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A blog is known by its  posts , not  pages , right?  Yes, but pages have their own special role in blogs. While  posts  are the life-blood of a blog, standalone  pages  give the blog the required background support. Their content is more permanent than posts and therefore need not be updated too often. Yet, blog design tutorials often miss this point. They give web page design ideas relating to the overall website and then posts , seldom giving importance to pages . If you have not yet created static pages on your blog or not considered them important, take action now so that your blog becomes more valuable for readers and optimizes your blog for search engine visibility. How to use standalone pages on the blog to get to the top of Google search results? Posts and pages both are technically web pages and have a URL or web address of their own.  Pages  are those web pages that are not pushed down like posts when new matter is posted on the blog. Usually they do not have a timest

There are thousands of book review blogs and websites on the web. In addition, major newspapers and magazines regularly publish book reviews. So, if you are a book blogger, why will someone come to your blog for reading book reviews and why will he give importance to your book reviews as compared to those on established websites and blogs - and sites like Goodreads? The short answer is: You should know how to write a book review like a professional. Of course, you will have to promote the blog among readers so that they know that your book review blog exists. But that answer does not solve the problem of book reviewers whose blogs are yet to reach a big reputation and a big audience. Let me tell you step by step how to write good book reviews and what makes a good book review, starting with the basics of reviewing books:      How to write a book review: the basics Though a book review is nothing but exposing good or bad points of a book, it has to follow some basic rules so that

When it comes to search engine optimization, who can tell you better than the daddy of search engines and guru of SEO - that is Google? Towards improving search results, Google has engaged thousands of Search Quality Raters throughout the world. Their task is to evaluate sample web pages and search results on the basis of quality parameters fixed by Google. So, Google has issued a document called Search Quality Rater Guidelines . Google first issued this doc in 2015 and has brought out the latest revision in 2019. The ratings given by Raters do not directly affect search but give valuable feedback on what Google considers as useful, relevant, trust-worthy search results - and tries to master the science of serving the best possible results to searchers. The Search Quality Rater Guidelines feel boring to the lay reader as they are slightly technical and are specifically meant to guide individuals involved in website evaluation work. I give here the distilled takeaways from the docum

What are the best search engine optimization techniques and what strategy they should follow, bloggers and small website owners keep asking on Google and Q-A sites such as Quora. And most of the times, the answers are convoluted or copy-pasted - and they are seldom effective becaue the 'SEO expert' himself doesn't know the merits of the techniques he recommends. Please also remember that what worked a few years back might not work a few year later, and some actions that looked innocent in the past may be red-flagged by search engines; one more reason the copy-pasted advice does not work. Then there are some genuine experts (including big SEO and tech companies) who have mastered SEO techniques but they take the visitor to the garden path only to end with a bait: buy their SEO tools, analytical tools or SEO service. Why should you go anywhere else when Google itself keeps issuing advisory articles and answers to SEO-related queries? The present list of SEO techniques is

If you are a blogger or owner of a small business website, you need to have SSL certificate implemented on your website so that the website is protected by HTTPS protocol. However, you need not pay for it because a totally free and fully dependable SSL/ TLS certificate is available. As a blogger or website owner, you would know that the world wi de web (www) runs using a protocol called HyperText Transfer Protocol or HTTP. So, all websites must have an HTTP declaration in their URL. But it is possible for miscreants to 'phish' or present a shady website as a genuine website. The HTTP protocol is not able to check such illegal actions. Moreover, when the data is transported between your website server and the visitor's internet browser, there are 'sniffer' programs that can read the data. So, there is more and more stress on making the protocol secure. Thus came HTTPS (S in the abbreviation represents 'secure'). Now a majority of websites, including blogs, ha

If you have created a blog or website using Wordpress, you must be knowing about plugins. These are not part of the core Wordpress code but are third-party codes that add to functionality of the blog/ website created with Wordpress. Plugins are also available to bloggers on Wordpress.com blogging platform, but only after upgrading the free plan to business plan.  There are dozens of plugins for SEO or search engine optimization. Perhaps the most popular of them is Yoast . It has been installed millions of times on Wordpress sites. But there are many more. Some of them are nearly as good, even better. All in One SEO, Rank Math, SlimSEO, SEO Framework and SEOPress plugins are among the most popular. I have done research on behalf of bloggers and website owners who are not tech savvy, and will shortly tell you which SEO plugin suits a small website/ blog and why. So many articles on SEO plugins for Wordpress. Why this post? There are hundreds of websites that have already written on Wordp

This post is in response to queries we have received about how frequently one should update the blog. The questions are like these:  Should I blog everyday?  What is the ideal blog posting frequency?  I am updating my blog regularly but not getting much traffic, why?   How many blogs per week should I post for ranking on Google?  How often should I blog to make money? The general advice is: You should update your blog according to its niche, your content, competition's posting habits, and interest of your audience - all of them are linked. Of course, a big deciding factor would be how much resources you want to spend on the blog and what you want to achieve from it.  Since organic traffic does not chase blogs any more because of competition from social networking and instant messaging sites, social media integration is as much important as frequency of posting. You must publish all your major blog posts on your social networking sites, after proper modifications. It has been docum