Top blogs

There are some questions that come up again and again, however much you answer them. One such question, relating to use of graphic file-format on websites, is whether to use .png or .jpg images. As technology evolves, the answers are also likely to change as has happened in the case of .gif format. Nobody now asks whether to use.gif in place of other formats, unless it is a simple animation. We’ll try to give all that a lay blogger needs to know, in simple terms. PNG and JPG are both widely used graphic formats and both compress images to make them small, without perceptible quality loss for the purpose of websites. So which of the two to use on your blog or website? Use PNG when the picture has objects with sharp edges and there are not too many colour gradients. That includes computer graphics and drawings. Use this format also if you want transparency; that means, the transparent parts of the graphic will show up the background under it, as shown below. We placed a PNG f...

LinkedIn now allows you to post on it like you post on your blog. A slight correction: LinkedIn did it last year for members in the US and has opened the posting ‘long form posts’ to everybody now. It boasts that in this one year, over one million posts have been written. This biggest professional networking site in the world says, long form posts let members underscore their professional expertise. We believe that to be true.  Writing original posts on LinkedIn is like blogging on one’s own blog. And, like blogging, a well-written post presents the author’s character, strengths and weaknesses, talent and skills as much as his expertise. LinkedIn membership is now over 330 million strong, most of it free. LinkedIn allows its ‘premium’ features only to paying members. The ability to write long form posts gives especially the non-paying members an opportunity to showcase themselves better.  People have used this opportunity to write on myriad topics: sharpening resume,...

A number of studies have shown that web readers seldom read the text word by word. They scan it for relevance and look intensely for the matter they’re looking for.  Most readers, thus, have their brains trying to get the maximum value without big effort that goes in serious reading. That means, you must write text in a way that catches readers’ attention in the first go. Headlines and visual content are two major ways to catch attention, but this post focuses only on a third important aspect - catching attention to the written content . 1. Put sub-headings , and bolden the text, enlarge it or give it another colour. 2. Highlight words and phrases: use different formats such as bold, underline, italics, another font, large font, colour, putting within quotes, putting in a box, etc 3. Use simple and small sentences, and simple words. Simple language leads to greater reader comfort. 4. Keep paras short ; in a para, give only one thought. Short, focussed paras lead to c...

If you ask me what is the Search Engine Optimization (=SEO) best practice that you can follow without much effort and with great impact, I will say, on your new posts, give links to top posts from the past.  This is called internal linking . It is a good practice to do internal linking for SEO, but it is also good for content discovery on the website/ blog. Linking to other posts leads to deeper visitor engagement on your blog/ website, especially when visitors find high-quality content on other webpages. This results in higher positioning of your web site on search engines, higher traffic , higher visitor satisfaction, chance of making money and so on.    Internal linking looks routine SEO and is often ignored. But it is one of the easiest ways to offer more content to visitors without your having to create it again.  You can give links to other posts in many ways such as - Links within the body of the blog/ website, referring to specific resource...

This is the last post in this series on Blogger's great features. The complete list of these posts is given at the end of this post. This has been updated in Feb 2016. Create a customized search engine for your website Have you seen a simple search box in the right column of IndianTopBlogs.com ? You can easily put similar or a more complex search gadget (=widget) on your Blogger blog. In addition, you can customi z e this gadget to search only your website, linked sites or the entire www. You can make the search gadget here . You can put this gadget on any website or blog if that platform allows you to place an html gadget on the blog. Want to have blogging tools and tips in your own language? On the top right hand of your Blogger dashboard, there is an option to change language from the standard English. If you change that to Arabic, Bangla, Hindi or Russian, you will then get tools, tips etc in the language that you selected. However, if you want to write post...

This is the seventh post in the series on Blogger's features. Blogger is a wonderful blogging platform with many lesser-known but fantastic features, and bloggers on this platform should make use of them on their blogs for better looks and functionality. Blogger offers bloggers a way to easily advertise their blogs on the web, using its own  AdWords advertising platform.  A non-Blogger can use    AdWords and its associated tools, for blog SEO. Though AdWords is primarily for advertising on Google, it has many tools that can be accessed by bloggers to improve their blog's popularity and to optimise it for making money. We'd discuss these sometime later and not in the present series. In this post, let's just remind our blogger friends that they can use AdWords for advertising their blogs, especially if they are on the Blogger platform. For starting an ad campaign, go to the main dashboard of your blog and click on 'Campaigns'. You are taken step by step to ...

updated: November 2020 Relevant URL is important for blog SEO Do you know that though  Blogger assigns a URL to each blog post based on the first words on the post, it   lets you change to an SEO-friendly URL?  First, if you are a very new blogger, let me show you how URLs work. I hope you know that URL is the unique web address of any webpage - a blog's homepage, blog posts, pages etc. Blogger has a typical structure for giving URLs to blog posts:  https://www. blogname.com/year/month/slug In this structure, all is fixed except the last part, called slug . If you don't bother about it, Google automatically assigns the slug based on the first few words of the post. Suppose you have a blog on cooking ( www.example.blogspot.com ) and your latest post is titled ' The right way of mashing potatoes for burger '. Blogger would automatically give the post a URL something like this:  Https://www.example.blogspot.com/2024/10/ the-right-way-of Now, if someone searche...