Password

When creating passwords, use long ones that contain numbers, letters and symbols. Do not share them with others and avoid sending them via email. There’s also a way now to set up your password recovery options. This can be done through your mobile phone, another email address and through the security question feature.

Content

Do report and flag content that you feel is illegal or contains abusive information. You can also adjust your privacy settings with regards to how you want to receive and share content.

Browser

Be sure to update your browser and operating system as well. Always check your source, though, to avoid virus and malware attacks.

Web Address

Most often, we’re asked to sign in before entering a site such as social media and online banking services. To ensure that you’re connecting safely, check that the web address starts with https:// which means the site is encrypted. Photo via geekersmagazine

Platforms

Blogger is the top bog site used in the U.S. with 46 million unique monthly users. This is based on the 2012 blogging stats. As for WordPress, there are now more than 60 million sites worldwide that use this platform. Each month, some 33.9 million new posts and 40.9 comments are made on WordPress.com while more than 399 million people view more than 3.5 billion pages. On a daily basis, data from 2011 showed that more than 100,000 new WordPress sites are created.

Bloggers

Bloggers fall into five types, according to the 2011 State of the Blogosphere Report. They are the hobbyist, part-time professional, full-time professional, corporate and entrepreneur. Most bloggers are also young with nearly 60 percent aged between 25 and 44, educated and with experience. The business bloggers were found to be managing an average of three blogs.

Blogging Habits

Among entrepreneurs, 60 percent normally spend from one to five hours blogging on a weekly basis. Majority are also updating their blogs about two to three times each week. Most have been blogging for at least two years. Technorati also revealed that one-third of bloggers have experience working in the traditional media usually as journalists. It also found that 65 percent of bloggers follow brands on social media and that most of them write regularly about these brands. It’s never too late to start blogging. You can find many resources on the web to help you get started. Photo via perfectenvision

Other Asian News

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What are some steps you can do then to increase your blog’s visibility?

Posts and keywords

Find out which among your posts and keywords are most popular. Use Google Analytics to help you determine this aspect. Some social sharing plugin such as Shareaholic and Digg Digg also provide free analytics on the most popular content.

Trending topics

You also need to find out the trending topics on various social media sites to guide you on what content to write and post on your blog. When Some free tools you can use are Trendsbuzz, LinkedIn Today, Google Insights, Know Your Meme, Hashtags and Topsy.

The why

Think about the reasons why people will share your content. Your goal in blogging should not just be to simply disseminate information but you need to provide value to people. This means sharing something useful such as those that can entertain, educate and help them build relationships.

Headline

Create a captivating headline for your blog and for your blog posts. This should be done all the time. Here’s a tip. Copyblogger’s advice is to use the 4 U’s – useful, ultra-specific, unique and urgent.

Promote

Promote in different ways. Use not only text but as well as photos and perhaps even videos if you can. And promote on various social media sites including Pinterest which a very popular now for driving traffic to websites.

Call to action

Finally, keep visitors coming back on your site. Don’t forget the calls to action at the end of your post or on your blog pages. Provide links to previous content and use the recommended content widgets.

Google normally ranks blogs according to a number of factors such as relevance, content and backlinks. Blogs that are indexed more quickly than the others are considered to be the authority ones.

Here are ways that you can do to improve traffic to your blog. They’re fairly simple but when done consistently, will help you achieve your goal.

Updating your blog every day is most ideal. Make sure you provide original and informative content with the targeted keywords.

Label the images on your blog properly. Instead of naming it just photo1.jpg or pic2.jpg, provide a more appropriate description relevant to your post.

Provide internal links as well. This means link one blog post to another post in your site. Try to link your new post to an old post for better search results.

Using a short and simple blog URL is important. It has to be something that’s easy to recall so more people will be able to find your site right away through the Google search engine.

Getting more backlinks is as vital. One way to do is to submit articles to directories and then include the link to your blog particularly in the resource box. Note that links are not usually allowed in the body of the article so put it in the resource box instead.

Photo courtesy of Photo Dictionary

It is for this very reason that a blog needs to have photos in order to attract visitors and encourage them to read through the page. It’s an effective come-on.

Businesses, authors and publishers alike can benefit greatly from posting beautiful photos on their blogs. When you are able to include an image relevant to the article posted on the blog, you have a better chance of gaining regular visitors moving forward. It is because they trust you to provide them with quality and useful content to enhance their knowledge and experience on the internet.

For your photos, choose those that are colorful, bright and eye-catching. Remember that a person normally first scans a web page before deciding to read through the text and photos are a great way to get that first impression.

Research has also shown that even on the top social media sites including Facebook, the type of content that drives the most traffic and interaction among users is photo. In addition, people often tend to leave a web page immediately if they don’t find great photos there except when the writeup there is really worth reading. Otherwise, they would rather check out those that have attractive and unique images.

Another tip worth considering is providing your personal photo on the blog. This is ideal for authors and publishers wanting to share valuable information with their readers. Make sure, though, to post a photo with you in a happy and friendly mood. This will let visitors know that a real person is behind the blog and not just a dummy.

Other News

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While these are all jobs I do routinely as part of my job as a copyright and plagiarism consultant, I’m happy to say that Splashpress has adopted a practical policy on scrapers that not only allows them to enforce their rights, but prevents them from having to pursue every single case of infringement, regardless of how unimportant.

The company recognizes that, as an organization with over 100 sites and 200 people, that it is impractical, especially on a reasonable budget, to target every single scraper or spammer that wishes to misuse their content, let alone every attributed reuse by a human.

As such, the company carefully targets those that it goes after, using its resources to focus on those who cause the most damage and create the most headache.

While it is a relatively simple process, understanding it requires a basic grasp of how the search engines parse duplicate content and why not every case of infringement is action-worthy. Most importantly, it involves understanding tips that can show any blogger how to use the spammers to their advantage and turn duplicate content into free advertising.

Understanding Duplicate Content

As I recently explained on BloggingPro, duplicate content is when the same or very similar content appears on multiple pages. It can be pages on the same site or pages across different domains.

Search engines don’t like this because they want to showcase a wide array of original material with every search result. As such, they do their best to detect duplicate content, determine which URL is the best and/or original and then penalize the others with the same content. To do this, the search engines use a variety of tactics including looking at which URL was posted first and seeing which page has the most inbound links.

Fortunately, Google does a decent job of detecting which page is the original. Though spammers will scrape the contents of a site, usually using the RSS feed, and republish it on their blogs, they rarely fool the search engines. With few inbound links and URLs that appear hours after the fact, they have a hard time fooling the search engines into thinking they are the original work.

This doesn’t mean it can’t or doesn’t happen, which is why I do occasionally have to step in on rare occasions. However, realizing that most scrapers aren’t hurting the sites they lift from, no matter how hard they try, frees up SplashPress to focus more on creating new, interesting content and entertaining/informing its readers.

It’s a win/win but it wouldn’t be possible without a few additional steps.

Preventing Scrapers from Mattering

Just because most scrapers and other plagiarists don’t usually impact their original sites doesn’t mean it can’t or won’t happen. As such, we take proactive measures to prevent that from happening and decrease the chances of them hurting our sites.

One of the key steps we take is an internal linking editorial policy. Almost every article, when appropriate, has a link to a different relevant article on the same site or, if one isn’t available, another Splashpress property.

The reason for this is simple, in addition to directing readers to relevant content elsewhere on the network, these links are also picked up by spammers and republished. Those links, in turn, become valid, inbound links that search engines pick up and place value on.

This has two very important effects:

1. Increases Page Ranking: By generating more inbound links, the spammers are actually helping the sites involved rank better. Though the importance of links from spammers is likely minimal, it’s still a help and, given the amount some of our content is lifted, can be quite powerful when spread across so many sites.
2. Prevents Duplicate Content Penalties: Second, by linking to the original site, the spammer is essentially “voting” for the original site and search engines see that and weigh it when determining which version is the original. This helps ensure the original version isn’t accidentally penalized as a duplicate.

While the system isn’t perfect, it has served us well, making it so that well over 99% of all spammers can be safely ignored.

Still, every once in a while a spammer or scraper gets lucky and starts ranking well with our content. In those cases, that is where I step in.

Dealing with Outliers

In the rare cases where a spammer does manage to start causing harm to the original sites, we do have an action plan in place and it closely mirrors the Stopping Internet Plagiarism guide that I have written on my main blog, Plagiarism Today.

Basically, the system consists of first trying to contact the scraper, which is rarely possible, and then filing a takedown notice with the site’s host to get the entire domain removed. If that fails, we then file a similar notice with the search engines to get it removed from the indexes of the search engines which, while it doesn’t remove the site from the Web, at least prevents it from competing with the original sites with their own content.

To date, we’ve been able to resolve every damaging case of infringement without much problem. However, that wouldn’t be possible if we tried to stop every single one as, without the ability to focus on those that were actively hurting us, we probably wouldn’t be able to ensure resolution.

All in all, the need to take such action is very rare, a couple of cases per month at the most, but it is necessary and we are prepared. However, it isn’t nearly as necessary as many think that it is.

Bottom Line

In the endl, content management and enforcement is an important part of any site’s business. However, that isn’t the same as stamping out every unauthorized copy that exists. Not only is that impractical, but it is a tremendous waste of resources.

Managing your content is much more than simply removing works, it involves understanding how your content is being used, encouraging useful and beneficial copying and dealing with harmful ones.

Fortunately, this is something that Splashpress Media does very well and is something that I’m very proud to be a part of.

My hope is that others will understand this as well so we can all work on spending our energies on what’s really important, creating good content and promoting it well.