I ran into Labor Nurse when she submitted an essay for our scholarship contest over at Nursing Jobs.org. Her essay definitely stood out, and I spent some time reading her blog. Very, very entertaining, so I asked her if I could interview her for Ask Shane. She kindly agreed, and I think there's a little something for everyone in our conversation; we covered quite a bit of ground. I hope you enjoy it! Keep reading »
You've probably heard many times about all the free visitors you can get from search engines. Well SEO, or search engine optimization, is the science -- and art -- of getting a site to rank well in order to get as many of those visitors as possible. The great thing for you as a blogger is that you don't have to been an SEO expert to see quite a bit of search engine traffic to your site because most blogs are tailor-made for ranking well in search engines. Just take a look at the top ten search engine ranking factors and notice how many are naturally inherent in blogs. I count seven to nine, depending on how strict you want to be. Since blogs are almost always text-heavy, very community-driven and interlinked heavily, it's hard to find your blog not ranking for lots of things if it becomes popular. However, there are a few easy things that you do need to do to ensure that you're set up for search engine success. The basic principle behind all of them is that SEO, first and foremost, is about so much more than your homepage. Especially with blogs, you'll find that most of your search engine visitors come in on anything but your homepage. So almost all the basic SEO for a blog has to do with your individual pages. Keep reading »
Jessalee asks a great question in the comments of Best Free Blog Hosting: Blogger or WordPress.com?: How would one go about driving their regular traffic to their new blog? By just putting up a post, “Find me here,” or whatever? Regrettably, Blogger doesn't make it easy to redirect all your traffic to your new blog. It would be nice if they did, but I can't blame them for not spending time on that feature :D So if you're moving from ... Keep reading »
There are downsides to free blog hosting (not having your own domain name may be the biggest), but few casual bloggers care enough to spend $5 to $10 a month on for-real hosting for their blog. So, many of them end up at Blogger. More and more, though, people are beginning to shift to WordPress, which also has free hosting. In talking to my friend Mama Mia last week about whether she would like me to help ... Keep reading »
.org