Tips on blogging: new blogging tips from around the web
* First, here’s one of the best articles I’ve ever read about how to choose the keywords you should optimize your posts and blogs for. It’s called “Beginner WordPress SEO: Optimize Your Blog Posts.” This brief article is an easy to understand, step by step guide to the methods that work. (I’ve used them with great success.)
* “Dealing with a DDOS attack”: if you blog about anything controversial — or you just happen to get on somebody’s bad side — you might be subject to a Denial of Service (Dos) or Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack one day. This means someone is malevolently flooding your server with hits, to “break” your site. (The same thing happens — but for good reasons — during an “Instalanche,” when one of your posts becomes so popular that thousands of people are trying to get to your blog right away.) Either way, your blog will suddenly crash, and you (or whoever is in charge of your servers) will have to go to some trouble to get it back up. mThink has a very short, pretty technical but helpful guide to reducing your chances of being the victim of a DOS attack.
* ProBlogger’s Darren Rowse asks fellow bloggers: “What do you do with posts when you change your opinion?”
* “Why aren’t you hosting your own blog yet?” asks Kiesha Easley:
“I have nothing against Blogspot or WordPress.com. In fact, if it wasn’t for Blogger, I might have never gotten my start. But it only took a few months of struggling to build search engine traffic before I started asking myself, how could I honestly say that I’m taking my blogging seriously if I wasn’t willing to invest in my own domain name and host my own blog? (…)
“for a blogger who really wants to be viewed as an authority, having .blogspot.com or wordpress.com at the end of a sub-domain, just isn’t going to cut it.”
Note: this blog, and almost all my other ones, are hosted by DreamHost and so far I’m very pleased with them. (Their customer interface really needs a 21st century makeover, but otherwise I’ve never had a problem with DreamHost.)
* “When is the best time to publish blog posts?” An outstanding post, full of infographics, looking at the ideal “time of day” and “day of week” to post on your blog, in terms of traffic and the chance of getting your posts shared on Facebook. Some surprises! All in all — fascinating. One to bookmark.
