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You can build a food blog easily and maintain it with just a little effort. It can also earn you some dollars. But to make a food blog successful and to make good money from it, you need to take care of something extra .  What's that extra that differentiates a great food blog from the ordinary? Before discussing that, let us recapitulate the food blogging scene. What is a food blog? How do food bloggers maintain blogs? A food blog is a blog that deals with human food. That is too simplistic a definition of food blog, because food blogging covers a vast area including  maintaining a kitchen garden picking up the best veggies and fruits ingredients: their types, usage recipes/ cuisines: differnent types according to location (English/ Scottish, Continental, Asian, Indian, Chinese), ingredients (vegan, non-veg), base (mutton, pasta, gluten free, dairy), cooking style (baked, fried), serving time (breakfast, lunch), taste (spicy food, sweetmeats/ desserts), etc foods for speci...

We get many blog review requests everyday. In a recent one, the blogger asked us two specific questions and one of them was - 'Is my blog too gaudy and colorful?' We have dealt with display aspects of blogging in a good number of posts, but have not answered the specific question of when a blog turns too gaudy.  Overall display of a blog, including colors, depends on personal preferences. However, we often do not realize that our own choices of color, font size etc may not be liked by many visitors especially if we use elements that do not suit our type of blog . For example, while a kid blog may look very good if it has doodles, splashes of primary colors, balloons hanging from all corners, a duck floating over the title and weirdly twisted text. But these elements will look totally out of place on a blog on scientific aspects of skin diseases. This could be an extreme example, but doesn't it show that we should not ignore this aspect on the blog ? Coming speci...

Happy, unhappy and uninteresting moments in our life come again and again: some pass by and some leave us either hyper-excited or frustrated. In either case, we need to give vent to our feelings so that we do not end up doing something injurious or stupid but return to our normal self. Blogging is a great way out for immediate calming of nerves as well as long-term emotional well-being!    Personal blogging I mean, not a professional or corporate blog. How to relieve stress and anxiety with blogging I suggest that you open a blog, a personal blog. Use Blogger or Wordpress - the top free blogging platforms. I would recommend blogger for a stress-buster blog, because it allows you to experiment and not remain sober (as happens with Wordpress). Even if you are scared of technology or have never opened a blog, you cansee this article on how to  open a new blog in just five minutes  and learn how to spruce it up. Use your personal blog as your punching bag. Make it th...

This post has been updated in 2018 end. The historical perspective and facts of 2011 are retained while links and obsolete information has been updated.   Now that we are in the last leg of compilation of the Directory of Best Hindi Blogs , we present before you our detailed observations on the world of Hindi blogging. Like they say in journalistic parlance, we can get major details on a news event by asking 5 W’s and 1 H [what, who, why, when, where and how], we’ll try to share our findings in that manner, answering the first question here and the rest in one or two next posts. ITB’s is perhaps the only team that has manually checked over 35,000 blogs, examined a quarter of them for specific attributes and reviewed nearly 600 blogs in fine detail. We tend to be very nasty in our comments when we review blogs. However, in these two posts, we will avoid sharp value judgments or advice. What types of blogs are there in the Hindi blog world? What is written on Hindi...

A blog is a diary, fine; but a blog is also a public space [except for private blogs] on the www. In the latter sense, blogs are a form of media, like newspapers. Therefore, blogs are expected to maintain minimum standards in terms of web ethics, design, content and updation. We have numerous posts on how IndianTopBlogs scrutinises blogs for putting them in directories and ranks them as ‘Platinum Blogs’, so we won’t repeat the process here. We have also a number of posts on various quality aspects; in fact our ‘blogging tips’ section is full of tips on maintaining quality in different aspects of blogging.   In this post, we give a list of practices / features that spoil the quality of a blog,  and we add to that our experience with Indian blogs that we've checked for the last nearly two years of blog ranking, reviews, showcase, etc.    Major blogging mistakes Poor navigability Too many - and useless - widgets Too long pages Pages wider t...

Post updated in July 2020 This post is written keeping in mind blogger friends who are not technology-minded and have been brainwashed into believing that getting search traffic to the blog needs big-time HTML tweaking and SEO.  SEO ‘experts’ often advise bloggers and website owners to necessarily put meta tags in the HTML of their blog, or put ALT attribute on images. So as to impress the blogger, they talk about robots.txt and sitemap.xml, rich cards and such other jargon. The blogger starts feeling that he must try HTML tweaks suggested by SEO experts or to hire an expert so as to bring the blog among the first few results on search pages of popular search engines, e.g. Google, Bing and Yahoo!.  In this post, allow me to debunk one big myth: “ You must know HTML to optimise your blog properly for search engines. If you do not know it, you should hire an SEO expert. ” The reality is that you need not know any HTML for fairly good part of search engine optimization! In fact...

updated: November 2020 In this post, let's check whether our blog or website uses SEO practices that Google likes and avoids the ones it hates. Why Google? I am not weighing Google vis-à-vis Yahoo, Bing and other search engines here. But the reality is that at present Google is the industry leader in the search domain and therefore doing something that this giant search engine hates means low reputation and low popularity, even chances of being penalized. Moreover, Google has been more transparent about what it likes and what it hates as compared to others. When search engines [as well as reputed directories] look at content on the web – including text, images, links, comments, archives, tags/ labels, affiliation, advertisements, messages… – they look for relevance and quality in deciding the value of that content. They do not like manipulative tricks – tricks that are employed to fool search engines and directories into seeing a poor web resource as one with high value. Take the...