Top blogs

This article applies to Wordpress free/ personal/ premium/ business blogs as well as blogs created with wordpress.org CMS. Wordpress bloggers are fascinated with plugins because these little bits of software can add great functionality to the blog, ranging from improving SEO to installing a beautiful comment box to what not. And in most cases, you don't need to know coding at all. Yes, plugins are a wonderful way to add great things to the blog, which you cannot do without knowing a lot of PHP - the computer language used by Wordpress. Moreover, a number of plugins are free. Wordpress offers more plugins and allows you to install third-party plugins as you go for paid plans. On Wordpress-created self-hosted blogs, you can install plugins by dozens. For self-hosted blogs on Wordpress CMS, the number of plugins available is growing by the day. Its depository already has around 52,000 plugins! In all, plugins are such an important part of Wordpress ecosystem that withou...

Updated: January 2021 Art and craft blogs by Indians are hard to come by, nor are there more than a couple cartoon blogs that are regular and well designed. Many artists or art lovers create a blog but either leave it unattended or become irregular in updating it. There are only a few DIY blogs maintained by Indians. Out of all that are present, just a few blogs are worth mentioning and we bring them to you here. Art blogging There are thousands of blogs on the web on visual arts including drawing and painting, design, decor and craft. Some art blogs are well-established and earn handsomely. If you type "top art blogs" or "art and craft blogs" on Google, you get numerous listings, some with corporate websites and buy-sell platforms but also some outstanding art blogs by individuals and institutions. Artists, being highly creative in their field and immersed in their work, often lose sight of how blogging can help them in many ways. Some artists, however, have disco...

On a Facebook Group on blogging, someone created doubt recently whether Google gives low value to blogs hosted on its own Blogger platform just to prove a point before enforcement authorities that it does not favor people using its services. It looks logical, going by numerous court cases and questioning from national IT authorities such companies have to face globally, relating to anti-trust, monopolistic or restrictive practices. Or is it illogical? Specifically, we saw the following arguments during discussion on that group: Google deprecates Blogger blogs when it comes to its search preferences. Blogger blogs that retain .blogspot ending are thought of as not too authoritative sites. Google favors Wordpress blogs over Blogger blogs, for some curious reason. In any case, search engines think low of blogs unless the blogs are maintained as regular websites. I, or my colleagues here at ITB, have no clue about Google deprecating .blogspot blogs. And we believe, it won...

You can add new markup to your site or blog so that they are better discovered on Google visual search With the latest offer , Google has given a facility to showcase recipes on Google app on Android and mobile web by using a 'badge' feature. The badge on the image of your recipe prompts the searcher to visit your blog. That's it! What it means is (I'm using Google's own example) that if someone does an image search for cupcakes on Google on his mobile phone, he will get a badge on the bottom left corner of thumbnails which tells about the image's category and options available from there. So, if one sees a type of cupcake with a badge 'recipe' on it and clicks on it, he will be taken to the recipe to make that cake. This added good user experience is likely to drive traffic to the website or blog from which the image is sourced. As a blogger or website owner, what you have to do is to apply recipe markup to your pages so that your  images get t...

For some reason, all social websites want us to post images of a particular size, which is not common between any two of them. I don't know if they want to test our knowledge or get fun out of our discomfort. Anyway, let's leave it to them.  The fact, seriously, is that you need to resize photos taken from digital camera or mobile phone, so as to suit them to different social media accounts or other websites. Sometimes you need photos in a particular dimension or size for other purposes. A few quick theoretical points before we discuss how to do things the right way. Talking of photo dimensions and image size Though photos and drawings are always rectangular, the relative measurements of width and height can lead to a variety of shapes, like a very tall but narrow one, a very wide one, a square, and so on. (By the way, with some exceptions, even round or oval pictures have corresponding rectangular dimensions.) Talking of size, photos can be very large or small - th...

All bloggers want traffic, and for that search engines are godsend. Who does not want to come on the first page of Google? Wondered how many top search results show blogs? I did a bit of random research for you, to give you a glimpse of that. I am not a researcher, nor has my site ITB resources to get a research done. I, however, bought some gigs on Fiverr for variety in searches and some experimentation. My small but guided experience will definitely give you a few hints on how to search optimize your blog, especially if you have not hired an SEO expert. When I went for a very broad search term (e.g travel, health, recipes, America, sports, blogging), hardly any blog came in the top 10 results on Google. Mind it, I used the private mode on the browser and wiped memory of the websites/ blogs I had earlier visited from the browser cache. But since all big search engines have their servers in major world locations, they'll likely give at least some results of your country howev...

Updated: August 2017 Answer these 5 straight questions to see whether your website or blog has the right type of text or you need to take some corrective action. 1. Is your website/ blog for reading or viewing?  If mainly for reading, does it read well? Blogs and other websites either have a lot of text or images/ videos/ podcasts. If there is a lot of text to read, any flaw that makes reading difficult hurts the website. For such types of websites, take care that- the text size is big enough (but not too big); the text is in dark color on a white or light background (or the reverse);  the font is with rounded edges, such as Verdana or Helvetica or Georgia (not like Times New Roman); the text is normally typed, not italicised , not in ALL CAPS; there is no distraction from an underlying image background 2. Does your website have large passages of text? If yes, does it flow well? If the site has a lot to read, take care that- the reading column is wide e...