one. I do hope Yahoo! will keep it alive!

So to merge all our author feeds, let’s do the following:

Step 1: Sign in to Yahoo! and click “Create a Pipe”

Step 2: Add “Fetch Feed” module to your dashboard and add all your author feeds in it:

Step 3: Connect it to “Pipe Output” module and click “Save”.

Step 5: (Optional) Sort the updates by date

If you want to just aggregate your guest articles, you may miss that step. However if you want to share this combined feed to let your readers keep track of your articles elsewhere, it is essential to sort all the updates by date.

For that click “Operations” section in the left-side panel and add “Sort” module. Put it in-between your feeds and the output feed and elect sort by “item.pubDate”:

Note: Why this step is “optional” while still being quite important is simple: if most of your feeds are “self-created”, most of them will lack the “date” and the filter will move them up or down.

Step 6: (Optional) Truncate most active feeds

In some places I blog (or used to blog) weekly, so they started dominating my author master feed. I used “Truncate” module + “Union” module to cut some of my most active feeds, then unite them and offer my dear followers some variety:

Step 7: Click “Run Feed” and grab your feed URL (HERE’S MY PIPE – feel free to clone it and create your own):

Note: This WordPress plugin seems to also combine various feeds and even publicize them on your blog automatically as round-ups. Feel free to try it if you only want to use your Master feed for your blog.

3. Import Your Feed into a Page

Update: eventually I ended up with the PRO features of this tool to publicize my feed. But you can use the tips below which are free:

Create a page which will be automatically updated whenever you have a new post published.

Don’t worry, our tutorial is getting easier step by step

Step 1: Install RSS Just Better WordPress plugin.

Step 2: Create a separate page where you want to aggregate all your guest articles and contributions and use the following code to embed your feed:

Feed URL not provided. This shortcode does require an attribute as feed = 'http://your-rss-or-atom-feed'. Please, enter one.

Where:

RSSjb feed=”YOUR MASTER RSS FEED LINK”
list=”ul” (for the bullet-style list)
target=”_blank” (to open links to my guest posts in a new window)
pubauthor=”false” (to remove the plugin credit link; I am crediting it in this post)

Note: I had to edit the plugin source code as well as it seemed to force the 5-post-from-feed limit. I edited this part:

The Result?

***Here’s my page listing all pages where I guest post and featuring a self-updating list of links to my contributions***.

What are your thoughts?

cc licensed ( BY SD ) flickr photo shared by Open Kitchen España

HOW TO: Force Facebook to Grab the Best Image from Your Page (WordPress)

Ann Smarty — Thu, 12 Jan 2012 13:58:59 +0000

When you “share” a page on Facebook, you will – in most cases – have the range of various image thumbnails to choose from. More often than not, these thumbnails will be random, to say at least: banners from the sidebar, commenter’s Gravatar photos, etc. Obviously, you can always choose the best image, but will your readers do the same?

What is more, when a reader “likes” your article (which most users are more likely to do as that’s just so much easier), there will be no option to choose the thumbnail and your post will be placed on that user’s Facebook stream with an absolutely random and (in most cases) irrelevant image.

How much more interest could you great article result in if it *always* had a great and relevant thumbnail to go with the update?

Unlike Google Plus (which is much smarter at marking up the page and grabbing the most relevant information from the page), Facebook should be clearly “pointed” to what should make it to the update. Like it or not, it benefits you (in the first place) if you spend an effort to explain your page in a language Facebook understands.

For the lucky WordPress bloggers, there are a few plugins that will help you point Facebook to the best image to go in your Facebook “likers’” updates:

First Things First: Clear Facebook Cache!

If you try experimenting with different images as a thumbnail, you will instantly face a problem: Facebook page caching. Facebook would cache your page as soon as you (or anyone else) like it and will show you the same thumbnail each time (no matter which image you have in the meta tag).

Use this tool that clears Facebook cache of the page and creates a new one.

You can also use that tool to preview how Facebook “sees” your page before you even try to “like” it:

1. Custom Image SRC: the Simplest Option

Custom Image SRC is a handy plugin that lets you specify the image you want to be in the page preview on Facebook when anyone “likes” your post. The plugin works on the “Edit post” level:

Basically, the plugin adds the following code in the individual page section:

With this code in the header, the random preview image is overridden by the image that you specify.

Let’s see if it works!

Here’s what the page we are “liking” on Facebook looks like:

Before activating the plugin:

(Absolutely random image from the sidebar is grabbed as the page thumbnail after someone likes your page)

After:

(The image *you* want is grabbed as the page preview):

2. Facebook: Open Graph Plugin

There’s another way to control your page Facebook “snippets”: WP Facebook Open Graph protocol which adds Facebook Meta information to your blog pages (the plugin requires your a Facebook User ID or App ID for it to work).

When it comes to generating the image preview, the plugin will:

Try to use the page “featured” image;
If you don’t have a “featured” image, it will pull the first image in the post/page content;
If there are no images in the post, it will default to using the image you put into the plugin settings in the admin panel.

Besides, controlling the post thumbnails on Facebook, the plugin will also handle the proper title / description within the snippet on Facebook user’s wall:

Here’s the info the plugin has added to my post:

3. Also:

It’s rather a speculation (but one I myself have seen evidence of), but Facebook seems to prefer .JPG images
In order for the plugins above to work properly, make sure your image is self-hosted
The image must be at least 50px by 50px and have a maximum aspect ratio of 3:1. Facebook will make it square if you don’t.

cc licensed ( BY SD ) flickr photo shared by joannapoe

Meet MBG Tracker: The Simplest and Cheapest Way to Monitor Your Backlinks

Ann Smarty — Thu, 22 Dec 2011 14:14:19 +0000

One of the most frequent issues we have faced at our guest blogging platform is the deleted / “nofollowed” links (or articles). Imagine the disappointment: you have spent time and effort creating a good post and had it placed at a good blog to then discover that your author byline (together with your links) or your whole post was removed. Unfortunately, this can happen very often for various reasons:

Blogs can get neglected, domains expired (with the new owner creating new content for it);
Blogs can be redesigned (and the author bylines may be forgotten);
New “SEO” plugins can be installed and all blog external links nofollowed (I can’t imagine who could recommend bloggers installing these stupid plugins and why, but that does happen very often!)
etc. etc.

While we of course don’t guarantee all the guest posts will remain intact for the life being (we are community after all, we only help to connect; we can’t promise anything like that won’t happen), we do our best to alert our users if any of the articles or links were removed and even help them handle the situation.

Here’s how the MyBlogGuest Tracker was born. It tracks all links in the guest posts placed through the Articles Gallery and alerts the authors if anything strange is going on (for example, the site is down, redesigned, etc).

The author can then go ahead and contact the blog owner, and in most cases the problem is fixed very quickly. Even if the article was removed on purpose (for any reasons) and the blog owner refuses to put it back, the author will still be able to use the removed article again and let other blog have it (this way the content creation effort won;t be wasted).

We have had great feedback on this tool and decided to launch it as a standalone app.

***So welcome my next little project: Guest Blogging and Link Tracking Tool!***

The tool is brand new, still in alpha but you can go ahead and play with it. Mind that the tool does require considerable hosting and development costs, so it’s paid but very cheap (for now all we really need is to cover expenses).

How Does the Backlink Monitoring Tool Work?

We probably don’t do anything new, but we are the cheapest and simplest alternative I am aware of:

Receive instant emails if any of your links were removed or nofollowed;
Track your guest post social popularity (Likes and Tweets)
Measure traffic from each of your guest posts (for that you’ll need to install a tracking code)
Identify most efficient backlink sources (for example, to find places where you can guest post again).

To start tracking your guest posts or links, you’ll need to create a new project and specify your base URL. For all pages you add within one project, this very base URL will be monitored automatically (even if you don’t specify which link within a given page you want to track).

You can add / remove columns from the table (to adjust a clearer view) and sort by each column. You will also receive weekly summaries of your missing links and most popular link sources.

Please try the tool and let me know where we can improve it. We love feedback!

I will add your suggestions to our TO-DO list below:

Upcoming Features (our TO-DO list)

Guest Post Widget (we have one within MyBlogGuest): a highly customizable, easily installed widget to easily share your recent guest posts on your own blog (something you see here in the sidebar)
A Customizable .PDF Export: I do track all the placed guest posts fro my clients and I think our users may want to add that service as well. With our tool this will be an included bonus!
More to Come!

***Test the tool here***

No related posts.

Is Google Making us Illiterate?

Guest Author — Wed, 14 Dec 2011 19:51:23 +0000

The following is the guest article by Dan Almond, at Piranha Internet, a Preston SEO Company. If you want an awesome guest article like this, join our guest blogging platform MyBlogGuest.com

Since 2004 Google has been in widespread use, and there are now generations of people who have grown up using Google on a daily basis. These are the same people that have grown up in an age of technology, using mobile phones and specifically SMS text messaging. It has long been argued that text messaging has negatively impacted people’s ability to spell and use grammar correctly, particularly in formal writing.

Google is similarly positioned to exert such negative influence and I’ll attempt to show how it could be doing using an example from the world of retail.

I was actually working for a client in the retail sector who sells clothing when I came across some shocking examples of the use, or rather misuse, of the apostrophe within meta titles and descriptions belonging to some of the major UK retailers.

Sorry if you find this next section a little patronising, but I’m going to assume that everyone reading this has had their understanding of grammar impaired by the continued use of search engines and mobile phones.

Which is Correct:

{Mens Clothing}

or

{Men’s Clothing}

or

{Mens’ Clothing}

?

I’ll get the first one out of the way immediately, there is no such word as “mens”. “Men” is already a plural and so does not need pluralising in this way. This also makes “mens’…” inaccurate. The correct plural possessive (as the clothing ‘belongs’ to men) is therefore “men’s”.

Now let’s see which of the top 7 retailers got this one right in their meta title and description:

As we can see, all of the retailers have used the grammatically incorrect version, although interestingly Republic has chosen to optimise for both “mens” and “men’s”.

Womens Clothing, Women’s Clothing or Womens’ Clothing?

The rule for “women” is exactly the same as for “men” above. The correct use is therefore “women’s clothing”.

Again let’s see which of the top 7 ranking retailers got this one correct in their meta title and description:

Many more retailers seem to have got this correct, the reason for which I shall return to later.

Ladies Clothing, Lady’s Clothing, Ladies’ Clothing?

This is probably the most tricky one of the three examples I’ve provided. “Ladies” refers to more than one ‘lady’, whilst “lady’s clothing” would refer to one particular lady’s clothing. The correct choice is “ladies’ clothing” with the apostrophe after the ‘s’ being used to signify possession (the clothing ‘belongs’ to the ladies).

Not many of the major retailers seem to be targeting this keyword, but those that were all seemed to have opted for “ladies…” and not “ladies’…”

Why Do Google Not Auto-correct?

This confused me somewhat. Normally if you spell something incorrectly Google will either automatically correct your spelling, or at least suggest what it thinks you might mean. Enter “mens clothing” however and… nothing. Not a sausage.

Why is this?

Do Google not know that “mens” is not a word? Do they not have a good grasp of grammar? It’s difficult to believe that this is the case, though I’m at pains to offer an alternative explanation. This is made all the more confusing when you search for “womens clothing” and Google asks if you meant “women’s clothing” – why do it for ‘womens’ and not ‘mens’!?

Why Are Retailers Getting it Wrong?

The first thing to establish here is, are retailers actually getting it wrong, or are they purposefully using incorrect constructions in order to target the most popular search terms? According to Adwords, “mens clothing” is searched for 40,500 times monthly (locally in the UK, using exact match), compared to just 73 times for “men’s clothing”. That is a staggering statistic.

The SERPs for “mens clothing” and “men’s clothing” are different too, so Google are definitely not ignoring the apostrophe in this instance. From this perspective you can completely understand why retailers are using incorrect spellings within their meta titles. Some retailers, such as Republic even use both “mens” and “men’s”. One can only assume that the misspellings within the meta descriptions represent a lack of SEO knowledge (meta descriptions aren’t used for rankings), or are an attempt to maintain consistency (I’m probably being generous here).

I guess that retailers, or at least the people who do their SEO, have to decide whether it is more important to be correct, or to use the construction that most people use. I suspect that the latter option will win on most occasions when sales are at stake, at least when the difference in search volumes between the two is so pronounced. I just really thought that as an industry, we’d got beyond the whole incorrect spelling for SEO thing.

Chicken or Egg?

So who is to blame? Do retailers spell incorrectly deliberately because customers do? Do customers spell incorrectly because they’ve been badly educated by Google and the retailers? I suspect that both are true to an extent. It’s a chicken and egg situation and the only party involved that can actually fix this, is Google.

If they autocorrected searches for “mens clothing” to “men’s clothing”, and their autocomplete also selected the correct variant, people would begin to search in this way and retailers would have to optimise for the correct spelling. You can already see evidence of this above, with many more retailers using the grammatically correct “women’s clothing”, quite probably because Google suggests that particular spelling.

Does Search Illiteracy Equal Illiteracy?

So far I’ve spoken only of the influence upon people’s search behaviour, but it’s possible that repeated incorrect grammar use online could spread beyond search engines and into general language use. The aforementioned links between text message speak and a decline in literacy are often disputed. Indeed, renowned linguist David Crystal has categorically stated that he believes any such link is a myth.

I would argue that there is a clear distinction between txt spk and standard language use though, whereas the distinction between “mens” and “men’s” is less clear. Children and impressionable adults are much more likely to believe that “mens” is acceptable language use, and to use it themselves, than they are likely to think that “gr8” is fine to use in formal writing. People often learn by imitation, and Google along with retailers and SEOs, are not setting the best possible example.

So come on Google, you can do better.

Dan Almond studied English at The University of Liverpool and works at Piranha Internet, a Preston SEO Company. He regularly blogs about all things SEO and social media on the Piranha Internet blog.

cc licensed ( BY SD ) flickr photo shared by quinn.anya