0 5 Easy Ways to Improve Internal Linking on Your Blog

1. Use a sitemap

Sitemaps are not only important for helping visitors find what they’re looking for, but they’re also an easy way to increase the amount of internal links to your important pages. I’m not talking about XML sitemaps created for search engines (although they can be important too), but rather a sitemap for your readers with links to all of your posts, or at least your most important ones.

WordPress users can use the Sitemap Generator Plugin from Dago Design to automatically create a sitemap for their blog. This plugin creates a helpful sitemap page with links to your posts arranged by category.

2. Create a FAQ

Frequently Asked Questions pages can help you to get internal links to your posts while using highly targeted keywords and phrases. Create some common questions readers might have that can be answered by your blog posts. Pose the question on the FAQ page and partially answer the question and provide a link to a particular post for more information. When phrasing the questions, use keywords that readers are likely to use when performing a search, as this can help to improve traffic from search engines. Also use keywords in the anchor text of the links to your posts.

3. Link to related posts

Linking to posts on similar topics can help your readers to find additional content that may interest them. Just as importantly, it can also improve the number of internal links to your blog posts. You can manually create related links at the end of your posts, or you can use a plugin to do it for you. WordPress users can download the Related Entries plugin.

4. Include links to your most popular posts on your sidebar

Many blogs contain links to specific posts in the sidebar. Linking to those that are the most popular is a good way to increase your page views and also to improve your internal link strength. This also can either be done manually or with the use of a plugin. Doing it manually will require updates and changes whenever you want to feature new posts, whereas a plugin like MostWantedwill eliminate the manual effort.

5. Write a series of posts

One easy way of building up the number of internal links going from one post to another is to write a series. As the series is written and published each post can link to the others. If you have a very long post, consider breaking it into a series. Be careful not to do this all the time as your readers may start to feel like you are using them to gain page views.

0 What Is Bounce Rate?

Bounce rate is a very important metric for website owners. It basically tells you what percentage of your visitors are “bouncing” away after landing on your site (e.g., they just visit one page and leave before clicking on to a second page inside your site). A bounce can occur for several reasons, including:

• The visitor hit the “Back” button on his browser.
• The visitor closed his browser.
• The visitor clicked on one of your ads.
• The visitor clicked on one of your external links.
• The visitor used the search box on his browser.
• The visitor typed a new URL on his browser.

All the actions above would cause the visitor to leave your site. Provided he did any of these actions right after arriving at your site (and before clicking on to a second page), it would be counted as a bounce. In fact the formula for finding the bounce rate on your website is:

Bounce rate = Visits that left after one page / Total number of visits

For example, if during a certain month your site received 120,000 visits, out of which 80,000 bounced after visiting just one page, your bounce rate for that month would be 80,000 divided by 120,000, which equals to 0.66 (or 66%). Notice that you can calculate the bounce rate of your whole website or of single pages inside it.

Obviously the lower the bounce rate on your website, the better, because it means that visitors are getting engaged by your content and design, and that they are clicking to visit a second (third and so on) page on your site.

How do you know the exact bounce rate on your site? A web analytics program like Google Analytics will automatically track the numbers for you.

Next week I’ll talk about what is considered to be low and high bounce rates, as well as about the misleading numbers you can get from new websites. Stay tuned.

0 Most Popular Websites on the US – September 2012

The current edition is the September 2012 one.

As one could guess the top 5 are: Google, Microsoft, Yahoo!, Facebook and AOL. Below you’ll find a compilation of the list that appeared on the Cnet blog:

Curious points in my opinion:

• Technorati in the 28th position? Are they still around…?
• Federated Media, 17th, doesn’t own any online properties as far as know. They are an advertising network, so not really sure how the computations are being made.
• MySpace?
• Pinterest broke in the top 50 for the first time.

0 Turn CAPS Lock into a Dedicated Windows Key

The Windows key is probably the most important key in Windows 8 since it is part of so many new keyboard shortcuts.

Now if you have been using an old keyboard that doesn’t have a dedicated Windows key or if you would like to add another Windows key to your  keyboard for ease of access, what you can do is remap the rarely-used CAPS lock key and turn it into a Windows key. Here’s how:

Remap the CAPS Lock Key in Windows

To remap any key in Windows, you need to make certain changes to the Windows registry. Since this can be intimidating to most users, there are tools available that let you map one key to another without fiddling with the registry.

Sharpkeys and Microsoft Keyboard Layout Creator are popular programs that perform key remapping but I prefer ScanMapSet since it requires no installation and once the required keys have been mapped, you can just delete the utility.

1.  Download the scanmapset.exe file and put it in, say, c:\temp folder.
2. Open the Command Prompt in Windows as an administrator (video tutorial).
3. Switch to the temp folder (using cd) and run the following command.

scanmapset.exe -s capslock=lwindows

Restart your Windows computer and the CAPS lock key will now function as a Windows key.

0 What Is A Blog and How To Create A Blog?

A blog is basically a type of website, like a forum or a social bookmarking site. As such it is defined by the technical aspects and features around it, and not by the content published inside it.

The features that make blogs different from other websites are:

• content is published in a chronological fashion
• content is updated regularly
• readers have the possibility to leave comments
• other blog authors can interact via trackbacks and pingbacks
• content is syndicated via RSS feeds

Keep in mind that it is the bundle of those features that should define a blog. An online forum could also offer an RSS feed for example, but that would not make it a blog.

How do I create a Blog?

There are many quality Blogging hosting services that you can choose to create a blog but the best among them is Blogger.

How do I create a Blog On WordPress?

WordPress is a free personal publishing platform. It is an easy to use, fast and flexible blog script. It comes with a great set of features, designed to make your experience as a publisher as pleasant as possible. With WordPress you can easily:

Publish and edit posts;

Sort articles in categories;

Search within your content
;
Manage users' access;

Change your website themes and more.

With the SiteGround WordPress hosting services you can use all WP features.