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Tips for Bloggers

Tips for Bloggers

Overview

Who's a Good Blog? is a blog discovery site that allows readers to find quality blogs for their entertainment and education. It provides easy access to blogs allowing users to browse by category or search by keywords. The site is FREE for readers and bloggers. At some point in the future we may fund the site through advertising.

Our focus is on blogs and more specifically blog posts. We do not index or provide access to news, forums, wikis, directories, corporate websites (except for their blog), etc. Just blogs and just the posts on the blog. If blog has a shop, or legal pages we try not to index those and deliver just the postings to readers.

WhosaGoodBlog uses an ethical web crawler to find blogs and index the postings. Readers and bloggers (i.e. anyone) can submit blogs to be indexed. Bloggers can sign up to see a “WhosaGoodBlog view” of their blog. Once you have signed up and verified you manage the site (by placing a custom code on the blog home page). You will then have some control over how your blog posts are presented and in the future you will be able to see some “likes, views and subscription” information for your blog and postings.

Blogger Signing Up

While you don't have to sign up to get your blog indexed, and there is no "ranking difference" between blogs that are signed up or not, we highly recommend it.

Here is why: You can -

Note: Not all of the above are available for Blogger Early Access (Sneak Peek). We will continue to add capabilities for bloggers to promote their postings.

* Subscriptions in the context of WhosaGoodBlog will work as follows. The users can subscribe to receive notification in app and/or by email when new posting thunbnails appear in our database. This is the same information that is presented on the site.

Here is how:

Meta Description

The meta description should be the “teaser” you would like us to use to describe the positing. It should not be the same meta description as your home page uses. Typically bloggers use the first sentence or paragraph. If you write a long meta description, don’t expect it to all get used. If your meta description does not reflect your posting we may be confused and not index the post.

Meta Keywords

Meta keywords are not typically used by crawlers. WhosaGoodBlog.com is the exception at the moment. We suggest using it for “category” words. Where your post might be “How to Bake a Better Cake” it might not contain general category words like lifestyle or food. The meta keywords is a place you can put them to signal how you would categorize the post. We only use the first three that match or are close to our categories (as seen on the browse menu at the top of our home page). Alternatively you can use hash tags instead of meta keywords. Of course you can hope we figure it out without any hints, but if your post “Baking in the Sun on the Gold Coast” lands in the Food category when it should be in Travel category, meta keywords provides an opportunity to provide a hint.

Hash Tags

You can hash tag posts to signal categories that your post should belong to. Put them somewhere in your post. For instance #food, #lifestyle at the bottom of the post. Don’t expect any more than 3 categories to be used, so using many category hashtags will not help categorization. Having said that you can use as many hash tags as you like and they will be indexed for search, just not used for categorization.

Page Title (aka Tab Title)

The page title that shows up in your browser tab is, as you probably know, the <title>This is my Title</title> element in the meta section of the HTML for the page. This should be the same as or at least based on the title the user sees on the posting. It should NOT be your blog name. If your really want to use your blog name, put it after the posting title. Not Good: The blog Name Better: The Posting Title | The Blog Name Best: The Posting Title

Image File Names and Alts

The main image file names should match or reflect the blog title/heading. We recommend:

Short hyphens between words is a good convention (but not needed for Who’s a Good Blog). If you want to shorten the title to make the image name fine, but just drop the less important words. For example the title: How I Spent my Summer Vacation on the Gold Coast could be shortened to summer-vacation-gold-coast. Bad: download284759e, my-dog-running-on-the-beach Good: Vacation-Gold-Coast Better: Summer-Vacation-on-the-Gold-Coast Best: How-I-Spent-my-Summer-Vacation-on-the-Gold-Coast Note capitalization does not matter. Same rules for the alt fields (except spaces between words are encouraged). Bad: no alt field or “my dog running on the beach” Good: Vacation Gold Coast Better: Summer Vacation on the Gold Coast Best: How I Spent my Summer Vacation on the Gold Coast

Headings

We encourage the use of headings. We suggest the post title be a h1 element and remaining headings be h2 or h3 elements as you find appropriate.

Post Ranking

See our post on How to Write a Good Blog Post for a search engine. WhosaGoodBlog considers many factors in ranking a blog post. These include:

Ranking factors NOT currently considered

Free for Readers and Bloggers

While we have not yet given a lot of thought to monetization of this platform we want to maximize the number of readers and bloggers. To that end we intend the the platform to be free for both bloggers and blog readers. At some point we may use display advertising and/or affiliate links but we are nowhere close to being there yet.