A Mogul To Be

Easy tips for blog carnival participants

March 15th, 2007 by Robert

I recently got to host the 14th Carnival of Entrepreneurs and it was a great experience. A few things came to mind that can help you with your entries.

Trackbacks

The number 1 item is trackbacks. Many of the entries that I received did not supply a trackback URL. Trackbacks are an important part of linking blog posts between bloggers. For some platforms (e.g. standalone Wordpress blogs that have permalinks setup correctly) trackbacks almost come without any work, others require a little more work but in the end you should supply a trackback URL. This is especially true for TypePad users since the trackback URL is vastly different than the post URL, unlike say Wordpress blogs.

Luckily for some of the posts I knew they were running Wordpress and was able to manually add the trackbacks but not every host will want to be able to do this.

Permalinks

Many blogs are running wordpress without the permalinks set up. This results in a URL like: http://www.myblog.com/?p=90. There are two problems with this kind of URL. First, search engines won’t index them. They leave off everything past the question mark in a link, so if you have this link a search engine won’t follow it and thus greatly reduces your chances of getting search traffic. Second, and closely related to the first, is that keywords that show up in a URL help with search engine ranking.

For wordpress, this fix is in the admin panel under Options then Permalinks. You have a few options here and the first is the default which shows up like I mentioned above. The second option is very popular which puts the year, month, day and blog post title in the URL. The third which shows the post number isn’t quite as popular and given that there are options that allow the post title to be used, not recommended. What many do (including this blog) is use a custom URL that just shows the post name/title. To enable this, in the custom field put in /%postname%

Other platforms may or may not allow customizing your URLs, but check just in case. Others like Blogger do this automatically and make each page look like an HTML link (you will see .html at the end of the URL).

Highlighting Helps Scanning

Many blog readers, including myself, like to scan through a post picking out the highlights first, then go back and read the post. This is very common for those who use RSS readers as well. So with that in mind, highlight sections of your post by either bolding or using hX tags (h1,h2, etc.) I used them on this post, but you can see other examples on StartupSpark.com, JohnChow.com, InstigatorBlog.com, TheSimpleDollar.com and many other sites.

While I geared this more towards carnival participants, all these tips will help whether or not you submit to a blog carnival. Either way, I hope you found them useful!

   Post in Daily