Blogging

Waiting for the Ultimate and Best Search Engine

April 29, 2012
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Waiting for the Ultimate and Best Search Engine

Welcome reader! Like all other weeks, today I will have another round of personal conversation with you. Strictly non personal finance. Today I wish to talk about search engines and our, bloggers, struggle to appear at the top of search results. Readers who are not yet familiar with the concept of SEO (Search Engine Optimization), SEO is a technique which puts a particular site ahead of other sites in a search result. SEO technique essentially means cracking the algorithms that search engines like Google, Bing or yahoo use to rank search results. There are serious flaws in today’s search algorithms, better article often get placed after not-so-better articles. Throughout this article I would give reference to a search term “Best credit cards”. I would mostly mention Google, but it implies all search engines, not just Google. Searching Google for “Best credit card” brought me a 2008 and a 2009 article on the front page. They were from reputed financial newspapers, but their coverage is now outdated and the searchers will not get any benefit reading them in 2012. There are millions of other search terms for which search engines pull up totally irrelevant result. There is only one possible reason I could think of. Improper/inaccurate search algorithm. Most of the

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Does Blogging Affect Your Work? I Think So

February 20, 2012
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Does Blogging Affect Your Work? I Think So

Does blogging affect work? Last year, when I started blogging, I didn’t know the answer, or at least, I didn’t want to find out. I got caught up in the intricate world of blogging, to an extent I was never fascinated with anything else. Not even my day job. The reality was, there were no blog income, where as the salary was more than satisfactory. First week of February was a wake up call for me. The appraisals for 2011 came in. It was a rude shock to me How blogging affected my work For past two years I was assessed as “Exceeding the expectation”, or rated 1. This year I was assessed as “Meeting the expectation”, or rated 2. My manager saw my performance degrading compared to last two years. On a later one-on-one with my manager (a director), I was pointed to my behavioral changes. 1. My work hours got reduced by an average 1:30 hours a day, it is a right observation, instead of spending 11+ hours, I was spending only 10 or even less. This might sound ridiculous to you but, I am fine with that number of hours. I feel hard work is necessary to grow in career or

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7 Reasons Behind My Low Blog Earning

January 29, 2012
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7 Reasons Behind My Low Blog Earning

Regular readers should agree that on Sundays I don’t talk about saving money, investment or getting ahead. I do talk on subjects other than those. I share random thoughts on Sundays. This week, let’s talk about things that kept me busy for last couple of days. I was researching about monetization of blogs. The best practices, latest trends and more specifically-how to increase earning. Yeah shameless, you may think. Those who just rolled their eyes, please consider this, a blog can’t get successful if it’s economically weak. There are certain exceptions, alright, but generally if a blogger does not keep earning money, the blog dies eventually and slowly. Many bloggers do not show ad on their blogs but, they sell their products, books, courses, lectures for money. They use their blogs to grow a follower base to promote their money making products. Zen Habits is the best example of this type. So, here’s my pitch for monetization, your blogger SB needs to earn money from this blog or the charm of blogging may die, tomorrow or the day after. If you love reading me you don’t want that, right? A constant source of income brings continuous improvements in a blog. The blog

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Weekend Roundup and Random Thoughts

January 22, 2012
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Weekend Roundup and Random Thoughts

Readers, the past week was our biggest week in terms of visitors. Also We had seen the biggest traffic volume on Tuesday, January 17. Followed by the second largest traffic number on January 18.  Secret being a The Simple Dollar round up inclusion. I will discuss the traffic data as part of monthly update . Which is due in two weeks from now. SEO Tip of the week As per Google, the best SEO strategy is to increase your page loading speed. Google provides a tool to check your page speed and diagnose issues. It also provides a detailed list of improvement opportunities. I took the test and found a lot of issues with OCAAT performance. Since then I removed many WordPress plugins (a piece of code that performs specific tasks like blocking SPAM comments or, the ‘related posts’ section that you can see at the bottom of the article). I now have only 17 installed and active plugins. I also did some performance tuning at this site. Webmaster tool, till last week, complained about OCAAT being slower than 80% of sites. Now it says only 45% of sites are  faster than OCAAT. My daily search engine visitor volume is trending upwards ever since I

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Weekly Roundup, Top Blogs of The World by Visitors

January 15, 2012
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Weekly Roundup, Top Blogs of The World by Visitors

Welcome to yet another round-up edition.  Last week I talked about Keyword research. We bloggers, receive more than half of our traffic through search engine referrals. Putting our keywords in front of other, to be specific, putting our links on Google’s first search page requires a lot of work. The basis and the direction of that work is set by keyword research. This week, let’s talk about some non personal finance blogs that attract most visitors compared to any other blogs. Click on the respective banner image to visit the blogs. Remember they are not exactly by the order of daily visits. I picked up a few of the largest in their respective categories. The most followed blog (in any category) by daily unique visitors is The Huffington Post?  This is not really a personal blog, rather an industry in itself. Read for anything from gossip to tech gadgets. A news papers in form of a blog. A close competitor is Business Insider.  Although not really at the top tier in terms of traffic, but, Zen Habits is by far the biggest blog run by a single person. The simplicity of this blog is amazing and soothing. Don’t bother to offer a guest

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OCAAT Weekly Roundup, The Key Word Research Edition

January 8, 2012
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OCAAT Weekly Roundup, The Key Word Research Edition

Blogging is a learning process. During the holidays last week, I was learning key word research. I am putting it out for my readers who are bloggers by themselves. This article is not about deciding new topics based on number of search queries they can generate in future. This is about that part of key word research where you want to write guest post, or want to build links, based on certain key words contained in published articles. The objective is to tackle the words that can generate maximum visits to your site. I took the help of Google Webmaster Tool in doing this. Understanding Google Webmaster Tool Logon to WMT and go to “Your site on the web” section, then click on “Search Queries“. You will see the list of searches performed to visit your site in last 30 days. Below picture is how my screen looks like (it shows 9063 rows, that means, I had 9063 SE visitors last month), for obvious reasons I blurred out the search words. Let me first explain the columns, then I am going to talk about how I zeroed in on search terms that I wanted to build links on. Impression – The

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A Look Back On the Year 2011

December 29, 2011
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It’s end of the year 2011, a year in which OCAAT was born and started flourishing. During 2011 we’ve seen 153 posts, 2,480 comments, and over 40,000 unique visitors to the site. OCAAT has also attracted over 12,00 subscribers. It’s been a fun year. I’d take this opportunity to reflect a bit on how OCAAT got started. For almost 5 years, I have only been reading other blogs. I was a regular reader to personal finance blogs like The Simple Dollar, Get Rich Slowly and Consumerism commentary. I thought, hey, if they can do it, I can do it. Enough of reading was done, I thought now it’s time to have my own blog to write on. I was new to this country and it took time to understand the personal finance aspects over here. The credit rating system, the investment tools, the retirement saving options and the stock market were so different than what I saw in India. Though stock markets around the world run the same way, and, the dynamics are similar. Still it took time to get familiarized with the companies and funds. Apart from the blogs, CNN Money and Yahoo Finance were my other resources to

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Readers, Need Some Ideas

October 26, 2011
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Readers, Need Some Ideas

I recently had influx of Facebook fans and feed subscribers, both stands more than 500. I have more than 1500 Twitter followers and the number is increasing at a healthy rate. Overall, I am gaining more and more readers over time. The increase is at 50% month over month rate. Which is good performance by a blog that is only 7 months old. Are you one of these readers, followers or subscribers who come back and read my posts regularly? I am not boasting about my numbers here rather, I need of help. This post is for you, I am seeking help from my hitherto unknown and unannounced readers. I want to know about your choice. What should I cover in my future posts? Send me topic suggestion. So far I have only written about topics I have an interest in. Now I want to know about your choices, as from here onward I want you to direct this blog. You set the mood and tone, you show me the direction. Personal finance is a not a rocket science, its simple and straight forward process where you earn more and spend less to take care of the days you won’t be earning.

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Sunday Round Up And Monthly Blog Update: September 2011

October 16, 2011
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Sunday Round Up And Monthly Blog Update: September 2011

This is Sunday morning and in next 1 hours I have to finish this update before going out to run errand. This week-end was relatively less troublesome compared to last three weeks as I am going through the most hectic phase of work life right now. It’s mid of October and finally I got a chance to sit down and write about the progress OCAAT is made in terms of pure stats for the month of September. The highlight is this blog is still growing, and, as compared to August result, I had a 150% traffic increase in September. Bounce rate reduced from 73% to 70% and Average time on site increased by 0.08 second compared to August. Also number of pages per visit number increased by 0.09 which is very encouraging statistics. In September OCAAT completed 6 months anniversary and probably also cross Google incubation period. I now see search traffic growing every week. Quiet expectantly SE traffic comes as top traffic generator. Last month it was referral traffic. In fact last week on 10/13 I saw all time high SE hits. I am particularly encouraged by increase in direct traffic, which saw an increase of 138 direct hits in a month,

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It Is That Time Of The Year, A Personal Talk

October 12, 2011
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It Is That Time Of The Year, A Personal Talk

 If you have read my articles for past few months or weeks you might have noticed that I have been posting more guest posts lately. The reason behind this is the obvious, the pressure of day job! I work for a financial company, developing their software applications. Every year we undertake slew of projects involving existing application enhancements along with occasional system overhauling projects. Typically projects which requires a system overhaul runs throughout the year and comes to completion by October/November time frame. As the rollout day nears our work pressure increases in terms of testing and release activities. Since in my capacity as subject matter expert I get involved in many such large projects, every year around this time my phone rings round the clock with co workers and developers asking for advice and communicating the status reports. The saga this year started during last week of September and is expected to continue till mid November. I don’t get enough time to write these days. I am grateful to all those who have submitted their guest posts and it is because of them that I still am a good boy in my leader’s eyes (after all that is most

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