These are some insights and Blogging Best Practices are updated regularly as I find more that I have collected over the years of blogging and social media:
Write everything with Search Engine Optimisation in Mind.
Aim to have 300 words in each post however the proportion of shares versus the number of words is optimised at 100 according to analysis of 2 years of Mashable.com data, more about that in the post – How Many Words should my content have?
As always if you have any thoughts or want to discuss further then lets have a real conversation and get in touch on twitter @naoimigillis.
MicroBlogging is a term used to define the new idea of short status updates like your Facebook status update, your tweets. They are generally short in length. They are not a good practice in your own blog as they are difficult for search engines to quantify what the content means and every single time you sit down to write content SEO needs to be at the front of your mind. It has been said that the optimum character length is 300 word count for a search engine to be able to quantify, however the analysis from the word count in the Popularity measured from 2 years of Mashable.com articles contradicts this. This popularity was measured by the number of social shares. Since a microblog is essentially social media this has now come full circle. Examples of MicroBlogging sites include to name a few:
Twitter
Tumbler
Digg
Reddit
Microblogging your content on social media is very important to drive traffic to your website and the higher the credibility and popularity of the content then the higher the ranking on search engines. Unfortunately its is not one size fits all for increasing ranking, its a big picture that needs to be looked at and tailored to your business. Start sharing on social media.
As always if you have any thoughts or want to discuss further then get in touch on twitter @naoimigillis. This is my microblogging platform of choice.
Should I allow commenting on my blog is a question that I have pondered since starting this blog, I want this blog to be as interactively real as possible, it has been decided not to allow comments, so how else can it be interactive and how can it be more real than a commenting forum to discuss topics? Comments allow engagement and interaction, they are not without the downsides though. Theodore Roosevelt gave a wonderful speech commonly known as “The Man in The Arena”, the full PDF of which is at the following link – The Man in The Arena Speech. What a wise man he was that his words are as relevant today if not more than they were when he wrote them and spoke them, that they can transcend time effortlessly.
Man in The Arena Speech
This idea lends itself very well to commenting and internet trolls and how to manage this type of human behaviour, it is very easy to say what you want to say to a screen using a keyboard, and to say nasty not nice comments to me is indicative that the person definitely is not a gladiator and not someone I want to interact with. The gladiators in the arena are more likely to reach out and get in touch in a positive way. The choice of not allowing commenting is in no indicative of a lack of engagement. So how to get in touch email me. Tweet me. I can moderate both of those mediums quite easily and enjoy those interactions immensely.
As an aside I have done the Pros and Cons of Commenting as how I see them. The Cons far out weigh the Pros as you can see.
Pros of Commenting
Interactivity
Conversational Style
Cons of Commenting
Comments need to be moderated, this seems an unnecessary waste of time and resources. We can thank the internet trolls for this.
So for the trolls, it allows a soapbox that has no positive function. To be clear negative feedback is perfectly acceptable so that is not what I am discussing here.
On that note please get in touch via social media. @naoimigillis on twitter and lets have a real interaction.
